Optimization this is the thing that Separates Me from all these drop shippers that go ahead and build a store get some sales and that s*** goes and dies a couple days later. The reason why I was able to turn this into a brand that lasted for two years is because what I did in this phase which is optimizing the product I could have very well just kept spending money on my ads making a little bit of profit and then watched my product die slowly like this, but instead I took two steps backwards and figured out how can I make this product better before I start scaling and that is what made it much more profitable and much more scalable for the long term more specifically there was three things that I did in this phase that I'm gonna talk about in this video. The first thing was creating my own custom video ad now as you saw I tested this product with footage that I found on the internet, I didn't have to order the product. I just used what was already out there. Cut it up uploaded it to Facebook and tested it with that. That is the quickest and most efficient way to test products. The only problem with that is Facebook doesn't like it. And if you scale a video like that there is a high risk of your account getting banned also many other people were using that same exact footage. So I was not standing out as much as I could have been if I made my own video now as you guys know, I have a little bit of a skill set in the video creation side, but if you don't there are many ways for you to Outsource the custom content portion of making your video there are many agencies out there. That'll do this for you. One of them that comes to mind is viral Ecom ads. Another one is bands off ads. There are many companies that will do this for you, but I wanted to do it myself because I know how to do it and I know exactly what I was looking for and I didn't make something from scratch. I didn't come up with a brand new idea. And in fact, I literally just Recreated the video that I already went viral with the chopped up one from the internet, but I used my own footage. I shot it in much higher quality using my iPhone and this video ended up getting over 20 million views. The second thing that I did was maximizing my funnel, which means I was trying to get as many dollars as I could per visitor to my website and there's a couple tricks and things that I did to do that and I'm gonna explain them in this video. This is going to make your ads 10 times more profitable and allow you to actually scale without missing out on so many customers and the last thing I did which most dropshippers are not doing is focus on improving my product and getting faster shipping, which is honestly not that difficult. The hard part is getting your first profitable product and getting it to make consistent sales, but actually customizing your product getting faster shipping. Those are very easy. There are a thousand agencies in China that will help you do that and I share some with you in this video today. So those are the three things that we're gonna discuss. This video creating my own ads maximizing my funnel and improving my product getting faster shipping. Those are the things that I did to optimize this product which is what allowed me to scale to that next level. This is going to be a long video but I'm telling you this is the difference between me and these drop shippers that are here today and gone tomorrow. This is the reason why this brand was able to scale so high and last so long and eventually be sold. So if that's your goal listen closely without a doubt having a custom one of one video ad is the best way to say yourself apart from your competitors and unlock a new level of scale for your product. Seriously taking the one day to make the custom video ad for my product unlocked a Year's worth of scale from my brand that video was the Catalyst to us getting our first consistent profitable daily numbers and it was scalable with the previous ad that I had just tested with that couldn't have been possible. So I seriously That you guys need to consider this if you're having a product that is getting a couple sales a day make your own ad with your own footage and get the best shots possible. Now when I say this, I don't mean you need to have a professional camera crew and a rig and all these things. I mean that you need to follow a couple key principles to a great ad and I didn't come up with these principles. I've learned all this just from studying the biggest brands out there and following their recipe and turning it into my own unique creation. So what we're gonna do today is break down these ads which were the first ads that popped off for the Sleep band. So you could see if we Spring Forward a little bit from the last time period this is about the time that the product first started getting because it's a sales July through August and if you guys see just in this one campaign, we were actually running a lot of campaigns, but if we just look at this one campaign, which is the new ads you can see this is when the product finally started growing. I mean we were able to be around a Roas, we had $13 cost per purchase on hundreds of purchases and the CPC and the CTR were decent compared to the stats of the old ad like you saw in the last video. This is a huge Improvement. The actual ad itself though is not the most insane thing you've ever seen. It's actually a very simple ad but that's okay. That's sort of what we want. So I'll just go ahead and let this play all the way through no interruptions no skips, and then we'll break down each element of the ad. All right, let me pull it up. Yeah, that's the ad and as you can see it's not the craziest ad you've ever seen but it was able to get to over 1.5 million views in the first like two to three months of us testing it which again really validated this product for me and gave me the confidence to go all in this minor optimization is what really took it to the next level. So the first thing that you're gonna see in the ad is actually a hook and this is non-negotiable no matter if you're selling a t-shirt or if you're selling a product like this, you need to have some type of hook in your