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Lunch with Norm | 0 to 100 000 Active Paid Subscribers

#91: 0 to 100 000 Active Paid Subscribers

w/ Ryan Mckenzie

About This Episode

Paid subscribers are to hard find, let alone 100 000 of them! Find out how Tru Earth’s, Ryan Mckenzie was able to grow 0 to 100 000 active paid subscribers in less than 20 months! Ryan is the Co-founder of Tru Earth, a husband, and dad to three kids. He has been an entrepreneur since before he knew what the word entrepreneur meant. In this episode, Norm Farrar and Ryan Mckenzie speak about subscription services, building authority online, the struggles of scaling your business quickly and strategies to help build up your micro-brand outside of Amazon! Find out Ryan’s golden nugget tip to sell a subscription product at 30% off the original price and still make profit.

About The Guest

Ryan is the Co-founder of 𝗧𝗿𝘂 𝗘𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗵, a husband, and dad to three kids. He has been an entrepreneur since before he knew what the word entrepreneur meant. As a kid, he loved setting up lemon-aid stands or collecting cans to make money.

Ryan has helped grow Tru Earth to 100,000 active subscribers in less than 20 months, with absolutely no-funding.

Episode: 91

Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Ryan McKenzie, an Entrepreneur and the Co-Founder at Tru Earth. 

Subtitle: “Subscription is Definitely the Sweet Spot.”

Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episodes/episode-91-0-to-100-000-active-paid-subscribers-w-ryan-mckenzie/

 

In this episode of Lunch With Norm…, Norman Farrar introduces Ryan McKenzie, an Entrepreneur and the Co-Founder at Tru Earth. 

 

Ryan has helped grow Tru Earth to 100,000 active subscribers in less than 20 months, with absolutely no-funding. In this episode, he talks about subscription services, building authority online, the struggles of scaling your business quickly and strategies to help build up your micro-brand outside of Amazon.

 

If you are a new listener to Lunch With Norm… we would love to hear from you. Please visit our Facebook Page and join in on episode discussion or simply let us know what you think of the episode!

 

In this episode, we discuss:

  • 04:39 : Ryan’s Backstory
  • 09:39 : The Beginning of Tru Earth
  • 12:40 : Amazon Subscribe and Save
  • 14:05 : Niches that Works with Subscriptions
  • 17:32 : 0- 100,000 Subscribers in 20 Months 
  • 21:35 : How to Handle the Rapid Scaling of your Business
  • 24:12 : Culture Fit
  • 28:17 : Subscription Price Point
  • 30:25 : Golden Nugget
  • 35:27 : Upsell, Down sell & Cross sell
  • 41:57 : Off Amazon Strategies
  • 44:44 : Authority Plus Trust Equals Sales
  • 57:43 : Importance of Having a Reseller Agreement
  • 59:35 : How to Get Around Product Cannibalization
  • 1:04:12 : Subscribe and Save Do’s and Don’ts

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Norman  0:02  

Hey everybody, it’s Norman Farrar a.k.a The Beard Guy here and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, The Rise of the Micro Brands.

 

Norman  0:20  

You know what sucks when you have a live podcast? When life just throws you a curveball, sorry, we had some tech problems and we’re trying to go live. We tried to go live at noon, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. But unfortunately, we were having some technical issues. But we’re here now and today we have on the show, Tru Earth co-founder Ryan Mackenzie, and we’re going to be talking about engagement and how to grow audiences. So what’s really cool is that Ryan’s been able to grow Tru Earth to over 100,000 active subscribers in less than 20 months. So if you’re an Amazon or eCommerce seller, if you’re just doing anything online, and you’re trying to build engagement, just like when we talk with Maayan Gordon, this is a podcast to listen to. So tag your friends, get them over here, and this is gonna be a good one. I’m looking forward to it. Really, Ryan’s new to our community. So I’m really interested to hear what he’s got to say as well. So not new to the eCommerce or social media community, but Lunch with Norm community. So Kelsey, where are you?

 

Kelsey 1:31  

Hey, how’s it going?

 

Norman  1:35  

You just it’s, uh barrelful laughs

 

Kelsey 1:38  

Yeah. Great. Awesome. Alright. So yeah, if you guys are new, the podcast, new to the show, you can go ahead and join our Lunch with Norm Amazon and eCommerce community. It’s a Facebook group, we call it the Beard Nation. Throw it in the comment section. But if you guys have any questions at all for Ryan and Norm, put them in the comment section and I’ll throw them up on screen and we’ll get to them as soon as possible.

 

Norman  2:05  

We are running a little late. So if you do have friends that normally listen or the Beard Nation just tag them to get them over and we’ll start to build up the audience before we really dive into it. But first of all, Mark, Marina, Yarrow, Radd, how are you? Simon. Happy Blue Monday. What is Blue Monday? Is that the blues? Anyways, let’s get into this. We’re running a little bit behind. Kelsey, do you have anything important to say?

 

Kelsey 2:39  

Yeah, just we have about three more days left of the podcast are the AirPod Pro giveaway. So I’ll put that link in there too and of course, smash the like button, share the episode to your friends. We’ve got Nathan too. But yeah, that’s it for me and let’s enjoy the show.

 

Norman  2:57  

Alright. Okay. Oh, and by the way guys, if we are trying to figure out a name for I forget what the name of the site is Patron or something, I think.

 

Kelsey 3:10

Patreon?

 

Norman 3:11

Yeah. Patron’s a tequila. But anyways, we’re coming up with this really cool content that we’re going to be providing on that Patreon site and it’s going to be sort of a day in the life of a successful entrepreneur or eCommerce entrepreneur. So we’re trying to figure out what to call it Food for Thought, I thought, Inside the Sandwich was kind of cool. But Kelsey, and my wife thought that was horrible and they said that it was the worst. But those are the two names so far. If you guys have an idea, or if you have a name, just let us know, for this little thing we’re going to be doing. It’s gonna be like 15 minute interviews with Kevin King and some of the top people that have been on the show. Alright, so sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the show. Hey Ryan.

 

Ryan 4:08  

What’s going on Norm? How are you doing?

 

Norman  4:10  

I’m doing fine. So yeah, that’s probably the chillest intro we’ve ever had. So why don’t we just start right at the beginning, like I said, you’re new we’ve never really sat down and been able to have a coffee or whatever, to talk about what you’re doing. So let’s go back. Tell us a little bit about your backstory and what you’re all about.

 

Ryan 4:39  

Yeah, so first of all, I appreciate you having me on the show and I apologize for my computer’s all crashing here today. So about 20 months ago, we launched Tru Earth which is a brand new laundry detergent with the goal of eliminating plastic from the laundry room. Let me rewind a little bit more and go back to when this all started. But you still hear me right? I think you’re muted, but alright, cool. So it was it was mid 2018, and are probably early 2018 and a family friend of ours had heard something about their subscription products that we had been doing, and kind of prompted us, because he had purchased or he invested in the patent for these laundry detergent strips and he thought that what we were doing was interesting and thought that, Hey, maybe you guys could make something like the dollar beard club with these little strips that that we’ve invented and at the time I thought, when I was idea got back to me, I was kind of thinking, I don’t know, that’s good. That’s a really difficult product to break into that market and then, and then be from a direct response perspective, it’s going to be tough to make it profitable on such an expensive product. So kind of kick it down the curb, and we didn’t do anything with it initially and then I have three kids now, but at the time, I had two and they were both under four and I mean, you have kids. One of the fun things about being a new dad is discovering anxiety about your children’s future and what the world’s gonna have in store for them and I was kind of going through one of those phases where I wasn’t sure what was going to happen in terms of like, is the world going to become overpopulated? Are robots going to take over all the jobs? Is there going to be food for them? Is global warming going to happen? Is Skynet gonna come in and take over humanity and one morning when my wife was pregnant, we were watching an unboxing show on YouTube, one of those kids ones, and they were unboxing, this treasure chest and it was full of like surprise toys and the treasure chest is wrapped in plastic and the treasure chest itself was made of plastic and then there’s like 15 little toys wrapped in plastic and a plastic shell that that toy itself is made of plastic and it was just like, I was starting to get like, I’m like, this is insane how big how big consumerism has become and we’re like teaching this to kids. So I kind of did a little bit of digging into kind of how much plastic actually gets recycled from different things and laundry detergent happened to be one of them and I discovered that there’s about a billion jugs of laundry detergent used in North America every year and of that there’s about 30% that can be recycled in some capacity, but 10% that actually gets repurposed and 20% it gets, it’s turned into like burned for energy and we had this conversation with my partner’s stepbrother basically and it kind of popped in my head. I’m like, what about that laundry detergent? The first thing that I thought was that we never actually tried this when we pitched it, because I didn’t think that this could wash clothes. I just thought it was impossible. We were blown away by how effective it was and then we were like, Okay, Well, let’s see if we can try selling this stuff and if we can move 150 or get 150 people to buy into this cause in the first month, then we’ll move forward with that and so Kevin, my partners spun up a website for us, and we tested it out in the first month, we sold more than 1500 and a year or 20 months later, and we sold more to more than 250,000 customers DTC, and I think I probably 50,000 on Amazon.

 

Norman  8:42  

Very good. So before we go any further, I’m just looking, Andrew, are you in eCom mule? You’re hopping around from Jakarta to I mean, Thailand to Hong Kong? I don’t know. But I think somehow you’re a mule of some sort of eCom product. Fatiha, how’s it going? I see a couple of Facebook users. I don’t know who they are. But this is a cool one down here for you, Ryan. I’m not sure who that is. Kelsey, we’ll find out in a second. But it says Hey Ryan, if you’re looking in, get laundry strips into brick and mortar stores, I have a fabulous master rep who can set you up nationwide. So I’ll make sure that you guys get in touch. 

 

Ryan 9:22

Awesome. Thanks.

 

Norman  9:23  

Alright. So let’s start talking about it. You started off with this really cool idea. So what was the next step? How did you start to build the momentum? How did you get influencers to pick this up? Let’s go right from the beginning.

 

Ryan 9:39  

Right from the beginning. So we built the site up. It took us probably about a month to kind of figure out what our brand stood for and all those things, but took us about a month end to end to get it all done and then we launched two Facebook ads, which is a pretty standard for a lot. A lot of guys and surprisingly, the first day we launched, we didn’t actually get any sales from the Facebook ads. The first sale came from somebody I used to work with, who I had texted the link to and so I was kind of like a little bit bummed out day one, no sales you’re expecting that, like, push the Go button, and then just like blew up all your systems, but it didn’t fly and then day two, the woke up in the morning, and the sales started rolling in and rolling in and rolling and rolling in and that was kind of like the first moment where I was like, Okay, this is actually something that looks like we’ll be able to skip me something and the first thing we did from there. We went in, we moved into like Google ads, basic Google Ads covering like our brand terms and stuff like that, going after low hanging fruit for kind of eco friendly laundry detergent and stuff like that for in terms of search intent and then we eventually moved into, we never really jumped straight to macro, the macro influencers. What we did do is we started seeding in some subscription boxes. One of them was the Simply Beautiful Box and that actually got us in pretty good traction right out the gate. But it also happened to coincide with Earth Day was the month that we launched. So there was like, there was a lot of buzz, and Greta Thunberg was kind of really starting to get on that ego tear, roughly around the same time that we launched. So part of it was, we caught lightning in a bottle with lucky timing.

 

Norman  11:40  

Alright, with Amazon Subscribe and Save. So you’re on the Subscribe and Save model with your Amazon listing? 

 

Ryan 11:48

Yeah, we are. 

 

Norman 11:49

So I’ve had a problem with Amazon Subscribe and Save and yet, I’ve heard people have great, great success with it. The problem I had is I like to play around with the price. So I might try to play around in it and start out at $15. But I want to get it up to 19, then I might bring it back to 17. Because I’m just trying to find the sweet spot, and might end up at 24 it might end up at 30. All of a sudden, I start getting all sorts of emails from Amazon just saying that because of the price fluctuation I’ll be kicked out of the program. So what do you do for something like that? What happens if you want to bring up your price? What happens if you increase the perceived value of your product? Can that hurt your overall sales? Or do you still like that Subscribe and Save function?

 

Ryan 12:40  

Yeah, so I mean, you can’t typically get access to Subscribe and Save on an individual product until it’s been on the market for I think about three months. So I mean, we didn’t do that many experiments, but we try to mess with the price elasticity during that period where we don’t have any subscribers yet. But with that said, we did adjust our price once after Subscribe and Save and we didn’t get any sort of errors or warning messages from Amazon. But yeah, I think the best practice in that scenario would be to test price elasticity prior to offering Subscribe and Save, and then with Subscribe and Save itself, there’s three different tiers that you can essentially offer additional discounts. So the default is 5%. But you can bump that to 5, 10 or 15%. So instead of messing with the price elasticity on the front end of the product, I’d probably recommend figuring that price elasticity out prior to launching Subscribe and Save and then you can mess with the elasticity with actual discounting levels on the subscribe to save option itself. That makes sense.

 

Norman  13:46  

Yep, makes sense. So now let’s talk about different niches. There’s certain niches that are perfect. I sell soap so it’s perfect for this. Let’s talk about some good, bad and ugly niches that  just shouldn’t even be attempted. So any thoughts on that?

 

Ryan 14:05  

Yeah like, if your products are not consumable, it’s probably a bad fit. 

 

Norman  14:11  

Mining equipment wouldn’t be good.

