Andrew:	This course is about how to create your simple and powerful marketing plan so you can increase sales. The course is led by this guy, Amit Kumar. He is the founder of Lexity. Lexity is the company that offers simple advertising for e-commerce businesses. I invited him here to teach how you can create your marketing plan. I'm Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy.com, where proven founders like Amit Kumar of Lexity teach. Amit?

Amit:	Thank you so much for this opportunity. Today I'm going to talk about five tactics to improve your business and take it to great [??].

Andrew:	Before you get into it. These are the big tactics that you're going to be teaching. But before you even start teaching, here's the first thing that I know my audience is going to be wondering. If this is so good, this is so powerful, what have you been able to do with it? So I want to spend most of our time talking about the tactics that people will use, but just tell me a little bit about what you've been able to achieve with what's on the big board and what we're going to be talking about?

Amit:	Yes, I started Lexity two and a half years back, and even from the very first day we new that our own product needed to found by people who were looking for similar solutions. Then, over a period of time we would give them [??] right channels and get people talking about it, and become loyal customers. 

As I spent some time in my previous company working with really large businesses, travel agencies like Kayak, and Expedia and what not. Helping them improve their sales, I realized that they still wanted the same things month-over-month. A bottle of champagne, a little bit of smoozing. I didn't really care about the bottom line as much and when we applied these five tactics for our customers at Lexity we noticed that not only were their business sort of taking off and making more sales, getting more repeat customers. 

But the people who were running these small businesses were happier. They were happier because they had figured out where to spend their energies instead of trying everything under the sun and ended up spending more time with their family, spending more time with their kids. 

Andrew:	Tell me about Mark. I like to understand big ideas with single stories. One guy that you work with, one of your customers is Mark. What were you guys able to do for Mark with the ideas that you're about to teach us.

Amit:	Mark was spending hours a day managing his ad words account and not getting a lot of success out of it. And with Lexity he was able to switch that over, let Lexity manage it, and then those few hours a day that he saved, he ended up spending with family. He's very grateful for what we were able to do for him. But this course is not about Lexity. It's about these marketing tactics that you can build with or without Lexity, and save those hours a day to enjoy life, because that's what it's all about. 

Andrew:	All right, I've been there, too. Where I say, it's time to for me to go buy advertising so that I can grow my business. So I start buying ads on Google, I bought a little bit on Facebook. Then I said to myself, where's this going? It's not really working out for me. I don't really know what direction I'm going in. I just have been told that buying ads on those platforms is effective, and so I'm buying ads on there kind of like a monkey just paying without any clear understanding of where I'm going. Which is why I wanted you to come here and teach. Which is why you put together this set of tactics that we're going to be teaching. 

And the very first one which I highlighted over here is, 'Use social media and buy ads to find customers.' Tell me how to do that, maybe give me an example there to if you could?

Amit:	The first thing I want to focus on is building awareness. Twitter is a great medium to do that. You know people are already talking about their pain points, talking about what they need, and that's a great way to find them. In fact [??] barbeque truck that's very famous in LA, and they have this truck and they keep moving it around and they get hundreds of customers lining up. And one fine day they park in front of a conference venue and there's no one. 

The guys realized that people are not aware that we're here. And so they tweet about it, and they suddenly see all these people from buildings around them sort of walk to the truck like zombies. It reminded me how powerful Twitter is, and you can do the same thing, you can see are people looking for a fancy contraption that you've built.

And also, as you're searching Twitter for this, you can also see people who are [selling] their products. So, it's a great way to get competitive insights as well. You can use that as a customer discovery mechanism, for example, and take that next level by going to Facebook. What Facebook allows you to do is really hone in on the kind of targeting

For example, if you have a product that's really useful for married couples or people who are already married as opposed to [audio break] you can target that, or if you want to focus on people that are working at certain companies, you have a product that would be really helpful to people who are working at the Gap. It's a certain kind of a shoe for people who are standing on their feet all day, you know, waiters. You can find people at the right companies to target. That's very powerful, and it's also very cost effective.

Andrew:	I want to challenge you in a moment, but first make sure that I understand what you're saying. You're saying:	the very first step to creating my marketing plan and also my precious, precious audience, for them to be able to create their marketing plan. The first step is just search to search Twitter to see what their customers are complaining about and what they're saying about your business already. To go to Twitter and see what they're saying about their competitors. Once you have an understanding or who they are and what they're saying, go to Facebook where you can narrow target those customers and buy ads, right?

Amit:	That's right.

Andrew:	OK. So, here's the thing. I’m thinking about the person who's listening to me, and he's saying:	again with the Twitter, again with the Facebook. All these guys are telling me that the world starts and ends with Twitter, and they're saying to themselves:	I've had Twitter. We've had Twitter accounts, they're all saying, and nothing big has happened. 

So, help me understand and help the audience understand, why Twitter, why Facebook, and how does this fit in with a real marketing plan that is going to help them see results.

Amit:	Yeah, so let me take a step back. So, if you think about any business as it grows, the focus for a business changes over time. Take a simple example. You start a business today. You can't focus on:	hey, how do I get repeat customers? Well, you don't have one customer; how are you going to focus on repeat customers. So, there's something called Adsell that I talk to and use internally at our company and talk to our customers about. And this is the Adsell method that I want to talk about for a minute, and then we'll go back to the tactics again.

Andrew:	OK. This is the framework that you're going to be teaching, and this is the framework that's behind the marketing plan that our audience will be implementing for themselves.

Amit:	That's exactly right. And it's a simplification of a lot of research that has been done in this area. If you go to Wikipedia and search for literature, it will be saying similar things in a very sort of complex academic way. We have simplified it for smaller businesses where you are not a tycoon yet. You want to be one day, but this is sort of the thing that you can gather. Now, it is five points. 

The first point is you've got to build awareness for your product or service. People don't know about what you're trying to do, that's not going to work. And the examples with Twitter and Facebook are relevant to that. If you have a great product or service, something you invented, if there's no one who really knows about it, there's no point. So you've got to build awareness, there's no solution to that. 

Andrew:	And awareness what you've told me before we started recording is, sometimes it happens one at a time. And that's why Twitter's effective because it's a free way to connect with people one at a time. And if you want to go a little bit broader, you're saying Facebook is a good place to do it because it's a way to micro target just the people that you want, as you mentioned earlier. Just married couples living in Chicago who happen to love the Beastie Boys, or whatever it is that's yours. 

Amit:	Exactly.

Andrew:	And so, we start small by building awareness. And then, what's next?

Amit:	The second would be:	get distribution. As it turns out, and if you just think about how you look for products. If you're trying to buy something that you have a feeling is listed on Amazon, that's where you'll go. If you're like, maybe, there's a website that sells it. You're searching on Google. Every consumer, every target consumer that you have is looking for your kind of products, some that are specific. So, you've got to get distributed there. You've got to be present at where people are looking for your kind of a product or service. Even if it's completely new, they're looking for similar, something already, and you've got to be there. So, that's the distribution part. 

Now, let's say, people have kind of heard about you and are able to find you and land on your website. You've got to absolutely make sure they check out as soon as possible and buy. So, you need to optimize your site conversions, get those first few sales, and in this day and age once you have these people hooked in, they've bought, they're enjoying your product. You've got to make sure all of their network knows. You've got to drive …

You've got to enable evangelism. You have to make it easy for someone to tell their family, A, you know, I love this pair of leather shoes, sort of custom built for me. You should get them, too, right. And that's critical in this day and age of Facebook and, you know, Google Plus and Twitter. People are talking, and you want to help them talk more about your product and service. And, finally, you have to drive loyalty. You know, someone who has already bought from you, already trusts you, and hopefully you had a good enough product that they want to buy again. And that's the easiest sell, right, just tell them, 'Here, by the way, you bought a barbecue, you know, sauce from me two months back. Probably, you ran out of it. Here's a coupon. You know, buy it again.' And in this talk, in this workshop, I'm going to tell you specifically what you can use in order to do each one of these.

Andrew:	OK. All right. First, you're building awareness for the product. Then you're getting distribution or going where the distribution is. Then you're going to convert the people who are getting aware of your product, and who you're reaching through your new distribution, convert them into customers. Then you empower them to go and tell their friends, and then you drive loyalty so that they come back. So, now, what telling us is, Twitter and Facebook are the way that we're going to get awareness.

Amit:	That's right.

Andrew:	Anything else that we need to understand about this part before we continue? I want to make sure that we really understand every part of it. Don't let me push back so far that you back away from the message here. I just want to sharpen the message, based on what I anticipate our audience is thinking.

Amit:	Yeah, absolutely. And, so, you know, many of the listeners are thinking, you know, why I'm not talking about Google AdWords, to build awareness, for example. You know, the [??]. There's a lot of [??]. 

Andrew:	Sorry, the connection's just going out a little bit. What you were saying a moment ago was, many people in the audience are saying, why aren't you saying, use Google AdWords to build awareness? And what was your response to that?

Amit:	And, you know, some of these traditional channels, and, you know, I count AdWords as a traditional channel at this point, are becoming very expensive, to do things like awareness-building, to get your first 100, first 1000 customers. And the newer, sort of more social channels, [??] and target your message much better, are more effective about that. So, for awareness, I was really, you know, assuming that you are starting out and, you know, you are strapped for cash. I would start off by looking at more sort of newer channels. For example, Pinterest is another example where, if you have a very visual, you might want to go pin that on Pinterest, and, you know, have other people sort of like it, and the word spreads from that. I'll have something to say about AdWords later on, but this is what we should have for awareness.

Andrew:	OK. Very first thing, build awareness. Think of that small taco truck that was a nobody for a while there. They parked outside of the conference, no one showed up. They start tweeting, and people walk in, as you said earlier, like zombies. They start, they seem to just come gravitating towards the truck.

Amit:	That's right.

Andrew:	And that's what we want to do, just build that awareness, one at a time. Don't look for huge avalanches of customers as soon as you start tweeting. You're looking for just a little bit of awareness. Next step, let's go to the big board, next step is to get distribution where buyers already exist. 

Amit:	Yeah, and it's funny . . .

Andrew:	Do you have an example of that?

Amit:	You know, I want to start with that one example. So, our first big break, for Lexity, was when we got featured in the Shopify app store. And in some sense that was, in fact, you know, in no uncertain terms, that was the distribution for us. We are an application that helps e-commerce merchants. Well, Shopify is an e-commerce platform. And, you know, that's where our customers are, they are using Shopify. So, you know, we got featured in the Shopify app store, and a lot of our customers found us there, including a store called ModKat. And, you know, that's an example of us finding unusual customers. They were one of our initial customers, modkat.com. And they sell, you know, these fancy-looking, very modern-looking cat litter boxes. You know, who would have thought?

Andrew:	Mm-hmm.

Amit:	But, because of the fact that we were distributed through the Shopify app store, they found us. And we, in turn, helped them distribute their products, right? So we said, well, you know, where do we need to get listed? And Amazon.com, of course, is where a lot of people, you know, buy fine products. So they're now listed on Amazon. And you can buy Amazon product ads through a very simple sort of account they can create. If you already have an e-commerce store, you can connect to Amazon, and, you know, be able to sell there. And that's an example for an e-commerce merchant. 

If people are already searching on Amazon, instead of trying to find other avenues, just find out what it takes to get listed on Amazon. They make it really easy, and that's a great place to start. And all this for the free opportunities. So for example, Google, right? Google's trying to get everyone to come to their site instead of Amazon. So what did, did the launch, well they launched Global product search a while back. And, because they want to be competitive, they made if free. So if you're selling an e-commerce product the first thing you've got to do, get your product listings on Google product search. Right? It's free and they get tons of traffic. So that's again a thing about sort of from a distribution perspective. Where are people searching? On Google, on Amazon. How do I get my products there? Now, you can also use Google ad words. Ad words is also a, you know, if you think about it from that perspective it's, you are searching for a product on Google, your ads show up, that's perfect. 

Now it tends to be a little more expensive, it tends to be hard to manage, so you can use third party tools. Of course Lexity has its own tools to help you simplify Google ad words and you can sign up and use that. But again it's a sort of a way to think about it from a distribution perspective. People are searching on Google. Maybe they're searching for my, you know, custom built leather shoes, and then they're going to be able to find it if you're on a Google ad words ad. So this is, it's all about distribution.

Andrew:	I see. And by the way, this is something that I should have, that I should have done when I started my business here at Mixergy. But let me make sure I understand this and then I'll tell you how I think I should have done it to help Mixergy grow faster earlier on.

What you're saying is, ask yourself who already, what platforms already have your customers. In your case Shopify is an e-commerce platform. They already have merchants, you guys work with merchants, you're courting more and more merchants as your customers. So of course it's a natural to work with Shopify. If someone is selling a product, a physical product obviously, Amazon has the platform that has their customers and they should be working with them. So just keep looking for those platforms. If you are a software vendor and Facebook has your particular audience, build on that platform. But look for those distribution platforms. 

What I think, first of all I see you're nodding, so I'm on the right track with that. What I should have done with Mixergy is, when I launched and I was a nobody and couldn't get any traffic, couldn't get any customers for these courses and for the interviews. What I should have said to myself is, which platform already has those people? Maybe it's the American Express, I forget what they're called but they have some kind of, some platform there.

Amit:	Open Forum.

Andrew:	What was it? Open Forum, exactly. So American Express open forum. I should have maybe partnered with them and only done on their platform first. Or maybe partnered with one of the magazine sites. But said to myself, not how do I get more people to my site but who already has my people? What other platforms that already distribute to my audience? Build on there.

Amit:	That's right. Because the reality is, you know, even if you are venture funded up the wazoo, you're always running short on cash and short on time. And you know it's much easier to piggyback on someone who already has the kind of people you're looking for. Build a partnership with them or use tools to get there. So Amazon and Google product search for example, sort of like you're partnering with them. But you kind of happen to know that they have their audience already that you want to distribute to, so go there. Make that happen first.

Andrew:	I see. By the way, as you noticed and all my audience notices, in the intro I don't give a long paragraph of information about what the course leaders business is. Because I know when I'm in the audience I don't care about that person's business. I care about my business, right? And that's why I zip through that. But at this point we've gotten to know a little bit about your business and we're using your business as an example. We should understand, what exactly does Lexity, does Lexity do?

Amit:	Yeah, you know, our core mission is very simple. We wanted to make simple, affordable and effective for e-commerce businesses to be able to become big businesses, right? Start small, you know, get distribution, get awareness, you know help like you know on product site conversions. You know just sort of succeed. And the way we do that is by looking at all of these tactics, you know. Whether it be Facebook ads or AdWords ads or Better ads. And we put it all in simple packages. 

We say, what's your goal, what's your focus on? Is it to make more sales? You know, is it completely focused on sales? Or you're like, no, I think I need to build awareness first, or I know there's tons of people coming but they're bouncing. And we make it really simple for people to come in, spend as low as 20 bucks a month and increase their sales from that point on. All these people want them to spend up to 10 thousand a month. We don't even take bigger guys than that. If you want to spend 100 thousand dollars a month, you know, please go talk to our partners down the street, not us. Because we really, really laser focused...

Andrew:	Starting from 30 bucks a month.

Amit:	20 bucks a month.

Andrew:	30. Oh 20 bucks a month.

Amit:	That's right.

Andrew:	Starting for 20 bucks a month you help them get customers, you help them think through what their marketing should be.

Amit:	That's right. And as they grow bigger and bigger of course that 20 bucks a month doesn't give them great traffic, they want to spend more, get more, and they can build a business with us.

Andrew:	Okay. Great. And now I can see if you're working with e-commerce stores as I said earlier, you want to know what platforms like Shopify. Did you go to any of the other platforms? Did you go to Big Commerce, anyone else who has e-commerce sites?

Amit:	We actually support all e-commerce platforms. There's a few where our integrations are deeper. But anyone on any e-commerce platform can come in. So for example, we have (?) with Magento, MagentoGo and Big Commerce is coming up and (?) is coming up, (?) is coming up and (?) is already live. I mean there's a bunch of platform relationships but you know, and you can sign up for what we call Lexity Live right away. 

So if you are not interested in marketing right now, you just want to look at your storefront. Like, you know, people walking into your store, walking around, which products did they view? Are they buying? You know, what's the conversion path? All of that in fact we give out for free so you can just sign up and if you're on Big Commerce you can just have it for free. And like enjoy looking at Lexity Live. And when you're ready to spend money on marketing, 20 bucks a month, you can start that right away from the Lexity Live interface.

Andrew:	Okay, and again this is what our audience needs to be thinking. Not so much how do I bring people to meet in the early days. It's who already has my people? How do I build on them? You use Shopify as the one example but you're on Shopify, Big Commerce and as many of these platforms as possible. And frankly that's what I should have done. Not just American Exchange Open Forum but, excuse me, American AMEX open forum, but also Mashable and Onstartups.com and every frickin' site out there and the same thing goes or our audience. 

Why by the way are you saying, why do you have it in this order, and then we'll go back into the tactics. But why do you say first go to social media and find some customers of your own and then go and look for distribution platforms. Why don't you just say, look, you're going to struggle at first. Just go and get your distribution platforms worked out. They have customers. And then look for your own customers.

Amit:	You know so the thing about starting with awareness is actually in a sort of an irony it brings you awareness about your own products and the way it's being perceived. So imagine if you had a conversation with a random Joe who tweeted about this need he has and you tweeted him back saying, hey I'm building this, what do you think? And he's like yeah it's interesting, but 10% of it is interesting. The other 90% I don't understand, like I don't know what's going on. So this process of building awareness of your brand by one on one interactions, by talking to people and exposing your message to Facebook, etc., will give you awareness of your own, you know, product and what you need to fix before you get to distribution. 

Because the honest truth is that the further down the pipe you go sometimes it's more expensive. So imagine that you start you know, advertising on Amazon, spending 100 bucks a day and you find that half the people return your product because you haven't thought about what makes it successful. So it's somewhat important to go in that sequence but honestly you know, nothing is as cut and dry. It might be that you get this distribution deal because you happen to be talking to someone and you're like, you know what, let's just go get it. You know, honestly, American entrepreneurship is all about taking a chance, grabbing it and running with it whenever you find it. So I'm not saying don't do it, but if you, the logical progression sort of helps in sort of thinking through these issues.

