Ecommerce Storytelling and List Growth with Chris Lang

Welcome and Purpose

0:01Hey guys, it's Chris with Fresh Chili and Move, and I'm excited to talk about how you grow your email list and how you kind of make it possible to ignore it. And it's really about community, and I gave this talk at the Retention Roadshow with Jimmy Kim and Chase Dimond, and I got a lot of feedback in it, which is really cool. It's a very interactive audience, a lot of Q&A. We won't have Q&A during this presentation necessarily, but obviously when it's posted to YouTube, drop in the comments. I'll do my best to respond to to any questions you have. So, really excited about this, and I kind of have some tabs open, like my Shopify store, and you know, my Omnisend account, and like the Fresh Chili store, so I'll just go ahead and present here, and we'll take a look at it. So,

Chris Origin Story

0:46I'm Chris. if you don't know my background, I've actually been in the Shopify game for about a decade now. So, my first brand was this T-shirt company called Oregon Mountain Outfitters. And with every purchase, we would with every purchase, we would donate lunches back to the public schools. And so, this started from my garage, and this is something that was really passionate, you know, for me to to start off with because it was something where I grew up in extreme poverty and no running water, no electricity, food was scarce, and so this was an opportunity to be able to give back to my community.

1:16And so, through that, we traveled around the Southwest and just really really told the story of, you know, communities and it really took off even to the fact where Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve, the CEO saw my photos and was like, "Hey, I want I want to see these images come to life with with our cameras." So, they gave us a bunch of cameras, we traveled around the Southwest, and they did a like a little spotlight video on us, but also with the footage that we shot. So, any Hollywood blockbuster that you see most likely was edited on DaVinci Resolve. The footage that we filmed was the footage that is used in the training materials that you can see here. So, always start with story, always start with creative, you're going to see that theme throughout this presentation as well.

1:54That's is family, it's my wife Carrie and my my daughter and son, Sadie and Levi. And this is just me with the superintendent. You know, it was one of the first $10,000 checks that we gave to the public schools. And so, this was a surreal moment. But, in 2020, we paid off the debt for all the families at the Las Cruces public schools. So, that was a really monumental achievement. And then later that year, a Title 1 legislation was passed in New Mexico where there would be free meals for all New Mexico students. So, this is the governor of New Mexico.

2:24This really was like, "Wow, you're not dreaming big enough." So, and but very grateful, very thankful that, you know, we were able to play a small part in in helping New Mexico children. So, how did I get involved with Hatch

Fresh Chile Co Beginnings

2:38green chile? And what is Hatch green chile, right? So, Hatch, New Mexico, is a small, small, small town. And about 30, 40 minutes outside of Las Cruces, New Mexico, where I live. And this is the chile capital of the world. Can you believe it? That's pretty cool. So, I live in the chile capital of the world. and basically, you're either born into Hatch chile or you're married into it. So, that didn't happen to me. So, what happened was my partner here, Randy, and his father have been making this red chile sauce in their kitchen for for generations. And so, basically, it'd be one of those things whenever the Hatch chile pepper turns from green to red in the field, they'd make their their their signature fresh red chile sauce. And it's very, very good. It's it's still my favorite product that we make overall.

3:26And but, it was just a family recipe. He was making this for his real estate clients in his kitchen with his wife. So, they So, through the notoriety of Rocky Mountain Outfitters and and some other things that I had done in the community, they reached out to me and said, "Hey, can you take this product online?" And I'm like, "Yes, I can." So, they were on Wix at the moment and and on Facebook.

3:48And we were we were able to put it on Shopify. So, one of the things that I

Tracking Numbers and Content

3:52really love because I'm going to jump into it now, one of the things I really love is I really believe you should be looking at your numbers. I don't think enough people look at their numbers on a week-to-week basis, day-to-day basis for sure. But, it's like one of those things that like you don't really know where you're going if you don't know where you are today. And that's so true just of anything in life, right? So, basically, you know, I published this report on LinkedIn, on X, and it's just something to you know, that started off that was something I was having trouble with. And I had really some great people in the industry reach out to me, DMs, and really kind of helped turn things around, especially when I was really struggling kind of post iOS 14 update.