 

Ryan 14:14  

I mean, we’d even play with stuff like we generally don’t, our brand doesn’t want to promote waste. So we were generally not going to try to subscribe to something that’s not quite like, we tried to jam circles through circle holes, not circles through squares. But a good example of something that didn’t work super well as we were selling. One of the things that we sell are they’re like reusable face wipes or cleaning off makeup and stuff like that, and they’re made of bamboo so they’re sustainable and based on our estimates, the average person probably be able to use them for depending on how frequently they clean their face, but for every six months, they probably need a new pack so we put a Subscribe and Save option up for looking every six months renewal and we get people subscribing to it but it’s not like even if you price anchor the one time buy versus the discounted buy or the subscribing say buy at a pretty significant discount, most people don’t just don’t look at that product and think like they don’t future pace themselves enough to think that Hey, in six months I’m going to run out of these would probably be really convenient to get more delivered. That type of product even though it technically is consumable over time is not an ideal fit for a Subscribe and Save environment

 

Norman  15:34  

When you’re doing social media ads or do you do Amazon posts?

 

Ryan 15:40  

You mean that like in there in the feed those that they’re kind of the newer wine?

 

Norman  15:45  

Yeah, it’s Amazon’s social media platform.

 

Ryan 15:48  

I think we do. Actually I have an agency that runs most of my Amazon stuff now, we were talking about it a few months ago. I sound ignorant here but I’m not 100% sure if we’re doing it. I know we’ve been creating videos and stuff like that, probably posting but not probably hyperactive like we are in other platforms.

 

Norman  16:08  

Okay, well just promoting Subscribe and Save. How are you going out there? How are you driving external traffic to get people to understand Subscribe and Save? Are you doing any upselling? Are you doing anything on your website to drive traffic over to Amazon for Subscribe and Save?

 

Ryan 16:27  

So I mean we are still probably like 80% direct to consumers. We do great on Amazon too. Don’t get me wrong like we’re the number one powdered laundry detergent in Canada but we do a lot of just basic standard Amazon advertising like keyword stuff. We advertise on the product page, other people’s product pages, we advertise with the Brand Registry chunk at the top of searches. But externally we don’t drive any traffic to Amazon. It’s all halo effect from outside of the native advertising platform and on Amazon. It’s all a halo effect from like, if I’m sending people to our B2C page, there’s about 20% of sales spillover to Amazon because a certain amount of people will only buy from Amazon and don’t trust anybody else.

 

Norman  17:23  

What about growing this subscriber base so you’ve been able to get it to 100,000 in 20 months? How were you able to achieve that?

 

Ryan 17:32  

I mean, there’s a lot of different things we built this whole movement that has people sharing the product with other people like people will buy a package of these and then they’ll go and give two strips or a couple of strips to their neighbor or somebody in their family that they really like and they’ve gotten to the point like where they’re buying these for Christmas gifts and stuff.  We’ve done a lot of media buys, a lot of Facebook ads and a lot of YouTube ads we’ve been really digging into like the humor Harmon brothers style content lately and that’s worked tremendously well for us. Something that we’ve been doing more recently is we’ve been working with micro and macro influencers on YouTube, and having us integrated 30-second to 1 minute spot inside of the the content they’re creating, where they talk about our brand and we’re seeing like, over time, the more of these pieces that we buy, the more like I don’t want to say organic views, but YouTube’s like a search engine and the content lives there forever. So we track it month over month, and we’re seeing a big growth in the overall views of these videos that include our products. So as these YouTube channels grow, our brand grows with it.

 

Norman  18:52  

So we talk a lot about nano, micro, macro influencers and influencer marketing on YouTube. How much do you typically spend before an influencer average?

 

Ryan 19:06  

Sorry, what do I pay? So what we do is we take the last 10 videos that they put out, we average out how many views they get on those last 10 videos and then we have a CPM we use internally. So like compared to Facebook or whatever, but anywhere from like $5 to $30 CPM. We don’t pay them for ongoing views, but we base the purchase price on our estimated viewership based on our last 10 videos.

 

Norman  19:37  

So you’re setting the price, not the influencer.

 

Ryan 19:41  

It depends like sometimes they’ll give us the price and then we’ll negotiate but we typically like in order for this to be scalable, we need a system that allows us to kind of determine whether something’s worth it or not and what’s really wild about YouTube or any influencer for that matter is sometimes you’ll find somebody that has a fraction of the followers of another influencer and they’ll drive 10 times the sales because the audience is so much more engaged and listened so much more to what they have to say, like, last month, we paid $500 for this one piece and I mean, this is still small in the grand scheme of things, but it drove over $2,000 worth of sales and most of our YouTube pieces don’t necessarily play out on from an attribution standpoint, from the link that that’s included in the bio, a lot of it’s going to be word of mouth direct, or brand left that you’ll notice inside of search versus like attributable clicks through last click sales attribution.

 

Norman  20:48  

I’m kind of curious, your product has taken off so I would call it a fairly fast growth company or hyper growth company. How do you handle it going from the first month, 20 months, going crazy? I always call it Crossing the Chasm. People, like I’ve seen so many brands fall apart going from $10,000 a month, 50,000, 100,000, a million dollars and they absolutely implode because they don’t think they don’t have the internal structure and they’ve never thought about it until it’s too late. What did you do to prepare for that?

 

Ryan 21:35  

I mean, there’s a lot of different things like we’ve grown a number of multi seven figure businesses before but nothing of this size. My business partner’s been involved with another business where he was the CEO that was doing close to the same revenue numbers that we’re doing here. But I think you can expect that whenever you triple in size, all your systems are gonna break. So we’ve always been trying to anticipate what’s gonna break next and like, it’s been crazier and we have 186 staff now, like we there were three of us when we started and we’re at 186. Other things that have really helped is in the beginning, you want to hire scrappy hustlers who want to learn and who want to grow with the business. But once you get to a certain size, you really need to hire people who have like, who’ve been there before. So we’ve hired a very experienced COO, it’s been with Dr. Pepper and correct. We’ve hired a Director of Sales, Director of Marketing from Johnson and Johnson. We’re trying to bring on people that have industry experience and obviously, they’re much more expensive, but your needs as an organization transition when you get to a certain size and as much as you want to bring people up and help people who are hustlers, when you’re Crossing the Chasm,you have to have people there that have like sailed these waters before or you put yourself at risk.

 

Norman  23:12  

I’m just thinking ahead of myself. This might make sense. It might not make sense. But this is what I’ve seen with a company that I was involved with, is that we’ve had a really good solid first tier of hires. So that could be VAs. It could be project managers, it could be whatever. When you bring in the second tier, or if you’re hiring smarter which sounds like you’re doing, that tier can get put off, and that tear like that first group of sellers or get resentment. Have you ever seen that? If so, how do you battle that because I’ve seen really great people leave the company that could have been something, but because the new person comes in which is higher than them now. Because the company is growing, they get put off, and now they feel resentment rather than really pumped about being in the company.

