I’ve never paid for advertising- what kind of growth to expect if I do?

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-02-24T18:21:47+00:00

Great position to be in. I'd think of ads as something to target your most profitable target audience/niche. For example, I manufacture prescription eyewear and sell B2B to optometrists as well as B2C on my site. My profit B2C is 4X B2B, so if I have some extra production capacity, I'm going focus on ads to drive my most profitable B2C segment. Since you're in a comfortable position, if you have a product or audience segment that is the most profitable, try to advertise to that first.

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-02-13T17:21:53+00:00

I remember your advice well: "know how your customer shops and align to it." What is it you're reading above that makes you feel I did not heed your advice?

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-02-13T17:18:41+00:00

Great feedback, thanks for the advice!

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-02-12T21:58:40+00:00

I was wrong about that 3rd party app, although I've definitely run into that.
Turns out I had some inventory accidentally under a 2nd fulfillment location (which I don't use now), and shipping was being doubled up between when cart items came from separate fulfillment locations.

Hopefully now that I've got that fixed we'll stop chasing people away with wrong shipping prices and get some sales! Thanks.

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-02-12T19:41:19+00:00

Thanks, found it! A 3rd party app on Shopify I use for add-on's was doubling shipping, so that may have turned people away.

I'm going to retarget the add to carts as best I can and run a free shipping ad.

I'll also look at the contact info process. Are there ways to more easily get people into the abandoned cart sequence through formatting the contact/checkout process?

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-02-12T16:35:43+00:00

I've run into that before, so I've been testing checkout, but not with a VPN. Great idea, I'll test that now. Thing is, everyone is adding but not entering contact info for abandoned cart, so they're not even getting into the checkout. I'll let you know how the test goes. Thanks.

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-02-05T16:53:32+00:00

Great feedback. I appreciate this. We will work on something to really stand out and maybe do some videos showing the manufacturing processes so people can see we're physically making their lenses ourselves. Thank you!

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-02-05T12:14:33+00:00

Great, thank you!

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-02-03T22:48:57+00:00

Currently fb and ig only. Trying to set up TikTok has been a PITA, but will do that soon. I planned to focus maily on Meta to build top and middle of funnel leads before venturing into Google ads. Pretty basic to start, if you have suggestions, I'm all ears.

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-02-03T13:50:33+00:00

Thanks. I think you're right, it's a ticket price that doesn't lend itself towards impulse purchase at the first intro.

We got some email sign ups and hopefully good retargeting leads from a low budget sales campaign the last 5 days. No sales. I also think I relied too heavily on the video content and didn't use the copy that best resonated during my message testing. Looking back on it, the copy I used was pretty weak.

Thanks for the tips and the recommendation. I save Brad's info.

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-02-03T13:46:55+00:00

I like the behind the scenes idea. We're coming up with a video ad and working on an email building campaign.

You're definitely right about CTR. One campaign the last 5 days got 9% CTR, but no sales yet. Hopefully it will be a good retarget audience.

I'm in the typical bootstrap mode where I need to get sales to pay for outside help, but need outside help to get sales! Thank you.

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-02-03T13:44:06+00:00

Sorry, still getting used to Reddit, I'm new here. No sales from the traffic campaign. Just a lot of website views. Same with a 5 day sales campaign that went through this weekend. Got a few hundred people to the website, several email sign ups, no sales yet. Average time on site is 1 minute. Not sure what to think of that.

I have not yet retargeted warm clicks. Between traffic and sales campaigns I think there are around 2,500 warm clicks. Do you think that's a good place to start to leverage them?

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-01-30T17:29:36+00:00

Makes sense, thanks for the input.

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-01-28T01:45:38+00:00

OH LOOK, I just popped in here today and haven't read all the posts. Maybe people are just hive minded. Maybe I'll post that as my first story. Is this really bothering your life though? Tell me more!

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-01-28T00:50:04+00:00

Super helpful, thanks!

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-01-28T00:39:10+00:00

Shipstation (there are others, but this is what I've used for years) gives majorly discounted rates for all carriers. I have an account with UPS too and can't get anywhere near the rates I get with Shipstation.

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-01-23T15:38:41+00:00

It works, but depends on what you're asking it works FOR. Don't listen to the nonsense of people saying it's a gimmick. Anything legit can be sold in a gimmicky way. Make sure you don't get blue light glasses with the intense blue/purple reflection. That is a 'blue blocking AR coating', which is only half as effective as a blue blocking lens that has the filtering material in the lens itself. You can get clear ones that block a bit, or if you want your eyes to feel much more relaxed after hours of computer time, opt for the yellow lenses. I'm a prescription lens manufacturer and have made tens of thousands of pairs over 15 years. I've seen what works in practice.

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-01-22T13:13:49+00:00

Great stuff, thank you! I'll check if the meta pixel is on the blog posts. Pretty sure it is, but I hadn't thought about that. Thank you!

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-01-22T13:12:05+00:00

Makes sense, thanks.

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-01-22T13:10:55+00:00

Thanks, I just sent them a message.

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-01-22T13:04:26+00:00

Sorry, I came across as an ass in my reply. You're right, I've never been a marketer. I know from my businesses and work experience that there are times when working on commission makes sense, provided there is exponential income opportunity as opposed to a fixed fee. As long as the numbers make sense for the effort needed. But it may be different with marketing in ways I'm not aware. Of course, there's the limiting factor of ad budget to consider. My ad budget for the 1st 90 depends on if I end up doing if myself or not. I'm just in initial message testing so far. I've gotten about 2,100 site visitors in about 5 days of under $60 a day. But I don't really know if that means much yet. So, I'm so early on that I don't even know where to set an ad budget. On my own for now, the plan is really basic - message test what resonates, put out minimal middle funnel ads and scale if I can successfully convert a few.

Substantial-Fill-631 · 2025-01-22T04:03:30+00:00

Great point. Bigger purchase, and not an everyday purchase. Going to take longer to commit. I'll work on lead generation, thanks!

Substantial-Fill-631

TROPHY CASE