Talking Shop with Chase Clymer

So you've started your brand, and you've gotten your first few customers. That in itself is a milestone, but where do you go from there? This week on the podcast we're joined by Chase Clymer of Electric Eye and host of the podcast Honest Ecommerce. We'll cover his Brand Scaling Framework and how to optimize your Facebook ads to maximize your return on ad spend.

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transcript.

Kelly (00:00):
So you started your brand and you've gotten your first few customers. That in itself is a milestone but where do you go from there. This week on the podcast we're joined by Chase Clymer of Electric Eye and host of the podcast Honest Ecommerce. We'll cover his brand scaling framework and how to optimize your Facebook ads to maximize the return on ad spend. Let's dig in.

Rhian (00:22):
Welcome to Commerce Tea, a podcast to help you succeed on Shopify. I'm Rhian.

Kelly (00:27):
I'm Kelly. Grab a mug and join us as we talk about all things commerce.

Rhian (00:32):
Hey, Kelly. How can merchants leverage customer data to drive more revenue and increase retention? How could they create personalized experiences customers love.

Kelly (00:48):
I recommend Octane AI, the leading buyer profile platform for Shopify and Shopify plus merchants.

Rhian (00:54):
How does it work?

Kelly (00:54):
Octane AI features a shop quiz, Facebook messenger and SMS and opt-in tools. Using the shop quiz, merchants can get to know customers with interactive questions. From product recommenders to gift finders. You can learn about a customer's needs, preferences, pin points and more. This information gets saved in the buyer profiles and you can think your buyer profile data with your Facebook Messenger, SMS, email and ad campaigns for personalized customer journeys.

Rhian (01:20):
What kinds of returns can brands expect?

Kelly (01:22):
Brands in the shop quiz have increased email signups by 16 times and driven a 28% increase in average order value. Facebook Messenger and SMS see 80 to 95% average open rates and drive up to a 20% increase in revenue. Better yet, Octane AI has plans for any size business and offers a 14 day free trial. Every plan gives you access to the shop quiz, Facebook Messenger, SMS and often tools. There are also plans available where Octane AI's experts will help you set up and optimize your tools for success.

Rhian (01:54):
It sounds great. Where can merchants go to learn more?

Kelly (01:56):
You can learn more book a demo or try it free at join.octaneai.com/commercetea. Again, that's join.octaneai.com/commercetea. Chase hello? How are you doing today?

Chase (02:10):
I'm doing great. You guys just pumped me up with that intro song. I'm ready to share the knowledge that I have in my brain.

Kelly (02:18):
Amazing. Chase and I have... how long have we known each other now?

Chase (02:24):
We met in a tiny hole in the wall bar in a weird back room in Canada three or four years ago?

Kelly (02:31):
It was 2017.

Chase (02:34):
It was the same week I met Rhian as well. We all met at the same time.

Rhian (02:39):
How fun but we weren't all together at the same time. We were independently.

Chase (02:42):
We went independently. Thank you Shopify Unite, please come back.

Kelly (02:48):
We united as Shopify Unite.

Chase (02:50):
We did.

Kelly (02:51):
Oh, look at the purpose of the conference, actually worked. Wonderful. Rhian how are you doing today?

Rhian (03:00):
I'm doing great. I'm drinking a Stumptown Original Nitro Cold Brew, which on an earlier zoom call, I realized looks like a beer can and I drank it and I saw the person's eyes go really wide. He was like, "Are you drinking?"... I drink it and I say, "It's coffee." Of course I didn't them to think I was chugging beer at like nine in the morning.

Kelly (03:25):
[crosstalk 00:03:25] you're a business owner. There are no rules but also maybe don't drink at nine a.m, I don't know.

Rhian (03:31):
Yeah, I...

Chase (03:35):
Before our agency got a lot more serious. It doesn't matter, I'd still do this now. We normally don't do in person meetings but way back when like five years ago, I definitely went to a business meeting in swim trunks because I was going to the pool afterwards.

Kelly (03:47):
That's amazing. I love that I cannot say I've done that.

Rhian (03:51):
Yet.

Chase (03:52):
Yeah, it's your business you can do what you want and be like, "Look, I'm going to tan after this."

Kelly (03:58):
That's cute. Thinking that I can get a tan.

Rhian (03:59):
Yeah, He is going to say a tan, hold on...

Kelly (04:03):
You mean a burn. Chase I think you confused that [crosstalk 00:04:07]

Chase (04:07):
Yeah. That's what I do these days. When I was little, I was like a pool rat and I looked muddy but that's just because I was so dark.

Kelly (04:15):
I've only tanned once in my life and that was when I was in The Bahamas. Every other time I burned and I was also 11 when that happened. I don't know if my skin still works that way.

Chase (04:26):
I think you're more resilient when you're a child.

Kelly (04:28):
Yeah, I would say so. All right, Electric Eye does some really cool things I'm obviously very familiar with it with your agency, but tell us about your agency and tell us about Honest Ecommerce as well.

Chase (04:41):
Yeah. So Electric Eye is a full service agency. We're very particular in the lanes that we do things. Design and development, just like Kelly over the taproom. We also offer marketing advertising and all of it's around a strategic framework. There are big reasons why we're doing exactly what we're doing. At the end of the day we're just making really, really beautiful websites that sell stuff really well.

Kelly (05:06):
It's true.

Rhian (05:07):
I'm not laughing at that. I just love that distillation. You're like at the end of the day we do red stuff and it works really well.

Chase (05:16):
You can use all the buzzwords you want but if it isn't English and it doesn't make sense to somebody they're not going to want to work with you and be like, that's I... I don't know.There's no reason to over-complicate it. We make Shopify websites that the user experience works. It gets the customers to where they need to be and then we help you get more traffic and we help you raise your average order value.

Kelly (05:35):
Getting more traffic is definitely not my area. I'm really good on the conversion rate optimization, beautiful websites, complex builds when it comes to anything with paid social, I stay or just like social media marketing in general. I always just send them to you, for example, just because that's not my area of expertise.

Chase (05:58):
That's where the agency started five or six years ago. Shawn had left his previous gig at Homage Clothing and it was like, "Hey, I'm helping my friends brand on Shopify do this thing." I was like, "What's Shopify?" He's like, "Oh, you'll figure it out." He's like, "You know how to do Facebook ads, right?" I was like, "Yeah." We just did that then we did it a couple more times. The next thing we knew, we had five or six clients on retainer and we were doing Facebook ads for these Shopify brands and the agency was born out of necessity more than anything. Because they were like, "Who do we make the checkout to?" Then we were like, "Wait taxes." Now we have a business.

Kelly (06:40):
I love that origin story because I can resonate with it.

Chase (06:47):
If you are doing something well in the service business you build yourself a job pretty quick if it is a marketable skill.

Kelly (06:54):
For sure. All right. Tell us about Honest Ecommerce.

Chase (06:57):
Yeah. I also host a podcast and both of my... Well, you guys will be the hosts. Both of the hosts of this podcast have been guests on my podcast. That is a hair in my head to think about. Those are fantastic episodes and I'll find them and I'll make sure that Kelly can link to them so you can listen to us talk more. But yeah, I started Honest Ecommerce a little over two years ago. It was a big push from Andrew on our team to do it and actually Kurt Elster pushed me to do it as well.

Chase (07:29):
It's just awesome way to learn more about the industry, stay up to date from just a strategic perspective and me just understanding what's going on. But not only that, these days I've definitely rotated more to interviewing brand founders and asking them how they did it, trying to distill out from their story. The things I know about e-commerce that they did well that other listeners can do well to hopefully get their brand either off the ground or get a brand that has some traction to the next level. At the end of the day, it's just trying to put out awesome information out there to help you grow your business.

Kelly (08:02):
I love that all of us really know each other in the Shopify ecosystem and I feel like there's probably... Some of our listeners are like, "How do you all just know one another and are friends?" I think that's just the ecosystem that Shopify has created is a rising tide, lifts all boats or lifts all ships and we're all getting lifted together and hanging out and doing cool stuff. I love that about this.

Chase (08:30):
Yeah, it's an amazing ecosystem in the mindset. Kurt literally fixed my broken brain about the mindset of competition when I first met him. He was like, "There is so much work to go around, you're going to be an..." I don't know if I can cuss, but you're like, "You're going to be an asshole if you are that type of person and think competition is the enemy." He's like, "You're going to learn so much from these people. If you go to with questions and you reciprocate answers when they have questions to you, your businesses are both going to grow versus you having this combative mentality about things."

Kelly (09:05):
For sure.

Rhian (09:05):
That's important in all verticals, right? It's just because you sell one beauty product and there's a competitor, doesn't mean there's no overlap.

Chase (09:13):
I guarantee whoever has one... one mile ahead of you and one mile behind you, both of those people are going to be great assets to you in your growth of a brand. I guarantee if you email the founder of that brand that you think is a competitor or you look up to and whatever... They're probably just going to give you the answer to whatever question you have without asking for anything in return. They're going to tell you it because they remember being in your shoes in entrepreneur and they wish someone could give them a handout.

Kelly (09:39):
I think it's really important, especially in terms of... We see it from the partnership ecosystem in general, where we are all growing our businesses, we're all helping each other. For me and the great thing about helping each other out from the brand side is that you can also form these brand partnerships and actually collaborate on creating a bundle together, for example, and literally help grow each other's businesses. Even if you're technically competitors, you can still find ways to work together.

Chase (10:07):
Yeah. I just emailed someone recently about that and they... Part of their growth strategy is finding complimentary brands to do co-marketing with. Doing email campaigns and co-marketed Facebook campaigns. They share the pixels with each other and they go all in on a product together or potentially it's a bundle of both of their offerings. There's a really cool, unique way to grow a brand in a untraditional way, which is dumping a bunch of money into some paid channel.

Kelly (10:33):
Speaking of dumping a lot of money into some paid channel. Let's talk about Facebook ads.

Rhian (10:39):
I thought you were going to say, "Let's talk about Rhian's shopping habits."

Kelly (10:44):
We can do an entire episode on your shopping habits but trying to be productive here a little bit. Facebook ads. I have a brand new business. I have maybe... I've established what I'm selling. I have a site, I think it looks great I'm ready to begin marketing. Where do I begin?

Chase (11:07):
This is going to sound counterintuitive and the reason we made the ad was to... not the ad, the course. We made the course about ads is to essentially give people a great source of information to learn from when they don't take our advice. I'll get to that in a second. If you start a business, nobody out there is going to help you find product/market fit. I don't care.

Chase (11:30):
There's no ifs, and's or but's about it and that is my opinion. Whatever no one's going to help you find product/market fit. That's on you as a brand founder to get out there, talk to customers, figure it out on your own. It's the hardest part about it. Hands down is finding product market fit. I would just... if we're going to put numbers behind it, if you're organically selling your product online to people that aren't your friends and family and it's predictable and there's a cadence to it. You probably have found product/market fit. Your copy in your product and how in the market you're going after.

Chase (12:02):
It's all resonating and it's doing the thing well. Until you have that, it doesn't matter what you do advertising wise. Humans still... it needs to solve a problem for humans and they're not going to buy your product if it doesn't kind of make that sense. Usually when I have conversations with people that have just started, I am steering them down that path of, "Hey, you're not there yet. Don't waste any money on paid ads because it's all math." There's three numbers that matter and that's where the brand scaling framework comes from but it's essentially your conversion rate, your traffic and your average order value.

Chase (12:40):
If you multiply all those things together, you're going to get your sales for whatever data set you're working with. I usually do monthly averages. If your conversion rate is less than half a percent, if you dump a bunch of paid traffic in on the other side and raise your traffic up in that equation, it's still only going to convert at that super low conversion rate and you're essentially lighting money on fire. We talk about this in the course a lot at the beginning to set expectations of paid ads and traffic doesn't exist in a funnel, just like your conversion rate doesn't and just like average order value doesn't. They all work and interplay. Going back to your original question of I've just got started, what should I focus on? Not paid ads. You should focus on building out a content engine. You should focus on building awesome imagery like working with local photographers and videographers to just keep creating content, keep getting your brand out there organically and invite...

Chase (13:37):
Because at the beginning of your brand, you have more time usually than you have money and you'll run out of money faster than you run out of time. Use your time wisely and build things organically that last forever. Any content that you can create is going to last forever versus your paid ad campaign lasts until you run out of budget. That's like my positioning on going from zero to one. It's a lot more of your time investment and it should be honestly as little money investment as possible.

Rhian (14:06):
I love that mentality because I've had a lot of founders through the years who go all in when it comes to ads and then they wonder where their traffic goes afterwards. They're like, "Oh, well now I'm not getting found in search on Google." I'm like, "Well, yeah, because you didn't put the content, you didn't put the work in and the legwork in that develops the content that Google then crawls that makes you... They're like, "But I bought all this traffic" I'm like, "Yeah, but bought traffic only lasts so long in terms of the..." I don't like using the word juice for SEO, but it doesn't juice you up as much. It doesn't last that long. I love that you're talking about this because it's just something that a lot of folks just don't lean into and having a content play and having storytelling built into your brand day one, it is crucial.

Chase (14:56):
Yeah. That's going to give you longevity and so that's where we answer those questions. But at the end of the day, some people are just going to do the thing anyways and so we're like, "Okay, well this course is literally exactly how we do it at Electric Eye. We distill down our processes and how things work into our... this course is how we do it at the agency. The more advanced strategies and the stuff that we're doing right now obviously don't get into the course as quickly when we update stuff but it's exactly what we do. You know what I mean?

Chase (15:27):
You can go learn how we do it and run it yourself if you have that time or I think the best part about it is learning how to talk about it correctly and understand what you're asking for. I think that's even more... I think that's a better reward than being able to run the ads yourself. Its like eventually when you do hire a media buyer or a team member to run your ads for you, you can actually have a conversation appropriately about it versus just blindly throwing money at something and hoping the results are good.

Kelly (16:02):
Hey, it's like me taking an accounting course right now and being able to have those conversations with my CPA. Absolutely. I learned about deferred revenue I'm like, "Hey, most of our revenue is deferred. Should I be telling you what... how this is structured she basically said, "Honestly, doesn't really matter unless it falls in the month of December, because then I have to make sure everything's allocated correctly for a year." I wouldn't have known to even ask her that question and so it was helpful to have that. I love that. Maybe I'll take your Facebook ads course as well.

Rhian (16:35):
Yeah. I was just thinking that too. I was like, "I don't know very much."

Chase (16:38):
When you learn something, it's going to either interest you or you're going to learn how much you don't want to do it and you would rather hire someone to do it for you.

Kelly (16:46):
Yep. I'm a big fan of delegating anything. Okay, so we're going to include a link to the course in our show notes, but can you just say what the link is as well?

Chase (16:57):
Oh yeah. You can just go to honestecommerce.co/course and that will take you right to the Facebook and Instagram advertising for Shopify course. It's specifically for Shopify brands, sorry if you're not on Shopify, but I'm assuming that there's only like one of you listening that isn't on Shopify at this point.

Kelly (17:15):
One out of four of our listeners, thank you.

Chase (17:18):
Well, you got to start somewhere. The course is fantastic, it's literally the framework that we use to run paid ads at the agency. We have made millions of dollars for brands following this framework, I'm not joking. There are case studies on our website.

Rhian (17:33):
Okay. You're telling me that you are a Facebook ads wizard without saying that part. I'm just adding the wizard part. What else are you phenomenal at? Because I know you're not just great at Facebook ads.