ad. What I decided to do was the snoring angle because it had yet to be done on Facebook. And if you guys remember from earlier that was the exact situation that I had and that's where it clicked for me with this product like a lot of people deal with a snoring partner that is like everyday occurrence. So we made this hat and in the hook, it goes like this. Like that is a relatable frame for a lot of people, you know, and then I try to use like certain terminology like keeping you up. Like that's painful like yeah, he is keeping me up all night. Like that's painful, you know what I mean? But then we talk about the actual benefit of the product instantly instead of saying this headband has built-in speakers. No, we say like these comfortable headphones. Oh those have headphones in them will help you fall asleep faster. That's the main thing so somebody keeping you up. This will help you fall asleep faster. It's very simple problem solution. But boom and I didn't have footage like this available online. There was no footage of the product like this on the internet. So the fact that I created this footage to create this scenario that allow me to market the product again is one of those things that really allowed me to take off with the product and this is a political to almost every single product. Okay. After that, I did some editing where I just put the music to come on went like I turned off the snoring and then I put the music on and then when she covered her eyes, I dropped the brightness. I don't know if it made a difference but Then we talk about the product introducing the Sleep band. It has built in ultra thin. You know, you know, you got to Market it by the way, they are hella thin, you know, if you guys are gonna try to go out and copy this product. I don't recommend it what you're gonna be selling is a cheap knockoff from China at this point. My product is fully customized and we'll talk about that later. But yeah anyways I feel like that ran on for a little too long could have changed like anyways and doubles as a light blocking mask help you sleep deeper. So again light blocking mask instead of sleep mask and then sleep deeper another benefit. And then we bring another pain point because some people do already sleep with their airpods or their earbuds, but they're uncomfortable. You know, I mean, this is actually a major pain point that I ended up using in the future of growing this brand and I'll show you guys some of that stuff later on but yeah, Enjoy your favorite music sound. full Comfort Circle We could have done without this clip, but I think it's essential, you know for like Bo. Omers people comment. Does this work with my phone? Come on, we show the Washington things, you know, these were questions. You know, how I came up with this stuff. These were questions that I saw on the Amazon listing for the product. So like can you wash it? Can you how's the battery like and then lastly just You know some school. Very simple if I was gonna recreate this ad right now in this year, I would honestly include some type of review, you know, I would include some type of you know, 10 second 15 second. Oh, yeah, I love to sleep man. I use it every day type thing, you know. I had to make sure my camera still recording number one man crew over here. Okay. Another area that I think I might have improved a little bit is the ad copy but at the same time it performed very well. So, you know, I think this style of AD copy is good, but I would have maybe reworded certain things like I might have come with something else and I did I mean I've tested so many copies for this so it's not like I just did this and went to sleep like no, I've tested hundreds and hundreds over this last few years. But yeah, so we ran that and then all while I was running that I was doing more split tests just to try different thumbnails, which I personally liked this thumbnail a lot better. And as you can see like the majority of people did as well. It had like a 1.49 compared to a point nine five, but also I spent a lot more money on this one up here. But anyways, yeah, I had this ad working and I had this ad working. So ultimately what I decided to do was I just ran them both alongside each other you can see there they're scattered around here. To them and that's sort of a common theme over the years of running this brand as I never really relied on just one main creative. We always had at least two or three running at a time excluding the retargeting stuff. That's totally separate. So I think that really helped us too because they might have seen the first ad but then they see the other AD and if you guys look right this other AD actually explains the product better. So this ad overall I think has generated us more Revenue profitably. So this ad copy format is really good as well fall asleep faster. Enjoy deeper sleep way better headline, by the way than the other one meet the Sleep band. It's built with noise canceling speakers. I would have probably said like thin noise canceling speakers or something like that breathable materials 10 hours battery life. Like this is a good ad copy. This is a very standard ad copy format that I think could work for almost any product but the short one outperformed it pretty consistently. So, you know, I ran both the whole time but the short one really really popped off. So take that information. However you want but yeah, that's really the difference that happened from me creating my own custom video and that's sort of the framework that I follow when creating my own custom video now am I saying it's the world's best ad or I'm the best copy writer. No, I learned all this stuff from studying the biggest brands and that would be my homework for you after watching this video go find an e-commerce brand and she really like if you want some inspiration check out like Snow teeth whitening or belangea right or glamnetic and go look at their ads and you'll see they're all very user-generated content very clean, very simple ads similar to ones that you saw here. So go study some more big Brands and if you got a product that's making some sales order the damn product and make a video ad come