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Five things I wish I knew
We just had two back-to-back best days of 2024 and we’re just getting started! This summer is shaping up to be the best ever in CROSSNET’s seven year history and we’re more prepared than ever. Inventory is in stock. Creatives look beautiful. Landing pages are dialed. And we know our numbers.
I’m going to take you through each of these today and hopefully you walk away with 1-2 gems that helps your process.
Ps. I’m writing this from Barbados. If you randomly have any wild adventures, restaurant suggestions, or things to do let me know!
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The Numbers
First the question you need to ask yourself first, “Do I need to make as much cash as possible by turning my inventory back into money or squeak out as much profit as possible?” These are two different scenarios that require two different plans of attack and the more wishy-washy you are on that answer the worse your year is going to be.
For us we are stocked up and need to turn our inventory into cash. Every day we want to be pushing as much revenue as possible while staying in the black. I have a massive excel sheet that I update daily with my team. The two north stars are:
1) Are we profitable? How much total dollars & contribution margin did we make?
2) Over the next 30 days will the contribution margin be enough to support our overhead? If the answer is no, do I need to scale ads up or down to achieve the results I want?
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Zoom in
The Creative
We have the team dialed more than ever when it comes to content creation. Year to date we have spent $0 on photoshoots or videoshoots. It may come back to bite us in the ass, but for now we are reusing thousands and thousands of photo and video files the world has barely seen.
We have a world class designer working for us at what feels like very fair prices. The turnaround is within 48 hours and we’re able to test more things than ever. Hit up Christian if you need a graphic designer - [email protected]
Pro tip: Have your performance marketing team be looped into the creative team.
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The Events
Regardless of your industry, there are at least 1-2 trade shows every year that are 100% worth your attention and effort. Instead of playing the slot machine with Facebook ads, fine one that excites you, make the effort and go show out for it.
This Monday we have the Boy Scouts of America conference in Orlando, Florida. Essentially this is the biggest Boy Scout conference in America and it makes complete sense for us to attend. By nature, these scouts are constantly outside, camping, and looking for things to keep them busy. We provide a perfect solution.
The event cost us like $1000 for the booth and lets call it another $1000 for some workers & some materials. All in, we gotta sell about $2500 worth of nets to make it worthwhile. I’m feeling good about it.
There’s no better feeling than your first show. I’ll remember we were up in Atlantic City for a physical education show and we’re doing about $20,000 per day. It was a gold mine. I know some brands doing 50+ shows a year. Do what works.
The Tech Stack
I can confidently say you are overpaying for software right now. I’m not saying go into Shopify and delete all your apps. But I’m also not saying that. If it’s not making you more money or saving you a ton of man hours, then its probably note needed.
One that I’m stoked about this summer is getting Revenue Roll into rotation. We’ve been in business now for nearly a decade, so we’ve had millions of customers in our funnel at all different stages of our business. Some moms have been on our site in 2021, 2022 and again this summer but still haven’t purchased!
Revenue Roll identifies lapsed & bounced emails of the most high intent shoppers & will add up to nearly 100k+ legit emails over the course of the summer.
The way Mike from Revenue Roll describes it is, lets pretend you were on CROSSNETGAME.com on your laptop one day. You were super interested, but for whatever reason you just didn’t purchase. Over the next 90 days you haven’t been back to our site on your laptop, nor opened one of our emails, so Klaviyo & Sendlane identifies you as a lapsed user and kicks you off my engaged email list.
However, this is actually not the full story. Most shoppers buy from their phones these days and you actually creep on our site quite frequently. Klaviyo sadly can’t pick up on this since the original activity was from that laptop and you now longer are getting any emails because they marked you as unengaged.
Revenue Roll picks up on this. Flags this user. Gets you back on my list and now I can convert you with my next campaign. You wouldn’t believe how many people are missing out on this and don’t even know this is a thing.
I’m so excited for our best summer ever. Hit up Michael at [email protected] if you want to test this out.
The Landing Pages
I owe you guys a full newsletter on landing page development but the one massive difference between CROSSNET 2023 vs 2024 is that we are going big time on individual landing pages.
Historically we’ve been lazy. I won’t lie. We sent people to our Shopify product page and assumed the badass videos would do enough. This year that won’t cut it. When milk costs $7 and breakfast is $52. Customers are tightening up and that means we need to work that much harder to make that sale.
So what’s that mean?
Every product is getting its very own dedicated landing page. We just finished out first two for CROSSNET H2O & SmashNet.
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The one thing you’ll notice is that we are very bullish on Buy With Prime and sending traffic to Amazon. Done are the days of us caring about having all of the customer information. As much as I want to keep having them come back, I care more about making the sale and turning them into a loving customer. If that means they are 5 times more likely to buy on Amazon, then so be it!
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I haven’t bought anything that was not on Amazon or Walmart in the past three months. Why do I expect differently from my customers?
If you need a landing page builder hit up Aeron, he’s the best. Super affordable, extremely creative, and A+ communication - [email protected]
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I hope this provided the Monday motivation that you were looking for. If I missed something, have questions on something specific or would like to hear more about a specific topic from me, just drop me a response back.
Remember since this is free the best way you can pay me is by increasing my response rate, clicks and open baby! Even if you want to say hi I’d love to hear from you and see who’s new to reading this.
Oh and on a very positive note! I’m thrilled to announce that The Founders Club has officially passed $250k in ARR. If you have been living under a rock, I launched a private e-commerce community for founders doing over $200,000 in annual revenue and above. There are hundreds of brand founders and every day people are trading tips, secrets and organizing get togethers across the country. If you want to apply hit me back to schedule an interview. We just opened up May’s admission window, we’ll be accepting 12 new members this month.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Have a great week,
Chris