Andrew:	Alright, that's a good point. Because if I would have gone for distribution before I created my first product and gotten some feedback from my first users, I would have been awful. I mean, I couldn't sit on mic and feel comfortable talking. I was asking terrible questions and not leading the conversation well. I see, you want to practice with people and you get feedback from people one on one, people who really have a vested interest in you and then take this better, maybe not super polished product, but improved product and give it the distribution power of working with whoever has your customers. 

Alright, speaking of moving things along, I don't mean to keep you on these first two points for too long. Let's go onto the third one. So now we've gotten to know our customers, what they want, who they are and made some sales to them. Then we've moved onto distribution partners and broadened our reach. You're saying at this point it's time to optimize and retarget. Tell me about that. How do I understand that?

Amit:	Yeah, it's, I have an interesting story about that. So one of our customers signed up and they sell these fancy leather bags. And our customer support person, Katy, she really loves you know handbags. And she said, oh this is awesome, this store signed up. I'm going to give them our first sale by buying it myself. And she goes in and chooses the color, starts checking out and discovers that the buy it button is missing. So in fact the store could not have made any sales because the buy button was missing throughout their entire site. So you know, you spend all of this time on awareness and on distribution and you're like, okay, now the sales, their just about to come. And they're not. 

So it's very important for you to sort of keep an eye on how the site is doing. Now, of course this is an extreme case. You know I feel making thousands of sales and suddenly they're going to zero, you know something is going on. But as a, if you're just starting off you're like, well, you know, I get a sale month in the first couple of months and maybe that's just what's going on. So it's very important to look at your site and what's going on. Site, you know Google analytics is a great tool, great free tool for you to look at your site. Look at how people are converting, what sort of "define like" how are people progressing through your website. And then not only look at it, right, because it's like, it's just data. How do you react to it? So there's a great tool called Optimizely which can be used to vary things around. 

Maybe you have a front page where you're trying different messages and you want to swap them out and maybe change the button or change the message, you know your call to action. And you can use Optimizely to change these things very simply without requiring like IT departments and whatnot, if you don't happen to be technical. So I would really encourage using that. And this is only to fix the conversions for people who are already pretty decided they want to buy. They're on your site and maybe there's something troubling them and through all of these experiments and (?) data you improve site experience. The honest truth is, and if you just think about yourself, how many times have you just gone to a site and bought? Just like within 15 minutes you're done, right? Here it is, you know, click, here's my card, buy. You know, half the time you are at the office and your boss walks by and you turn off the computer. You know, just stuff happens right, you can't just like buy all the time. Or even if you're really convinced that you want to buy. 

So roughly 2 - 3% of people who will come to our site will make a sale. So 97 to 98% will leave. So there's this new technique, it's you know, a few years old. It used to be used only by the big guys but now it's available to a lot more people, it's called retargeting. And the idea is that you try to find the 98% of the people who left without buying and you show them an ad again. Right, so they come to your site, Megasite.com and then, you know (?) their browsing CNN or Amazon.com and they notice an ad for your product. And they're like, yeah I was there a few days back and I don't know what happened. I think I should go buy that great product that I was interested in. So there are some companies retargeter, adroll (?) where we go back and you can create these ads that will be shown to people who came to your site and did not buy. Which if you think about it is incredibly powerful. 

It's like ten times more (break in audio). You know like (break in audio), don't buy that actually buy from your site and yet they came to your website because they were interested. It's not like (break in audio) random people, they're just very interested committed people who just didn't buy that made that purchase decision. So you want to make sure you give them as many opportunites as possible to come back. And that's what I'm going stress in terms of conversions. Think of it as a site conversion. It's not advertising in a traditional sense. It's just you're (?) the site conversions by reaching (break in audio).

So number one, understand your site patterns and characteristics. Number two, improve call to actions, text and test them using Optimizely. And number three absolutely try to do retargeting as long as you have enough traffic coming to your website to get the people back.

Andrew:	I see. Right. That's a really good point that when you start out, when you don't have a lot of customers, doing AB testing is a pain in the butt and it really doesn't get you much results because AB tests in order to be statistically relevant need a certain number of people to come to your site, a certain number of people to go through your flow. And at that point it doesn't make sense. So you're saying first, get that awareness of people. Talk to them one on one. Sharpen your product and then once it's good put it on other platforms where you can start getting more traffic, more customers, and then make it better by using these tools. Optimizely, I like Visual Website Optimizer but I also love Optimizely, Google website optimizer is pretty good but it's a pain in the butt to use. It's a little complicated for what we need sometimes. And that's what we do to sharpen the product.

