Influencer marketing for ecommerce explained
In this episode, we break down influencer marketing for ecommerce with a Shopify merchant that used influencer marketing to launch their weighted blanket in 2017 with influencers including Kourtney Kardashian.
Guest Corey Turner is candidly breaks down:
Corey Turner lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two kids (Henry, 3 and Avery 1). After graduating Northeastern University in 2009, he joined a startup with friends dropshipping mattresses. In 2013, they sold to MattressFirm. From 2013 to about 2016, they ran MattressFirm's ecommerce division. Late 2017, BlanQuil was launched just in time for the peak hype in weighted blankets.
Kurt Elster: Today on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we are talking about an issue that people have asked in our group anyway, or in conversation many times, and my answer is I don’t know! That is the unfortunate truth. And it’s good. It’s so freeing to be able to say, “I don’t know,” with confidence. But the question that I don’t know is what about influencer marketing. You hear about it. You see it. It seems like an attractive no brainer, yet when I tried it, my wife tried it, clients have tried it, it’s like flip a coin whether it works incredibly well, or you probably definitely just got scammed out of a few hundred dollars and some product.
So, I have someone here who is going to break down influencer marketing for us, and he’s gonna do it based on actual experience as a successful merchant. Very exciting. We don’t have someone pitching us on something. So, joining me today is Mr. Corey Turner from Faded, but you may be familiar with my BlanQuil, or in the past he sold a mattress company to Mattress Firm. That sounds pretty cool. Corey, you have done… You’re younger than me. You have done more than me. Give us your bio. Who are you? Who’s Corey? Why should I care?
Corey Turner: I’ve done a lot of things, but I mean, I don’t know if I’ve done more than you. But given the history of it, so it wasn’t necessarily me who sold the company to Mattress Firm. I was part of a team of kids I went to college with, so coming out of Northeastern-
Kurt Elster: You sold a company to Mattress Firm. Now, you’re king of Mattress Firm and worth one billion dollars.
Corey Turner: Yeah. I don’t think it quite worked like that for us. So, we were a drop shipping company. Started at dorm beds. The founder, Dan Dietz, he started selling mattresses in dorm… What are those? The pads. The mattress pads that go on dorm beds. And he built it into a pretty large business along with his friend, Marcelo, who’s now the CEO of Faded that I work directly with, they launched that when in college, and after college, I quickly joined them doing the accounting and operations, and in 2013 had an opportunity to sell the business to Mattress Firm, and Dan took up that opportunity and we all… Well, four of the five team members, I didn’t, moved down to Houston where Mattress Firm is, and ran the eCommerce department for Mattress Firm from 2013 to 2017, when about everyone exited.
When everyone exited, Marcelo moved over and created Faded, which is the parent company of BlanQuil. Weighted blanket, started as a single-SKU company selling weighted blankets. It has now expanded to other home goods, such as mattresses, comforters, aromatherapy pillows, sheets, massage products, but the reason we’re here is influencer marketing and how we grew BlanQuil with influencer marketing.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, so you started BlanQuil in 2017. At what point do you start using influencer marketing with BlanQuil?
Corey Turner: It was within the first couple months.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Corey Turner: Started taking a look. I mean, we went after Bachelorettes and other reality TV show celebrities that were just getting their Instagram accounts up and running. They probably had a few hundred thousand followers and that’s who we first started.
Kurt Elster: Did that work?
Corey Turner: It did. We saw returns, 30 to 20x return on influencers at that moment in time. Now, the key is weighted blankets were a very hot product ending 2017, 2018, and I provide a stat in June of 2018, weighted blankets was searched 90,000 times, and then June of 2019, it was searched 201,000 times. So, you see it really start to build up, and it was a newer category that was becoming very popular, and influencers really helped bring awareness to that and bring us an audience.
Kurt Elster: You know, what’s funny is around that time I used to get pitched on podcast guests or clients, and I had multiple people tell me that they were the first weighted blanket Shopify store.
