Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Arlen:
Welcome to the eCommerce Marketing Podcast, everyone. My name is Arlen Robinson and I am your host. And today we have a very special guest, Andrew Maffettone who is an e-commerce marketing expert with over 15 years in the industry, he is the Founder of BlueTuskr, a full-service marketing company for e-commerce sellers and the host of The E-Comm Show podcast.. Welcome to the podcast, Andrew.

Andrew Maff:
Thanks buddy, appreciate you having me on.

Arlen:
Yeah, definitely excited. And we were just talking right before we started, we’ve kind of did a podcast swap. I was first on your podcast as I mentioned the intro,

Andrew Maff:
That works.

Arlen:
the Ecom Show podcast, I had a great time and hopefully added value to your listeners and I’m looking for you to do the same with our listeners as well. I’m looking for you to do the same with our listeners as well.

Andrew Maff:
I just hope I can match what you did, man.

Arlen:
All right, I’m sure you can. I’m sure you can. I think we’re both kind of, I guess you could say, I don’t want to say dinosaurs in this marketing industry, but we’ve been around the block for a

Andrew Maff:
Hahaha

Arlen:
little bit. So, you know, we’ve seen a lot of changes and, you know, it’s an exciting time.

Andrew Maff:
Yeah, it is. It is definitely a very interesting time right now.

Arlen:
Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. And so today we’re going to be talking about omni-channel marketing and really diversifying in off-channel marketplaces or off-marketplaces. And you’re really going to be kind of enlightening on all of that and kind of diving deep. But before we do get into all of that, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and specifically how you got into what you’re doing today at Blue Tusker.

Andrew Maff:
Yeah, so I’ve been in e-commerce marketing specifically for a little over 15 years now.

Arlen:
Okay.

Andrew Maff:
It was pretty much my first job. My father actually owned, he had acquired a business that was not e-commerce. He took it on, put it online, had to make a whole custom site and everything because there was no Shopify or anything back then.

Arlen:
Right.

Andrew Maff:
My favorite thing that’s… tell about that story is that he was one of the first companies to get offered to sell on Amazon

Arlen:
Oh, wow.

Andrew Maff:
that wasn’t books

Arlen:
Okay.

Andrew Maff:
and he turned it down

Arlen:
Wow.

Andrew Maff:
and I love it’s like my favorite thing to bring up at every family dinner.

Arlen:
Okay, gotcha, gotcha.

Andrew Maff:
But since then, so I did end up getting into, I pretty kind of stayed into it a little bit. I got into a little bit on the retail side for a while there because obviously e-commerce wasn’t as big back then.

Arlen:
Yeah.

Andrew Maff:
Started my own agency in college, exited that after like five or six years. Then went in-house for a little while, then started another agency and then in late 2019, exited that with a partner of mine. We ended up selling to… public company that was doing all this stuff with it. And I was there for like three months and I was like, no, I’m done. And so I got out of there. And then in early 2020, right before the pandemic started Blue Tusker.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Maff:
And we are a full service marketing company for e-commerce sellers. We’re basically like an outsourced marketing department. So I kind of see us as like an agency of agencies because we’ve got a whole SEO team that just does SEO stuff and email and social and paid ads and all that fun stuff. So. The reason I started it was before my last agency, when I was in house, I was the only marketer. It was e-commerce sellers well into eight figures. And I spent most of my time trying to get contractors and other agencies and all this stuff to just talk to each other, just work together. And it was driving me insane. And I was like, why isn’t there just like one place where all of these agencies work? And I have one sole person whose job is to manage all this stuff. And so our account managers, account strategists, whatever we call them are basically like fractional CMOs. They oversee the rest of the team and they kind of act as like a partner in the business and extension of that team.

Arlen:
Okay, great, great. Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, interesting story about, you know, turning down the opportunity to sell on Amazon. So I guess he would have been the,

Andrew Maff:
Love it.

Arlen:
kind of one of the first non-book stores there. Very, very interesting.

Andrew Maff:
Mm-hmm.

Arlen:
Does he regret it to this day?

Andrew Maff:
I love picking on him for that. Oh yeah, oh yeah, he’s got to. 

Arlen:
Yeah.

Andrew Maff:
There’s no way he doesn’t. He says, he’s like, no, I like the decision. I’m like, no, you don’t, you’re

Arlen:
Right, right, exactly. Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Interesting. Well, great. 