Chase (17:48):
Oh yeah. Well, thank you first of all. Second of all, I am good at Facebook ads, I don't even run them anymore for our clients at the business. I'm more on the strategy end of things and I would say that what separates our agency from most agencies is everything we're doing comes from a strategic perspective. Everyone says that like, "Oh, strategy is our number one thing." But we have a framework for how we approach every client and every strategy and I'm actually building this strategy like framework as a course for Shopify compass right now, about halfway done doing it, but it will be coming out. It's called our brand scaling framework and it just distills down how you've gone from zero to one, you've found product market fit. You've got some organic sales, you've done that part.

Chase (18:34):
The hardest part, where again, you cannot hire someone to help you with that part, you are lighting money on fire if you do that, you need to do it yourself. Once you figure that part out and you've got some KPIs to start with, this is a framework of how to focus your energy and how to essentially pick which KPIs to pick and then try to scale from there. It gets really simple once I get into it but at the end of the day, there's only three KPIs that matter, in my opinion. Which is your traffic, your average order value and your conversion rate. I talked on this before.

Chase (19:11):
We use a monthly average but if you take all three of those numbers and the averages and you multiply them together, you're going to get statistically how much money you made that month. Then you essentially reverse engineer like okay, well, if I do that with these numbers, pick a number that you want to improve. Then you can... there are ways to improve them in tactics and all that stuff. A framework is just a fancy way of saying a strategy that gives you a little bit more wiggle room and that's how we approach all of our engagements.

Kelly (19:40):
I love that and I definitely agree on those KPIs in particular. It's cool seeing just how much money you're leaving on the table when you have, let's say a conversion rate of 0.5% you show those numbers. Then it's like, what if your conversion rate was double what it is right now? What if it was 1% and you can show them exactly how much money they would be making if they had a higher conversion rate.

Chase (20:01):
Yeah. I can walk you through the numbers right now because I have a spreadsheet that does it and it's insane how things work. Let's say that you've got of a half a percent conversion rate. 0.5% conversion rate, but you got a pretty solid average order value of $75 and you're just crushing it with traffic, well that's relative but you're bringing in 30,000 sessions a month, right? With those numbers, your average sales are $11,000 a month, $11,250 and that your yearly sales are 135K at those numbers. But let's say through this that okay, we see these numbers and we understand the conversion rate is the problem here and we need to fix the conversion rate and it comes down to... The only things that you can actually do to fix your conversion rate is improve your technical performance.

Chase (20:53):
So your speed and to improve the user experience. Those are the only things that you can actually do to improve your conversion rate. The rest of it is things that you don't have control over. You can't force your business to go viral or something like that. You know what I mean? Those are the only things that you can really control. Let's say that this brand, this hypothetical brand with half a percent conversion rate, their big issue was their mobile experience which is where they get most of their traffic. Which is most brands, was just garbage. Someone smart, a team went in and redesigned the website essentially and made mobile work and it fixed that problem and now their conversion rate improved and it went up to something better. You know what I mean? A 2% conversion rate, which is fantastic.

Chase (21:40):
That's a great place to start anything. Also conversion rates vary particular to your brand. You can't compare it to anyone else because it's your brand and your customers and those are unique to you. Doing any comparison with the conversion rate to any other brand is like a dumb exercise, I feel. Back to the numbers. Originally you had half a percentage at $75 with 30,000 sessions. Your monthly sales were $11,250 a month with 135K a year. Now if you can get that up to 2% a month, the same exact average order value in the same amount of sessions, you're not changing your traffic at all. You're not doing $45,000 a month and yearly, you're doing 540,000 a year. Just working on that one number, you've improved your business by $400,000.

Rhian (22:32):
Wow, a lot. I have a question, hot topic. You mentioned speed?

Chase (22:38):
Yeah.

Rhian (22:39):
What are your thoughts on speed, because I have thoughts too?

Chase (22:41):
None of this stuff is isolated and exist within its own bubble. There's always asterisks with everything in e-commerce.

Rhian (22:52):
Of course.

Chase (22:54):
My thoughts on speed, the fastest website is going to be a buy button on a blank page, but that is a terrible user experience. There's a give and take and an ebb and flow to it. The speed number on the backend of your Shopify store is pointless and you should just ignore it. There's my thoughts on that.

Kelly (23:08):
That's a spicy take.

Chase (23:12):
When you are working with a consultant agency, developer, whatever worth their salt, they're going to understand what number makes sense for your business and what you can improve and how high you can get it. You can go run Google lighthouse scores on all the big brands out there. Go look at Kim K's web line, her store is so bad when it comes to performance but it doesn't matter because the customers want that stuff. Once you start bolting on bigger and cooler or better extended functionalities to what Shopify does your site speed is just going to always go down. There's a give and take between the level of functionality you want to offer to your customers and does that make sense for your customer's needs versus trying to get the best performance score ever. I think chasing a performance score is just an exercise that isn't worth doing.

Kelly (23:59):
You're always going to be disappointed. You're never it... You can't achieve what you think you want to achieve and I've seen this time and time again with merchants that they're stressing over a... maybe a small dip in their score one day. You never know, if your customers are buying, if they're happy, if your business is growing and your store is not super slow, obviously or there aren't any drastic errors. It's just important to not put so much focus on that particular number that you see.

Chase (24:32):
Yeah. Well with that being said, make sure that you look at it and fix any easy stuff to fix, get it to the point where improving it is like the juice isn't worth the squeeze anymore and then just move on. Ignore it, checking every couple of months to make sure that something didn't break, but yeah, just get it to a point where it's good enough and move on. Then all of your energy will be better focused on improving the user experience from a conversion rate optimization standpoint or better yet investing in creating content or strategically building upsells across ELL's or bundles to try to raise your AOV.

Rhian (25:09):
What's AOV?

Chase (25:11):
Average order value.

Rhian (25:12):
What's KPI?

Chase (25:14):
Key performance indicator.

Rhian (25:15):
Okay, I forgot to ask. Normally I try to stop us while we're talking in our language about... Which is heavily anachronized is that... would that be the right-

Kelly (25:30):
Acronymized.

Chase (25:33):
The ABC's of DTC? All right. That's where our framework comes from is because there's so many of those acronyms or whatever out there and it's so confusing and I'm just like, ignore them all. These three matter the most and other people will out there be like, "Well, you're not mentioning margin Chase, or what about lifetime value?"

Chase (25:48):
I'm like, "That's advanced course. We're talking about going from one to two here." Zero to one, you're getting your brand off the ground, you're finding your foundational marketing strategies to keep... to build an actual business. You know what I mean? Going from one to, this is a very good framework to understand how to do that.

Kelly (26:07):
When can we expect this course to come out? Do you have a date for it yet?

Chase (26:10):
I am forcing myself. This is Tuesday, March 2nd, we're recording this and I'm forcing myself to get it done by the end of this month. I don't know when they're going to want to put it out though.

Rhian (26:22):
Do you want us to hold you accountable? I love that you're like, today is this date someone please make me do this thing.

Chase (26:27):
Yes. Right now I'm trying to put time aside every day, because I'm essentially just writing all the nonsense that I just talked about in my head. I've talked about this all the time on other podcasts or even I bring it up with guests on my podcast. I'm talking about this every day with clients and prospects. This is how we frame all of our conversations of what we want to work on to make your business more money and I just got to get out of my head and get it on paper. That's what I've been writing a lot lately to get it out. I'm trying to make it short and concise. I really want the course to not be longer than 30 minutes but make sure it covers the good stuff. It's hard to distill that stuff out. Making courses is so hard.

Rhian (27:05):
Very hard. I have an idea, not that you asked. I love unsolicited advice specifically me giving it. What if you just talked or had your co-founder ask you the questions and you just talk and then Otter.ai recorded it and then you didn't have to write anything. Just saying.