Corey Turner: I know we weren’t the first.
Kurt Elster: And I’m sure we could figure it out, but-
Corey Turner: Yes. I know we weren’t the first one. But I mean, the product’s been around… ‘80s or even longer. It’s been used by therapists for kids that have some sensory problems and helps people calm down, so it’s not a unique concept, a unique idea, but what happened was the way it was brought to market was unique, and it was a different angle on the product, and it became very, very popular.
Kurt Elster: So, that was in 2017, but things have changed a lot.
Corey Turner: Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: Instagram is very crowded. It’s 2021 now. Would the same strategy work today?
Corey Turner: So, it doesn’t work as well, but it does work, and one thing I love about influencer marketing is I think the best way to get a sale is when a friend recommends the product. And so, the next step from a friend recommending a product is someone that you trust, or that has that authority online, and an influencer has that typically. So, we’re looking for authenticity and looking for anyone that has that true authenticity in their account, that when they recommend something-
Kurt Elster: Well, let’s start there. Authenticity is important, but it’s subjective.
Corey Turner: It is.
Kurt Elster: How do you determine authenticity? Let’s say you’re reviewing your influencers and one question is well, how do you even find them.
Corey Turner: Sure.
Kurt Elster: All right. Let’s back up. How do you… You get your list of candidate influencers. How do you start there?
Corey Turner: So, building a list or we already have the list?
Kurt Elster: Let’s build our list of influencers.
Corey Turner: Okay, so we’re taking a look at what the product is and who the target market is, and we’ll look at the data and have an understanding of what audience we want to be able to go after, and then we’ll go find an influencer that has an audience like that. So, we use a software called Grin. I think you may have mentioned it before on one of your podcasts. That helps us take a look and analyze the audience’s data. It’s a very powerful tool. There used to be a free one, but for some reason, Instagram attacked them and shut them down, so that was unfortunate. It was right at the time that we were looking at Grin, and it gives a lot of good metrics on who the influencer is, and when we’re looking at it…
So, we first start with the audience, who we want to go after. For BlanQuil, we’re going mainly for that 25 to 45-year-old female category, so we look and see, “Okay, who is an influencer that has that audience?” And Grin can tell us the percentages. And typically, we’re looking for someone that has about a 90% female, 10% male audience. We are very heavily skewed towards females. And so, that’s where it starts, but then we’ll start taking a look at other metrics to determine, “All right, do you qualify for our list?” And the stuff we want to take a look at is obviously the age ranges of the audience, the location of their audience, the language of the audience, their engagement rate that is given as a stat based on how many people like and follow that influencer. Non-follower likes, which is an interesting stat, and Grin gives an overall credibility score.
And so, we kind of have a baseline, like if you’re below 75% overall credibility based on Grin, you’re out. There’s something wrong. We’re not gonna deal with you. But as long as you meet some of these criteria that we need, but also you have to match your product to who the influencer is. So, we’re going back to authenticity. We’ll take a look, and the first thing is looking at someone’s front-facing account. Do the images that they portray on their account look real? Do they look staged? Do they look like they were kind of Photoshopped together? Or is it just like scenery? Or do you actually see the human being with their family or in their real life?
Is it a picture that you can just go take yourself or does it look like it took a lot of time to set up and it just really looks too polished? And if it looks too polished and all the images are all the same, it’s a little bit of a red flag initially. We think that “Okay, maybe this person’s not gonna be the best for us.” I sent you over an example. Even a couple hours ago, I got pitched on the same person again. They have 1.3 million followers on Instagram and it’s a female blogger. She looks good, but all the photos look a little staged, so I already would have a little bit of a red flag on her. But when I go and take a look at her Instagram stats, I see that it has a 12% credibility rating. Okay, there’s a huge problem here, so I’m getting DM’d on Instagram for this person. “Hey, do you want to run with this person? Do you want to do a promo with this person?”