Andrew Maff:
You know, as a liar. There’s no way.

Arlen:
we mentioned, of course, we’re talking about omni-channel marketing. And so where I want to start off, Andrew, is if you can kind of let us know a little bit about just a brief overview of what omni-channel marketing is and why it really is so crucial for e-commerce businesses today.

Andrew Maff:
So there’s, I’ve come to find that there’s several definitions of this, even though they all kind of have the same general feeling. So at a very broad level, Omni Channel Market is simply just making sure that your marketing is relevant no matter where your customer likes to shop. Retail, if they’re at a gas station or if they’re at your own store or if they’re on Amazon or if they’re on Walmart, they’re on Shopify, whatever.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Maff:
My way, because we are strictly on the digital side for the most part, We focus on an omni-channel strategy that is targeted towards wherever a seller is available. So whichever sales channels they have available. Most sellers when you talk to them, they treat their Amazon business like one thing, they treat their Shopify business like one thing, their Walmart business like another. And because they keep them so separately, it also makes you split your audience. So you can’t really manipulate your marketing into a direction of where you want it to go. So we work with sellers that are primarily on multiple sales channels, or they might be on one, but they’re looking to diversify, and we help them develop strategies and execute those strategies to help them benefit wherever their business needs it at the time. So to give you an example, we work with, what tends to be what we always tend to work with, which is someone who’s on Amazon and someone who’s on Shopify. Those are two pretty standard ones. So what happens a lot of times is, we’ve definitely started to realize that Cpcs on Amazon are getting out of hand mainly because there’s an obscene amount of competition Amazon’s making it easier to sell product which means everyone and their mother is selling products So it’s hard to stand out and hold your ranking Plus everyone spends all this time nitpicking these tiny little things so that they can get that like point zero zero one percentage Improvement on something when all that time could be better spent just diversifying. So we help them start develop these strategies from an off Amazon perspective, whether we’re leveraging Shopify or whether we’re just leveraging their audience. And we basically direct that audience wherever we think is necessary. So the most common being, if you launch a new product on Amazon, you’ve got like a 30, 60 day, like honeymoon window where they still kind of give you a tolerable ranking. But

Arlen:
Right.

Andrew Maff:
if you don’t get enough sales, you don’t get enough reviews, that thing starts to tank. So we actually will work with sellers. Like, okay, what if we took your entire audience? found a way to segment them based on the ones that we know shop on Amazon, and send them directly to Amazon with some kind of like, hey, we’ve got a new product doing like some kind of campaign or promotion or something around it, getting that kind of traction going on the organic side, then pulling back and going back to their site, because usually that’s where they’re gonna get their best margin anyway. And that way we can kind of focus on Amazon as like a customer acquisition channel and not so much something that we just solely rely on. So. Every business is different, every owner’s different, every product line, every category, everything’s completely different, so it doesn’t always work the exact same way. Some sellers have the buy with Prime button on there now. Some sellers just do the available on Amazon button and let them just go. Others are like, no, no, no, I don’t wanna send them to Amazon at all. So like, it always depends because everyone’s margins are different, but.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Maff:
That’s more or less in a long ranting way of how we see Omnichannel basically just manipulating your audience to whichever sales channel you’re available on.

Arlen:
Right, right, yeah, that’s a really good explanation. I mean, that’s really ultimately what it comes down to, manipulating them and then trying to catch them where they are on these different channels.

Andrew Maff:
Mm-hmm.

Arlen:
And then that really brings up my next question. Of course, obviously businesses, kind of the main things that we’re always talking about, we’re always hearing, and you mentioned it, is the direct-to-consumer right on the website, whether you’re using Shopify to sell or other platform. or you also may be selling on Amazon as well, so two different channels. Now beyond that, the other distribution channels or the other methods of reaching customers, what are some other key channels that you think e-commerce business really should consider implementing when they’re thinking about this overall omni-channel marketing strategy? And how do the different channels really differ as far as the types of customers that they can potentially reach?

Andrew Maff:
This’ll venture a little bit into where I think the market’s probably gonna end up going. But right now, the obvious ones are you should have your own site. And because you have all the control on your site, you get to keep all the data, you can make your product look and sound how you want it to look, so you get all this extra benefit from it. You have the Amazon side, which is, I think they’re like almost 60-something percent of product searches online with, I think, Google, well, it might be a little less, because Google’s, I think, 46 last I looked. And so… Obviously Amazon’s another big one. Very few brands shouldn’t be on Amazon. There are some that I’m like, no, no, no, don’t go. But usually they’re on there. Then you have like the Walmart. I say don’t sleep on Walmart. I think that Walmart is highly underutilized. Some sellers we work with, it’s great. And other sellers, it’s like, hey, you know what? It’s better than nothing. And it’s another place to have your product. And I always see Walmart as like, they’re perpetually like five or six years behind Amazon. So. five or six years from now, what if you’re doing the same amount that you’re doing on Amazon now? So it’s kind of one of those like, yeah, it might not be as great as Amazon, but

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Maff:
I wouldn’t forget about it.

Arlen:
OK.

Andrew Maff:
Then you could get into eBay, depending on the direction you’re in, but then you get into the specialty stuff. So you have like the chewies or the wayfares. So I think that we’re gonna start to see over time more and more of those types of marketplaces pop up. Like I’m sure… Home Depot or Lowe’s or like maybe Bass Pro Shop or something like they’re gonna turn into these specialty like I could totally see Bass Pro Shop just becoming like everything fishing and hunting marketplace. So all these different little like siloed marketplace are gonna pop up in which case it just becomes go wherever your customer is and then that’s where I think that they should be.

Arlen:
Yeah, exactly. Go where your customer is. Yeah, great examples there. And you mentioned, of course, Walmart, where, you know, businesses don’t want to sleep on it. You know, I always mention that when we’re talking about other channels, different e-commerce businesses that I’m dealing with. And yeah, it’s, you know, like you said, they may not be, of course, where Amazon is now, but at some point they’re going to be, you know, where Amazon kind of was. And so it’s, you know. Believe it or not, yeah, like you said, they do have a pretty good market share. I mean, as far as like products, their distribution that they can, you know, their reach actually is, you know, is pretty good. Yeah, I actually happen to use Walmart for their grocery delivery actually here locally

Andrew Maff:
Mm-hmm.

Arlen:
where I am in the suburb of Orlando and been doing it for a good couple years now. And for what I need, yeah, it, you know, they get everything that I need, you know, the delivery is on point with that. the things that I can’t get delivered, you know, they’ll show me if it can be shipped. Usually it’s either this, they do the, they can do same day sometimes, and they can even do the next day as well.

Andrew Maff:
Yeah, I think that there’s a good chunk of America that uses Walmart solely and nothing else. And then there’s the other chunk where it’s like, it’s right up the road. So why not? So

Arlen:
right.

Andrew Maff:
I think that it’s also a nice, the one thing that amp that Walmart has that I’m still wondering like when they’re going to start to really implement this that I know Amazon doesn’t is that they have the brick and mortar presence. So my belief is if you can actually do a good amount of sales on walmart.com they will find a way and they will hear about you and then they’ll be like, how do we get you in stores? And then it’s a real nice stepping stone into getting into brick and mortar and getting into retail, whereas Amazon doesn’t really have that.

Arlen:
Yeah.

Andrew Maff:
If you’re on the food side, you have the CPG side, like maybe from like a whole food side. I

Arlen:
Right. Yeah.

Andrew Maff:
haven’t heard of someone getting that, but it’s possible. But with Walmart, they already have the presence, so why

Arlen:
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly.

Andrew Maff:
not?

Arlen:
And Amazon, you know, they’re trying to, they’ve done different tests. You’ve probably seen those Amazon Prime stores.

Andrew Maff:
Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Arlen:
I was in San Francisco last year and they had one in downtown San Francisco. Just kind of went by it and actually go in. And you know, it’s an interesting concept. You know, their whole thing with that is, you know, you’re gonna use a credit card. Everything is tied to your Prime account. You just kind of add things to your card and it just automatically gets charged to your, you know, to your Prime account, whatever, you know. billing information or credit cards that you have tied to that. So it’s just not widespread. I mean, if you compare that to like Walmart.

Andrew Maff:
Yeah, well they had a, they had a, what was it, Amazon Books too that

Arlen:
Yeah.

Andrew Maff:
failed.

Arlen:
Yeah.

Andrew Maff:
They had Amazon, was it Amazon Fresh, I think? Didn’t

Arlen:
I think she’s dead.

