Ecommerce

The allure of ecom

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Today, I’m preparing a hot seat for one of the copywriters inside Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind.

So far, the dozen or so hot seats I have done were all for info products — high-ticket coaching, courses, a live event.

This hot seat is not for an info product. Instead, it’s for an ecom product, a strange $1,200 metal contraption that’s apparently selling well to an audience of middle-aged men.

As so often happens, this ecom business has a list of tens of thousands of past buyers and prospects.

And yet these guys never, ever, ever get an email from this business.

It makes me think I should go back to what I was doing a few years ago, and simply seek out such businesses, and write their emails on commission only.

It’s an alluring thought, but one to pursue another day.

Anyways, in situations like this, when a business has not been emailing their list for a while or at all, it’s common practice to send out a few warmup emails before a full-blown sales promo.

Those warmup emails typically deliver “value” — as in, they make it impossible for the prospect to buy anything.

It’s not my favorite approach. But in the case of info products, I am willing to run with it.

However, in the case of these ecom buyers, my recommendation as the resident promo expert will be to sell something even in those warmup emails, even in the very first email after a silence of who knows how many months or years.

My reasoning:

Unlike with info product lists, where the intent is often vague and shadowy, the intent for this ecom list is hard and concrete.

The only thing we know for sure about these guys is that they are in the market to buy this physical gadget or something like it. And so I will recommend to give them opportunity to buy something physical in every single email.

Of course, this won’t go out in a typical ecom email, with a big red coupon or even a picture of the product.

I’ve written and sent hundreds of ecom emails.

​​They’ve all looked and sounded very much like the email you’re reading now. And those emails have sold a few million dollars of physical stuff, from shoe insoles to weight loss pills to dog harnesses.

Do you have have an ecom business?

If you do, and you want to see how I wrote such emails, including a few dozen examples of the ecom emails that brought in the most sales, then take a look here:

https://bejakovic.com/sme/

Chargeback

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I woke up this morning to find a Sunday-morning email that read:

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CAPITAL ONE, NATIONAL ASSOCIAT ION has initiated a $297 USD dispute.

A $297 USD payment for Desert Kite is being disputed by CAPITAL ONE, NATIONAL ASSOCIAT ION because your customer says they didn’t initiate this purchase (this is known as a fraudulent transaction).”

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In other words, somebody bought my Most Valuable Email course a few days ago.

​​And now somebody — either the person who bought, or the actual credit card owner in case in case they had their credit card details fleeced — was contesting the charge.

I shrugged my shoulders and clicked to archive the email and get it out of my sight.

I had had something like this happen once already, back in September. Somebody bought my Copy Riddles course. A week later, I got the same Capital One chargeback notice, saying that the credit card owner wants to contest the charge.

Back in September, I went to check the account on my site associated with this purchase. I saw that they had logged in, gone through all the 40+ pages of the course in quick order, and now were claiming they had nothing to do with it.

I submitted whatever proof I could gather to contest the chargeback, and to show that this was a legitimate order, and that all the pages of my course were accessed. It probably took a half hour to an hour of my life.

Still, a few weeks later I got a notice that the chargeback had gone through anyhow. There’s no appeal process and that decision is final.

So the reason I shrugged my shoulders today is not that I accept that chargebacks are simply a part of doing business online, but rather that I don’t see that there’s anything I can do about it.

​​And if there’s nothing I can do, I don’t want to give it any more time out or emotion out of my day.

Except of course, I remembered that I do have the wonderful resource of this email list.

So not only can I get a daily email out of this event, but maybe I can even learn something from you, either to deal with the current chargeback request or to prevent others like it coming up in future.

So if you have any info for me, hit reply, and write away. I’ll be grateful to you.

If you have a working ecommerce funnel…

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A break from our usual late-night programming to bring you the following announcement:

If you or a client you work closely with has an ecommerce business, and you currently have a funnel that’s working on cold traffic, then hit reply and let me know. I have something you might like.

If you have an ecommerce business, then I’d like to talk to you

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If you have an ecommerce business, and you want to make more front-end sales, increase your ad spend profitably, and make more money from your current customer list, then I’d like to talk to you.

I haven’t talked much about this over the past year — but these are things I know about.

My longest-running client, back when I still did client work regularly, was an 8-figure ecommerce business.

I wrote dozens of cold-traffic funnels from them, from snout to tail, including a unique front-end format I called the “horror advertorial.”

That client was consistently making up to 2,000 front-end sales each day, using a bunch of my “horror advertorial” funnels. Another client of mine went from $2k/day to $12k/day in daily ad spend by adding in one of my horror advertorials to their existing funnel.

I’ve also done email marketing for ecommerce businesses. I’ve worked with 8-figure direct response supplement businesses and tripled results in their email funnels. I’ve managed two 70,000-person email lists and pulled out free money for them out of thin air, month after month.

All that’s to say these are things I know about.

So if you have an ecommerce business, and you want my help or advice, then get on my email list. And then write me, and we can start a conversation.

5 (+ five) easy ecommerce pieces

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See if you can spot the one green “5” in the picture below:

Wasn’t hard, was it?

But if I asked you how many 5’s there are in the above picture, that wouldn’t be as easy. In fact it might be a pain in the ass, and you might give up rather than count.

Counting doesn’t come natural to us. Our eyes and brain have to work at it.

Not so with contrast.

We’re kind of like that T-Rex in the original Jurassic Park. “Don’t move… it can’t see us if we don’t move.” In other words, create enough contrast, and your prospect immediately sees the message you want him to see.

Of course, marketers have long known about this. And they have long used it to make more sales. As Rich Schefren likes to say, different is better than better.

Anyways, that was my little intro to try to sell you on watching the video below. It’s a recording of a presentation Stefan Georgi gave a few weeks ago. And it’s all about split tests he always recommends performing in ecommerce funnels.

I’ve done a lot of work on the direct response side of ecommerce. And I knew some of Stefan’s split tests. But most were new to me.

And while it’s not guaranteed that any of these split tests will win for any specific funnel, all of them sound reasonable. Because all of them are based on fundamentals.

Stuff like contrast… or reason why… or guiding your prospect’s attention… or cutting down his confusion.

So if you’d like to see all of Stefan’s split tests, along with his breakneck explanations for what exactly to test and why, you can find it at the YouTube video below.

But be careful. Because the first two-thirds of Stefan’s presentation are all about these split tests. But then Stefan shifts gear.

​​And he gives a soft pitch for the Copy Accelerator live event that’s happening in Scottsdale at the end of this month.

I say be careful because you can get sucked into Stefan’s pitch. For example, it happened to me.

After watching Stefan’s presentation yesterday and hearing his pitch, I found myself excited abuot going to the Copy Accelerator event. Even though I’d have to fly halfway around the world to do it (what a contrast and a pain)… and even though I’d have to laboriously count out a bunch of simoleons for plane tickets, hotel rooms, and for the event admission itself.

We will see how that ends up. ​​

In the meantime, if you’re already planning on going to Stefan’s event, let me know. So far, I’ve only met 2 people in real life who read my email newsletter. I’d like to maybe bring that up to 3, and meeting you there might sway me to go.

(Whaat? You’re not signed up to my email newsletter? You can fix that here.)

And if you’re not going to Copy Accelerator (yet), or if you just want to see Stefan’s ecommerce optimizations, here’s the money-making video: