#346 – Amazon + Shopify: How Dakota Morse Built An 8-Figure Omnichannel E-com Empire

#346 - Amazon + Shopify: How Dakota Morse Built An 8-Figure Omnichannel E-com Empire Speaker 1: Welcome to episode 346 of the AM PM podcast. My guest this week is Dakota Morse. Dakota built an eight figure business in just over a year. It's got some great tips about creating videos and video marketing as well as a bunch of other great stuff in this episode. Hope you enjoy it. And don't forget this summer, I'm debuting the Billion Dollar Sellers newsletter. It's 100% free for listeners of this podcast. So be sure to go to BillionDollarSellers.com and put in your email address and name to get on the beta list so you can be one of the first to get this brand new newsletter. It's gonna be chock full of advice and tips and strategies and hacks for E-com and Amazon sellers. BillionDollarSellers.com. Unknown Speaker: Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast, where we explore opportunities in e-commerce. We dream big and we discover what's working right now. Plus, this is the podcast where money never sleeps. Working around the clock in the AM and the PM. Are you ready for today's episode? I said, are you ready? Let's do this. Here's your host, Kevin King. Speaker 1: Dakota Morse, welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. I'm super stoked to have you here with us today. Speaker 2: Really appreciate you having me on the podcast. I've been listening to it for a while. I'm a big fan of Helium 10 and the course that you have on there. I actually just took it super recently, really amazing and yeah, excited to be connecting finally. Speaker 1: Now, wait a second. You're an experienced seller. You run like a seven or eight figure brand. Why are you taking a course made for beginners called Freedom Ticket that's included with any Helium 10 subscription? You're not the first one to say that, but I just want people to understand there's a lot of people that go into Helium 10 and they're like, ah, I don't need some beginner course. I already know what I'm doing. And they don't click on that. But why should they reconsider? Speaker 2: Yeah. So I'm an eight-figure seller between Amazon and Shopify put together. But Helium 10 obviously is, most would say, the best tool when it comes to Amazon. But with it being such a robust tool, they're always adding new features and functions. And when I first launched my initial product, I did it the manual way. I wasn't really using a tool that helps me automate the process. And now I have about 35 products under my main brand, Wallaby Goods. And the last I'd say 15 products that I've launched have all come through Helium 10. And it largely came from the training that I got within your course. So I've had a lot more home runs recently than I've had in my initial spat. And I could have probably saved probably about $100,000 being completely honest, if I had been a little bit smarter about how I chose products, analyzed competition, and made sure I was launching smart rather than just hoping I had something, which I sometimes didn't. Speaker 1: So, so freedom taking you what you're saying is then it's good for experienced and new sellers because it might fill in a gap that you don't know that even if you've been successful or give you a different way of thinking about something or approaching something. Speaker 2: Yeah, the modules are set up super well. That's one thing that I really like is the ability to go into modules where I feel like I was weak. So obviously, the first couple modules are great for new Amazon sellers. But then as you start to get into the more advanced Amazon sellers, or even looking up how you've set up your business within the different modules about virtual assistants or whatever, it gave me a lot of ideas about how I could improve what I was doing and actually It has allowed me a lot more freedom in a lot of ways to travel more. And then as I looked into... I wasn't really using advertising through Helium 10 at all or informing our keyword strategy through Helium. So yeah, that really changed fundamentally, even within our agency, how we approach ads. So I think it's definitely something that everyone who's advanced and beginners, obviously, should check out. But advanced people, obviously, need to be looking at some of the more advanced tools within the modules that you speak through. Speaker 1: Now, before you were a seller, you actually worked for Amazon, right? In corporate, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, that's exactly right. So I worked for Amazon for five years. I worked in the advertising division called Amazon Advertising. It was called Amazon Media Group when I first joined. It was my first job right out of college, which was pretty crazy. And actually, at my first client meeting, I couldn't even have a drink of alcohol. I was 20 years old. So it's pretty funny. I'm sitting at a table with a CMO of a public headphone company. And he orders Louis XIII, which is like a very expensive cognac. It's like a $300 or $400 glass of cognac and I couldn't even have a sip of it. So he got to have two glasses, which he was happy about. Expensive back to the company. Yeah, it was really awesome. Basically, my job at Amazon was working with rapidly growing brands and consulting them on their advertising. So everything from sponsored product ads, sponsored brand ads, and then Amazon DSP, like the display ads. Speaker 1: Your knowledge and the connections that you made by working in Amazon for those five years, you were able to leverage that into starting an agency. So your agency does ads or do you do everything for them? Do you manage the entire account and inventory and all that stuff? Or is it just hyper-focused on a certain aspect of things? Speaker 2: Yeah. So my agency is called Alt Group, A-L-T group. And basically, it was we wanted to take an alternative approach to advertising. And when we first launched, it was right when the sponsored brand video advertising unit got released on Amazon. And for those that don't know, That's when you're technically on mobile and you type in a specific keyword like dog jacket and you scroll down and then you'll see a video playing that's about halfway down the page and it'll be like a really compelling ad. And at the time, those ads were going crazy. Everyone was trying to buy into those ads because it gets you right on the front page of search results. And that's the holy grail of Amazon is probably everyone who's watching this or listening to this knows is first page is where you need to be. 70% of people don't click past the first page. So the thing was, is that everyone wanted this video ad. And I was at Amazon. I was like, all my clients were wanting to spend money on this. And I was commissioned at the time. So I'm like, how do I sell more of these video ads? But there really was no good provider of these videos. So, I kind of like had that itch of like, here's a product market fit situation where there's these companies that I had been working with at Amazon that have thousands of products or hundreds of products, even 10 products, and the videos have a direct return on investment. So, if they spend $2,000 on a video, that video is actually going to generate them $10,000. So, the video has a five-to-one return and no one was able to actually give them the videos And I said, okay, I'm going to leave Amazon and kind of take like a leap of faith. And I worked with one of my buddies who had basically a camera and was kind of doing a side hustle of video production. And we thought, okay, if we can get 100 videos made at $2,000 a pop, we're basically making more money than we're making at Amazon. And it's a no-brainer. And it ended up being really successful. And we make a lot of videos now for Amazon aggregators like Perch. We work with companies like Veridesk, Sabra Hummus. So it went from us just having this like, The pie-in-the-sky idea related to video content. And with the success of that, the clients have now come back and said, Hey, we love how quickly you guys do video for us, how efficient it is, the returns that we get from the videos and the content that you produce with A-plus content, detail pages, whatever it might be. We want you to do ads, Shopify, Facebook, Google. So you just tacked on responsibilities and it's grown a lot. Speaker 1: So what's a mistake that you see a lot of sellers make when they're creating videos for video ads or something they should be doing that they're not doing? What's the difference maker there? Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question. I would say one of the biggest things that I see consistently is, I guess, two things. One is they don't articulate benefits of products in the videos and they don't grab the attention right away within the videos. So let me break those down a little bit more. So when a video starts, you need to capture that eyeball right away. A customer is on Amazon. It's a hyper-efficient shopping experience. Most people only spend like two minutes on Amazon. They need toilet paper and then they're gone, right? And they might realize they need something else. But if your video is not grabbing their attention, right away, and you're showing it in an engaging way or a dynamic way right at the beginning of the video, then they're going to keep scrolling and not click through to that detail page. So a good way to do that is to show a person dancing right in the beginning of the video or show them holding the product or doing something a little like I've seen some really cool videos recently where people emulate the search result page and will make it look like as they're scrolling down, it's just a normal search result. And then the product starts bouncing across the screen. It really grabs your attention. And then what you need to do is articulate a level of benefit. So you don't just want to show the product because that's just like, okay, this product is cool. But if someone continues to watch that product, you want to explain why they should click on yours versus the other search results on that page. So for toilet paper, again, as an example, you could say it's thicker, more absorbent, just articulating why the customer should click versus just saying, this is a fancy video. And, you know, you might not have that, you know, conversion or that click through because you haven't really helped the consumer understand why your offering is better than the competitors that are on the same page that might be cheaper than your offering. I think one of the last things too, is a lot of sellers make the mistake of not analyzing metrics when it comes to video content. So just making sure that you're understanding obviously the performance of your video ads and running multiple different types of video ads to understand which ones are obviously getting the highest return on investment and then optimizing future video assets like videos that you make as your brand in the direction that's most effective for you. So, if you just launch one video and it gets a 1x ROAS, you're kind of like, okay, this video is terrible. Video doesn't work for us. And I see that all the time. People are like, oh, we tried video, it didn't work. Or we tried influencer and it didn't work. It's like, okay, but did you try... Did you try split testing? Or did you try one with a person and one with a dog? Or did you try different approaches to the intro? And the answer is almost always no. And if you run, obviously, the videos that have different tests, you'll start to see, oh my god, the one with the dancing dog or the one with the woman or the one that even just showed the product and didn't show any people and it actually performed best. And then you start to optimize in that direction. And that leads to the greatest performance over time for any video asset, not just on Amazon. Speaker 1: How important is, I mean, I know most people are scrolling without the sound. So a lot of people don't want, you got to make sure the message comes across without any sound. What about the quality? There's some people that say more user generated content, more rough around the edges does better than, you know, something professionally shot by a 4k camera crew in a studio or something. What's your opinion on that? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a great question. We've historically seen... We've created thousands of videos at this point. I've probably recorded within our agency, 7,000 or 8,000 videos. And most of them are sponsored brand video assets. And those are for some of the biggest aggregators. Some of the names I can't disclose. The most successful for Amazon has typically been, for us, more professional-looking content that makes the brand look very clean and modern and has models in it, or shows the product with professional lighting and text overlay. And that's just for Amazon. So that's what we're seeing in terms of sounds and noises and things like that. Not critical, to be honest. Most people, as you said, are shopping on mobile. Don't necessarily unmute while they're scrolling on Amazon because you might be on the bus or whatever. Coming home from work, you realize you need whatever. So we've seen the videos that are professional looking and then have that text overlay that captures the attention and shows the benefits. Text overlay is basically just like If you show a model with toilet paper, it shows the benefits like super thick, and then it goes into the next screen. And then it just shows a bunch of benefits while keeping engaging. And then we'll put music over that. But there's no narration, pretty much in any of our videos. And I think that's an extra cost that's not necessary for most of the content. But if we're talking Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter ads, the UGC, the user generated content that feels more natural as made by like an influencer is much, much more successful than running anything that looks remotely professional. And the remote, the professional stuff is like basically totally ineffective at this point. Speaker 1: So what's it cost to create a video like that? I mean, is it a pack a package deal is 10 grand for, for three of them or something, or what, what's at that level? What is a client typically paying or is it like a just an ongoing contract where you do so many per month for or how does that work? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a great question. So when I started my agency, I wanted to offer really efficient pricing. I think that's like one of the biggest hurdles that a lot of brands cross and they don't want to get video content is I was at Amazon and I was like, what are you guys paying for video content to one of the larger companies I was working with and they were like, Oh, we pay like $10,000 per video. And I was like, $10,000? Damn, you guys must have blown over a million dollars with your video agency this year. And they're like, oh, easily a million. Yeah, a million. Way more than a million. I was like, that's crazy. Because I'm obviously... I'm still not making crazy money at Amazon, six figures. And I was like, okay, damn. If I can make more videos and a better quality, will you guys start to Give me some of that video production budget." And they're like, yeah, that's a no-brainer, especially if your videos perform better. And I just started getting those rumblings of people like, Overspending, in my opinion, for a piece of video content that was compelling. So our videos are typically about $2,000. Anywhere from like $1,850 to $2,000 per video. And the reason for that... And some people will say like, Oh, that's really expensive. I could just shoot something in my garage, which is entirely true. And if you're capable of doing that, I encourage it. But on average, most of our videos are getting about a 6x return on ad spend. So that's like our benchmark average that we report to our partners. And our clients keep coming back for more and more video content. Because even if it's $2,000, it's essentially an asset that you implement into the Amazon ads ecosystem. And then it's just multiplying dollars for your brand at that point, as you start to get more reach. And you can also use the same video On your detail page, which in most cases is enhancing the conversion rate of the product page, if it's doing a good job of explaining the product. And most customers will say... I think there's a statistic not that long ago that about 80% of customers would rather watch a video about a product than read about the product. I pretty much never read bullet points anymore. I look at the title, I look at the images, and then I look at the video when I buy something on Amazon. And if a brand doesn't have a piece of video content, I'm kind of like, okay, well, I might buy from the brand that does have video content because I can actually see the thing and how it'll fit my space and what it looks like and how it's going to be used in my environment. Speaker 1: Is there a certain length that videos should be? Is there like, have you tested, like you need to make them 22 seconds or 44 seconds or, I know Amazon has an upper limit, but have you found anything to be, you know, how long, where's people stop watching and make sure your message is in this, this, anything like that? Speaker 2: Yeah, we'll typically do two cuts depending. So obviously, Amazon has a bunch of different places that videos can go nowadays, which is another thing. I think a lot of people are not investing in video content, but then you're also seeing Amazon They put video content in so many different places on their website. So obviously, you have sponsored brand video. You've got the video that's in the detail page. You have videos related to this product now, which you can actually even implement your own videos there as a brand. You have the video in the premium A-plus content. You have video in the brand store. And when you look at Amazon's pages, which is another tactic, which I think is really funny. People don't really use is like actually going to Amazon's detail pages for their Alexa products or their ring products because Amazon obviously has access to way more metrics than we do about the performance of their detail pages and what's impacting their detail pages and the heat maps of where people are scrolling and blah, blah, blah, blah. I copy a lot of Amazon's detail pages and how they set them up and their best practices for the minute lengths of their videos and how they even run their own video ads with sponsored brand video. And not saying it's always best practice, but I think directionally, it's helpful to understand what they're doing. But what we've seen typically work best, and this is again, similar to Amazon's best practices that they're running on their pages, is We're seeing videos for sponsored brand video that are under 25 seconds typically work best, just so they're super quick, super compelling. We have videos that are only 15 seconds for sponsored brand video that work super well. But I would say no matter what, keep it under 30 seconds. Because any longer than that, it's just too long and you're going to lose people. A lot of content on YouTube now, they say if you don't capture the customer in the first two seconds, then you're losing the customer. And then for detail page videos, we're typically more in a 45-second range for those. Because a lot of customers on the detail page will do the scroll bar. So you can scroll to the part of the video that articulates what you're interested in seeing. Speaker 1: So besides doing the agency and doing all this video stuff, you also are selling it. Like you said, it's eight figures between Amazon and off Amazon. How important is it for people to actually be off Amazon? How important is this new, you're hearing this omnichannel all the time now. The guys at Amazing, at SellerCon are talking about it, everybody's talking about it. And people are always, when they come on Amazon, it's like, don't put all your eggs in one basket. When should someone, Amazon is such a good place because they already have the eyeballs, they already have the traffic, they already have Systems in place. Shopify is a whole different animal or WooCommerce or whatever you might be using. But when should someone actually start focusing on Shopify? Is it from the beginning or is it only the bigger guys that have money to spend should do it? Or should you wait till you get established on Amazon and then go? Maybe you have a basic Shopify site that's just there for credibility, but you don't really put a bunch of focus on it. When's the right time for a seller to actually truly start looking at Omnichannel? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a great question. And I think Omnichannel is going to become an increasingly important topic over the next even like year, but it's going to become really big in the next five years. Because Amazon is obviously a great marketplace. And we do about 40% of our revenue from Amazon. So about 60% of our revenue is coming from Shopify right now. And I actually just launched my brand Wallaby Good on Amazon initially. So I had no true intention of really going the Shopify route initially, but I had seen brands while I was at Amazon do massive revenue through their Shopify stores. It was typically more like 25% or 20% of their total revenue, but these were brands that were doing like multi hundred million dollars in revenue. And I realized that A lot of the growth that had occurred for them on Amazon was actually coming from an omnichannel experience that they were offering to customers and their ability to grow a brand off of Amazon. And I know that that can sound very foo-foo-y and hypothetical, but the idea is basically that You need to grow your brand off of Amazon so that when people come to Amazon, they're more familiar with the brand benefits that you offer. So it's basically like when people go... And I like to use this as my example. When people go to buy a pair of shoes, they're not typing in shoes to Amazon typically, right? They're typing in Nike, Puma, And the reason for that is what's called brand affinity. And if you can establish that brand identity off of Amazon, and really help people understand the benefits of the products, it's that much more likely that when they come to Amazon, they're not typing in... For me, for example, they're not typing in long-term food storage bags, they're typing in Wallaby long-term food storage bags, or just Wallaby goods bags. And our branded searches are insane for our product. Because as we started to focus more and more attention on our Shopify store, where we also have higher margin because we're not paying marketplace fees, we just started seeing an increased level of sales that we never really expected. And it went from like 5%, 10%, 15% of our revenue all the way up to now to about 60% of our revenue. And customers love buying from our site because we offer more value on our site as well through bundling and discounts and deals and couponing through our email list that you can't get on Amazon. And then we do a lot of education on social media. And then what I really like about Omnichannel compared to Amazon is with Shopify, email, all these things, when I launch a product now, it's like, I can email out to 200,000 people that I have on my email list that I got for free. I didn't have to incentivize these people to join the email list or whatever. I give them 10% off in some cases, but 200,000 people on the email list, 40,000 Instagram followers. 50,000 text phone numbers that are opted into SMS through Attentive. And when I launch a new product, I can catapult new products on Amazon to top 10 almost instantly, just because of the demand and the built-in audience I have there. And Amazon is not giving you access to that audience. So both in parallel, in the long-winded answer, I'd say is the best strategy. But I think you should start from the beginning if you're going to get going because it's like, why not? Speaker 1: Shopify now, especially with the buy with prime, what's it called? Speaker 2: Yeah, buy with prime. Speaker 1: Yeah, the buy with prime where you can actually have Amazon. You could always have Amazon fulfill, but you can now seamlessly do it. And so in the past, a lot of people might just Find you on Shopify because you drove them there from your Facebook ads or your socials, but then like, I don't know this site. I don't trust it. I don't want to, I don't have my credit card with me. I'm sitting on the bus or whatever, but I got it stored over at Amazon. Let me go check over on Amazon and see if it's there. And that's where, like you said, if you're a brand and you're there, you can often launch just on Amazon by doing nothing, just by throwing it up there. And I haven't even run any PPC if you don't want to or any kind of launch campaigns. And I know like, Matt Clark was on the podcast a couple months ago and he was talking about their coffee company where they can just take a SKU and just throw it up on Amazon and it starts doing $100,000 a month without them doing anything because they have all this brand awareness. And I always say like on Amazon, you're not really a brand until you have at least 3,000 searches per month. So, that's just my rule of thumb. I mean, that's not some hard set facts, but if you can get to where people are typing your brand name, Nike, Adidas, whatever it is, with something else, qualifier after it, that's fine. At least 3,000 times a month, that's when to me in my mind, okay, you've made it. When I'm looking on one of my businesses, we license products. And the brands come to us and they say, we're Body Glove or whatever, you want to license and create some dog products for surfers. We're like, okay, let's take a look at it. Let's see actually how big of a, I know who you are, you've been around for years, but let's see on Amazon, does it matter? Are people actually going there to search? And if I go and I see, yeah, there's like 360 searches for that brand name and the past year, I'm like, this is not going to be a good licensing deal because I'm going to have to do all the work. I am 7% to use their name and their name is really not worth much and the space so it's it's. It's important. So what's the difference though? A lot of people don't understand. These are two completely different business models in a lot of ways. At Amazon, the traffic is already there. You're trying to figure out exactly how to get in front of it and beat out the competition. On Shopify, you're having to drive that traffic and create that traffic, whether it's on social or from email lists. There's a big difference there. Even though the benefits, like you said, or you get the customer name and email address and all that, what do you have to do to make a Shopify site successful? Speaker 2: I would say the biggest things have been... Well, going back to what you just said, I think buy with Prime, obviously, it's a really interesting play for Amazon. And I don't know exactly Amazon's long-term play with buy with Prime, but Amazon's obviously recognizing that there's this huge opportunity that doesn't exist on Amazon. There's this huge buyer pool of people that While maybe a lot love Amazon, a lot don't love Amazon or see that there's increased value from other Shopify stores. So I think that gets to the root of why people should start Shopify. Amazon is always looking for where the money is. And if there's money to be found, Bezos has a little tactic to explore and find it. So they've activated this payment gateway, which we've actually had a lot of success with. So we're getting a lot of new features that are rolled out there. And we've seen really good success with it. Honestly, I was hesitant to add it to my site initially because I was like, I don't really want to give Amazon more data about who is coming to buy on my site. But customers like Amazon at the end of the day. We're offering better incentives. And obviously, we're not paying the marketplace fee. And it works out pretty well for us. So I would say as far as getting started and scaling a Shopify store, it's not as hard as a lot of people make it out to be. But it does take effort. And you need to pull the right strings to do that. I would say the best way to go about it is Having both Amazon and Shopify in tandem, if you're going to be selling on Amazon, doing them both at the same time. You can also just do Shopify. Obviously, there's people that grow dropshipping stores and all that. But just by having an Amazon presence, people are naturally going to go to Google and Google your brand. And then you want your website to obviously pop up there and look legit. And it's actually going to help your Amazon conversion to have a really well built out Shopify because it makes you look like a more established brand. So I always recommend that you just have at least a landing page or just even point back to Amazon on your store if you want to do that. And you can actually even put a special Amazon link on your store so that Amazon pays you commissions for any traffic that you drive back to Amazon. As far as scaling the brand off of Amazon, the most effective tactics for us have been social media influencers. Speaker 1: Is that TikTok or Instagram, Pinterest? Which ones typically work best? Speaker 2: Yeah, we've seen for our niche, which is long-term food storage, that Instagram has been the most effective. For other brands that we work with, it just depends. It just depends where their audience truly lives. I work with a large air purifier company that crushes it on TikTok. So the content is just really demonstrative and it's just been gone viral a lot. So we've been really focusing on that area. But as far as working with influencers, the best strategy when you're starting out is to give influencers... Choose 10 influencers who are within your niche on Instagram. Speaker 1: So another advantage like having a Shopify store though is you can remarket to these people. I mean on Amazon you're pretty much it's a one and done unless you run another ad or you're on subscribe and save or you figure out some method with your inserts to get them back. But on Shopify you have all that data. You can collect their phone numbers or email addresses. And then a lot of people, though, unfortunately, that's the end of it. They just sit on those. And they're like, I don't want to send an email to my customers that they might think that's spam and may not like me. But if you're doing things right, anywhere from 20 to 50% of your sales should be coming from remarketing to those existing customers, even if it's not a subscribe and save or a monthly, you know, it's not a supplement or something that they need every month. What are your thoughts around that and are there any good things? Are you seeing like SMS is working really good, always get that phone number? Are you seeing that email is working better? What are you seeing on remarketing? What kind of tips or strategies could you share on that? Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's... So they always say like on Amazon, you're just like renting your space, you're just renting your customers. And on Shopify, you own your customers. And that's exactly right. And that's like why Omnichannel is so important is because you can have so many touch points with your customers. And the more touch points that you can have with customers, the more likely it is that they're going to be educated about your product. And then convert on your product. So Amazon's like, we'll handle all that for you. Trust us. But on your site, you're just able to completely own that process and experience. And what we've seen work super well for us is email, SMS, and affiliate have really been what I would say are our core growth pillars, as far as owning the customer and having those multiple touchpoints. So I would say with Email, you're exactly right. We're seeing probably about 30% of our revenue right now come through email. And that's attributed to email, technically. But it's hard to pinpoint it exactly. But email ROI is insane. Most brands that we work with are doing about a 20x on their email investment. Most of our brands are working with Klaviyo. What's cool about Klaviyo is you're collecting those emails and you basically set up what's called a flow. Which basically automates the process of sending those emails. Someone adds something to their cart, doesn't end up checking out, it shoots them an email and says, Hey, we saw you added this to your cart. You should go ahead and buy this item. And a lot of customers do. And it's not annoying. And if it is annoying for the customer, they can opt out. So you're not being annoying. It's just part of the natural sales process that customers are used to. But with email, I would say it's critical and any site that doesn't have email or Amazon brand that doesn't have email isn't collecting that customer data. It's completely losing out. You launch a new product, you can email out with a campaign. Via Klaviyo, you can offer deals. If you get overstocked on a product on Amazon, which unfortunately happens to most of us every now and then, you can say, okay, we're doing a flash sale on this product, 40% off, whatever it might be. But what I like about SMS is I believe SMS is going to be the next frontier of communication Because the open rates on emails for us actually are very high for my brand. We're hovering right around 35% open rates, which is crazy. But a lot of brands' open rates are only about like 10% to 12% just because people aren't as interested or engaged maybe with the brand. Whereas SMS open rate is like 75% for most brands. And some brands have almost 100% open rate of text messages. And those are people that have opted in to receive those text messages. What's really cool is you can update customers on where their order is at. So you can say like, hey, your order is on your way. Pick it up, blah, blah, blah. And then you can also say like, Hey, happy birthday. Here's a 20% off thing. It just keeps people engaged, interested. We just see crazy revenue. We did about 500K through attentive just last year, which is insane. Never would have expected. Speaker 1: It's a plugin for Shopify that does SMS, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. So Attentive, I love because it's just very automated. Klaviyo can be a Ferrari, but you got to get it up and running. You got to build out the flows, which are like those automations of how the emails go out. You really got to perfect them. And most brands need about 40 something flows to be fully optimized with Klaviyo. Whereas with Attentive, pretty much anyone can open Attentive and pay for a monthly plan and then click like go. And it just starts doing the right types of text messages that you need to be doing, which I think Klaviyo should do a better job of. Clavio, you can hire a freelancer or hire an agency if you want to be running super effectively. It's hard to really learn, master, I'd say, Clavio without having someone on your team that's potentially handling that for you. Speaker 1: Why is it hard to master Clavio? You're talking about flow. Is a sequence of emails based on actions that they took, right? And you're saying that's difficult to set up on Klaviyo or it's just difficult to warm up the audience on Klaviyo because coming off a new ISP or what is it? Can you be more specific? Speaker 2: Yeah. So I would say with Klaviyo To have a truly effective email strategy, you're going to need your emails to be visually dynamic and interested and compelling to obviously click on. So not every brand has the capability of doing that in-house, designing those really visual emails. And then within your given brand or your given niche, there's different strategies that work most effectively for email. So for us, we typically see within my brand that our customers are the hottest So we have really dynamic flows set up that we've optimized over time to say like, okay, customer clicks on the email or clicks on a product, doesn't purchase, they get this exact email. Okay, if this customer didn't purchase 90 days ago, or this customer purchased 90 days ago, we're going to send them a different type of email than if they haven't purchased for 90 days. So we try to keep customers within our pool of shoppers. By keeping them engaged, we're willing to offer those discounts within certain periods of time. And we've just perfected this. And I have email people now that are setting this up and paying attention to this constantly. But that's part of why our open rates are so high, is because we have people paying deep attention there. Whereas attentive, for the most part, I pretty much check on that myself. I think Clavio could be a little bit more automated. And I'm not saying at the lower level, Clavio has not set it and forget it, which I think it can be. And I think a lot of brands do it that way. But I think to turn Clavio into the Ferrari that generates 25% to 50% of your revenue, you have to pay a little bit more attention to it to have it fully reach that potential. Speaker 1: And you said earlier that it's important to have payment methods that people like, like PayPal or pay with Amazon or whatever, so they don't want to enter their credit card. What about, have you done any testing with like these? Buy now, pay later kind of things. That's been a hot thing and conversion rates for a lot of people that were using them were going way up, but then there was a really high default rate on them. A lot of those companies were like upside down. What's your experience been with using that and should you only use that for high ticket items or does it work for a $20 food storage thing too? Speaker 2: Yeah, we don't do huge volume, honestly, through a firm. So we use Affirm, which is the leader in the space. Amazon also has a partnership with Affirm. And There are people that use it. So we do want to offer it. I always say you want your website to be at least at parity with Amazon. So you don't want to have less functionality on your website than Amazon offers. We've been very intentional with the offerings on the site to have them be there because I don't want someone to be like, Oh, I'm buying on Amazon because they don't have pay over time. So we offer that. But I would say for us, it's not crazy redemptions. But for our partners, clients that I have, that sell like higher ticket price point items, you know, like a hundred dollars, then we're seeing crazy claims, you know, for a firm where people are like, yeah, like doing it pretty, pretty constantly. And like a large sum of revenue is coming from pay over time. Speaker 1: Are you doing anything when it comes to SEO or, you know, blog posts or SEO or anything like that, that, that, that you're seeing results on? Speaker 2: Yeah, we pay a lot of attention to SEO. I'd say that's been one of our biggest tactics. SEO is a little bit different because it's a long-term strategy. It's been like a one to two-year strategy for us. And I really don't even think... I think it's gonna be more of a five-year strategy. It's one of those things that a lot of people don't do because it doesn't have that immediate payoff like working with influencers or Facebook does. But I saw brands like I have some friends that work for a very large soap company. And they started really heavily leaning... A D2C soap company. And they started leaning in very heavily to SEO. And it blew them up really crazily. When you type in, best soap for men, they come up right away. And I was like, Dan, I should be coming up right away for long-term food storage bags. My brands should be coming up for these keywords, but you're not. And I'm like, why are my brands not coming up for the right Keywords because I always click on the first thing on Google that's not an ad typically. I think most people shop that way because we're now trained to not click on the Google ads because they're seen as spam in some cases. So you have to build your authority. Obviously, to start ranking for those, you have to get indexed within Google. And I started really diving in, I'd say about a year ago, into Google Search Console. And we built out an internal SEO team that focuses pretty aggressively on SEO because it is such a crazy tactic. So if you look up like, best Mylar bags now, which is a pretty heavily searched keyword, you'll see Wallaby Goods. And typically, they're like the number one or number two position because the other brands are also fighting for SEO. The idea is that by getting that position, you're writing essentially blog articles and indexing all the content on your site correctly in order to have Google be able to scrape that content and offer it to its searchers, anyone that's doing a search on Google, so that they find the right content and then get to your website and then don't go to another website. And just for anyone that's like, I didn't really understand that premise, but Google basically awards web authority by you being the last place that someone went for a given search. So someone types in best miler bags, they get to our site, and they just stay on our site. And they're done with their searches. Google is saying, we did our job. We helped connect people to the right place they were looking. We helped connect the information to the person. That's Google's accomplishment. So And you can be that source of information for common searches on your blog. For us, a blog post might be like, 10 critical foods for long-term preparedness or the best foods to bring for a 10-day hiking trip. That's a very common search. So we can have that blog article And then tie it in with the offerings that we have, we start to index higher and higher and higher for that search and the relevant keywords within that article. And that's really... I don't know the exact revenue tied to it. But obviously, getting to an eight-figure business in a year, I think I attribute a lot of it to that SEO strategy. And if anyone out there has a better mechanism for tracking revenue tied to that, I'd be interested in that as well. Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a good site called answerthepublic.com where you can actually get a lot of these questions that people are asking. And another thing on the SEO that you can do is you can find things that people are typing like, what's the best Mylar storage bag? And if you look at the results on Google and there's not a video on page one and you go and create a video on YouTube that has that exact title, oftentimes you'll actually get ranked. Google likes to actually show a video on page one, you can actually get ranked. Then you actually have links and stuff in there. So there's lots of ways you can play the SEO game. There's good tools like SEMrush and a whole bunch of those that are really good for figuring that stuff out. But I guess the moral of the story here is you need to be hitting on all cylinders because if you're just focusing on Amazon, just focusing within the Amazon ecosystem, You're leaving a lot of money and opportunity on the table. And as you said, did I hear you correctly? You grew it to an eight-figure brand in less than a year? Speaker 2: Yeah, just, just over a year. So about a year and like two months. Speaker 1: And you did this with no, you did this self funded, right? You didn't have any outside money or anything? Speaker 2: Correct. So I, I worked at Amazon for five years, so I had some savings from that. And then, uh, we put in initially when we started the business about $50,000, um, into Wallaby goods. Um, and then, you know, we've, we've bootstrapped it since then. I don't know if we have technically taken out, uh, So we've used... I forgot the exact... I think it's like Amazon Lending we've used. It's like a program where you take a loan out from Goldman Sachs. They have a partnership. And it's like the Marcus Lending Program. And they'll extend you lines of credit based on your sales. So we've had a lot of success with that program with Amazon Lending. And the terms have been awesome. Comparatively, we've looked at other providers in the market for getting funds. I don't love the payment schedules of some of the partners that are out there right now. By just taking out that money, being smart, launching better products that are making us money, getting more intelligent, using tools like Helium 10 to inform our decisions, and then just doubling down. And now we're launching 3 more brands this year, which we're really excited about. So we're continuing to scale that and we're continuing to scale our partner brands. We apply basically all the best practices to our partners as well. So I think that's what really helps us as An agency is like we're really in the trenches. We have our own brand. We're launching more brands. And we're able to really just be in the weeds. Whereas a lot of agencies, I've found and I think you would agree, they don't really necessarily... They talk the talk, but they don't walk the walk. They don't know what it's like to spend their own money and make the mistakes. So we're actually doing that in real time. And I have teams managing that. I'm more focused on the agency side. It's been something that I think has benefited our partners greatly. Speaker 1: How is AI affecting what you're doing on your businesses or is it yet? Speaker 2: It's made writing the blog posts a lot faster. But yeah, I mean, we've been using chat GPT a