Andrew Maff:
they have like their own store, their own grocery store for a little while there before they bought Whole Foods?

Arlen:
Right. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Andrew Maff:
So I see them keep trying.

Arlen:
They’re gonna keep trying, but yeah, as far as the footprint of an actual retail spot, I don’t really see them getting to, you know, like a Walmart level or anything like that. As far as their footprint is concerned, I think their focus is on just the warehousing, the warehouse space, being able to fulfill, you know, what they can do as far as the same day, next day delivery and all of that. So I think that’s kind of their… their bread and butter.

Andrew Maff:
Yeah, I agree.

Arlen:
Now, as far as these different omnichannel marketing strategies, these different platforms or rather channels that you can actually go to, if you do, let’s say, branch out, you do the Walmarts, you hook up with some of the other distribution channels, if you’re trying anything like that, what are some of the main key metrics that you should be paying attention to to make sure? you know you’re in the right place.

Andrew Maff:
That’s always an interesting question, right? Because it’s gonna be dependent on where the business is at, what the business’s goals are, maybe not necessarily, because if I were to just be like, oh, you need an X ROAS, and then you’ve nailed it.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Maff:
Congratulations, I answered your question. But no, it’s gonna be more of where’s the business at? You’ve gotta understand that when you’re going to a new sales channel, it’s an investment in the beginning. You gotta get it up and running. So it depends on where you’re at at the time. I’m a big fan of… Looking at everything holistically right so The reason I started kind of going in this approach because I’ve actually been doing this whole omni-channel thing for like six seven years now

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Maff:
my last agency was also the same thing we’re doing because I Actually sat down was watching my wife shop once and she was which is always fun when she was sitting on her She was sitting on Instagram as usual We go to her web to go to a website and if she saw that the web she saw the product was interesting And she liked it. It’s like oh, this is a really nice site, but they don’t have a lot of reviews she would leave the site and go to Amazon to see if they were available there.

Arlen:
Right.

Andrew Maff:
Now, she would usually just buy the product and a lot of people will go to a website and even if it has a ton of reviews, they’ll still go to Amazon to go buy it.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Maff:
I’ve seen her do the opposite,

Arlen:
Mm.

Andrew Maff:
where she’ll actually find the product on Amazon, it’ll have a ton of reviews, but possibly just from listening to me complain about it for years on end, 

Arlen:
Right.

Andrew Maff:
she was like, no, I’m actually gonna do some due diligence. So she would actually look and see like, what’s their social following like? 

Arlen:
Okay.

Andrew Maff:
What’s like, if it’s a new brand, she wanted to know. before so she’s a very conscious shopper and I started to realize based on, I was like I’m gonna run some tests and I started doing some stuff with some sellers we were working with at the time and because everyone was so fluid, even if there was no button on the site, they would go to a site then they’d go to Amazon, they’d go to Amazon, they’d go to a site and it would be all over the place. Same thing with Walmart, I’ve seen it a couple times where we’d have like a Walmart button and they would just go to Walmart.

Arlen:
Mm.

Andrew Maff:
So when I started to realize that, I realized like okay, it’s not smart to look at your Amazon ads and not incorporate what other advertising you’re doing because there’s so much bleed through, there’s so much brand recognition happening off Amazon that I’m sure it’s benefiting the Amazon side. So obviously you get people that are solely Amazon sellers for years and years and years, all they would do is they would look at their ACOS and like, no, I don’t care about your ACOS, I wanna know your tacos. And now it’s finally become a little bit more mainstream of like, okay, yes, that’s what we’re focused on. Now I’m looking at, okay, if you’re marketing everywhere, I wanna know what are you spending in advertising and

Arlen:
Mm-hmm, right.

Andrew Maff:
what are you making? I don’t care what channel it’s on. I don’t care if Amazon’s 10% and Walmart’s 100 and that math doesn’t add up, but you know what I mean? Like I don’t care what it is, I wanna look at what are you spending, what are you making, those are our targets. Now I can take a step back, look at different KPIs for individual channels and start to see where I wanna push and pull. But when you talk to nine figure business and they’re like massive. They’re not sitting here going like, oh, well here’s what my ACOS is for this campaign and here’s this specific keyword. Like they’re so macro at that point that they’re realizing like they have a set advertising budget. They’re going to spend it where they find it to be most lucrative, but they know that the way that people shop now online is completely fluid so they’re not so reliant on it. So I try to look at just an overall. ROI of the business of your marketing spend versus your overall revenue.