Amit:	Yeah, I want to sort of underline what you just said. It is very important because all of us have very little time. We are running from A to B. Is to know where you spend your energies. You're exactly right. If you focus too much on optimizing your conversion flow before you have the traffic coming to your site, you're really wasting your time, because even if you did own your messages, it might be that when the real swarm of customers come in, they actually wanted to hear a different message. So you super-optimized for a message that you liked or your early audience liked, but the vast majority of your late customers might be looking for a different message. So, this understanding of when to focus on what is important because it's just going to save you time and money.

Andrew:	Right. I like your example of the company that doesn't even have a "Buy" button by accident. They deleted it or left it out. But I think you're right, that's an extreme example. What's more likely to happen is what happened to me at Mixergy where we were getting customers and everything was good, but what I didn't realize was, I didn't make it obvious. I didn't make the buy process obvious. I thought everyone knows, go to the top menu and select the premium membership and that's where you buy. 

What I didn't realize is most people don't know that's where it is, and so the bigger the button, the more orders we get in. That seems to be the kinds of issues that you can solve. We actually solved that issue by using Visual Website Optimizer. I said, "Let's see, most people really know where the button is. I think most people really know how to flow through our site". I did an AV test, sure enough, increased sales. Most people didn't know. I knew because I was on the site everyday. I knew because I built it.

Amit:	Right.

Andrew:	Back to the big board. Now we've got our customers. We've sharpened their experience so that more prospects are becoming customers. It's time for us to take those customers and convert them into evangelists so that they can go and grow our business. Do you have an example of someone who has created evangelists out of their customers?

Amit:	Yeah. In fact, one of our very early customers that we worked with was Dodocase, and Dodocase makes these beautiful iPad cases out of bamboo. It looks like a moleskin notebook. We were talking with them and they said, you know, a large number of our sales come from people who buy our product and then tell their friends about it. Almost like a premium product, where if someone comes into the website they're like, yeah it looks nice, but I don't know what it feels like in practice. A majority of their sales, if I'm not wrong, came from people referring other people to that product. 

And that's one of the examples that really taught me the power of these referrals. Intuitively it makes sense, right? Yeah, if you tell your friend... But that process used to be really tough, 6 years back and before then. With the advent of Facebook, it's really simple to post a message. Tools that help you promote your products are really making it simple to do so. For example, there's a company called Curebit, there's another called Referral Candy, Shop Logic. Some of them are available on Shopify if you're an ecommerce merchant. Some of them are general purpose like Curebit. Each one of them makes it really easy for the buyer. What happens is someone buys a product. 

On the final confirmation page where it says "Hey, thanks for making this purchase!", something will pop up saying "By the way, thanks for making this purchase, but if you refer this product to your friends via Facebook, we'll help you choose which Facebook friends you want to refer. We're going to give you 25% off your next order and your friends who buy will also get 30% off." Some sort of coupon, some sort of an offer. And that works extremely, extremely well. 

That's a great way to increase the reach of your product via these social networks. And you really don't have to do much. You just install this script or just push a button to install and you're good to go. Really, really use these tools. They're easy. And if you're not an ecommerce merchant, of course, the way you implement this may be different. Maybe you have to send an e-mail as opposed to an on-site buy experience or a thank you mail or something like that. But the bottom line is, use these evangelism platforms to help your customers get you more customers.

Andrew:	I see. Curebit, Referral Candy, Shop Logic, you put them on your site and after someone buys from you, it incentivizes them to tell their friends to shop from you too. And actually what I've heard for non-ecommerce sites is, I talked to the founder of Launchrock and he told me that that's a product that's often used by people who get free users to tell their friends. You get the person who's signing up for your free product to use Launchrock. After they give you their e-mail address, the confirmation page says, "Great! If you want this extra incentive, just get two of your friends to come in and join for free, also." And they give your users a special URL to do that.

Amit:	That's right.

Andrew:	All right. Mm-hmm?

Amit:	That's right. That's right. Well, I have one tip on that, is that, you know, people tend to forget e-mail. E-mail is still a very, very strong driver of, you know, evangelist traffic, if you will, right? So, if you make it easy for people to forward an e-mail or, you know, share this sale via e-mail, that has a huge impact. So, Facebook and Twitter are really, really great, but e-mail, e-mail is still the big daddy, so never forget e-mail.

Andrew:	And how do we use e-mail to, how do we get our customers to use e-mail, to promote us, to evangelize us?

Amit:	Yeah, so, for instance, if you use one of these tools and SAO, you can help your customers share, via e-mail, or by Facebook, or by Twitter. Make sure that you're allowing e-mail-based sharing.

Andrew:	Ah.