Chase (27:24):
That's how I'm writing my book.

Rhian (27:27):
Perfect. I'm glad we're all on the same page.

Chase (27:33):
Once I'm done with the course, I'm going to turn it into a book. I believe in all that stuff, it's just the way I'm approaching is I want to organize it in writing because I'm moving stuff around. When I originally approached doing it, I was on the fence about including lifetime value in it. I think it just added too much asterix to the equation and will just confuse people. For anyone out there that's on the service side of things, you'll realize that your knowledge is so far ahead of most people when you're in a consultative engagement, that you are giving 400 level advice when people are still on 100 and you just need to really distill it down. I decided to pull lifetime value out of it and just make it those three KPI's.

Rhian (28:20):
I think that's smart. I noticed that with such stuff too, because there's the zero to one stuff, there's the one to two then there's the stuff after that. There's no point getting in the weeds with the two plus stuff if we don't have zero to one lockdown.

Chase (28:36):
In this particular use case, no one cares. You know what I mean? When they know they have that problem, they know what solution they're looking for and so they're not looking for the general stuff.

Rhian (28:49):
I couldn't agree more.

Kelly (28:51):
It's also just overwhelming, especially when you're just trying to figure out the basics and so many acronyms in particular are thrown at you and you just don't know what to do with all of them and then we're eating acronym soup, so...

Rhian (29:04):
Acronym soup. I haven't heard that. That's so silly. I love it.

Chase (29:10):
Terms of your first t-shirt idea.

Rhian (29:13):
That's a great t-shirt idea.

Chase (29:15):
Introducing the commerce tea swag store.

Rhian (29:18):
It's just a mug, with just random D to C letters.

Chase (29:24):
Make it spaghettios but all the letters spell like e-commerce acronyms.

Kelly (29:31):
It's perfect.

Rhian (29:32):
It's perfect. Thank you.

Kelly (29:33):
I would wear this all the time.

Chase (29:35):
I think it's great.

Kelly (29:38):
Before we move to shout outs, I would love to just end with, what is one thing that a merchant can do today that you are recommending that they do?

Chase (29:51):
Go into Klaviyo because you're on Klaviyo right. Write a plain text email to your customers and all it says is, "Hey, I'm the founder of brand whatever and I want to know what we could be doing better. Please respond to this email with your ideas." Press send.

Kelly (30:11):
I love it. That is such, I... we were talking about... Last week's episode, we were talking about how strong just a plain text email is in terms of getting actual responses from people. You can even automate the plain text email and it still generates so many more responses. It is one of the most powerful, hidden secrets of literally every email platform.

Chase (30:36):
Everyone listening is probably not emailing their customer as much as they should in trying to solicit advice from them of how to make your brand better. Because if they like your products, they want your brand to be better. They've given you their money, you've got their buy in and their trust. They will give you the truth.

Kelly (30:52):
Absolutely. All right. Let's move into shout outs. Each week we shout out a store that we have either recently purchased from, or maybe consumed their product, which tends to be the case for most of our store shout outs. Chase, what store would you like to shout out today?

Chase (31:11):
I just bought a new phone case from Peel Cases. They make super thin cases but the reason I bought it was actually because I had heard that their first time purchase flow on Klaviyo was very funny and I can admit it is hilarious because you get sent a video of their staff reenacting getting an order for the day and that's all I'm going to say. It's worth watching. After getting the case. I realized I am an idiot and I ordered the wrong size. I had to exchange it and they've got a good process in place for dealing with that. Shout out to them for making it easy on me.

Kelly (31:52):
That's great. Do you have the thin case?

Chase (31:55):
I do but apparently I have an iPhone 11 pro, I don't know. I have the one that I didn't order.

Kelly (32:04):
Wait, so do you have an extra case?

Chase (32:06):
I do. It's sitting on my desk right now.

Kelly (32:09):
It's for what size phone?