Arlen:
Yeah, yeah, interesting. Yeah, and the point that you mentioned as far as what your wife was doing, which was kind of the reverse where a lot of times people will hear a brand, they find out about it, they may go over that brand’s website and then regardless, because they’re just so comfortable with the Amazon ecosystem and the prime, they’ll just go to prime and look up that product. I mean, I know I do that myself a lot of times just because I, you know, I don’t have to worry about the returns. It’s just a lot, lot smoother. Now, on the businesses side. How much of a concern should it be for the business owner that has a presence, has their own DTC presence, selling on Amazon? Is it ever a concern that the business could be kind of, I guess I wanna say competing against themselves as far as, you know, obviously they wanna control the customer, you know, and they can do that more effectively as far as the customer’s information, the whole life cycle. the money that they have to spend to get the product out. It’s a lot easier to do that with the direct to consumer sale.

Andrew Maff:
Mm-hmm.

Arlen:
So is it a concern if they’re kind of growing simultaneously the Amazon presence as well as their presence on their own site?

Andrew Maff:
Kind of like I said before, every business and every owner specifically is

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Maff:
very different. So it always kind of comes down to their philosophy on their own brand.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Maff:
One of the things I started to do when I realized people were coming to a DTC site and then they were going to Amazon directly. So we would actually just build our own button, just CTA that would say like available on Amazon or whatever and it would take someone directly to the listing.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Maff:
And the reason we did that was because I knew based on tests we would do, we’re like, hey, let’s increase Facebook advertising spend by 10%. And yet when I would look at the website, I’d be like, wow, we didn’t increase revenue by 10%. But if I include Amazon and I didn’t increase the budget there, collectively we did increase 10%. So I can tell from off Amazon ad spend

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Maff:
that all of a sudden it’s getting a bleed over. And I was like, okay, the problem with that. is if people are going directly to Amazon, they don’t know how to get straight to our product. Obviously they can search for it, but if they’re all of a sudden bombarded with every competitor.

Arlen:
Right, right.

Andrew Maff:
So I wanna send them straight to the listing to at least minimize, I know the sponsor display that’s still there, but at least minimize that kind of friction and the extra clicks.

Arlen:
Yeah.
Andrew Maff:So we started just developing this button. And one of the things I realized like, okay, now that we have this button, the thing that I can do is I can put a pixel on that button and I can retarget anyone. that has clicked that button because now I have them pixeled, I have them in an audience, whether it’s through Facebook or Google or whatever we’re doing. So I would actually find ways to be like, okay, now how do I market them to come back to the site? So I would actually change my remarketing stuff and I would change it towards like, okay, let’s give them some kind of offer to come back to the site or let’s do something along those lines and still using Amazon as an acquisition channel.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Maff:
The thing I always think about is if you take a page out of Amazon’s book, which is basically just doing whatever is best for the customer. If you think like years and years of this, we still have sellers that are like Amazon’s not answering any of my tickets. Like they don’t really care. There’s like, they’re just taking my money and blah, blah, blah.

Arlen:
Right.

Andrew Maff:
But if you’re a customer and you have a complaint, you hear from them real fast.

Arlen:
Yeah, yeah.

Andrew Maff:
And it’s because that’s where they put most of their resources. So I realized like, all right, well, if we just take a page out of Amazon’s book and we let people just shop wherever they’re most comfortable. will I actually start to see an improvement? Yes, Amazon’s got commission, yes, that becomes a problem. Now that’s changed, by the way, because you have your brand referral bonus, so you get a 10% commission for sending traffic to Amazon anyway, if you use the attribution. So you’re already getting 10% back there. Now we’re one of a handful of Amazon Buy With Prime partners. So we started implementing Buy With Prime. which is a three as of right now is a 3% FBA fee as opposed to 15 or 20 or whatever it is. So by driving traffic to Amazon, Amazon’s caught onto this and they’re like, okay, let me reduce some of our fees because you’re helping us bring traffic. But I started to realize that because you have such a high conversion rate on Amazon, because as soon as someone gets there, if it’s available in two days, they convert so much faster than anyone else because that’s what Amazon is for, right?

Arlen:
Yeah.

