I'm Back!

Well hello there,

It's been exactly one month since my last newsletter. Where the hell have I been? Well for the first time in five years I took off almost three entire weeks to gallivant across the Amalfi Coast to go marry the love of my life, Lyndsey Meade.

We had 82 of our closest friends and family members fly out to a town called Ravello where we celebrated the most incredible weekend of my life. Also a massive shoutout to the handful of your readers who somehow found my wedding registry online and sent over gifts. Absolute class act. If you're getting married soon check out Honeyfund (they should be paying me to plug this) but absolutely the dopest registry site ever.

If you’ve never gotten married before, let me tell you its a lot like planning to launch a start up. 18 months of planning went into this wedding all for one amazing launch day. Just like th bells & whistles of your new site, our friends were there for us and couldn't care less if we got married in a Friendly’s parking lot. So much stress between planning travel logistics, dealing with the weather (up until 48 hours before the wedding it was supposed to rain all day on our wedding!!!!), and coordinating everything with a band, DJ, priest, photographer that did not speak English.

It’s such a crazy feeling being able to fully rely on your team and to know that you’re not going to come back to the entire business burning down in flames. I won’t lie, my daily email from Triple Whale showing us our e-commerce revenue & profitability, especially in Australia where we are hitting our stride kept me sane.

Since the last time I wrote to you guys a lot of things have happened:

1. We’ve raised $251,000 for our crowd funding round on WeFunder. Our round closes in like 10 days & you can become an official investor of CROSSNET here

2. Tapcart is building us a mobile app & building one for any of my readers for free

3. We’ve started to secure purchase orders from our biggest retail accounts for 2023. If you’re trying to enter wholesale for 2023, you have just a few weeks left until you can kiss those plans goodbye for a lot of stores for at least the first half of the year

With marketing costs about to go dumb crazy for BFCM, our team has been busting their ass behind the scenes to make this holiday season the best one ever. Here are some areas I suggest you buckle down on if you haven’t already:

1) Creating Like-Minded Partnerships

Let's face it we're all going through the same shit. Find a few brands that are in your space or complement your product well and cross promote through your owned audiences. One of our largest priorities second half of the year is to build out our Australian market so we recently partnered with an awesome Australian brand called Cool Cabanas.

The partnership included organic social posts (story & timeline), email and SMS from both brands and helped drive several thousand dollars in revenue, but most importantly thousands of new email sign ups that we can now mature in our funnel until the holidays.

2) Dedicated Newsletter Sends

Just like how brands pay me for sponsorships (got two left btw for 2022), we pay publishers that have newsletters for a certain amount of annual sends to their audience. It takes a bit of trial and error, plus a ton of negotiation but if you can find a good brand with dedicated readership these things pay for themselves.

I won't get into the specifics of the dollar amounts but we are the "Official Backyard Game" of USA Volleyball & Canada Volleyball. Each of these deals requires an annual payment in exchange for 4-6 email sends & social promotion. Our team maps these sends out months in advance and coordinates them around product launches & sales.

3) Weekly Giveaways

List growth has been our #1 focus over the past 30 days heading up into the holidays. We're paying to acquire customers now who we know will need a few touch points before they drop $149.99, instead of trying to acquire them in the thick of things.

We've created dedicated landing pages that are giving away roughly $2000 worth of goods to one lucky winner. In exchange, we are now collecting a couple thousand emails every few weeks. You can get some inspiration for what we're doing here.

4) Building a Mobile App

Tapcart's got some crazy deals going on for Black Friday so I said why not. They are building apps for Shopify brands in just a few weeks and giving them 2-3 months free to test it out. Seems like a no-brainer, especially if I don't have to do any of the leg work.

If I can get a couple thousand dedicated CROSSNET followers to download it, have them engage with it for gameplay rules, and tournaments I think this is going to be a massive win. Even better is that I can send them push notifications (think Amber Alerts) whenever I want :) New product in stock - BOOM! 50% OFF FLASH SALE - BOOM!

The ROI is going to be a no-brainer, especially with up to three months for free. Book a demo & get an app in time for the holidays here.

5) Create a Robust Ambassador Program

Everyone loves free money. Why not reward your best-selling customers with an Amex gift card or better yet store credit for every friend they convert into a customer? We took our ideal CAC (customer acquisition cost) at CROSSNET and said hey lets just give it directly to you for being a loyal customer. For every person you convert with your code we’ll pay you $30 in cold hard cash.

We weave these touch points in everywhere: product packaging, emails (flows & campaigns), website, and influencer portal

We use Tremendous for the gift card portion & Social Snowball for the ambassador tech

6) Expand Your Marketplaces

Believe it or not, Walmart.com and Target.com have been crushing it for us!

Internally we have three major online marketplaces that we consider key to our business (Amazon, Walmart, and Target.com). A year or so ago when we set these up Amazon would account for nearly 95% of all sales between the three, but over the past six months something drastic has happened. We’re seeing Walmart account for almost 1/3 of these sales now and our team is rushing to upload every single SKU possible to their marketplace.

Shoppers are getting smarter than ever, price checking, and are loyal to the marketplace they prefer to shop on. My mom is a big Walmart.com shopper (it may be because she always forgets her Amazon password), but what I’m trying to say is take advantage of these marketplaces and get your products listed on there. If you get enough traction online, this will be direct inroads to in-store placement as well.

7) Build Dedicated Landing Pages

Driving traffic to your homepage only is not a receipt for success in 2022.

Take the time and use something like Unstack to build landing pages for each of your products OR buyer personas you’re looking to go after.

Here are some things that we’ve learned work best:

• Lead with your best offer, make it bold, make it obvious, make it so the customer can’t miss it

• Free shipping is table stakes in 2022, even us with a product that costs $20-30 to ship has to bake it into our margins

• Customer’s don’t always need a massive discount, if somebody wants the product they are going to buy it

• Leading with video or UGC is key. Cut to the action immediately, review all your ads currently in circulation, anything that isn’t hitting the action in the first second or two should probably be reworked (especially if its not performing)

Feature Spotlight:

Tapcart - You've seen them everywhere lately for a damn good reason. They've build a juggernaut of a business that specializes in turning your e-commerce website into an affordable mobile app in just a matter of days.

The best part? They offering three months free through October 31st.

BFCM has the highest mobile app adoption rate of the year. 40% higher to be exact. That means shoppers are more willing to download (and keep) your mobile app during peak season. They are driving nearly $13,000 per push notification for their enterprise brands and I'm expecting CROSSNET to do at least half of that. Bottom line: I got nothing to lose.

If you're a nerd like me, regardless if you try Tapcart or not, you'll love this BFCM Peak SZN Report that's filled with tons of mobile insights, trends, and things you should do to prepare for the holidays.

Bottom line: the time is now. Try Tapcart for free and book a demo here.

Next Week?

This past month off has really had me reflecting about how thankful I am for everything. I'm beyond blessed that you're reading this newsletter and I sincerely hope you get just an ounce of value out of each and every send.

I'll be hosting a free BFCM prep session next week.

If you want to join send me a reply back and I'll get you over a calendar invite.

Also if you happen to live or will be in Austin, Texas on November 9th I'm hosting a massive founders & marketers dinner with all the free food & alcohol you can ask for. Would love for you to come! RSVP here.

Finally, if you want to invest in CROSSNET here is you last chance to do so.

Have a great weekend!