First thing I’ll do is like, “All right, let me look at your Instagram account.” Okay, look a little suspicious, but not bad. But if you’re a female blogger looking at fashion and 66% of your audience is male, that’s a big red flag to me. Never mind the credibility rating. And then when I take a look at audience by country, if their audience isn’t based in… If you’re in the United States, shipping a product in the United States, and they’re an influencer that’s based in the United States, you expect to see most of their audience in the United States. This person has 26% of their audience in India, 17% Brazil, 12% Indonesia, 6% Iran, so to me it’s like, “Uh oh. We have something wrong here,” where that seems like it’s most likely bots that are building up this account.
So, that’s what we’re looking for, is when you have that absolute failure of an influencer event, I believe or I see that it’s most likely that it is someone that has falsely built up their account, and it’s almost like going out and scamming you to get your money. Hey, we’ll get you all this exposure, but it’s not real exposure. It’s exposure to bots, so it doesn’t help you at all.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, so it’s meaningless. That has been our experience was the follower count did not seem to have any relationship to the actual result, and on the really big influencers with huge followings and really polished accounts, that’s where we saw like zero. We would get scenarios where it was like literally nothing.
Corey Turner: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Versus micro influencers, people in the 10,000 to 20,000 range, they tended to have a lot more success for us.
Corey Turner: And that’s where it comes down to authenticity. Are you a real person? Are you engaging with your audience? Do they want to hear what you’re saying? And that’s why this non-follower like metric is interesting to me, because if you have a lot of non-follower likes, to me it’s you’re promoting your content and people that are not your followers are not liking it. So, if you’re not getting the majority of your followers that like your own content, that’s a little bit of a red flag, too. Now, granted, all these data metrics are behind the scenes, so you do have to use some sort of software. There’s other softwares that are out there that’s not Grin, and I’m giving a free promotion here to Grin. They’re not giving me anything for this. In fact, I pay them a hefty amount of money every month to use their software. I should maybe look into that relationship.
But they-
Kurt Elster: Yeah, where’s the… They need an affiliate link for you.
Corey Turner: Yeah. It is what it is. As I told you, I’m not here to sell you anything. You and Paul were talking about influencers at one point and that’s why I reached out. It was just like I have a lot of experience. We’ll just have a conversation about it. And it may be some people that have Shopify stores or are starting a business may want to look at influencer marketing.
And it is. For us, we have not seen as great of returns as it initially was. It is still a good advertising method for us, but it’s not a rocket ship every time. And so, that’s why you gotta do your research. Gotta look at the data. But it does bring in a good amount. If you’re doing it right, you’re bringing in a good amount of traffic, and then you already have all your other retargeting set up, you have your Facebook ads, Google, display ads, stuff like that, that it fills up your funnel and then you can work them through the funnel. You try to get them on your email list and send them emails and work them through that to get them to that conversion.
It's a good source of traffic for us because it usually comes pretty qualified, especially if you do your homework before you create that relationship with the influencer.
Kurt Elster: And when we talk about these KPIs that you’re using, that you’re looking at with Grin, is this all specific to Instagram? Or are there other social platforms we’re looking at?
Corey Turner: So, it is. We are very Instagram heavy. We have done some stuff… Grin is not Instagram specific, but they were built for Instagram from what I can tell. They have tried to introduce YouTube, and Facebook, and I don’t really see TikTok as much on there, but it is… For us, it is Instagram heavy, and we’ve tried a couple TikTok influencers. It’s the new, hot social media. That’s where all the eyes are. But what I’m seeing with TikTok is that it’s a much more global audience and your followers are much cheaper to get, so you see people building up these 20, 30, 40 million audience counts, follow counts, but it doesn’t quite translate into people are gonna go purchase.
It’s almost like how do you monetize Twitter, and they’ve always had that problem, as well, of monetizing it. TikTok is kind of… I don’t know where it’s going yet, but we’ve seen a problem with trying to monetize TikTok for us. It could be just, again, the audience mix being a lot more global and it’s a lot younger. Our product gears a little bit to a 25 to 45-year-old crowd.
