Join Our Growth Mastermind (Here's What's Inside)

[00:00:00] Richard: Hey, folks. Welcome to The Ecommerce Playbook podcast. I'm your host, Richard Gaffan, Director of Digital Product Strategy here at Common Thread Collective. And now it's happened again, folks. They've let me in to do a solo podcast which is... You know what? It's great. And thank you all for, for tuning in and listening here.

[00:00:16] But what I wanted to talk about here is, I think last time I was on solo, I talked a little bit about our P-Lite program. I wanna talk about something else, which is our next level growth mastermind, which is g- what we're opening up right now for brands across the spectrum. So if you're a six-figure brand, seven-figure brand, even eight-figure brand, we're gonna have mastermind cohorts for you.

[00:00:35] But the idea is you join us, it's 500 bucks a month. It's pretty affordable. You, you c- you come in 500 bucks a month, month to month, and what you'll do is you'll be assigned to a small cohort, about 10 folks, and you'll sit with us and... Or, or we'll assign-- What we're gonna do is assign you a growth strategist, profit engineer.

[00:00:54] What they're gonna do is take a look at everybody's business on a weekly basis, dig into everybody, put, put people in the hot seat, and give you guidance on a weekly basis as to what you need to do right now. So if you're particularly in a situation where you're working with, let's say, a freelancer, or you're working with an agency and you want a second opinion, this is a fantastic way to get a second opinion for very little cost.

[00:01:14] If you're also interested in, particularly if you're a smaller business uh, interacting with people who are in a similar situation as yours, other entrepreneurs, other founders, other owners, other operators, this is a fantastic place to do it as well. A couple of other things that come with that is you're gonna get access to a dedicated Slack channel, so there's a community aspect to it.

[00:01:33] You'll be able to ask questions of CTC leadership. You'll be able to connect with your cohort members there. You're also gonna get access to our methodology archive. What that is, is a compendium of everything that we believe about e-commerce and how we operate e-commerce. You're gonna get an inside peek into how we build our meta ads accounts, how we approach campaign structure testing, how we build Google, how we think about email, how we think about, I don't know, things like TikTok and Applovin and all of those platforms as well.

[00:02:01] You're going to get access to that material. And then of course, you're gonna get a full a- subscription to Statlas. So this is usually A full subscription is 750 bucks a month. This whole thing is 500, so you're gonna get a deal on Statlas. But what we're gonna do is ingest all of your information from across all of your different platforms, whether it's Meta, Google all of your sort of paid platforms, then your Shopify store, also your COGS, your marketing calendar, some of the more qualitative stuff.

[00:02:30] That all gets ingested, and it'll give us sort of this total or this complete 360 look at your business that then on the mastermind calls, your growth engineer or profit engineer rather, is going to be able to look into and is gonna be able to give you very specific actionable advice, actionable advice on what you need to do next.

[00:02:47] It's month to month, so you can cancel anytime you want. But anyway, that's, that's the pitch. We'll put that to si- to the side for now. And what I wanna talk about is kind of five things we've learned from mastermind sessions that we've already done. So we've had a pilot cohort that's been going for a couple of months here.

[00:03:02] We meet on a weekly basis with Joy Sharma, who will also be doing one of these cohorts as well. Joy is the head of our, our accelerator program or our seven-figure brand service, and he's seen it, he's seen it all and, and it's been really interesting some of the themes that have come out of these sessions.

[00:03:18] So I'm gonna go through five things and then a special bonus thing at the end that we've learned from these sessions and, and I will say specifically a lot of these brands are six and seven figures, so it's more applicable there. But generally speaking, I would say this is good advice and a lot of this was unexpected to me.

[00:03:34] So the first point here, the first thing that we've learned from these mastermind sessions is you've got to focus on offe- offer market fit first. I'll say that again. You have to focus on offer market fit first. Bit of a tongue twister. And in some senses, that's obvious. Like I'm sure that you've already heard that and you've al- you're already thinking about it.

[00:03:54] But particularly for brands that are at the six and seven-figure level I think the point here is that nothing else is more important than this. So likely, and, and this will happen with some of our brands that we've had in our mastermind some of the other brands that we've worked with in the accelerator program, but they'll be focusing on everything except the offer.

[00:04:13] And this is a really, really easy trap to fall into. You're thinking about small tactical changes that you can make. A lot of times people are thinking about a one, one place that this rears its head a lot is in CRO. This idea that if I could only change, like let's say the color of the buttons or something, all of a sudden my conversion rate would skyrocket and I'd suddenly be making money off of this offer.

