How We Made $92,000 in February on Shopify... Complete Strategy Breakdown

Hey guys! Today we are going to show you how one of our clients made $91,000 in February. We're going to show you exactly how you can do it too. Stick around, you're not going to want to miss this.

We're going to show you one campaign that made us almost all of the money and that nobody else is really using when they're creating Facebook or Instagram ads. We want to welcome you. If you're new to this channel, we've been in business for over five years and we've helped hundreds of businesses scale online.

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OK, guys. So we want to show you the inside of the Shopify. So February of 2021, they made $91,634. So 28 days, they would have probably had their $100,000 month if we had a full month. But this is the real numbers here, this is actually what this business did. 

But before we can do that, we can talk a little bit more about who the client is and that all really started at the beginning of the business, one of our first clients. 

So it was a boutique and we've actually been experimenting and doing a lot of different things with them and this type of strategy that we're moving into right now is completely different, completely new. It's something that obviously from March of 2020, when the pandemic hit, up until now, is when we've actually been implementing a lot of the things that we're going to talk about today in this blog. So this is not something that you can just do in one month and hit $91,000, it's something that'll take a little bit of time, but is absolutely possible for any of you who are reading right now.

So to talk about the strategy a little bit more, to give you guys an idea in March of 2020 and probably some encouragement, she was spending $400 per month. 

So that's a very good budget to start with, if you're a new business or e-commerce. But that's where she was too. And then, the pandemic hit and she had a brick and mortar store and had to close it up because, as you know, most places forced everything online or from their home. 

So what we did at that point in our past strategy was find something that was really good. Maybe she had a dress or a shirt or whatever else that was, run traffic or paid advertising to the website and then try to get people who didn't purchase and get them to come back, because with that kind of budget, you really can just send people to the site, hope that the website converts and then if they don't convert, try to run a retargeting. It's really all the money that we had there. 

But she either had two choices. One: grow the business and go all in on advertising, which we had been begging her to do. There's been many times where we said, hey, what's going on? You know, like you're doing well enough with this $400 budget, let's scale it. And she's like, no, I'm not going to do it. My boutique and the store, that's where it's all at. So that's when we came up with a strategy in March of 2020 and started implementing the five steps to make her business super successful and why she had an amazing month in February. And if you know anything about retail, you know that January, February and March are typically down months. So for her to have this kind of month in February means that she's doing really, really well.

All right. So the strategy that we implemented was to start focusing on all mainly 80 to 90% of new traffic, meaning people who had never heard of her brand. Previously, she had a group of people who were within 10, 20, 30 mile radius who knew exactly who she was and what she was about, and they purchased from her loyally. But now our approach was to expand it to all over the United States, get her brand in front of as many people as possible, and let those people make a decision on whether or not they were going to do business with her. 

Now, she does an amazing job of engaging with her audience, and it's all part of the rest of the strategy and the tactics that we're going to mention here in a second. But because she was able to do this and because she jumped all in on the advertising side and kind of embraced our strategy, it really helped her to hit full speed by summertime. So we had a couple of months where we were trying everything out and then by summer, she was in full speed with the new process and she started to trust the process and the results followed from that. So we're going to jump into the tactics here of how that all played out for her and how February became that $91,000 month. 

If you're new to the store or trying to find the best apps for your store, for your Shopify store, you definitely need to check out this video https://youtu.be/SPpgFF_NF5g 

So tactic number two, after you've figured out the strategy is email. 

Email is super important for any winning e-commerce strategy to increase sales of your store. So what they were doing before was just sending one newsletter, probably once a month-ish. So they weren't even that consistent with that newsletter and maybe sending blog posts here and there. But all in all, they were not doing too much with email. So that's where we came in and sort of revamped the way that they did that email.

So now what we did and what we implemented was segmentation. 

So there's two ways that we segmented. One, if they were taking action on the site, say, for example, they added to cart, initiated a check out or even made a past purchase. We segmented those audiences because we wanted to treat them differently than audiences who didn't do any actions on the site. The second way that we segmented them was by their interests. So if they went to a site and they were interested in dresses or if they were interested in tops or if they are interested in graphic tees, whatever they were interested in, we segmented them into a list so that when we created content, we would then send them only things that they were interested in. So if Christian is interested in tops or dresses only, we would only show him tops or dresses versus sending all the emails to everybody. That is probably one of the biggest mistakes people make is they think, hey, I have an email list and it doesn't work. Well, it doesn't work because it's not personalized. So what we did was we personalized the emails that went out and we segmented them to the right people and sent them out at the right time. So that's step number two. You absolutely have to have it in place. It should be 20 to 30% of the business.

The software that we used is Active Campaign. Definitely use that too. 

We are going to show you right now our open rates, click through rates and some example emails that we've done for this client. And if you're interested in an Active Campaign and want a free trial, you can click the link above and grab it. 

OK, so this is actually something they sent. It's called Apricot Blouse. This is actually sent in March. 

This is just the same type of email that we're sending here. Sent to 5400 people and the most important thing here is the open rate and click through rate. So the open rate is 21% percent. It's great. Probably still getting a little bit of more opens. We like to at least be at that 20%.

Click through rate, we want to be that two to three percent and that's where they're at. 

What's awesome about Active Campaign and what you can see here is that this particular email that took a little bit of time to send and made $1200 and it's still adding up money because active campaign takes a little bit to get all of the information here. But just this one email that they sent yesterday made $1200, the same kind of thing that we were doing in February. 