Kurt Elster: Now, I’ve heard the key word engagement several times in the last 10 minutes. And it was interesting to me you said, “We look for an engagement rate 3% or greater.”
Corey Turner: Yes.
Kurt Elster: It blows my mind that 3% engagement rate is good, at least on Instagram, but what… It sounds like not all engagement is created equal.
Corey Turner: Correct. So, 3% does sound low, but it… That’s a good baseline. The best I’m seeing out there for your typical influencer may be 10 to 12% engagement. But the… As you said, not engagement is created equal. It's the reason why someone is engaging with that influencer or that profile on Instagram. Could be someone that’s out there telling jokes, or they’re creating some sort of entertainment, and so people are watching it for the entertainment, but not really watching it for that person’s opinion or being that involved with that person’s life.
You really want someone that is captivating their audience, and are there for that person’s personality, and want to emulate that person. And again, it matters what your product is, too. For us, a supermodel is not the best influencer for us to go to. It has a very… A supermodel will have a lot of male followers on it, which is fine, but for us, that’s not the audience we’re going for. But if you had a product that was geared towards fashion and geared toward… Maybe you had a dress, or sunglasses, or whatever it may be, a supermodel may be perfect for you. But for us, it doesn’t really work out.
Kurt Elster: And one of the weird things with influencer marketing is how do you track it? You seem to be familiar with your ROI on these efforts. How do you track that? How do you know whether or not it was successful?
Corey Turner: Yeah, so we have two main ways of tracking it. One, we typically give a discount code, or we’ll send them to a private sale page. So, we’ll know those SKUs were bought, only could be purchased by that link that was incoming or the discount code being used. That is a unique discount code to that person. But we also utilize the UTM tracking, so in the links that we give will be the UTM data in there, and so in Google Analytics, we can see how much traffic they drove from that link, and then we can also see the sales that associated with that traffic. So, it’s very important for us to be able to measure how successful these influencers are.
Typically, we’re trying to be profitable on every influencer that we run, but there is an argument to be said for brand awareness and brand building. We have run influencers, very, very big influencers, that I would say maybe weren’t the most profitable initially, but it opened up many doors for us. It got our brand being aware of other retailers and wholesale accounts that wanted to then work with us because we had that cache of XYZ influencer repping us.
Kurt Elster: Well, one of the things I noticed when I went on BlanQuil is you have a Kardashian. Oh my gosh.
Corey Turner: Yes.
Kurt Elster: You got Kourtney Kardashian is the hero image on MyBlanQuil.com. How the heck did you pull that off?
Corey Turner: So, the team that we have has had experience in the entertainment industry before, and so we did… Those people had access to the agents of quality celebrities like that before. So, we were able to reach out and create a deal, and it took some time and agreement to get her on board and to want to do it, and I mean that Instagram post, it was great. It brought us a ton of traffic, brought us a ton of awareness, but it also got us a lot of PR. A lot of companies started then putting… I think it was like USA Today, there would be an article, Kourtney Kardashian reps MyBlanQuil. It expanded just beyond that single event, which was great.
Kurt Elster: So, there are secondary advantages beyond just like they promoted your coupon code. Especially when you get into these really big influencers.
Corey Turner: Yes. You have to be cautious, though, because we’ve done a couple other big influencers that have that same celebrity status and even with other companies previous to BlanQuil, I’ve seen it happen where you really… You don’t get the sales and then you also don’t get the cache, and it just kind of fell flat, so I think we were lucky that this one, the Kardashians are one of the biggest names in America, so it got picked up. People pay attention. I mean, obviously they have their own TV show, they got all their own brands, they’re always in the news, so that was a good relationship for us.
Kurt Elster: And even this software, this Grin software that you’re using, it sounds like it really defangs it. It takes a lot of risk out of this process, but is it foolproof?
Corey Turner: No.
Kurt Elster: Have you still made mistakes?
Corey Turner: Yes. What I will say is you can absolutely tell when someone’s gonna be a dud, but then you’re into the category where it’s like, “Okay, we know that it’s not a certainty they’re gonna be a dud.” But you have to then… Is the influencer gonna do their job properly? Are they gonna pitch the right sale? Are they gonna speak about it? And can you even get them to post? I mean, there’s been multiple times where we’re going back and forth like, “Okay, yeah, we’re gonna post today on Tuesday.” And then it’s like, “Where’s the post?” It’s like, “Oh, I didn’t get a chance to do it.” All right, Wednesday. “No, didn’t do it Wednesday.”
It’s like, “What are you doing? This is your job. We’re paying you to post. Can you please get this up?” And so, and then do they talk about the right thing? Are they selling the product in the right way? You’ll have some influencers that just kind of show it and then like, “Here’s your discount code.” And you have other people that talk about it, show it, the touch and feel of it, and really do a good job with the product, and no surprise, those are… The secondary group there does much better when you really get an influencer to engage with it.
So, the problem is you still… Once you have all those stats set, it’s like, “Okay, we know this person has an opportunity to do well.” There’s still a lot of other things you need to do to make sure that is a successful event.
Kurt Elster: And you were talking about like, “Hey, did they do their job right?” So, what’s the… Did they post? Did they post right? What are the expectations here around deliverables? Like in this case, you’re hiring the influencer. You’re the client. As the client, what are your expectations for deliverables that they owe you?
Corey Turner: Yes. It doesn’t feel like I’m the client. It feels like I am begging these people to do us a favor at times. But we go with Instagram Stories, so we have looked at Instagram posts. Instagram posts don’t get the same level of traffic initially. The Stories do get your level of traffic that you’re looking for. But the post is great because it stays there for a long time until the influencer deletes it. The Stories only last 24 hours. But that’s where the traffic comes from, is the Stories, so typically we’re looking for an influencer to do four to five slide Stories, 10-15 seconds in each slide, talking about the product, and giving a swipe up with a code, and we expect that usually be posted when we agree on.
We typically try to get someone to post weekdays, Tuesday through Thursday, but we have seen some success on like a Saturday night post, and what’s real interesting was with the pandemic, all the times got messed up. Because everyone was home at different times and your whole tradition of, “All right, people are going out Friday night. People are out Saturday.” Throw that out the window and we were getting engagement at different times of the week, and that was unique for us to try to figure out exactly what the best time was to post.
Kurt Elster: What is all this gonna cost me? How do you set… Well, you know what? I have no idea what this should cost. Break it down for me.
Corey Turner: So, there’s a whole range. Obviously, you talked about micro influencers before. When you get micro influencers, to me that’s 50,000 or less followers, they’ll typically post for trade. So, give them some product, give them a discount code, maybe give them an affiliate link, and send them the product, and that’s the deal.
Anyone that gets up to 100,000 followers or more, we’re looking at actually paying them upfront. Our rule of thumb, which kind of… It changes depending on the engagement, so these are all risk factors. When you take a look at all right, what’s their engagement rate? What’s their following look like? What’s their audience? What’s their… the age range? What’s the gender mix? All right, how likely are they to match exactly what we’re gonna look for? And does that decrease our risk or not?
So, these are different risk metrics, and we discount based on how risky the influencer may seem. But a general rule of thumb that we’ve seen is if you have 100,000 followers with a good audience, we’ll probably pay… They’ll probably get paid about $1,000 for that Instagram Story. And so on and so forth, so 500,000, $5,000. But I mean, if they’re new, and their audience isn’t as engaged, we’ll try to bring that back down a little bit, so it comes all… It’s all over the place and every one is its own negotiation. I would say that’s the general rule of thumb.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Good to know. And you’ve been doing this a while. Let’s talk about how it’s changed. What’s different when you approach this in 2017 versus now in 2021?
Corey Turner: So, I think for us, and we’re actually continually having this conversation, is in 2017 or early 2018 is, “Hey, here’s a weighted blanket,” and it just sold. It was a unique, hot product. I need a weighted blanket, BlanQuil sells weighted blanket, here you go. Now, it’s a lot more selling the benefits and features of the BlanQuil. Why is this a premium blanket? Why do you need to have the BlanQuil over a competitor product? So, there’s a little bit more on working with the influencer on getting that messaging correct.
And then I would say it’s also trying to find that right influencer and who they are. I mean, as I said, we started with the Bachelorettes. They were great, but it didn’t last forever, and so now we’re trying to find who that audience is or the influencer that have the nice audience, that’s authentic, and meets our requirements, so there’s a lot more hunting that goes on for us right now and a lot more looking through it and being a little bit more selective than we were before.
Kurt Elster: How bad are scam influencers? So, like I make… I’m an influencer, I make fake private jet photos, famously you can rent a private jet studio if you’re in L.A. for your Instagram posts, and I certainly… You know, I can spend a few dollars and get a lot of followers that are fake on Instagram. How serious a problem is that?
Corey Turner: I would say it’s a pretty serious problem. I mean, as I mentioned before, a couple hours before I came on this podcast was I’m getting pitched someone that has that 1.3 million followers. It’s a complete fake account. I mean, I won’t throw this girl under the bus, but maybe she got roped into the scam as well, where someone came to her and said, “Hey, we’ll pump up your Instagram stats and we’ll make you into a true influencer.” I don’t know how that relationship happened, but her account is a complete fake fraud.
And if you take a-
Kurt Elster: How much… All right, so on that fake account, how much is she asking for?
Corey Turner: So, they haven’t come to me with any numbers, but knowing that, they probably… With the size of audience that she has, they’re probably gonna be looking for somewhere around $10,000. And-
Kurt Elster: Oh, geez.
Corey Turner: Yeah. And so, it wouldn’t… It would be a complete… They would be lucky to send 10 people to our site from the 1.4 million followers that they have.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. The handful that are real and got roped into it.
Corey Turner: Yes.
Kurt Elster: So, you’ve got access to this tool and you’ve got a ton of experience. Can we break down a real famous influencer’s account?
Corey Turner: Who’s our real famous influencer we want to go with? Kurt Elster?
Kurt Elster: No, I have all of 800 followers on Instagram.
Corey Turner: I did break down your account for you.
Kurt Elster: My Instagram account?
Corey Turner: Yep.
Kurt Elster: All right, let’s hear it.
Corey Turner: All right, so we have your 800 followers. Your audience mix is 76% male, 24% female. Your peak age range is 25 to 34, followed by 35 to 44. Your U.S. audience percentage is 59%, but I think that makes sense. I’d have to pull it up again, because I think you have a large Canadian audience, as well. So, Shopify being a Canadian product, I think that makes sense for your profile. Your English-language speaking, 92% is what we look for. Non-follower likes, 0%, so it doesn’t look like you’re out there trying to force likes on your account.
Your engagement rate, 4%. Very strong engagement rate. And your overall credibility score is 92.1%.
Kurt Elster: Yes!
Corey Turner: For all your 816 followers that you have, you have a strong account.
Kurt Elster: They’re legit. I’m starting a new group. I’m in micro-micro influencer status.
Corey Turner: I’m not sure how the big market is for that, but… But it’s just interesting. I break down our brand, BlanQuil, and another brand that I created called Soothe, and I take a look at the stats there, and I’ve taken a look at a lot of other, like I took a look at Chubbies and other brands, and you always see that brands don’t have the same engagement rate as your strong influencer would. And I find that interesting and I think you and Paul have talked about that before, where you want to be the influencer for your own brand, and how do you get that authority and get that engagement, people want to follow you, but I think Chubbies does a great job with trying to do engagement, and with their Instagram account, and Facebook, YouTube, everything they do. And I’m surprised when I take a look at their account that their engagement is lower than what I would expect. I think they’re-
Kurt Elster: All right, do it. Let’s hear it. Give me the stats on a big boy Shopify store like Chubbies.