lot. I know it's like a hot topic right now. And I was actually pretty hesitant to get into chat GPT. And I hate to admit that I'm like old, even though I'm 27. But the Some of my younger teammates really heavily lean into chat GPT. And we use it now to inform content direction for Instagram Reels. So it'll help us come up with really creative ideas for Reels on Instagram, which is tough because we're publishing 4-5 Reels a week now, if possible. Sometimes it's tight with the deadlines. For blog articles, we're obviously able to pump out blog articles pretty quickly. But the blog articles need to be good content. You can't just copy and paste an article from chat GPT. You do need to edit the article, make sure it's good. But directionally, I think it's very helpful. And then I haven't yet seen a really good way to apply it to discovering products. But I thought that'd be a cool way to go about it or looking for different niches. And then we write the Instagram What is it called? The descriptions of the videos with ChatGPT now. So we used to spend a lot of time writing what we'd call SEO-packed Instagram descriptions. Because Instagram, similarly to Amazon, uses the keywords within the description of the videos to try to figure out who to show the videos to. So we use ChatGPT to write SEO-embedded descriptions for Instagram. Do you have any other ways that people are using it though right now? Speaker 1: Yeah, they're using it to analyze reviews, using it for PPC, using it to look at opportunities. We've had several guests on the AM-PM Podcast talk about it. A couple months ago, I went to a big AI conference in Vegas where they're showing all kinds of really cool stuff to use it across the board. It's going to revolutionize a lot of stuff. And what's really cool, like you're talking about all the video stuff, is the next version, I don't know if it's going to be 4.5 or 5, it's supposed to come out in December. Uh, you know, that could change, but in December of this year, it's going to have video in it. So where you can actually, it will analyze videos, uh, deeply and, you know, to tell you this, this video has three people in it and a dog or whatever. And we'll also create videos just like you're creating now with, with mid journey or Dolly or some of those where you're, you can create images. It's going to be able to create videos on the fly and that's going to be I think that's going to be the next level of things that's going to influence a lot of stuff. So yeah, the AI stuff is something, you know, even at the billion dollar seller summit that's happening next week in Puerto Rico, a couple of people are actually talking about it because it's, like you said, it's the hot thing right now. And I think we're just barely touching the surface. A lot of software tools have been integrating some of it to help you write titles or bullet points or whatever. But there's so much you can do way, way, way beyond that. I know someone at Parsimony, they have SOP box and it's actually, you can go into this and say, write me an SOP on how to do brand analytics on Amazon, for example. And it will create the entire SOP. So you don't have to have a human that's like clicking and following. It will go out there with his database and stuff. I don't know how it does it. It will create the entire SOP. So you can do things like that. You can do things with like your products, like probably with your storage containers, like here's have Chet GPT write 10 ways to better preserve peaches. Or I don't know, I'm just making something up. And it will create, here's the 10 ways and you know, you can. You can provide people with that kind of stuff and then segment them into audiences. You could actually have them scan a QR code off the insert. I'm just brainstorming here off the top. And then, what are you storing in your containers? I'm storing apples or peaches or cookies or whatever it may be. And then you know, okay, these guys are all storing cookies. Let's create a target. 80% of the people say they're storing cookies. Let's change some of our marketing So actually have a cookie long-term storage container instead of just long-term storage container that also that you know and cookies is just listed make it hyper focused on cookies. So people are like looking at a hundred different storage containers, which ones for me? I'm going to store cookie. Oh, this one's for cookies. Speaker 2: There's so much opportunity. I'm caving my ear to what's coming out and I'm hoping that someone really leans in on the Amazon side with the best practice document there when it's a bit further along. Speaker 1: Awesome. Well, Dakota, we've been talking for a while here and I know we could probably keep talking and geeking out on cool stuff, but I want to say thanks again for coming on. If people want to reach out to you, find out more about what you do or your agency or anything, what's the best way to go about doing that? Speaker 2: Yeah, my email is dakota, D-A-K-O-T-A at altgroup.com, A-L-T group.com. And I'm launching my YouTube channel. So just be my name, Dakota Morse. You can Google me. And I'm on LinkedIn. So look forward to connecting with the community. I appreciate everything you've done for the Amazon and eCommerce community as well. I've learned a ton from you. Via your content with Helium 10. So really excited, appreciate everything and you know, hope that we can connect again soon. Speaker 1: Awesome. Thanks Dakota. Speaker 2: Thank you. Speaker 1: A lot of great information in this episode with Dakota. Hope you enjoyed that and we're taking notes and got some good stuff that you can implement from that. Don't forget the past episodes of the AM PM podcast are also available. If you miss something, you can check your feed where you're listening to this Now, or you can go to ampmpodcast.com and always remember to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss a single episode. We'll be back again next week with another awesome guest. But before we go, I've got some words of wisdom for you. In order for your business to survive and to actually thrive and to be able to scale it, you've got to accomplish at least one of these two tasks. That's either develop an advantage, Or add value above the value added by your competitors. You either have to have an advantage that you develop or you have to add value above the value of your competitors. Do one or two of those or better yet both of them. You'll have a much better chance of success. See you again next week.