Andrew Maff:
So I realized like, okay, yes, I am sending that traffic to Amazon.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Maff:
but that conversion rate is so much higher. So if I send 10 people to my website and two of them actually convert, I have a, that’s, I’m sorry, let me take it back. If I send 100 people to my website and two actually convert, that’s your standard e-commerce conversion rate, right? Like a 2%, maybe you got a three, some get up to a four, but that’s usually about it.

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Maff:
You send them to Amazon, it’s like 20 something.

Arlen:
Wow.

Andrew Maff:
So even though my commission’s high, I’m sorry, my cost is higher because

Arlen:
Yep.

Andrew Maff:
they’re taking away that profitability. I’m getting so many more sales. So like net net, it’s really nice. It’s kind of a wash.

Arlen:
Yeah.

Andrew Maff:
So that’s why like we experiment with it. I never say like, this works for everyone. Like this is one of those things like put the button on your site, A, B test it, run some numbers, decide if it’s worth it. Don’t just be like, yeah, that makes sense. And then just do it forever. Test everything and anything. Yeah, that’s

Arlen:
Yeah, yeah, I like that.

Andrew Maff:
where I got with that.

Arlen:
Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. That conversion rate, I mean, you can’t beat it. I think a lot of businesses are a little leery from what you said initially, because when they go there, there could be friction because the customer is exposed to the whole world of products when they come there,

Andrew Maff:
Yeah.

Arlen:
not just your product. And when they start looking, I mean, you know how it goes when you’re starting up to, you get to Amazon and then you see the other products that are related to it. the other recommended products you can you know tend to get bounced around a little bit and that’s what I think a lot of the businesses see the friction there but it’s just that that conversion rate

Andrew Maff:
Yeah.

Arlen:
I think does speak to how how still effective it is even if you’ve got the higher cost you know selling it on that platform.

Andrew Maff:
Yeah, exactly. And like, to be honest, like, there’s, there’s definitely DTC size, like good size, DTC businesses that get really big, that have the brand awareness. People know the brand, they go to this, they go to

Arlen:
they are different sites in person.

Andrew Maff:
their website, they purchase at that

Arlen:
That’s definitely a major thing that’s there.

Andrew Maff:
point may not be necessary. Maybe the buy

Arlen:
But…

Andrew Maff:
with prime thing, if you can’t fulfill fast enough, 

Arlen:
Thank you.

Andrew Maff:
but outside of that, not entirely necessary.

Arlen:
Yeah. Thank you.

Andrew Maff:
It’s when you’re a good size Amazon seller and you want to start to diversify because of how ridiculous some of the cost per clicks are. And then obviously you have your, see your FBA fees and all this fun stuff. Like when you start to diversify and you start to build a true e-commerce business, doing this approach where you’re kind of like half on Amazon, half on your website. 

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Maff:
And you’re like, kind of have this nice little middle ground is so much more beneficial because you’re not forgetting about your Amazon business. You know that that’s where I made my money. I’m going to keep feeding it. And then eventually all A-B tests getting rid of these buttons are not sending traffic in that direction.

Arlen:
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now, as we get ready to wrap things up, Andrew, wanted to see if you could share just some general success stories of either businesses that you’ve worked with that have thrived on the different marketplaces or just businesses that you’ve worked with directly in your firm.

Andrew Maff:
Yeah, we’re a little bit all over the place. I mean, we’ve got a lot of sellers that are pretty much on the Amazon Shopify side. We’ve got some on BigCommerce, we’ve got some that are just on Walmart, stuff like that, but most of them are on the Shopify side. And I know we actually just did a case study of this one guy. We actually did a whole rebrand. He needed a new name and a new website and all this fun stuff for different reasons. But… built that out, started off with an available on Amazon button on his site just so we can track, like okay, what are we getting? The problem with that button specifically for him was that he has such a large product line that the Amazon attribution only tracks up to a thousand products and you can’t track the rest of them. There’s some brand, Halo, but he’s got different brands, so like it doesn’t work that way. So we couldn’t do it. And so we’re like, okay, we’re able to track how many people are clicking on the buttons, but we’re not able to track like who’s actually converting, which is an- Luckily Amazon buy with prime got involved and we’re able to actually start to implement that and just by implementing that kind of stuff alone And adjusting some of his testing or testing everything that we were doing and seeing how you know, which way we wanted to send traffic We’ve been able to severely increase the conversion rate on his website just by having that as an offer So by having the buy with prime button and his typical like buy now button He’s well over a 5% conversion rate, which is not a thing for most DTC sites And he’s traditional, it’s apparel. It’s nothing like crazy where they get a ton of traffic anyway. And with them, like we’re overseeing all ads there. We are their marketing department pretty much. We’re doing their SEO and their social and their email marketing and paid ads, like all that fun stuff. And as soon as we were able to put that kind of stuff into place, immediate return on almost every single channel that we had in place,