Amit:	Similarly, if you send a thank you e-mail, you can say, 'Hey, thanks for buying. Just forward this mail to your friends for them to get a discount.' So you're making it really easy for people to just forward on these messages. And really optimize the e-mails that you send for forwarding, in order for evangelism to really happen.

Andrew:	I see, OK. It's these tools, but make sure that you're also, that e-mail is part of the way that these tools work.

Amit:	That's right.

Andrew:	OK.

Amit:	That's right. And, in fact, e-mail is, you know, segueing into loyalty . . . 

Andrew:	Yeah. 

Amit:	. . . e-mail . . .

Andrew:	Let's take a look. So, the last item on our board here, the last piece of the marketing plan that you want our audience to use, is to incentivize past customers to buy again. 

Amit:	Yeah.

Andrew:	Tell me about that.

Amit Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it is not a surprise that if you have personally had a great experience buying something, or bought a product from a brand and it really worked out, you're going to buy again. But, again, we get busy, and we might not remember or sort of think about a particular, sort of a particularly good sales process. You know, I have a two and a half year old, and when we were expecting, we signed up at Baby Center. A while back, you know, three years back now. And every week we would get an e-mail from them about something. You know, about the growth of the baby in the womb, and then, when the baby was born, like, what to expect. And, you know, week one, week two, what should you be doing? And all of this sort of, all of these informational messages, but, you know, some sales messages begged in. You know, if you're buying a stroller, it's time to buy a stroller. You know, here's a discount, buy it through us and you get a discount. So it was transparent, right, but it was sensible. We were like, yeah, we know what you're doing. You're giving us information to sort of keep us involved. And yet, you're providing us really interesting deals that we would need anyway.

Andrew:	Right.

Amit:	So this kept us as a loyal user of the Baby Center website. [??] as returning customers for the kind of affiliate deals that they had. And that's pretty important. You know, it was very easy for them to keep this relationship going once I'd already permitted them to send me e-mail. So think of it in the same way as your relationships with your customers. In some sense they've given you permission to interact with them, by virtue of having bought something from you. 

Now, you don't want to spam them, that's really bad. But it does allow you to go back, at reasonable amounts of time, saying, oh, you bought a barbecue sauce, you'll probably be done with it in three months. You bought a stroller, maybe you need three years. And, you know, if it's a long-running business, you can have those kinds of long-range engagements. So, really focus on that. You know, it's an easy sell. Now, if you're selling a car, maybe, you know, you can't sell another car in a couple of months, unless it happens to be a tycoon, like some of the people you would interview Andrew. But, more often, that's not going to happen. But it's an important component of your business if it makes sense for the kind of products and services . . .

Andrew:	You know, speaking of a car, I bought my car from BMW in Santa Monica. Every few months they would send me an e-mail about, because I also had the warranty on it, and it came with all kinds of service. 

Amit:	Yep.

Andrew:	Every few weeks or months they'd send me an e-mail saying, 'Andrew, you're entitled to this service.'

Amit:	Right.

Andrew:	'You're entitled to having this done,' and that's how they'd stay in touch with me. Long after I left the country, I'd moved to Argentina, I was still getting e-mails from them.

Amit:	Yep.

Andrew:	I sold my car, I was still getting e-mails from them. But they stayed on top.

Amit:	Yep, yep. And, you know . . .

Andrew:	All right. And these, of course, there's so many tools for e-mail. These are just two. We could have filled up this, not just this slide with lots of different tools for e-mail.

Amit:	Yep.

Andrew:	We could have filled up this whole screen and this whole session with different tools. 

Amit:	Yep.

Andrew:	But, Mailchimp is a great program, Constant Contact, I think. Who else? AWeber, which we use here at Mixergy.

Amit:	Yep.

Andrew:	And, of course, there's the Roll Your Own. And, what is it, SendGrid has a way of getting your e-mail delivered if you're using your own system to create the e-mail messages or to send out the e-mail messages.

Amit:	Say, you know the most important thing that most of these tactics is to just get them in, right to just get started. So we wrote this great blog post on you know, blog.lexity.com on how to choose the perfect e-mail provider where we discuss all of the options that you mention, Andrew, and try to figure out which ones would be best for you. But the bottom line is if you just start with something (break in audio) and just send an informative e-mail to all of your customers once every two months, that's a great start, right? You don't have to over think it. Just get that started. 

Maybe ask people for feedback on the product that they bought. Hey you bought this two months back, you know, did you like it? And that's it. You know, just like as a way of engaging and that will get you rolling. And that's a secret for all of these five, really. You know, whether it be building awareness, raising distribution, you know, improving site conversions, evangelism and loyalty. Figure out if this is the right time, right? And I'll give you a few examples of what the right time is. And do something simple. right. Don't over think it, just get it going and then build on top of that.