Corey Turner: Give me… Can you give me one second, here?
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Little hold music.
Corey Turner: Okay, so Chubbies, overall credibility rating, 81.5%. Solid credibility rating. Their audience mix, 76% male, 24% female, which I think is on brand for them. Their age range, their peak age range is 25 to 34, which has 40% of their following is in that age bracket. Sorry, 18 to 24 has 38%, so they’re in that 18 to 34, which makes sense. They seem to go after a little bit of a younger demographic. Audience is 89% U.S., English speaking, 95%. So, those data points right there look like an extremely authentic account.
But their engagement rate, 1.2%. It just… They have 525,000 followers, which just shocks me on how strong of a brand that Chubbies has, and what I… You see people talking, and liking, and the content they make gets reposted. It’s surprising that the brand would have that low of an engagement rate.
Kurt Elster: If you didn’t know it, what would your expectation be?
Corey Turner: I would have thought they were gonna be in like that 5% to 10% range.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Where do we go from here? What else… What have I missed? You’ve got quite a bit of experience in eCommerce here. Aside from influencer marketing, because you’ve been doing this a while and have had some real successes. What else is working? And you know, I’m so fascinated by the idea that you were there, that you’ve been working from 2017 to now, so what doesn’t work anymore? Like what’s the thing you wish would go away?
Corey Turner: Well, what doesn’t work right now for us is Google search.
Kurt Elster: Interesting.
Corey Turner: The product category has become very crowded. Because it was so popular, you have… I mean, you see this issue that happens on Amazon all the time. When you have a popular product, you have manufacturers from overseas that just pump in their product, lower the price, and you have just a ton of competition.
Kurt Elster: AliExpress problem.
Corey Turner: Yes, exactly. So, the cost to acquire, to get that click on Google, or get that lead on Google, is just too expensive. Now, there’s a theory, okay, just continue to spend, retarget, get them in, but we’ve tried multiple times with Google search, and it is just painful. Anything besides our brand name, it’s just painful to try to get any good quality leads that are profitable. So, Google search has been frustrating, and when it first started it was like shooting fish and a barrel. All you had to do was throw up an ad and just say weighted blankets and Google search was great. But because of the competition that’s come into the space, it’s made it very difficult on Google search.
Kurt Elster: And I think in general, like recently we’ve seen on a few of our accounts just the Google search ROAS, still profitable, but starting to come down. Not where it was. And I think it’s just… It’s supply and demand and eyeballs versus advertisers. I think a lot more advertisers are getting, are jumping in and upping their budget again.
Corey Turner: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s been difficult for us there.
Kurt Elster: So, what’s a marketing tactic or promotion strategy, whatever it is, that you recommend everyone try at least once?
Corey Turner: Good question. For us, I mean, obviously we talked about influencer, but getting… I would give it a shot on influencer marketing, but when you’re doing it, make sure you’re trying to capture the leads, you have your pixel set up, and you can do the retargeting, and you can get them on your email list, and work them through a flow on your email list, and get to that conversion. I mean, you want to build that audience and I think you gotta give it a try.
Kurt Elster: So, what’s that… What’s your ideal welcome flow look like? Give me the high-level outline.
Corey Turner: So, typically we’ll try to make it oriented towards whoever they came with. So, whatever the influencer is, thank you for joining our list from XYZ influencer, and then we’ll give you a little background on BlanQuil, and then we’ll give you a little bit of background on the product and some information about the product, and the selling points of the product, and then by the third or fourth email, we’ll try to give you a reason to complete the purchase if you’ve not already completed that purchase.
Kurt Elster: So, in your experience, what’s something you always screw up? Like you just always try to get it right and can’t get it right.
Corey Turner: Spelling.
Kurt Elster: Spelling? Thank God for spell check.
Corey Turner: My grammar and spelling is poor. I mean, I’m 34 years old. I grew up right when computers were becoming commonplace in the classroom, so I’ve always had auto correct and I’ve just never cared to learn it, and so same with my grammar. I just… As long as you can understand my point, that’s all I need. I don’t need perfect grammar. But I screw it up all the time.