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Maff:
SEO started doing better because we were getting more engagement on the site, paid ads obviously started doing better. his email marketing started doing better because the buy with Prime, you get to keep all of the information. You get the name and the email and the address and all that fun stuff. So we started to build a list of everyone who shops with Amazon. And so now the thing that we’re doing with him is when he does a product launch, we send everyone straight to Amazon for who purchased through buy with Prime because we

Arlen:
Okay.

Andrew Maff:
know that they’re on Amazon.

Arlen:
Wow.

Andrew Maff:
So it’s how we’re trying to figure out which of his audience is on Amazon and which one isn’t. So that’s definitely been one of the like, 

Arlen:
Yeah, yeah, I gotcha.

Andrew Maff:
okay, this worked for you.

Arlen:
Yeah, thanks for sharing that. Yeah, it sounds like the key there is testing, testing, analyzing, and figuring out

Andrew Maff:
Yeah.

Arlen:
really what’s gonna work because you can’t, there’s really just kind of no blanket method that’s gonna work just for all the e-commerce businesses when it comes to this and trying these different platforms.

Andrew Maff:
Yep, completely.

Arlen:
Well, great, Andrew. Well, this has been awesome talking to you. I really appreciate you coming on today. I’ve learned a lot. I know our listeners and viewers have as well. But lastly, before we do let you go, I always like to close things out just so our audience can get to know you a little bit better if you don’t mind sharing one closing fun fact about yourself that you think we’d be interested to know.

Andrew Maff:
Ooh, fun fact about myself. I, hmm, I wish I was more interesting. I, oh, I was a traveling touring drummer for a long time.

Arlen:
Really? Okay.

Andrew Maff:
During, when I had my first agency in college,

Arlen:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Maff:
I did e-commerce, because I never got out of that, but I still did a little bit of retail, mainly because I was on the hospitality side, because I did so much music promotion.

Arlen:
Okay?

Andrew Maff:
So I got involved in like music marketing, which I will never do again, whole area is a nightmare. 

Arlen:
Right, right.

Andrew Maff:
But yeah, that was a good time. We did the whole playing festivals and all that fun stuff and

Arlen:
Wow.

Andrew Maff:
that was my, I’ll be well into my, I’ll be an old man just still talking about how awesome I was back

Arlen:
Yeah, I could imagine.

Andrew Maff:
then.

Arlen:
So you were with a band that just traveled and did shows and festivals and the whole nine.

Andrew Maff:
Yep, yep, yep,

Arlen:
Okay.

Andrew Maff:
yep. And sitting in a van with six other guys for weeks on end, super fun.

Arlen:
Yeah, I can imagine. I’m sure those were some fun times. Do you still play the drums today?

Andrew Maff:
Yeah. Yeah, I still play, but now it’s just to annoy my neighbors.

Arlen:
Gotcha, gotcha. I can imagine. Well yeah, thank you for sharing that, Andrei. I really appreciate that. Lastly, before we do let you go, what do you think, what would be the best way for our listeners to contact you if they want to reach out to you and pick your brain anymore about Omni Channel Marketing?

Andrew Maff:
Oh man, pick a place. Any social media channel, either at BlueTusker with no E in Tusker, or my name, AndrewMaff, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, tweet at me, I don’t really care. What’d everyone do?

Arlen:
All right, well, that’s awesome. We’ll definitely encourage people to reach out to you. We’ll have the link to the Blue Tusker website in the show notes so people can connect with you that way and see how you guys can help them out with everything that they’re doing. And thanks again, Andrew, for joining us today on the e-commerce marketing podcast.

Andrew Maff:
Thanks for

Podcast Guest Info

Andrew Maffettone
Founder of BlueTuskr

having me, Arlen.

Arlen:
Great.

Podcast Guest Info

Andrew Maffettone
Founder of BlueTuskr