 

Ryan 24:12  

Yeah, I mean there’s a couple things that you need to deal with. I mean, first of all, is culture. Like culture fit is so much more important than people think. We had one person who wasn’t the best hire, and it’s toxic. It’s like a cancer in the company. So like you need to have people on onboard who believe in whatever it is that you’re trying to do, and have personalities that aren’t like my way or the highway, like people need to be collaborative and need to understand that this is what got us here and these are the people that got us here and we’re a team, we want to be the best team there is. If that’s not something that you want to be part of, then you’re probably not the right fit and then secondly is this is from what’s his name, the guy that wrote Traction and Rocket Fuel, Gino Wickman, is accountability charts and like there’s org charts and everything like that, but like, determining who it is that each person is accountable to and that’s the person that they go to when they have issues and stuff like that and then I’m not necessarily gonna or new guys not necessarily going to come in and be be bossing everybody around who’s underneath them. He communicates, like the needs or whatever to those peoples accountable, or whoever they’re accountable to and if the information gets disseminated, and you’re not having people up here pointing fingers down at people down here and completely changing the way they operate like, specifically for us, I think what we’ve managed to begin to implement that we didn’t have before is there’s a little bit more structure, not enough structure, the things are stuffy and corporate, and boring and annoying and like all sorts of regulatory stuff, the hoops you have to jump through in order to get anything done. But when, like, for us, and I’m just I can’t speak for everybody, obviously. But when you’re growing at the rate that we were growing at, everybody’s doing way more jobs than they were originally hired to do. They’re being entrepreneurial and like, whenever you’re putting a situation where you have to be entrepreneurial for an extended period of time you risk getting towards like those burnout phases and you don’t get to stay in the wheelhouse of the thing that you love to do. So we try to structure our business in such a way that it lets people stay in their sweet spot and get them away from that burnout, doing more things that they’re supposed to be like, we want them to be happy and let them focus on what they’re good at and try to structure it all as we grow so that they don’t have to do the things that begin like doing anymore. So it’s basically positioned as a benefit versus boring corporate stuffy culture.

 

Norman  27:02  

I was hoping you’d answer the question, the first part of the question the way you did, because I was hoping you’re gonna say that we talk a lot about building a performance based culture or building your brand or having that buy in and especially with hyper growth, you absolutely need to have it and having the ability to have really good people kind of think for themselves and be performance based and just quantifiable have just reporting in place, getting them to be able to write their own SOPs to grow their own department. But anyways, let’s get back on to the subscription mode and I do want to ask, Kelsey, does anybody in the audience have any questions about subscription?

 

Kelsey 27:51  

So Marcia is asking, first of all, what is the price point for the package of Tru Earth?

 

Norman  27:59  

You gotta plug Ryan.

 

Ryan 28:01  

I got a plug. So basically, there’s two price points. The non subscription price is 19.95. The subscription price is 12.95. So we get about a 35-37% discount to take the subscription offer.

 

Norman  28:17  

That’s pretty significant. Is that typical for subscription?

 

Ryan 28:25  

No. But the reason why it works, one of the reasons why so many people opt for the subscription version is because the price is anchored. Very large benefit for them to take that option.

 

Norman  28:40  

Right. Okay, and Marcia? Kels I thought there was another question from her.

 

Kelsey 28:48  

Does he offer different discounts if buyers subscribe for three months, six months, etc?

 

Ryan 28:55  

So we do have an annual subscription option, which is like 384 loads, which is roughly the amount that the average family of four does in a year. It sounds like it’s a hell of a lot. But my wife said, there’s no way we do that much laundry and then she thought about the fact that like on Saturday, we’ll watch like all the linens and the sheets, and it adds up. But anyways, we offer if you do an annual subscription, it’s $109. So you save I think that’s another I can’t do the math live right now. But you save another good chunk of money by 12 packs which is equivalent to 384. So you save, you get to two extra packs for free.

 

Norman  29:39  

I’m just looking at a question from Fatiha and this brings up a great point, you just have this huge savings. Now, I’m not going to get into your cost of goods or anything like that, but you’ve got to have significant markup to be able to offer a 30% discount and I want to make sure that our listeners understand that too, because most Amazon listeners are probably going to take their cost of goods, multiply it. Some will do three times, some might do it four times, we try to get it, we try to talk people into much higher, but a minimum of four times. So by giving away a 30% discount like that, how is that affecting you? Obviously you’re making money on 30 points off.

 

Ryan 30:25  

Yeah, so we basically figured out, like the price that we wanted to sell the product for is our subscription price and then the idea behind having the like, by having the one time purchase more expensive, it offsets the costs when our media buys when people don’t make the purchase right away. But it allows us to build it, like I said before, roughly 65% of people take the subscription option and then with the annual version, we’re giving additional discounts, we’re actually saving money and so we’re not sending a package every month. So our shipping costs are now one time instead of 12 and then, packaging isn’t cheap. So instead of sending 12 packages, or purchasing and packing 12 packages, we’re packing one package which is a 384. Pack. So for us, we’re pulling a lot of those extra costs out by only having to ship it once, so we pass those savings on to the consumer.

 

Norman  31:30  

Okay, you dropped a nugget. So I never really thought of doing it this way. So what you just said, if I understand it, is that, okay? You will set all your margins, your competitiveness, you’re going out to the market, based on your subscription price than anybody else, that extra 30 points is just coming into your pocket for those single sales. Guys, that’s a really great thought. So just think about that when you’re doing some subscription. Because I do this, I’ve gone out, and it’s a great strategy. So this is something new, like, I’ll go out there, and I’ve got my prices for my soap or for my dog stuff and I’ll give a Subscribe and Save based on my launch price. Well, that’s not gonna happen anymore. So it’s just a different way of thinking and these are the things like when you hear about Tim Francis talking about knowing your numbers, and you talk about Kevin King doing things slightly different. This is slightly different. Go out, if you have a subscription model, and you think you’re gonna use that, have that as your base, and then increase 10,20,30 and put that in your jeans. That’s great. Thanks, Ryan.

 

Ryan 32:54  

No, my pleasure and I mean, obviously, if you’re starting a brand, it’s easier to do that if you’ve been prepared if you already have one going. But I’ve helped another supplement brand that I’m friends with one of my friends from Blue Ribbon mastermind, and he was having a really hard time or he’s like the percentage of customers taking Subscribe and Save was extremely low and the first thing I said to him was, you need to figure out the price that you want to get paid on your subscription. That’s your price and then your products already exist. Yeah, you can’t just go and bump your price up 30% and it’d be acceptable. But what you can do is you can slowly creep the price of the one time by up until that percentage savings is high enough that it justifies that like the value because at the end of the day, I mean, people are either going to take Subscribe and Save because it’s convenient for them to get the product on a recurring basis and then there’s other people that take it because it saves them money. So you’re basically tapping into both of those segments. If you can position it properly, get go but like a 10% discount, if I’m just trying something out, I might not really be that interested in taking the Subscribe and Save until I’ve actually tried it and with a lot of products, especially consumables, what I’ve personally found in my life and definitely in the supplement line is that I’ll start taking a supplement and as soon as I run out of that supplement in my cupboard, that’s it. I’m not taking it anymore because I have to go to the store and buy it again or I have to order it again online. I keep kicking it down the curb, it never happens. So you do run that risk, especially as a one time purchase item, you’re putting yourself in a situation where you have to win back the customer.

 

Norman  34:39  

Okay. We have another question here. I don’t know if it’s Dr. Koz or Fatiha?

 

Kelsey 34:46  

Yep. Do you folks have a Shopify site? Any off Amazon channels?

 

Ryan 34:51  

Yeah, so we’re primarily off of Amazon. I think maybe 15% on Amazon but our website is www.t ru.earth and we’ve built a proprietary software over the last decade. It’s called the machine. It’s not publicly available yet. I think they’re working on a launch later this year to make it publicly available. Our wholesales run through Shopify right now to separate inventory, but our entire platform’s proprietary platform that we built.

 

Norman  35:27  

This is great that we’re on Shopify right now, because so many people just think about Amazon. But on Shopify, this is a great opportunity and I’m probably not telling you anything that you don’t already do. But when you have a product like this, or when you have a subscribe model, one of the things that you can do is just get the bloody person get some external traffic over to Shopify any way you want Facebook or whatever, get them over and then when they do see a product sale, okay, they buy it, and this is Gorgeous Audrey that I learned this from is that you upsell, down sell, cross sell and while you’re doing this, you’re kind of figuring out your customers demographic. So they’ll come in, and then you’ll come back with a message basically saying, Oh, if you want to save x by three, Oh if you’re buying three, you’ll save an additional 30% by subscribing. Okay, boom and so you’ll just go up and you’ll see it, you’ll keep upping it, to see where the sweet spot is. So subscription is definitely the sweet spot. But if it’s not, then it goes down and then you cross promote with another product that you might have. But even this is one other cool thing and I mentioned this on the podcast once in a while. Once they get into your Shopify store and let’s say that they buy a three pack instead of a subscription. Or they might get into the subscription model, have a discount code there to drive them back to Amazon to buy off of your Amazon store as well. Now you’ve got their email, all their information, the customers or yours plus you got a secondary sale over at Amazon. It would work really nice. I don’t know if you’re doing anything like that. But that’s something we do all the time now in our Shopify stores.

 

Ryan 37:17  

Yeah, like I said before, we pretty much only drive, we don’t drive anybody specifically to Amazon. It’s all it’s just basically inside of that infrastructure, their ecosystem. But that’s a good idea. I’ll definitely take a look at that for sure.

 

Norman  37:34  

Yeah, and there’s just so much, you were right when we started talking about the Subscribe and Save model, getting people over to Shopify, so I’ve got a brand, it does very well in the pet niche and two thirds of our sales are off Amazon. It’s just not a product made for Amazon and yet Shopify just kills it, more external traffic, we drive over to get more sales. It’s just not the same over on Amazon, but most of the time, he can pick up just these people that want to sell Amazon. That’s it, Amazon one click and they’re just 100% Amazon shoppers. So unfortunate. But anyways, if you’ve got the two, at least you’re not going to be a one legged stool.

 

Ryan 38:26  

Yeah.

 

Norman  38:28  

Alright, so any other questions there? I see Melissa. Hey, Melissa.

 

Kelsey 38:33  

Yes. So I asked the audience what their favorite subscription services are and Melissa is Barkbox. So anyone in the audience, name your favorite subscription service, and we’ll put it up here.

 

Norman  38:45  

You want to know something crazy? I was asked to speak at this subscription trade show. So I thought okay there’s gonna be like 250. There were 1000s and 1000s of people with 1000s and 1000s of subscription boxes, anywhere from cannabis to supplements, you name it. We’re gonna have a guy on the show. I don’t know if it’s next week, I’m not sure when he’s confirmed for he just sold his subscription box for $500 million. Just sold it and he hasn’t been doing it that long. I mean, it is really crazy what you can do and the multiples you can get for subscription boxes and guess what, why? Well, it might be because of multiple or it might be because of scripts’ subscription, keyword. It might be because people think they’re getting a lot more value. I don’t know. But subscription boxes are definitely something to take a look at and you said that you were getting involved with some subscription boxes. Are you still marketing it that way?

 

Ryan 40:00  

Yeah, we’re still in a few. I mean, I have a bit of an advantage in that department because I’ve been a part of about seven subscription box projects that, probably three of them were multi million dollar projects. So I kind of know the inner workings of the business model. So we’ve found quite a bit of success in just like reaching out to them, like tons of different subscription boxes and getting placement and the one nice thing about getting put in a subscription box, from a marketing standpoint, is that the people that typically buy subscription boxes are a little bit more frivolous spenders, because they generally don’t know what they’re gonna get, like to try new things and they have disposable income, because they’re buying a box of stuff that they have no idea what it is. So the nice thing about working with them, they typically have like, like packages that come along with product placement, but they include stuff like influencer unboxings, and blog posts. You can typically put like a promo code inside the box to pull people over, there’s a whole bunch of different things. You obviously have to have decent enough margins in order to make it work. But we haven’t done a ton of them, but we’ve probably seeded at least 50 to 60,000 different homes with that and in that same vein, if your product’s inexpensive enough, and it’s light enough, you can also do direct mail through like the Postal Service and stuff like that. We’ve done that that’s worked pretty well for us.

 

Norman  41:45  

Alright. So Doctor Koz, he’s got a question here.

 

Kelsey 41:50  

Yep. So Dr. Koz, what are your off Amazon advertising Golden Nugget strategies?

 

Ryan 41:57  

Okay, golden nugget. The two most important things if you’re going to be selling like on Shopify store, or using Click Funnels or whatever your platform that you choose. One thing that I see a lot of people do, and this is kind of elementary is the other push directly to the product description page, or to a collection page or to the home page and those pages aren’t necessarily designed, they’re designed to sell, but they’re not designed to sell to somebody who’s not aware of your product. So they’re great for retargeting, and great for lists, I would recommend that if you want to do D2C off of Amazon where somebody is unaware of your brand that you build a specific landing page sales letter for your customer and a really simple format to found of follow is a form of transactional psychology I learned it from Travis Psycho, it’s basically the acronyms CAP, Child Adult Parent. The child gets excited by and like the emotional happens, then you personally you’ll buy into something emotionally because if change solves a problem of yours, or it checks all your interest boxes. So you start with something emotional your headline on how it’s gonna change your life, in the adult, this is like kitchen table logic, like what are the things that you need to hear, like the features and benefits that are going to give you the confirmation bias that you need from that emotional hook that are gonna make you like, let’s say I wanted to buy an iPad a few years ago, and the only reason I wanted to buy it is because Apple’s commercials suck me in and I was validating it in my head is that, Oh, I’m gonna bring this to meetings, and I’m gonna take notes on it, like, what are the things that you need to tell yourself to convince yourself like you’re already convinced, how do you make yourself agree with what you’re already thinking or what they read an emotion out of mind and then the final part is parents. So parents are critical. You tried stuff like this before, what’s different about this, like, so risk reversal? Why is this different than all the other things that you tried so like, just kind of like making sure that that person doesn’t feel like I mean, perfect example is a money back guarantee or double your money back if you don’t like the product, whatever that looks like. If you structure your page with this information and also sorry, testimonials work too and that kind of like segment of that as well because they can see what other people have said about the product. But you can look at our landing page if you want for a decent example. It’s not the prettiest, that’s probably not the best example in the world either, but it works for us and then have that page drive people to the product description page.