on. What are we doing? The next key to unlocking scale in your brand is maximizing your product funnel. Again. This is another one of those things that a lot of beginner dropshippers are not doing. So if you do this in your competing against those people you are going to massively increase your chances for success in terms of maximizing this sleep band funnel. These are the first five things that I really set up and we're gonna go through each of them one by one first. Let's talk about the bundle variance. This doesn't apply for every product but it almost always works. This is a great way to squeeze more money out of every sale and it's very simple. You don't need any apps or anything like that. All we doing is this so you guys see right here. I actually titled the variant category buy more and save so basically this might normally say color this might normally say size, but I just made it say buy more and save and then of course we have single Says nothing. You see the there's a little discount on single, you know, it's a discount but it's a little one now my bad if they click on couple. Now they're saving $20 and it's a good deal. And you know, it's 30% discount. It's maybe one for me and one for my wife and then of course we have the family one and that's the biggest discount of them all. So again, you know this simple thing. Will allow you to increase your average order value which will increase your profitability of your ads which as at scale will compound into you being able to run this business every day. So this is the first thing that I did eventually we branched off and built a gem Pages Lander for this but we're not there yet. Don't worry. I'm gonna show you guys all of that but I just want to take you to the initial scaling of what I did. So definitely that then we did a couple other things as well. The next thing we focused on was SMS marketing now SMS is one of the strongest and most effective channels out there. If you don't have it, you're literally leaving thousands of dollars on the table with scaling your business. So in the beginning we were using a tool called SMS bump. Now, we manage it entirely through this app called attentive, but unfortunately, I don't have like the original setup that we use to run because again, this was a while ago, but what we run now is very similar. So what I had was a little pop-up right here it says get 10% off and then when you click that it would ask you for your phone number. Now the reason why I use a different app now I use this app right here called attentive. The reason why I use it is because of this so watch as you put in your email and then they say put your number to confirm. So it's a very clean pop-up that actually captures the email and the phone number at the same time. So I really like this pop-up more than the SMS bump one, but regardless you guys need to set that up and what you can do when you have this information is set up a few basic things, like people that came to the website fill it out the form but didn't buy. Boom, you can hit them with a follow-up offer one day later two days later and you can fully automate this. So now they might have been on the train trying to order your product. They might have been at work and somebody said something to them what they were trying to order and this reminder gets them to come back and it it captures that purchase. So doing this and setting up this is extremely important. I don't think it's essential for us to dive super in-depth with everything that you need to write copywise, but I will go ahead and attach some examples of abandoning car emails and abandon viewer emails just to make sure that you guys have something to go off of but yeah, that is the next thing that I really recommend setting up SMS and email marketing there are tons and tons of tutorials out there that are gonna dive really deep into it. But again, we at the very beginning set up the bare minimum. I mean, I I literally use like the templates that they already have like for example right with clavio if you go to their campaign Teams and you go ahead and you create your own campaign, you do an email campaign and you go ahead and go through this. They actually have a lot of stuff already ready for you. So like we'll just hit continue real quick. They have drag and drop Builder. They have a Showcase of like the Thousand best emails that you can use and if you want to even take it a step, I'm gonna go back actually if you want to even take it a step further in terms of automation. There are apps that come with all the stuff already typed up for you. So attentive is a good one attentive has a lot of templates and text already written for you. It's just a little more expensive and an app that we use in the past for this store that basically has the whole thing all templated for you. You don't have to customize it. Is this right here abandonment protector? And pull that up real quick. And yeah, you know these guys they have the whole thing already written out for you same with reconvert. So what I'm saying is I'm not condoning any one of these apps like all of them work. So just do your research pick the one that you want. The this one has come very highly referred these days by many people that I respect. So I would recommend going with this app for you guys for SMS. It's very good app. So yeah, that's my tip for you for getting the maximization out of that and we use clay video for email marketing the next two things that I did are a little like, I guess you could say kind of like not sneaky, but they were a creative way to get a couple extra dollars on from our customers. So I'll show you what I'm talking about. If we go back to that time one thing that really boosted our Revenue at least enough to keep running and staying profitable and it was actually we added in there a lifetime. Warranty, so I wonder if I can actually pull it up. Yeah, it checks out. So we added a lifetime warranty option. This was a $5 purchase and all it was was basically we would guarantee if you had any issue with the product. We would send you a replacement or a refund. So it's not like a scam or nothing like that. We were gonna refund the customer. It's like an actual warranty purchase. So we added that into there. We also used to have free shipping and then we had like free insured shipping again. That one is a little more in the gray area, but it was another five dollars added to the overall profit at the end of the day. So and we still had the free option anyway, so, you know these things really start to add up guys. Like when you add in people coming back to buy from the SMS and emails when you add in people now buying two or three instead of just one and then when you add in these other little five dollars here five dollars there suddenly, you're profitable and suddenly you can scale and the last thing that I did and I think I only started doing at the very end of this month was actually coming up with an upsell. Yeah, you can see right here and The upsell for this product was actually another sleep band which ends up becoming our biggest most popular product of them all. But yeah, I started testing this upsell product. We'll look at it right here. It's funny to even call it an upsell product because now it's kind of like our Flagship product but it was this one so we would sell them one of these and then we would use one click upsell to promote them one of these and people started buying it and that's when I started running ads for that product as well, which will dig deep into how I scaled with the second product. But yeah, that's an overview of what it takes really to maximize a funnel on a basic level. There are more things that you can do, you know, like improving the conversion rate, you know, improving the website page speed these type of things help as well. But overall this is the main areas to focus on to get more revenue and more profit overall from each customer. So I want to talk about actually taking care of the customers and Simple things that I did to improve the product quality fast and get faster shipping fast. No, but for real, I want to show you guys how I was able to work with an agent get our product quality way up get the shipping faster and overall just move towards the process of building a real brand without having to deal with all the chargebacks and all the PayPal holds by the way, you know knock on wood, but with this brand in two years y'all I have never gotten a PayPal hold in my life. I got the Shopify hold that everybody gets 30% of your money for like three months, but that's it. I never got the PayPal hold because we did what I'm gonna tell you about in the next video. Let's get it this right here is the thing that the majority of dropshippers are not doing and it causes their business to fail before it even has the chance to get off of the ground in this video. I'm gonna talk about my process to improving the actual product quality and shipping times. I can't say I have perfected this but we've been able to sustain this business for over two years now. We have a pretty decent reputation. Online and people like our product. Of course, we still have some returns and some exchanges but any brand will have that as part of the game. The goal here is to minimize those as much as possible and the way we do that is by focusing on these things. So the first step and unfortunately, you know, it is unavoidable but it's it's a good thing that the opportunity even exists. You guys need to be testing originally on AliExpress. You can also use Alternatives like CJ dropshipping and there are some others out there but really start the process with testing first because I've seen the story so many times of somebody that ordered a hundred units because they thought they found the next light bulb and then they're stuck with these units. Nobody's buying them and they're out of cash, right? So Drop Shipping from these tools like AliExpress and CJ is very helpful. There are a resource there like it's not such a bad thing. They're negative side of it. Of course is still there. People are gonna expect to get products in a reasonable. Time frame so there are some things we can do to help remediate that and we'll talk about that in the next video. When I explain to you more about building a team and how to really handle those requests. But anyways, that's the first step is really testing your product with Facebook ads tiktok ads, whatever platform you would like to choose and get some traction on the product. The next step is reaching 15 to 20 sales a day consistently for at least one week. I think at that point you can say, okay, I need an agent I need somebody to work with here to improve this product because a lot of people will try to jump to this step was one order a day towards a day. But again, the agent is usually not gonna take on that liability. If you're only getting a one or two orders a day, they're not gonna order this stuff for you. So you need to really prove that there is demand for your product. It is selling and you are a profitable client for them. After that, though, as you guys can see, I don't know how to counterput step 2 twice after that you want to work with an agent directly? Okay, this is something I've talked about a lot in my videos, but we'll break it down a little deeper right now, you know, the the thing that you're looking for with the agent is a higher quality product than what you're getting an AliExpress with better packaging you you really want to look for a better price and it doesn't always have to be cheaper. But if you're telling me that I pay one dollar more and I get all this extra stuff too. I'm very happy with that. But if possible a cheaper price and consider you're ordering it in bulk so you can negotiate like that say, hey, let's get these units for this price. It's pretty much always gonna be cheaper and then you're gonna have other shipping options that you won't have available on AliExpress that can get the products to your customers around the world in a reasonable time frame, you know, we see products arriving these days around eight to a maximum of like 14 15 days. And that's from China to most of the major countries usually chose open around. Days, so that's where I would put your attention at when the product is starting to get some traction my recommendation for