We're sending out two to three emails per week to a segmented audience, in addition to automated emails like we mentioned earlier, for people who added to cart, people who purchased, there's automations going out for them as well. But this manual email that went out to 5,000 people made $1200 from them just from that one. And I anticipate that actually even more. 

Now, if you like the Active Campaign and being able to see a little bit of the back end there, let us know  in the comment section of this How To Video here. Let us know if you want to see a video of exactly how we set up our email campaign automations instead of active campaigns.

If you like email, you're going to love combining email with the number one campaign that nobody uses. This is amazing. I can't believe more brands are not spending more time on it because it's got a huge ROI.

So, before we jump into the last tactic, we must cover live selling. 

Live selling is an absolute game changer for brands that are now on Facebook, for example. We've done a lot of live selling within Facebook and the first taste that we had with live selling was actually an experience randomly on Facebook. It was maybe a couple of years ago, we were just browsing through Facebook live videos and we saw this girl who had thousands of people who were watching her. We ended up watching her for a long time, and what she was doing, she wasn't using any type of software or anything like that. She was just live and she was opening pearl shells, or oysters.

She had this knife and she was just opening live. There was like the water stuff just falling off of them. And then, she would move the membrane and the stuff around. So she would show you the pearl. There were different colored pearls. So that was the reason why people were watching live, because the people who watch live had already bought the pearls. So she was doing like a live reveal of the color and the type of pearl that they got.

So, you would buy the oysters, basically it's sealed, so you don't know what you're getting. But on that live video, you get to see her open what you’re getting and she was also encouraging people to purchase on their website. So it was sort of a type of live selling on Facebook, but not to the extent that we're using with our clients right now and with this particular client, this just killing it with live selling. 

So the software that we know most or best anyway is Comment Sold. There's another service out there called Buy It Live. 

There's probably so many other ones out there. But let us show you exactly how this happened. So, if you can see here, this is the last live before vacay. They're going down to the beach. 

It's spring break time right now. So what they're doing is they're going live at their studio or at their office and they go live for 20, 30 minutes. And you can see here that somebody commented, sold 101. 

So what they're doing on the video is talking about the product and how to wear it or how that you can use it in real life, talking about the material, etc. Explaining what you would get if you were in a real life experience, like at a mall. So it's kind of like the next best thing. What's great for you as an e-commerce store owner is that as soon as they comment "sold", that message is sent directly to your customer and the purchase happens directly. You don't have to worry about invoicing or anything. Live selling that way is a game changer. So think about all the time that you're going to save by doing it. So any product based business that can explain something like this is huge. A significant amount of money came from comments sold. These are all people who have engaged with them and now come back and shop live. 

So for this one, any way to reach like two thousand people, which is probably one of our smaller ones. Forty three comments or people who are interested and they're buying right there. 

They tell them what size that they want and then they purchase right there and say, OK, look. Twenty seven dollar order. Looks like one hundred and eighty three people are live through the app and they're purchasing right there live on Facebook. So in twenty, thirty minutes you could literally make thousands of dollars. So cool!

If you look inside of Shopify what you'll see here is "comment sold". This doesn't mean that all the sales were attributed from comments sold. What it means is that this was the last thing that they did online. But you can see that a good chunk of revenue came through comments sold. Initially, there's a long process for how they came in. There's not linear, but you can see the comments sold generated a significant amount of money for them in February.

If you've been loving these tactics, we actually created a private 15 minute training that walks you through the five key areas to grow and scale your online store profitably. You can find that link here. Make sure you click on it. 

OK, so what you've been waiting for is the number one type of ad that we tell you to run or we suggest that you run, which we've seen amazing results with for all of our apparel brands, when they're selling online through Facebook and Instagram is the Collection Ad. 

The Collection Ad is a video on top or an image on top with a variety of the products below shown on mobile. What this allows you to do is quickly get in front of your audience and let your audience see what kind of products that you have and easily click to go check out that product and go purchase. 

So if they like it they will go purchase a lot easier. And what we will tell you is that most people that we see, brand wise, except for the top one percent who have the budget, are not doing these types of ads. And this is just kind of a quick look at what does well. So you can see here we actually did a "look alike" of people who added to cart and past purchases for $20. 

But what is most important here is we spent about $10,000 on this, this is just lifetime for this particular collection.

It's made three times our money and it's made us roughly $34,000. 

We’re just going to show you the style of video that's running. So as you can see here, this is what it would be mobile only. And what's probably another big key is that it's only shown on mobile. You can't do it on a desktop. 

So mobile for Facebook, mobile for Instagram. It's got an image up top, multiple products down below and you can see there's 114 comments. There's four or five, six hundred people who connected there and thirty two shares. 

The reason that collections do so well is because it lets you easily see the product, the brand and it accumulates social proof. When you do something like a regular ad and you don't combine social proof, it lessens the amount of return on investment you're going to have because there's not as many people who are saying this is a good ad. Well, if you came across this particular blog and you saw hundreds of people who liked it and hundreds of people who engaged with it and thirty two shares, you're likely to stop too and you're likely to click through as well. So it just kept building upon each other that way. So, that is the number one way that we have seen for apparel brands to sell more products online. You've got to have a Collection Ad inside of your repertoire or your basket here. 

All right. And so just real quick, this is kind of a bonus,we did a video and we did really quick fast shots letting people know this was actually for fall. But this type of video, this is specifically for the video showing people what's going on. It's quick, fast shots telling them to follow us here. Spring is here. 

It does not matter where you insert this, but this type of video is what gets people to stop, take action. And as you can see here, this particular one made $18,000 for them, 3.2 times. So three hundred plus percent return on investment on that solid video.

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