 

Norman  44:44  

So I like to add something there and Amazon does this with Amazon posts, by the way. So what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to get rid of tire kickers and get the people that are actually going to buy. That’s why when you click on an Amazon post, it takes you four to five clicks to make the purchase. It’s not a one purchase click, it’s click first. Oh, okay, I’m interested in the brand or the image, okay, 50% of your traffic just got lost. Click again, now go to the actual post with all the summary with the show product. Click again, on show product and now you can go over to the product listing page, then you can click Add to Cart and buy. Now what you’re doing is you’re taking 5000 or 10,000 viewers down to 100 viewers, and you’re converting like crazy. Amazon absolutely loves that. So what you can do on the Amazon side for this, if you’re driving people over to a funnel page, so a lot of people drive traffic directly over to Amazon, they make a big mistake. I had one of my clients, they didn’t tell me about this, and they’re probably listening, but I’m not gonna say your name. A very, very successful company. They didn’t tell me that they were gonna drive and they had a Mother’s Day promo, where they drove 180,000 people out of their mailing list over to Amazon who didn’t buy. So they went from like a 30, 35% conversion rate to nothing. Well, guess what happened? Everything just collapsed. The ranking, everything just collapsed, because there was no conversion, PPC cost went up. So very similar to what you were talking about getting people over to a landing page, and then getting the people to buy through that same thing with Amazon, something to look at. I do want to take this one from Dr. Koz and then just to get your thoughts on this. I am 100% and I know Melissa here is going to roll her eyes because she hears me talk about this all the time. I believe in authority. I believe that authority is the only way that you can get sales, its authority, trust equals sales, if you don’t have authority and trust, it’s a harder road to go to get sales. Because what you just said Ryan, is that people don’t know you, you are a micro brand. Now we are in the era of the rise of the micro brand. That’s what this podcast is all about. But they don’t know you. So what do you do? You lay the groundwork out down usually before a launch. But what we try to do is we’ll go Alright, what can we do first? First of all, it’s brand consistency. If you’re on Amazon, if people are gonna click off of Amazon to see who you are. Now you’re over Google. Alright. Do you have social media setup? Is it consistent? Do you have your brand story? What are your colors? Is it consistent? Like everything has to be consistent. Yeah. Second thing is when you go over to the website, is it consistent or does it suck? When you give that consumer the ability to say, Wow, this looks a little scammy. Guess what, you just lost the customer. So being able to put those all in place, like whoever’s doing your website, make sure the same bloody graphic artist knows the social media to help you with your banners and spread the banners right across so it doesn’t look weird and then what’s more important Google’s algorithm right now is saying, We want information and by the way, the highest weighted information is newsworthy product. So that’s one of the reasons we pump press releases so much, but not press releases that suck. There’s so many people that go to the Philippines and pay two bucks for a bloody press release and it doesn’t work. It has to be good quality and also, when you’re putting out those really good high quality press releases, that could cost you anywhere from 100 to  $1500.

 

Norman  48:57  

You want to make sure that you’ve got all your information, all your content, you have a YouTube video in there, and that it looks consistent. Tie that into a blog article on your page and guess what it works like magic, all of a sudden Google’s going to start ranking you. You’re going to see a lot more and then you tie in with what you’re talking about Ryan, influencers who are going to independently put content up there about your product. Now you own the front page on Google. It’s really that simple. But it does take strategy to plan something like that. So that’s why when I started prREACH or bought prREACH and went from press releases into content into public relations, because we saw the power that all of those things vertically integrated would help with with eCommerce brands or most it was for Amazon, but for eCommerce or any business in general. Now we also have and you can definitely go talk to Craig Darling, we had Craig on two podcasts ago, the single biggest ranking tool that you can get on Amazon or on Google is free. If you’re paying like he used the thing about the $55,000 for a local car dealer. $55,000 a month in SEO and because of Google My Business, he was able to get it down to 1000 with more sales and more traffic than the SEO was driving. That is my advice to anybody listening. So again, you can check out our Google My Business thing. I’ve put it everywhere. Kelsey, right after the podcast, I said, Kelsey talked to Craig. We gotta get it on every one of our companies. The I Know this Guy, Lunch with Norm, my personal site, all the business sites, all the brands, so Craig went right through the roof and I know a lot of people listening here actually booked time with him. So anyways, Ryan, that’s a big spiel. But I know, I just wanted to take that because I’m passionate about building authority for my brands.

 

Ryan 51:12  

Yeah, and just to add to that too, I don’t even necessarily always use the wire to release stuff like if there’s something that’s geographically relevant, or also we’ll single handedly go out and track down the different press outlets that we want to be on specifically and we’ll craft a pitch directly to them and I mean, what I found is that when you go and you find somebody that talks on a certain subject, and you’ve crafted your pitch directly to them, including all the images that they can use quotes and all that stuff. Like, when COVID started, I reached out to eight different press outlets after we donated a bunch of products and I got picked up by five of them and it was just me reaching out, we did a wire as well. But like if you can go and contact these people directly and then the other kind of thing that I would add to this as well is that if you have a story that is newsworthy, you have a piece of content that you should throw in next in your Facebook ads or your Google ads. One of the the most effective ways that I make sales is when I create these kind of like locally relevant press releases, clean it up, publish it on our site, and have a couple of links to the proper internal pages that I want to link to, but then also the big call to action to try the product at the end and I don’t know anybody else that’s doing this, but it works amazingly well and if it’s geographically relevant, then you can cater to the locale in your Facebook ads. Like saying I live in a city called Coquitlam. I could be like Coquitlam, thanks for all your support. Dude, because of the subscriptions that you’ve purchased over the last three months, you’ve been able to help us donate 160,000 people, or 160,000 loads of laundry detergent locally to families in need, who are out of work because of COVID. Thank you so much and then people click the link because they’re interested because they live in Coquitlam. They want to read more about it, they get enlightened and are excited by the fact that they can help people in the area, contribute to helping people here and they want to learn more about the brand. So they click through and they wind up purchasing it like, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that we can unpack inside our PR here. But like I definitely think that people don’t, there’s a lot of pieces of PR that people could be stacking on to what they’re doing and really getting good bang for their buck.

 

Norman  53:44  

Yeah. Oh, by the way, Coquitlam. Been there so many times and I like to say that I was a good boy there but I was absolutely not. Oh my God.

 

Ryan 54:01  

Get some nice views of the mountains up here.

 

Norman  54:06  

But anyways, yeah, that’s my fishing hub. I like going out there and going flying out to Vancouver Island, but that’s a whole other story for another day. The other thing I like to say about geo targeting with press releases. When we put it out, like we have our own proprietary networks that we use and influencers and all this other stuff. But here’s a secret that a lot of people don’t realize, if you target cities or towns under 350,000 people typically and all you put is Tofino BC, Coquitlam BC, Tampa, Florida, you have just created a like next day, open up and search your your ranking, and now you’re ranking right across the board for bully sticks in Tampa or whatever. In that region, you can kill it. So let’s say that you take your reports and you see that you’re doing a great job over in Brooklyn or in LA or take a look at the surrounding areas, create press releases, and drive it either to Amazon or to your Shopify store and you’ll be number one. I showed this on a podcast before where we dominated the full first and second pages with our brand, just by doing that type of geo targeting and it’s so simple just in Tofino.

 

Ryan 55:35  

Yeah, to touch on that even more, it’s really smart to even wrap up your press releases just around these local areas and just test to see what traction you get. Because if you can get traction on a geographically relevant piece of content, or press release specifically, you can then go and duplicate that in different regions all over North America and gobble up, press, get links, get all sorts of media attention all over the place. But yeah, I like the idea of starting with one small city and making it work there and then you basically now have a scalable story. 

 

Norman  56:16  

Yep and you get, depending on the network, really high quality authority links coming back to your site. So that’s always cool as well. Alright Kelsey, it’s getting close to that time. Are there any other questions? Does anybody want to come in and talk?

 

Kelsey 56:31  

No. I think we missed one, actually. Okay, from Fatiha. Are you in the B2B section too, for bulk orders?

 

Ryan 56:41  

Yeah, we are. We’re in about 2000 stores or over 2000 stores now across North America. We actually made a decision to not go and discount stores recently, because we don’t want to cannibalize our D2C. We do want to be in as many places as possible. But we need to pick your pricing. We do offer products to pillories. But we’re definitely like a reseller is a place you can go and you can like bring your container and buy stuff by weight or by quantity. But we’re definitely being a little bit more selective on which resellers we work with because somebody, we don’t want people buying our product and repackaging it either. So, these are just the things that you learn after figuring it out 20 months of bashing your head against the wall.

 

Norman  57:43  

Yeah, there’s also something else that I wanted to see if you’ve run across. So I’ve worked with plenty of brands, just recently, I came across an absolute nightmare, where the brand has distributors. So fair enough, and they do like the distributors do a great job. However, there’s a reseller agreement and by the way, if you are selling to distributors, I would definitely have a reseller agreement in place. But yes, where can they sell and so what they’ve done is they’ve sold the distributor, did not sell on Amazon. So one of the clauses are you cannot sell on Amazon or this or that. They don’t, what happens is they go and sell to a distributor who ends up or another wholesaler who now sells on Amazon, and literally, we had 23 people selling this product that we had to send out letters just to stop selling the product. We are an exclusive online distributor for the brand. They didn’t care and it was a real hassle. So I think you have to be very careful about that. How do you get around that so you don’t get product cannibalization? Before you answer that, one of the biggest reasons I’m saying this is online with Amazon, I can charge 20 bucks, the product cannibalization outlets can take it, buy it at retail, buy it wholesale, and now they sell it out at 14.99. Which just it creates, your perceived value just goes out the window, everything goes out the window because you’re lowering your price so that these wholesalers or people that are not supposed to be selling your product are on there competing against you. How do you get around that? 

 

Ryan 59:35  

Yeah. Hey, I’m long winded. I’m sure if we had a conversation independently of this, we probably both be on tangents. But, so we have agreements in place that specifically say you can sell through third party vendors like Amazon, have had companies do it in the past and we’ve had to shut them down. They always have their pitch about why it’s good for them to be on there. But if you are working with a distributor, you need to make sure that your price point is high enough that it doesn’t make sense for these companies to even sell on Amazon and like most retail stores are not looking for keystone markups where it’s like, if I sell them the product for $6, they’re gonna sell for $12. I’ve actually found that they’re anywhere expecting anywhere between 35 and 65% margin. So like, there’s no need, like, I would not start by offering Keystone markups or Keystone markups to what while you’re selling wholesale, like, if it becomes an issue, and you need to reduce your price to make it work. I like one thing that we started out doing was offering the product too cheap, like not too cheap. But like the price point that we were giving wholesalers and distributors was there was actually too much margin and if you ever tried to get in grocery stores, they don’t want 100% margin. I mean obviously, they would like 100% margin, but like most of especially the discount ones, they’re used to operating on a 35% margin and if you give them 100% margin, they’re gonna wind up discounting the product and if you have kind of like pricing standards set there, they could potentially hurt that and like you can’t go and tell them that they can’t reduce your price. That’s like antitrust. So the only thing that you can do if somebody sells below the price that you want to be listed at is stop providing the product.

 

Norman  1:01:35  

Right. Okay, great. Alright. So I think that’s it. I think there was a giveaway today wasn’t there Kelsey?

 

Kelsey 1:01:45  

I think so.

 

Norman  1:01:49  

We just jumped right into the call. So we’re Ryan, why don’t you explain the giveaway?

 

Ryan 1:01:54  

I don’t think we actually discuss details of it. But I’m happy to give a couple packages away to whatever criteria that you guys normally use.

 

Kelsey 1:02:12  

Are there any places like the US only, Canada or anything?

 

Ryan 1:02:15  

I don’t worry about 55 different countries. Yeah. I’ll leave it up to you guys to pick some people, a couple people to get product to. I’m not trying to benefit from it outside of the fact that it gives somebody an opportunity to try it and I created a coupon code too. I think I sent that to you, right?

 

Kelsey 1:02:36  

You sent me that you have a discount, but you didn’t send the actual code. 

 

Norman  1:02:40  

Yeah, what ended up happening today is there was a tech issue. Ryan just came on, we hadn’t even talked yet. But what we’ll do, how about we do this? Let’s do I love green. The reason I’m saying that is because of being friendly, friendly to the Avaya. I love green to enter into the free packages, and we’ll get you out a couple of free packages and I know it’s late. I should have mentioned it earlier on. But it is something that I just remembered.

 

Ryan 1:03:17  

I think the coupon code I’m just double checking right now. I think it’s Lunch with Norm but I’m just gonna double check and it gives you 10% off if anybody wants to try it. One sec.

 

Norman  1:03:31  

Okay.

 

Kelsey 1:03:33  

So how many giveaways do you want to do Ryan?

 

Ryan 1:03:37  

Let’s give away three.

 

Norman  1:03:39  

Alright, so three packs going away. I see a few coming through right now. Andrew, I love green. Yep. So I love green. That’s great. Alright and while we’re waiting for everybody to put it in, so I love green and you’ll get this free product as well as we’ll be providing a coupon code. So are there any other tips while we’re waiting for everybody to come in that you can provide about Subscribe and Save do’s, don’t?