[00:04:34] That's not really how it works, right? If the offer is good and if it's connected to the right market, people will do the work to try to buy the product, right? I, I don't know if you've run into this anecdotally. There have been things that I've wanted to buy that have had terrible UI, terrible checkout experiences that didn't really make sense and I've had to do a little bit of thought work.

[00:04:54] But I will put in the effort to do it because I want the offer so bad. That is the type of offer that you need to make. And so you need to think about that offer market fit first, a-and particularly think about, let's say, the next time that you're going to be running some sort of marketing moment.

[00:05:09] Instead of thinking about again making sure each landing page is perfectly optimized for each audience, making sure that the flow makes you know, is, is perfectly smooth. Instead of thinking about, I don't know, like maybe little nitpicks on the creative, what you should be thinking about is, is the offer clear and does it connect with the off-au-audience and can I test it as quickly as possible?

[00:05:30] So that's the first point. Focus on offer market fit first. Everything else comes second. Okay, point number two here, and this is just a quick practical tip. Audience test. So test different audiences, tef- test different landing pages by simply just changing the name of the product or the offer. So a lot of the times let's say you're selling I don't know, a knee sleeve that's directed towards compression for athletes.

[00:05:54] But then you also have another audience demographic that's older folks who have arthritis or something All you gotta do is change the name of the product from, I don't know, athletic wear compression sleeve to a arthritis compression sleeve. That's all you have to do. Just change little things on the landing page and in the ads to tell the audience that you're speaking to that this is for them.

[00:06:19] And part of saying that something is for an audience is saying-- is kind of implying that it's not for anybody else, even though that may not be strictly speaking true. Really, the product can work for both, but what you wanna be saying in the audience, or, or saying in the advertising rather, and saying in the funnel, is that this is specifically for them.

[00:06:38] This is, this is one of the first principles of our creator content program, is when they're constructing different hooks. The hook is often about not necessarily saying something fantastic about the product, but calling a person out, s- calling a t- type of problem out, saying something along the lines of, "Are you the type of person who, I don't know, hates it when your dog's tags jingle?

[00:06:59] Are you the type of person who loves to go running at six AM? Are you the type of person who et cetera, et cetera?" Right? Call out the person, call out the audience, and it's just as simple as a name change for the product, name change of the offer. Okay, point three. This is another quick practical tip that I really love from Joy, which is pivot to gift cards right after the shipping cutoff for a gifting holiday.

[00:07:22] So if you wanna maximize what you get in marketing moments, and w- the philosophy we preach at CTC is that marketing moments is what it's all about, creating a reason to buy on a monthly basis. So let's say for instance Mother's Day has just passed us, right? A few days before Mother's Day happens, at that point, you're not gonna be able to ship a product and get it to mom in time.

[00:07:45] What you wanna do is then pivot to an offer around gift cards, because you can still sell those, you can still message to people who've forgotten that it was Mother's Day. I mean, this is in some ways specific to Mother's Day, because people forget the date all the time. That's can be, like, a really effective way of messaging to folks.

[00:08:00] And, and again that would work on Black Friday, that would work on Father's Day, it would work on any giving- gifting opportunity. I think, yeah, Father's Day is still coming up again. That's a date that I forget a lot. But that's the perfect place to test this out right away. You can, you can take that and run with it.

[00:08:14] And then let's jump to to number four here, which is... and this was kind of an interesting or surprising one that we actually talked about on a recent mastermind call, which is don't send emails to your subscribers. Which sounds kind of crazy on the surface, but let me explain. Don't send emails to people who subscribe to your product.

[00:08:34] So if you have a product with a subscription tier to it, don't pester those people with emails at all Your subscription list for your emails, of course, send them emails, right? But for those who subscribe to your product, don't send them emails. They're already in. The best that you can get out of those is a reminder that they're subscribed to something that they don't want, and then they'll unsubscribe.

[00:08:54] Which look, I mean, maybe that's something that they wanna do, but it's not in your best interest to remind them. So don't send emails to your subscribers. Number five and this is like a little bit more complex here. But number five the f-fascinating thing we learned is that the biggest mistake that you can make when you're launching a marketing moment, besides not doing gift cards, is launching ads before you've extracted value from your existing customer base.