4:27And the cool thing is is, you know, this also holds you accountable. You know, so like if you have a down week, you got to kind of explain what why did you have a down week, right? So, I really believe that like if you're going to grow something, you need to track it. You need to measure it. So, this is, you know, something I told my social media team. And this is the Slack. I want Fresh Chilly to have the best content strategy for social media. Here's how we can achieve this. And so, I was like, we're going to post recipes, food photos, food video reels, product education, share GGC recipes, promo of the day, week, month, whatever it is, right? I want this on a daily basis. And so, we started doing this with our social media strategy. And as you can tell by benchmarking against the you know, the biggest companies online like Heinz, Frank's Red Hot, Tabasco, French's, we have a net positive following.

5:17Whereas everyone is consistently having a net negative following. So, this is a strategy that we started to implement, and this obviously helped build momentum, you know, from a social media standpoint.

Proof and Growth Metrics

5:28So, I just want to give you some proof here. I know it's June in the screenshots from March P&L. I should update this. but, 27 million in income is is kind of what we're doing with Fresh Chilly. And it was something that again, it started out of a kitchen. my partner and I, we built our own manufacturing facility. We built our own logistics and shipping. We do everything from A to Z in-house. Customer service, I mean all the marketing.

5:52We never had an agency. It was something I did all myself. And then I kind of started to train other people on the team on how to do certain things. And so, that's kind of how the agency was born, but it was also boom, you know, this you know, we had to do it ourselves. We bootstrapped, no investors, no money. We've invested every money every dollar back into the company as much as possible. So, now we're got a million email subscribers, top 1% of Shopify brands.

6:1736,000 is actually 37,000. I got to update this presentation. 37,000 member community, about a 40 to 50% repeat purchase rate. And then our blended ROAS is is great. It's always it's something that I track. It's something that's our North Star for for me. So, like I'm always looking kind of at blended ROAS. And because, you know, I in-platform attribution is just all over the place. So, I'm always looking at at blended ROAS. So, now we're 30 million lifetime revenue.

6:4490% of our business is Shopify. And you know, it's like 10% wholesale. It's it's kind of the mix of it. We're not on Amazon, but I am looking to do that as well. So, here's Omnisend screenshot. A million email subscribers, 50,000 SMS subscribers. I need to say like how to grow your SMS list. You know, I mean honestly, the reality of it is is anyone knows SMS is really hard. People jump on, they jump off. They jump on, they jump off. It's like whenever they want that dollar promo, they jump on, jump off. So, you know, SMS is is a little different, but email is very very sticky still.

Seven Step List Strategy

7:18So, basically the problem is, you know, people like they built a list, but never a reason to be on it, right? So, like the classic give 10% off to subscribers, you know, this is kind of just the lazy way of of building your list. I mean, basically like they're just giving you their email for discount. They forgot they subscribed, and then they never open. But what we do is like the next drop subscriber. Gave you their email so they wouldn't miss the next drop, and they open everything and they buy on repeat. And we'll go through that strategy here.

7:46So, here's actually what we do in seven steps. Step one, we sell access and not the email. Nobody wakes up wanting a newsletter. They want the first pick of the harvest, the batch before it sells out. And that fresh chili every every entry every entry point like it creates urgency around this access. So, just a few bullet points and I'll get some visuals here. We never say subscribe for updates, we say get first access to the roast, same box, a completely different promise. I also have other examples that I'm going to show you here in just a moment. Every sign up points awareness to one question, what does the customer get the second they hand over the email? If the answer is 10% off, you bought a discount 100.

8:23One of my favorite sayings of all time is give people a reason to buy and a reason to buy now. That's that's something I really really or like give first give you know, if we were to take this a step further about building community, give people a reason to care and a reason to care now. So, how do we do that? So, going back to Hatch green chili, it is from July to late October until the first freeze of that season. And so, basically what we're looking at is like a very limited product. It can't be made year-round if you if you pick and you roast and you and you freeze it and you can cook from frozen. But, we'll call fresh chili for a reason. We're we're one of the only companies in the world that will pick, roast, chop, cook, bottle, and ship within 24 to 48 hours. So, that's kind of like one of the reasons why we exist and people really love that small batch mentality.

Website Popups and Trust

9:15So, here's one thing I'm going to jump off this real quick and go to the actual website so we can see this in real time. But like, here's an Alia pop-up, try your luck, scratch below, see what you can win. You got a free recipe cookbook. Let's see how this plays in real time. Boom, claim. All right. No one text me anything weird, okay? I don't want weird stuff. So, what happened was is now that cookbook is in the cart. How cool is that?