 

Ryan 1:04:12  

If you’re doing direct to consumer from your own website, a couple things. Make sure you offer a one time subscription option or sorry, one time purchase option because if you don’t do that, you can not go in Google Shopping. Also, people get mad when they don’t realize that they’ve subscribed to something given us another tip and these are things that I’ve learned through doing this is, if you have a product that’s consumable, make sure that you offer different frequency options. Because not everybody is going to use the same amount of product. Like for instance, when we launched this, you could only get once a month. A 75 year old grandma who lives by herself, and does one load of laundry a week. All you’re doing when you continue to resend them more every month is create and it’s every time that they see the product in the cupboard and they forgot to cancel, and another pack shows up and they start to get this stack in the in the cupboard, you’re not building positive brand reinforcement, you’re basically tying yourself to negativity. So it’s very important that if you’re offering a consumable and there could be multiple people in the house, that you offer different frequencies. So like we offer by monthly, quarterly, every six months. Like, once I did that, I did put analysis of the first purchase during time frame, and the lifetime value of our customers once they were able to pick their own frequency skyrocketed, because I look at that cohort you get, you’re getting all these cancellations fairly early on when they don’t actually need that much product.

 

Ryan 1:06:00  

Then the other thing too, is like, you’re not creating negative brand associations. If somebody has to pause their subscription, or cancel their subscription, when they need laundry detergent again, you want them to think like, Oh, I’m gonna go resubscribe, that was easy to cancel, or that was easy to pause, which is another tip. When we first launched, we didn’t have an easy way to cancel, you have to send mail or call our customer service and it was just that our platform didn’t have an easy way for customers to cancel and I just don’t think like, you people might think, Oh, yeah, but it’s gonna increase our retention rate if they have to call in or if they have to email and like that might be that might be great for you in the short term as a business, but you’re not building a trustful, positive experience for the customer and you want, like I said, when their laundry detergent runs out, the first thing that you want them to think is I need to go back to Tru Earth and unpause my subscription or restart it again, you don’t want them to think, Oh shit, I’m sorry. I’m out of laundry detergent. But like, that last time that I had to cancel, man it was kind of hard. I might be better off just like going and getting some from the grocery store, you want to reduce the friction, and you want to have the best possible experience so that you have lifetime customers. 

 

Norman  1:07:27  

That is so true. Plus, it’s against compliance. So if you’re accepting credit cards, there has to be an easy way for you to unsubscribe, or you could be in a little bit of hot water if somebody complains. So that is one of my huge pet peeves, especially when I’m buying something on the internet on the web, and you can’t bloody well, like I don’t even do it, I don’t even spend my time anymore. If I can’t find it at first round, I just go directly over to American Express, hit just cancel the subscription and that’s on them and I tell them by the way, there is no Cancel button for the reason I could not unsubscribe. There is a huge, fine that could happen. From what I understand, once you get in like every buddy that takes on or has a payment processor on your platform. You have to understand the compliance regulations and part of the compliance regulations is having currency on this site, you have to have a refund policy, you have to have the ability to cancel. These are things that you must have on a site. So anyways, you should check that out too. Just in case your site if you’re selling anything doesn’t have that, you think you might be retaining, all you’re doing is pissing people off. Alright, so Kelsey. Time for Wheel of Kelsey.

 

Kelsey 1:08:57  

Just give me a second. Okay, so can you see my screen?

 

Ryan 1:09:05  

That’s fancy.

 

Kelsey 1:09:08  

Oh, thank you. So two spins. So first one, so 3,2,1.

 

Norman  1:09:21  

Marcia. Yeah, there we go.

 

Kelsey 1:09:26  

Okay. Congratulations, Marcia.

 

Norman  1:09:28  

Marcia, by the way, is it Marcia or Marsha?

 

Kelsey 1:09:33  

I believe it’s Marsha. She corrected us before, I think. 3,2,1.

 

Norman  1:09:48  

Simon. Very good and one more.

 

Kelsey 1:09:56  

Is it three or two?

 

Ryan 1:10:00  

One more. Just one thing, when you get the information from everybody, we need to know if they want scented or unscented and we need their address, name, email and phone number. We’re not going to send spam or anything like that. But since we send from Canada, we need their phone number in case there’s any sort of customs issues or anything like that, but our system requires it because of that, just so you guys know.

 

Kelsey 1:10:27  

Okay, so name, phone number, scented unscented and address and email. Alright, one more. 3,2,1. Radd.

Norman  1:10:47  

Who also sells green products. I think he’s just said something about that.

 

Ryan 1:10:52  

Yeah. Very, very nice.

 

Norman  1:10:53  

Alright, everybody. So that’s it. We also have the coupon code that Kelsey added to Lunch with Norm. Ryan, thank you so much for the giveaways and thanks for being on the podcast today.

 

Ryan 1:11:06  

Thanks for having me.

 

Norman  1:11:07  

My gosh. Marcia, I was corrected. I hate when Kelsey is right. Marcia asked, What is the scent?

 

Ryan 1:11:17  

It’s called fresh linen. I mean, I can’t obviously describe a smell. But because the strips are very concentrated inside the package, it smells very strong. But you’re putting the scent for your laundry in a tiny little strip. Once it goes in the laundry, it doesn’t smell strong afterwards. But on the back edge, it’s pretty strong. The only thing to note, I guess this is important is that even our scented version is hypoallergenic. So it’s certified hypoallergenic. But if you are scent sensitive, I would suggest going with the unscented version.

 

Norman  1:11:59  

Okay, very good. Alright. So stick around after the call, I wanted to talk about a couple of things. But once again Ryan, thanks for being on the podcast. This is great. I hope everybody enjoyed it. We’ll be talking to you soon. So just stick around for a couple of minutes unless you have to go. But anyways, everybody. It was a lot of fun today, I learned a few tricks myself. Alright, Kelsey, anything else to say?

 

Kelsey 1:12:29  

Alright, so if you haven’t yet please join our Beard Nation. It’s a Lunch with Norm Amazon FBA and eCommerce Collective. I think we’re almost at 550 members right now. So I’m really excited about it. We got a couple of things planned, we got maybe new segments to do for our Patreon, too. We’re brand new on Patreon. So if you guys would like to buy us monthly coffee or donate a bit more to the show is always an option. But of course, just liking and sharing this episode is more than enough. But I do want to give a shout out to Marcia and Mark. They both sign up for Patreon and we really appreciate it and thank you so much for doing that. So little shout out there.

 

Norman  1:13:16  

Coffee was on them today. Thank you.

 

Kelsey 1:13:17  

Yeah, that’s right.

 

Norman  1:13:20  

Alright. So I think on Wednesday, we’ve got our returning PPC expert Brian Johnson, and can’t wait to talk to him. So he’s Wednesday and then again, join us every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon, Eastern Standard Time. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks for being so supportive of the show. Thanks for being in our community and we’ll talk to you soon