Chase (32:12):
It's for... it's right here in front of me, let me look. I don't know. I think what it was is I ordered an iPhone 11 case and I have an iPhone 11 pro which is smaller than the iPhone 11 but in my big brain, I thought it would be bigger. I don't know I just-

Kelly (32:26):
I was going to say if the extra one was an iPhone 11 pro?

Chase (32:29):
That's what I have yeah. It's the wrong case.

Rhian (32:32):
As I look at my phone, I'm like, I don't know which one I have. I have the big one, because my vision's terrible. I understand you can make them...

Chase (32:39):
Basically a baby iPad?

Kelly (32:41):
Yeah. It is a size of your head. That's great.

Rhian (32:48):
It is the size of my head. Kelly, what's your store shout out of the week?

Kelly (32:52):
I changed my mind about what my store shout out is. I'm going to shout out Rickshaw bags. Bagworks, I think is actually the name. I recently bought a bag from them for my car, I just bought a new car and I needed something to put in the glove box that contains stuff so it's not all rattling around. You got to customize your own bag and have all different options. Really, really great experience and they also have face masks that fit my small head and they're super cute and I'm really excited. They're not on Shopify by the way but I am a big fan of... I will be buying more masks from them. That's rickshawbags.com.

Rhian (33:35):
My brand of the week is sietefoods.com and it is a gluten free. I've got a bag right here. I love the ASMR. I just introduced that.

Rhian (33:53):
I was just introduced to this brand relatively recently and I wasn't introduced to it through the DTC mechanism. I was introduced to it because someone dropped it off at my house and said, "Rhian, I think you will like these." I tried them and they're gluten-free and paleo and vegan. The gluten-free as I've mentioned before, super important because our house is gluten free because my daughter's celiac. Then I started checking out this bread. I was like, 'This is yummy, let's check it out." Everything they make is gluten free and they bundle stuff. By stuff I mean their food really, really well together. We always talk about bundles and how they don't work. This is a bundle and it works really, really well.

Kelly (34:34):
This is so cool.

Rhian (34:36):
Isn't it cool. They have a bundle that is tortillas, enchilada sauce and seasoning.

Chase (34:40):
I like that. I think bundles... I will actually take a different position. Bundles work, it's just your UX doesn't work. It's hard to do bundles well on Shopify and that's what separates the men from the boys. Its like, how are you... you got to invest in this solution. It's got to be a real effort to make it work while but when you do it, Oh, you get some cool stuff happening. Once your AOV shoots the roof, that's where the money is.

Kelly (35:09):
Exactly. All right. We have one final question for you. Where can we find you on the internet?

Chase (35:15):
Oh yeah. If you enjoy listening to me rant about e-commerce stuff, you can listen to my podcast, Honest Ecommerce. It's on all the podcasts places. Then our agency electriceye.io. I'm sure that I'll be back here, these lovely ladies will be on my podcast and we'll do this more.

Kelly (35:36):
Yeah, we will. Amazing Chase. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Chase (35:40):
Thanks. I haven't had this much fun in the podcast in a very long time.

Kelly (35:45):
Thanks everyone for tuning in. Thanks again to our sponsors for supporting this episode. We have a YouTube channel, I'm not going to say the same thing I say every single episode. Visit our YouTube channel at youtube.com/commercetea-

Rhian (35:55):
See what happens.

Kelly (35:59):
You might find some really great videos from two months ago. If you like our podcast, leave us a review at Apple podcasts, reviews make us really happy. You can subscribe to Commerce Tea on your favorite podcasting service. We post new episodes every Tuesday so grab your mug and join us then. P.S we are going to have a surprise for you next week.

Rhian (36:20):
Yes we are and with that, bye-bye. Clockedin is a time clock for Shopify. With Clockedin your team members can easily clock in and out of their shifts from anywhere. You can manage your team's hours as they work remotely with an intuitive interface that can be used from desktop, tablet or mobile. Check it out at clockedin.io or in the Shopify app store.