you guys for this would be Ecom Ops. This is the company that I work with and have worked with for pretty much the entirety of running this brand the owners in there. You see, okay, they even shouted at your boy on the website. We love to see that but no I know affiliation like they're not paying me or anything like that. I work with these guys like you guys have never been able to see this but this is like a behind the scenes like they tell me. Hey we oh you owe this balance. I pay the balance my team member Ashley here. She puts up requests. They answer her request directly. They give constant shipping updates quality updates customer needs a replacement like they handle everything. It's very professional to very high quality service. And I love these people they really saved my business now, there's a alternative as well because you know, these guys are amazing, but Very selective about the clients that they work with so, you know, you got to have some good stuff but they will work with you. They really will we got to be good these guys on the other hand the owner of this company. His name is David and I've worked with David before I worked with Ecom Ops when I first started sleep band and we first started scaling. I worked with David and it was pretty good. He was able to get us to the point where we had a good quality product. I got a bunch of samples from him. He sent me like three different samples. I told him which one I liked and then he actually begun the process of putting my logo on the product, but it was at the same time that I got also in conversation with the people that Ecom Ops and I already had heard good stuff about them. So I sort of abandoned David and jumped on ship with them because I really wanted to work with them and they pretty much took over the entire process of getting the logo on the product. They also provided a better shipping line. And we dug even deeper with making samples and getting the best quality version of the product which really brings me to The Next Step which spoiler you guys can see it right there. But the next step is receiving a sample of your product directly from them. So you need to see not the Amazon version of your product not the other stores version. You need to see your product like the direct version from the supply. You need to see what it's packages like. You see what it smells like what the product actually like comes in the box or a bag and nothing. Is there instructions like you need to inspect your product thoroughly like you are you are consumer and figure out all the areas for improvement. And the thing about these agencies is that they can really help you with anything. Like let's say you want to have a thank you card in the packaging cool. Now you can do that. Let's say you want to put your logo on your bag cool. You can do that and we've actually done both of these things. I'll pop up some photos on the screen of what it looks like right now. When you order a sleep in maybe compared to some of the older photos that it used to look like, but we've came a long way and now from working Ecomops our product comes in a nice clear bag with our logo and then on the inside there is a satin travel bag with our logo and then we have the product itself. And we also have a card small business card with a thank you and a discount. And also if you scan the back of it you get a discount on your next purchase. So that's where we're at right now, but we started from dropshipping on AliExpress. So break it down make improvements and repeat. That's really the cycle. You just it takes so long though, like from China if you want me to be brutally honest with you today receive the sample and we're critique the sample and get it back. But if you really care about this brand and you want to make some real money, you have to go through that process and for me, it's been a fun process and it still is a fun process. The only thing I don't love about it is how long it takes but it is fun to create your own product from the process of dropshipping. I I do very much love that and then at the last step, you know, the last optional step I Is moved to a US fulfillment operation of course faster shipping a lot of benefits to doing this the best company that I could recommend for. This is Lancel Global. It's a good friend of mine that runs that business and they're solid they have a huge Warehouse. They can take shipments direct from China. They ship all around the world. They're very good. But we tried this and personally for me just wasn't worth the extra cost. So we are sticking pretty much with China fulfillment for now and it works just fine. So we do receive some feedback about the shipping speed but I would say, you know, 85 90% of customers are pretty much pleased with it, but, you know occasionally some people get upset. So yeah, that's pretty much it. That's the entire process to you know, increasing the shipping speed. I mean decreasing the shipping speed and increasing the product quality. I don't really think there's anything else much to say about this. I think it's pretty cut and dry. It's really unique to your product. It's really unique and you really need to look at the top competitors in your industry. If there are any that are at a high level and look at their product. How does their product come package? What is the actual product look like? Is it better than yours? And then figure out how you can do it in a unique way or improve upon some things that they lack in. I mean, I ordered products from every single one of my competitors. I ordered from all of them and I looked at all their packaging and I took some stuff from some people. I took some areas to improve from other people that I thought was bad. I thought I could do it better. So that would be my closing tip for this video is to order from your competitors and look at what their product looks like and really figure out how you can make your own thing because it really pays off people post our stuff on Instagram when they get it. We got a huge highlight on my story, like people just post a product because it's nicely package if it looks like they're not gonna package it or post it at all.