[00:09:18] So the sequence that we suggest is you send an email, let's say, for example, 48 hours before ads go live, and you frame it as VIP early access. So you, you find your existing customers, you find the VIPs, and you give them a special deal, and then you follow up with another email and SMS at, say, 24 hours before, and then you launch ads to prospecting only for the first two days.

[00:09:38] After 48 hours, then you can open up remarketing to capture email recipients who didn't buy. But the idea there is that the purpose of, of any marketing moment, the purpose of any marketing effort really is to acquire new customers. While at the same time, you-- we know that you need to get as much revenue as possible out of your existing customer base.

[00:09:58] There's a better way to do it than running ads to them. The best way to do it is via email. Make sure you give them something a little bit special. Give them a VIP early access thing. Message that they're they're getting something that other people aren't getting. Milk as much as you possibly can out of your remarketing, out of your existing customers, and then launch the ads.

[00:10:15] Okay. Finally, I think I, I promised a special bonus here, and this is an interesting one because it's very practical. You can go ahead, and you can do this right now if you want. But for a lot of marketing moments, what we're finding is that Post-it Note ads work really well. And so if you haven't seen these before, it's literally just a photo of your product with a handwritten-- like a handwritten Post-it Note, like, posted on it.

[00:10:39] Maybe you're holding the Post-it Note up, and it just shows the offer, like written in Sharpie or something like that. These work super well during promotional periods for reasons that nobody really understands. So I will say this: As with any of these things, once too many people are doing it, it will no longer be effective.

[00:10:54] So you take this, and you run with it as soon as you can, see what happens, test it out before that well starts to run dry, and every single ad that you see is just some guy holding a Post-it Note. And hey, who knows? Maybe that'll become something like I don't know, UGC generally, where it's it works so well that it becomes kind of a convention rather than a cliché, but we'll see.

[00:11:15] So those are just some quick kinda hits from... These are just insights that have come out of these calls. And, and I wanna say too, that these have all come out in reference to specific brands and their specific situations. So each one of these Was a piece of advice given to somebody who was-- They were showing us the landing page for their offer.

[00:11:33] We were giving them specific feedback. They were sort of running the sequence of their marketing moment by us. We were giving them feedback on them. And of course, everybody's sort of uploading to Statlas. So we can give you a sense of, like, what we think things need to look like on a month-over-month basis, how much budget you need to be putting towards Meta, how much budget you need to be, let's say, pulling back on, on Google.

[00:11:51] We can kind of f-function-- This will sort of function as an audit as well of, of your entire business, making sure that you are doing things the way that we think would make the most sense for your brand specifically. So again, I'm gonna run through the elements of this next level growth mastermind.

[00:12:08] You're gonna get small brand, small cohorts, ten brands max. So you're gonna get fast. You're gonna get tailored, actionable solutions for the hurdles that you're facing right now. You'll have weekly calls with senior CTC leadership. So, again, Joy Sharma, who heads up our s-accelerator program, he's running some of these cohorts.

[00:12:26] It's gonna be a bunch of other growth engineers and senior-- or, or rather senior profit engineers who are going to be heading up these cohorts as well. These are really smart guys who know what they're doing, who've seen it all. You'll get a dedicated s-- cohort Slack channel, so you can talk with your fellow cohort members.

[00:12:41] You can also get in contact with us if you have day-to-day questions. You're gonna get access to our methodology archive. Again, this is all of the information, all of the sort of the philosophy that we use here at CTC all laid out for you, so you have some understanding of exactly how we think about everything from meta to email.

[00:12:58] And then you'll also get a full Statlas subscription. You're gonna save about two hundred and fifty dollars a month on that. We'll up-upload everything all of your data into that, so we have clarity on what your business needs on a weekly basis. Again, it's also month to month, and we also offer a thirty-day money-back guarantee.

[00:13:15] So if you're interested in this, and you join us for the first thirty days, and you're getting no value out of it, then we'll refund you, no questions asked. But I will say that we believe we-- you can absolutely-- you're going to see significant material return on your investment if you join us. So, please check it out.

[00:13:33] We'll have a link in the show notes. I'll have sent out a few emails about this as well. But yeah you can go ahead, cometthraco.com hit the Hire Us button. Let us know specifically that you're interested in the Growth Mastermind, and we would love, love, love, love to get you on board there. All right, folks, that's gonna do it and we'll see you next time.

[00:13:50] Bye.