Andrew:	What do you mean by if this is the right time? How do we figure that out?

Amit:	Right. So, you know, the if you're just starting out focus on the first few customers. Raise awareness among a target audience, get them talking or talk to them. Number two, once you have figured out this is a product that works, people understand what it is and are happy to talk about it, use it, find where more of those people exist, get distributed there. This is, you're looking at tens of sales. Once you have hundreds of sales, or between tens to hundreds of sales, start looking at your site, right? Presumably they're buying, that means the site basically works. But is, are people dropping off? What is the conversion rate? 

So you know you sort of get into hundreds. I understand time where you know that there are extensive sales, and fifties of sales, there's enough people that think that your product is worth buying. Well if they think it's worth buying it's probably worth some of their network to buy. So make sure that you start thinking about that at that point. And you know, loyalty you can wait a little bit. Again, because if you have infinite time or if you have a lot of time or people helping you, obviously you can (?) some of those. But the loyalty will come a little later where you're like, you know what, I have my conversion flow without, you know, people are talking about it. But let me make sure that the people who bought I bring them back in again. So it's sort of more towards the end of the spectrum.

And always look at your metric. So let's say you're five years in, everything is going perfectly. Okay, so what do you focus on? Well, you can look at proxy metrics. So for example you can say, my site, how many new visitors versus returning visitors. So let's say almost all of the people coming to your site, which you find out from Google analytics, are returning visitors. What that tells you is that even if you're making a lot of sales, even if there is a lot of activity, you're not finding new people. It's just the same people coming back again and again, there's no new visitors. So you're like, ah, I'm five years in but I guess I got to work on awareness. Just for some reason there's no new people coming in. And that might sort of give you a clue.

Same thing with evangelism, right? Which is that, oh I'm looking at incoming traffic, almost all of it comes from like Google. And like 0.1% is coming from Facebook. This is kind of odd. You know Facebook is the biggest site on the web and people are not talking about my product on Facebook? Why is that? Maybe I should encourage that.

So you know, you can look at some of your data to figure out where you need to be. But the bottom line is that as you grow the business this is a good sort of waterfall for you to start off with, and then you optimize the (?).

Andrew:	All right, so I'm actually going to give of course, everyone who's watching this session I'm going to give them this document. Little secret. I've just been working off of a PDF here. I'm just flipping through a PDF on the screen. So of course I'll give everyone this PDF. Let me see if I can even show you it scrolls. There it is. Just this whole PDF that I've been scrolling through as we've been going through this session. I'm going to give this out to everyone who watched the course so they have it for themselves to review along with the transcript and links to everything that we mentioned. 

But I also want to thank you Amit. Thank you for doing this session and for teaching us and I urge everyone who's watching. I keep going back to my keyboard so that I can bring up different screens. I'm doing my own production here, I'm in real time showing all the screens, all the websites and I want to make sure to show people this site. This is your site, Lexity, where anyone who's watching is running an e-commerce site they can come here for $20 a month minimum? You can help them grow their sales. You can help them get more customers.

Amit:	Absolutely. I'm really, really honored to be part of the Mixergy experience. I've been following you for a long and I appreciate the work you're doing in helping people like myself understand, grow and learn from the greats. I'm going to keep myself out of that list of greats, but everyone else on your site is great.

Andrew:	I'm adding you to it. 

Amit:	Great.

Andrew:	And for the audience, let me say this. The reason Amit and I met is because he's not just watching these sessions, he's also contacting me and I urge everyone who's watching this, even if you're not sure how you're going to use this, if you're planning to use what you've learned here today shoot me an email, shoot Amit an email and say, hey thanks, this is one idea that I think I can use in my business. 

That exercise, the mental exercise of thinking about how you can use these ideas is going to be more valuable than just watching it and letting them flood you and hoping that one day you'll use it. Why don't you just say I can visualize myself using this idea over here. I can visualize myself using social media and connecting with two customers the next week. 

I can visualize myself partnering with this one platform that I've been thinking about, but didn't realize how important it was to partner with them. The name of the platform is, whatever, Shopify, I can possibly partner up with them. Having those kinds of thoughts will help you use what you've learned here today and I urge you to do that and to help hold you accountable I urge you email me or Amit. Amit, can I reveal your email address or is this too private? 

Amit:	Absolutely. 

Andrew:	It's amit@lexity.com, A-M-I-T@lexity.com.

Amit:	And Twitter is a great way to connect with me. I'm @akumar on Twitter. 

Andrew:	Right. All right. Thank you and thank you all for watching.