I Just Found the Coolest Shopify App 🔥

Happy Friday,

It's my birthday weekend. Turning 29 and damn this is depressing. I'm overdue for a fun weekend after the craziness of Black Friday & Cyber Week. If you’ve just joined the newsletter or been following along since day one, I want to thank you for reading, sharing, and all the incredible responses. Massive shout out to everyone who has reached out for consulting services, it's nice to know I may have a career after CROSSNET.

This week was huge for us! We just got our biggest piece of press ever as we landed on The Ellen Show. Huge shout out to the team over at Fidelitas for landing us this gig. You can watch the episode here. 

I can confirm the Ellen effect is 100% real and thank god we had enough inventory. Outside of that, BFCM was interesting for us. At first glance, our overall revenue was down (thank you iOS) but profit was up. Not always a bad thing! I loved this report from Aaron Orendorff on trends across the state of the industry. 

As a rapidly scaling business, there are times where we optimize for profit and others where we try to hoard cash. We made this handy spreadsheet (obviously can't share numbers) that breaks down everything that allows our media buying team needs to understand what the outcome for the business is when we hit a certain ROAS. As an owner, I need to understand exactly how much by business profited or lost each day.

The largest challenge I see my team facing this holiday season is that we are competing against ourselves badly with Amazon. When the product is priced the same on Amazon and Shopify, we see that we'll get close to 4 Amazon sales for every 1 Shopify sale. It's a frustrating battle when you want to collect consumer data and get them back into the funnel for future purchases & events. We are trying to combat that by playing with discounting (the amount Amazon takes in fees), free shipping and exclusive products or bundles available on our website only.

One takeaway from the holidays is that our influencer strategy was not as efficient as we hoped. Our program was rewarding $15-20 per sale and I had the epiphany that if I’m more than fine with a $50 CPA on Facebook, why not reward influencers with a similar deal. More money in their pockets, less in Zucks. Sounds good to me. So we have officially uped the game to $50 per sale. If your influencer program isn’t performing up to par I recommend doing the same to your CPA level. We are now building a portal on our website where ambassadors can log in, track their sales and see a leaderboard. We will be rewarding the top sellers with a huge bonus each month. Kinda like that haircare Ponzi scheme my mom used to do.

On the positive side, I just found the most amazing Shopify app that is every social media manager's dream.

How many times have you had an influencer or customer tag you and then you went back to save the content and it was gone? Archive App literally saves every single piece of content you’re ever tagged in. From posts and reels to IG stories, it does it all. I know our social team gets so frustrated DM’ing our customers or influencers asking if they could just send us that piece of content and then losing that piece of content forever. 

Now we just jump on Shopify and open the app and see all the things we’re tagged in. I can quickly toggle between photos & videos and then feed, story, reel, etc. Honestly a social media manager’s dream.

The coolest part is that I can then just click on the photo or video, hit download and I now have the content! Next I pass this to my freelance video editor and he’s blading up 5-10 pieces of UGC daily for my newest Facebook ad or Tik Tok. 

So capture your branded UGC in the background while you sleep, so your marketing team will have instant access to higher performing creatives.

If you're a fast-growing Shopify merchant, signup for early access and get 100 posts saved for free.

1. Sign up on  Archive App

2. Use the code CROSSNET100

Finally, as we wrap up 2021 it's so important to make sure that your team is fully aligned on your company's goals and excited about moving forward. Here are things I'm actively doing:

1) Make sure every single employee is aware of our acceptable cost per acquisition. Every employee at CROSSNET is fully aware that I am happy and open to any and every idea that involves spending $50 or less to make a sale. 

2) This holiday season we saw massive sales volume by promoting our product on other companies' newsletters. Find as many newsletters in your industry, reach out to do a dedicated email send, and purchase a test or a package. We were able to purchase some newsletters for $500 and they returned upwards of $10,000 in a day. This will be a huge part of my strategy next year. 

3) Send out an end-of-the-year survey to your team. Ask them to recap their wins, their losses, and the question marks they have on the company. I may not be the best boss in the world, but I'm actively trying to make each employee feel happy, understood, and have as few questions as possible about their position or career.

I'd love to take some questions and answer them on next week's send. With that, it's time to kick off the birthday weekend!

See you then,

Chris