9:53That's pretty cool. So, basically like that's a real value add. And the reason why we do like a cookbook as well, right? Let let's talk about that for a moment. It's because it's one thing when people buy your product, it's another thing if they don't if they don't know how to use your product, right? So, like we want to educate people on how to use our product as much as possible. So, we saw and you know, added to the cart there.

10:17Again. another thing that we do on the website, too. So, you go on the website and one of the things we do is over educate our customer. So, I don't think people do this enough, especially like in the age of like Temu and just, you know, kind of Shopify scams. Peop- You got to earn the people's trust. Like you can't take that lightly. You can't just like, "Oh, we're going to look pretty and that's it." Like we do a very, very, you know, in-depth like the Hatch Chile story behind America's favorite salsa. Buy Hatch green chile today. Like this no CRO expert's probably going to tell you to do this, and you don't need definitely have to take my advice, but this is something that answers the question when someone clicks our ad, right? It's like, "Who is Who are they? Right? And what do they do?" Another thing that we have is the social proof, right? Of over 400,000 satisfied taste buds. You can claim your free cookbook. And then also, you see we

11:02have a giveaway. We have the Hatch Chile Festival as sort of like, "This is the place where we can all come together as a community." And we're giving you a chance to win. So, every dollar you spend equals one entry, and we're going to announce the winner August 1st. So, this is, you know, we're offering a lot of value here and a lot of education. We're not just saying, "Give us your email. Give us 10%." We're showing you there's a community here of over 400,000 satisfied taste buds. We're we're we're showing you that there's giveaway opportunities. There's free cookbooks.

11:30again, like you walk into a retail store. Let's use this analogy for a minute. You walk into a retail store and like no one says hi to you, you kind of look around. There's really some the signage is not properly, you don't really know how much things are priced, and you're kind of like, "Mhm, that's weird." And you then you walk out. And then you get like a Facebook ad or an Instagram ad for that company. Very

Content Doorways Framework

11:49weird. So again, we treat our website like a retail location. Turn every post into a doorway. So if content entertains but doesn't convert, that's I mean definitely like dead end, right? But like everything we do, a recipe leads to a cookbook, a reel leads to the cooking group, a story leads to early access. We're going to talk about that. So the rule is nothing posted without a next step attached, right? You always got to be thinking ahead. It's not just email discount. You know, like the recipe leads to the cookbook behind an email. The reel leads to the cooking group. The story leads to early access.

12:22Every doorway leads to somewhere we own, the list, the group, the site. Never dead end, like, right? Our student produces over 200 to 400 pieces of content a month. Each with kind of built with a doorway, so like the reach compounds into the list instead of like just, you know, instead of it just being a dead end. So we talked about the Hashly recipe cookbook. We have different versions, 22, 23. The cool thing is is this is we give this as kind of like a free lead magnet, right?

12:46You know, so like happy to give this away and you know, if there's something that of value that you can give away for free, but it's still attached to your brand, I mean that's that's definitely like going to get people to be like, "Mhm, this is really cool." You know, this is this is something that I didn't know about. I didn't know that I could use hash chili on a lobster, you know, roll in Maine, so.

13:06So here's our community here. And basically what we have is Sorry. the screenshot's a little older, too. You can see 30,000 members here. But basically here, you know, what we have is this Hashly cooking group where we want to build community and we really want to like engage with people with like comment make it fun. And we really want to make customers the story. Like that's really it. Like we we do weekly winners, we do giveaways by sharing their favorite recipes.

13:36And so, this goes back to like the model of like what we're talking about and I'll blow this up here for you guys. But like everything we do is 30 days, 45 days in advance. Like I know what every reel we're going to post, I know every post we're going to post, I know what the grid looks like, I know what the videos I can go in by day and see what we're doing from a video standpoint, from a social standpoint, from a story standpoint, from a reel standpoint, from an email standpoint. All of this has intentionality behind it and I'm going to go a little bit more in-depth in a little bit and show you what that looks like.

Moments Not Campaigns

14:04So, basically like we we definitely want to build moments and not campaigns, right? So, what does that mean? Let's talk about that. So, basically we have harvest week, first roast drop, final batch of the season, and then the Big Jim pre-order. You might be like, "Yo, what's Big Jim, dude?" I'm about to tell you. So, these moments are real events, not invented sales. I mean, this is harvest week, the first roast drop, the final batch of the season, the Big Jim pre-order. You know, a promotion they they ask for money. And a moment makes people feel afraid to like miss something real. So, people set reminders for these moments. So, the moment anchors something to like the customer's already like desiring. And our hatch harvest season is a real calendar.

14:43Again, it starts in July, goes through late October. It's not a marketing invention. So, we build these moments around these campaigns. This is very, very important to us.

Big Jim and Varietals

14:51So, Big Jim as we talked about here, this is our most popular selling product. It achieved status in 1975 for being the biggest chili pepper in the world and no longer holds that distinction because now they've have created different varietals, but one of the things that we did that was different is we started treating chili like wine. I used to own a winery. I actually did the winery about a year ago. But you know, we on our state we had Cabernet Sauvignon, we had Merlot, you know, we had Barbera, we had all these, you know, like 30 different varietals on our estate. And, you know, but we also was doing fresh chili and I was like, you know, the wine makers like, you should treat chili like wine. And I was like, you know what, you're right. And so, we ran with it. So, when people ask, you know, is it hot? Well, we control mild, medium, hot, extra hot. I mean, we control the heat, we control the flavor by the varietal. So, Big Jim

15:41is a really just a one of the most beloved varietal blends for like chili heads in the world. So, you got to be like a true chili head to know about Big Jim. But again, this this sells out like crazy. First time it was 30 days, we sold out in a weekend, we sold out in 7 days. Anytime we try to put this back in stock, it sells out. I tell the farmer all the time, plant me more. Plant me double. I will buy all the fields, all

Facebook Views and Sellouts

16:03the farms. I want as much Big Jim as possible. So, let's talk about like, you know, again, we're we're growing our email list, right? So, how we doing that? We're making content, baby. Like, we are going out to the fields and we are live streaming, you know, from the farm and we're doing all these things. And one of the things that I tell people too is like, you're missing you're missing revenue on Facebook. I see all these brands, they only care about Instagram, Instagram, Instagram.

16:30But you spend so much money, but like, why don't you spend on Facebook? There's so much views to have on Facebook. Yes, we have Instagram and yes, we put up views on Instagram. But basically, like, you can see this video of me eating a cheeseburger at the farm wrapped up 4 million views. We wrapped up 100 million views last year. Okay? Like, you got to treat the platform that you're spending money with with respect, okay? What is this doing? As you guys know, views are attention, attention is currency. It's driving people to our brand and to our website.

16:58This is the network effect of it. Again, these are all the varietals. So, Big Jim is medium, Sandia is hot, Matador is extra hot, machete is mild. This is the network effects. We are sold out. We don't have anything left to sell you. It is gone, baby. Done. Can't get you anymore. I can't plant anymore. I can't beg someone for it. I can't do it. I can't get delivered. Sold out. This is what happens when you build around moments. Your inventory's going to look like a bloodbath.

17:26All right. So, cool. So, put your

UGC Community Engine

17:28customers to work by design. So, we talked about this a little bit. 36,000 member cooking group. So, submit a recipe, enter your email, win the contest, share with a friend. Distribution by design. All right. Let's Let's Let's walk through that. So, basically, we have people making product with our food every week. So, basically, like submit a recipe, enter your email, win the contest, share with a friend, tag someone, you both get entries. Like, these are all different models. And we play with this all the time. Like, this could be one model.

17:57But, basically, what happens is is when you get UGC, when you get like, you know, when we run contests and giveaways for this kind of stuff, too, the winner video does so much better in our ad account than any paid ad because like real customers, as you know, UGC whitelisting, it beats anything. And as you've seen, baby, organic engagement runs higher than Heinz, Tabasco, Truff, and Cholula combined. The community is your moat. So, the reason why I have this up here, this is an ugly burrito thumbnail. I think this is one of the worst thumbnails in the history of advertising. But, guess what? I posted this on Instagram, live from the farm.

18:31Two days later, I go back and look and it's got 500,000 organic views. I'm like, "What in the world? What's going on here? This looks ugly. It does not look appetizing to me." But, this has made us millions of dollars in revenue. So, again, when you're doing these things, I think there's a blend of like high-level, like this looks good, high media content, but like low-level does does so well. So, like, even though you saw, like, I have produced footage that the editors in Hollywood have cut, you know, but I love using my phone. I think it's really one of the best opportunities that we have, especially when it comes to like, you know, direct response advertising.

19:06So, again, this is just a graphic. We put We throw this in the post-purchase email. we put this in the cooking group. We post this on on on Facebook every once in a while, but like, you know, join the cooking group, win a free, you know, 12 pack of of chili from us. Again, fresh chili, Truff, Huy Fong's Sriracha, Tabasco, Louisiana, Texas Pete, Cholula. This is our engagement on Facebook. This is our community on Facebook. This is ridiculous. We are running laps.

19:32Laps, I'm telling you, around the competition. People, again, they dismiss Facebook. I'm also on Instagram, too. I'm on YouTube, too. We're we're growing those channels. I'm letting you know you're leaving money on the table by by being too cool. That's for sure. And I don't think it's a demographic, either. I can't tell you I think like I don't really go on Facebook as you know, as my main platform just because I'm in it all day like but I can tell you whenever I log in, especially when I go to look at my ad account or anything like that, my friend requests are really from like younger people now. I don't know what it is, but like I get a lot of young friend requests on Facebook. So, I don't know what's happening there, but I think you guys are sleeping on Facebook, and especially Facebook groups.

Giveaways and Q5 Wins

20:12So, let's let's talk about how we can engineer the giveaway to you know, pay us back. So, basically, you know, you can have purchase equal entry, email equal entry, referrals equals, you know, let's walk through this. So, this is pretty fun. So, we actually are spending 60% less on Meta this year than last year, which was our biggest year. And we're leaning more into like giveaways, giving away cash. I'm also leaning into like our Shopify segments and and, you know, our email channel with Omnisend and telling you like we've never had a profitable Q1, ever. This was our first profitable Q1 was I mean, was this year. So, kind of walk through it here with you.

20:59So, again, this is a this is a Shared Sweeps giveaway that we did with Shared Sweeps. I think it 2024. So, it's been a little bit, but whenever you're doing your giveaways, why I have this up, is make sure everything matches. Like, your emails, your stories, your reels, your web banners, your posts. I can't tell you how many brands don't post stories and reels, but obsess over the grid. Well, guess what? Instagram doesn't give a doesn't doesn't care about your grid.

21:25It's stories and reels, stories and reels. And what are you not posting? Stories and reels. You know, take this information, take the free eyeballs, make the content, and distribute it everywhere. So, this is what I'm talking about. Like, how granular do I get on my content that is 45 days out in advance? Again, I know my reel, I know my carousel post, I know my stories, I know my email campaign. And guess what? Everything is engineered to what? To provide value.

21:53Right? So, even like look at this, you know, here like Oh, yeah, looks good. But then we have a cookbook. Or you can subscribe and save. Subscribe and save and save 20% off. There's also a testimonial. You know, here's also our giveaway. You know, stock up, win $1,000 in cash. You know, and here's a video of our last winners. You know, mom and daughter who who made a really cool video. We are offering value, we are educating, and this is what's winning for us.

22:18So, this is 2024 data but with the ShareSwaps giveaway, we generated almost $200,000 in Q5. So, if you don't know what Q5 is, it's the last week between Christmas and New Year's, with a 83% year-over-year growth. We ended the last day of year with $45,000 in sales. We used urgency. We up the entry incentives by 3x. Last day to enter, all your purchases are worth 3x now. So, that was our funnel messaging, right? Email, SMS, social, meta, Google.

22:44We did everything. Clear messaging, strong incentive, high engagement, and that was our first profitable year was in 2024. We ended the year in profit, and we spent 30% less in meta.

Momentum and Engagement

22:56So, let's treat momentum like a live event, right? So, basically, this is another thing that I just see is like a red flag. when something hits, like make sure you're replying to every comment, you know, boosting top posts, DMing your network. So, like the brands that win are not necessarily the most creative. Like they're definitely like the most attentive, right? So, let's look at what that looks like. So, you definitely if you have something hit like we did with the ugly burrito, like you want to make sure it's hot, and you want to make sure you're replying to every comment. You want to get that social proof going, and put paid spend behind that top performer right away.

23:26So, organically pretested creative. So, again, I have 45 days in advance. I know 30 days of creative. Some of that's going to hit, some of it's not. Some of it's meant to educate, some of it's meant to convert, some of it's just, you know, meant to provide value. Paid amplifies the winner. Saves and shares are the real demand signal, not always likes. We also look at what, you know, what's being saved. Also, the views. We also if there's a lot of views on it and not a lot of likes, that's fine, too.

23:47Sometimes we want to get the algo going. Again, we want to be attentive here. So, how do we do this? We actually go and we do outbound external engagement. Again, you can build a community, but you have to put time into like building a community. So, we like, we comment, we let people know, "Hey, this would look great with Hatch green chile as well, in addition to it being a great looking burger." This is our fresh chile cooking group.

24:10something that we have here is you see our customer service here, right? Answering, liking, commenting, welcoming in new members. Like, "Hey, let's welcome the new members. You're seeing, we see you, we value." What do they do in return? "I love my 505 chile. Here's Here's free advertising for you guys." And you can you put this in an ad account, you know, we can run this on a on a paid as organic. and again, this this is, you know, it we're engaging with it. We're liking, we're commenting, we're building community.

24:42Again, we take these recipe winners and we made a cookbook from them. So, basically, 52 weeks equal 52 winners. You You can leverage that. We put this in our post purchase flow because again, we don't want people to buy it and not use it. So, again, we have this in our post purchase flow. As you can see here, like recipe ebook, hash chili recipes on the website, or like you can go to the cooking group. Yes, I will point you away from our website to our Facebook cooking group in our post-purchase flow because I want you to be a part of community. The other thing that we do here is we have a postcard that we send out with every new customer. And what does it do? It points them to our cooking group. It points them to our community. It's not necessarily saying go and just, you know, we're not even offering a discount for your second purchase. We definitely could play with that. It's a great idea.

25:26But it's also one of those things that like we're trying to let them know there's community and there is value here.

Inbox Worth Opening

25:31So, the last step here is build an inbox worth opening, right? So, ours feels like community, as you can tell. Real recipes, real people, the farm, the harvest, my partner's voice, my voice. So, like we're going to we're going to kind of give you some examples here, like the proof's in Big Jim could sell out again, right? It sounds like a promo, but it's really news from the farm. Right? I mean, like that brought in like $7,600, you know, from one send.

25:59So, the reason why people stay is there on the list is there's a reason to be on the list, like, right? And it ties straight back into our 40 to 50% repeat rate. And that is the inbox that what keeps existing buyers coming back, and it's the most profitable channel in the business. So, I just want to show you guys some examples here. I think these are pretty cool. go through them with you. And so, you know, kind of what we have here is a few scenarios of like what I'm really seeing is like text image CTA, text image CTA.

26:28But you'll notice like this is a real photo that I took. It's a good photo. Looks great. Here's also just a This is a screenshot from my my video. And again, I just threw a filter over it. This is completely AI generated. This is completely AI generated. you can see here that this one This again was a live video I did. Let me tell you about this one. The live video This was cool. Basically, I was doing this video from the truck. I was like, "Hey, it's too windy outside, so I'm doing this in my truck." So, but I did take a video of it and I was able to screenshot it. It was a really cool opportunity to like you could definitely see the chili was growing. What I did is I uploaded that video to Google Drive, was able to get the transcript, and then I was able to run it through AI, and it just crushed for us. I mean, this was just amazing. So, like you can leverage real authentic

27:12moments with AI, but also like this is a real authentic moment. Like this is just basically my voice with just AI reformatting what I said in the video. And we definitely we don't do discounts that often, but we do. We do text only. We've done image only. I we can design beautiful email and work as you guys have seen.

Stacking Attention to Ownership

27:32But what I'm really seeing right now in in the accounts that are really performing best are image, text, CTA. All right. So, you're not collecting emails, you're stacking, right? We're stacking here. Content, attention, access, ownership. That's what we're doing, right? Kind of some quick nuggets here. Amplify your story. One of the things that I I like to do, especially during harvest, is I'll just go in and I'll just boost every single organic post that we have, and I don't have to be political about it. I'm I'm not going to say I'm going to boost this and not that, cuz I can't tell you how many times I just find winners and winners that I wouldn't even think would be winners by the strategy. Again, driving people to the website, adding value, educating. Those are huge opportunities you feel like you're seeing everywhere.

Upsells and Membership

28:19One of the things that people do as well is that they don't actually convert on their community. So, this is a one-click upsell screenshot that we have with Zipify. And what happened is is we actually this cookbook right here, right? We actually put this in our post-purchase upsell. And the reason why we did that is because one, it's it's a lower ticket offer, and the AOV not may not be as high, right? But the lifetime value, the LTV, baby.

28:46I'm telling you, that was like that was the big kicker for us. We were able to really just extend the lifetime value of customers who just know they can be a part of a community and know how to use our product. We do test it out. Zipify's like, you know, they definitely like will go in and they'll optimize different campaigns for us, but I'm always kind of bringing them back and be like, "Hey, let's bring the cookbook.

29:05You know, let's let's bring you know, the giveaway in in to these mixes as well." So, again, every touch point. This is what I'm talking about. Post-purchase, pre-purchase, you know, thank you page offer in checkout, right? Like make sure that all these channels are optimized. This is another cool one, too. This is Revo, and this is kind of what we do here. I'll show you guys this. It's like we have this all-access membership.

29:27And so, our biggest pain point is shipping's too high. And again, it's liquid in a glass jar, and I'm not UPS or FedEx, as you guys know. Like so, like that's not my name, but what I can do is I built this membership with Revo that is $199 per year. And they get 20% off every order, freshly cashed, 5% back, early access to new drops, which you know is important at this point. Priority customer support. So, what does that mean? Whenever they order, there's a Revo tag in ShipStation where our people know to ship that out same day.

29:54So, they get like same-day shipping, and they get free shipping. So, that was that was really cool. So, this is something, too, that we've been seeing success with. So, I wanted to share that with you as well. Again, it's brought in over six figures of revenue for us. Cool. So, a million subscribers isn't

Omnisend Results and Wrap Up

30:14something you chase. It's what happens when you stop wasting the attention you already have. And this is this is so true. And I'll just kind of show you like a screenshot of of Omnisend here. we onboarded, you can see like around October 27th. We've almost done a million in revenue with Omnisend. again, we're always optimizing this channel, the campaigns, the automation, the SMS. Like we are always trying to optimize it as much as we can. and yeah, I just every touch point that you can do make sure that you're providing value. Again, I teamed up with Omnisend on this on a So, basically, if you go to omnisend.com/chris-ling, 30% discount.

30:59I migrated, as you can see, Sendlane was acquired. I was able to migrate over. they handled everything for me. It was a smooth list. it was a smooth transition. Actually, at the Retention Roadshow, so someone asked me like, "Why Omnisend and not Klaviyo?" And the reason that I gave them was like, "Hey, I've been on Klaviyo. I've been on Sendlane. And I've now I'm on Omnisend." Omnisend has 99% of the features at a way less cost than Klaviyo. So, basically, I don't need enterprise features. I don't need a publicly traded company to give me bloated features that I don't need. Omnisend gives me 99%.

31:33They're DTC focused. They have like a hundred thousand, maybe a hundred fifty thousand Shopify brands on their platform. So, these guys are in it. They know what their focused. I have a Slack channel with them. they're always giving me updates. Again, the new Texas SMS update. Again, Chris, we got to flag this for you. And so, responsive team, great platform. Again, the main thing is I'm able to generate revenue. So, but yeah. So, again, I appreciate you know, Chase and Jimmy for having me you know, at the Retention Roadshow.

32:02It was really great to to speak to you guys. and then also like Jimmy just said, "Hey, you got to do you got to do like a little, you know, video for us that we can put on YouTube." So, that's what I've done, and I'm really excited. If you have any questions, you can find me, you know, on on X and and LinkedIn and basically like Chris Ling social. this is where I have everything kind of here. So, basically, reach out. you can also book a call with me. I'm also always happy to chop it up with operators.

32:30Always happy to you know, to kind of get in the weeds. So, whatever you need, I'm here for you guys, and I appreciate just the opportunity again. shout out the Retention Roadshow, shout out Commerce Roundtable, shout out Jimmy Kim and Chase Diamond. Appreciate you guys.