Kurt Elster: All right, final, final question. And this is the second to last question after my final, final question.
Corey Turner: Go for it.
Kurt Elster: All right, favorite Shopify app. What’s the one you could never get rid of?
Corey Turner: I have a hate-hate relationship with most Shopify apps. They all sound great, and you plug them in, they don’t do exactly what you want them to do. For instance, we were trying to find a good free gift app, and-
Kurt Elster: Oh yeah. This one’s a surprisingly tough nut to crack.
Corey Turner: Yeah, and so we finally found one that we liked. We were installing it. And then it conflicted with another app that we already had going on in the store, and we couldn’t use it. And so, finding an app that just does exactly what you want is very frustrating. Something that’s out of the box. But for us, I mean, I think you have to go with your core… I mean, it comes down to two for me. Privy being one, where the popups lead capture is important.
Kurt Elster: I do-
Corey Turner: In that top line banner.
Kurt Elster: Every time I use Privy, I’m like, “Wow. There’s so much in here. I should be doing more with this.” Like I just did-
Corey Turner: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: We were looking at a store and we found like, “Oh, this store suddenly has this huge influx of new traffic from Google organic search.” It was really awesome. But it kind of artificially drove our conversion rate down because now we’ve got all these new folks in here. You don’t know what the heck they’re doing. And so, along with that, I started making popups. And what’s so cool about Privy is the number of filters, so I did a welcome popup, dynamic coupon code, one-time use, for new visitors who aren’t on a campaign, who have never placed a purchase, who have never placed an order, and come from a Google search. And so, I knew this is the people that I should be giving a discount to, and everybody else, I’m just giving money away. I don’t know, that’s just a recent example of why I agree with you that Privy, powerful and often underutilized.
Corey Turner: But with Privy, you need an email, and so we use Klaviyo. I switched over to Klaviyo. I think maybe your podcast or one of the other podcasts I listen to finally convinced me to switch over to Klaviyo. But Privy does have a little bit of email on its own, but-
Kurt Elster: Yeah, you could send off coupons, but it’s not email automation.
Corey Turner: Correct. And so, having that coupled, having Privy coupled with Klaviyo is extremely important. Get that lead generation, building that email list, and curating that customer.
Kurt Elster: You know what? I’m gonna make sure I include those in the show notes. And in the show notes, I’ve got links to BlanQuil, Grin, it’s Grin.co, it looks really cool. Privy, Klaviyo, anything else I should throw in there?
Corey Turner: So, I mean, the only thing we haven’t talked about real quickly is Faded, the parent company.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, what’s the deal with that? I didn’t look at it. Plug it.
Corey Turner: So, it’s an incubator shared service type company where… Faded LLC owns BlanQuil. We launched BlanQuil through Faded. But we’re also doing that with other companies. As an example, a company, a brand that I started was called Soothe Home. It’s Soothe Therapy Dough. And we’re able to accelerate a business because of the structure that we have. We have three pillars, essentially. Ecommerce, speed to retail, and product development and sourcing. So, we are able to… I mean, you can search Google, you can Google search right now BlanQuil and you can see all the retailers that BlanQuil is in.
We have all these relationships already set up and we’re able to get products to market a lot faster. So, Faded, it is our business services and incubator that we can launch products through, and we’ve done a few different brands with it. So, the website’s not live facing yet, but by the time this podcast is up… We’ve always operated kind of privately behind the scenes, but now reaching out, doing the podcasts, we’ll have that website up, Faded.biz on there.
We also have what I call the Faded Collective, and it’s a few of our close friends, other brands that do influencer marketing, and we all share our data inside of a database, so you can see what’s working for other companies, and we’ll be opening that up to other people to join that, as well. But it will be application based and everyone in the collective will agree, yes, we want this other company in here or not in there. So, Faded.biz, it will be a good resource for what we do, and what we’ve done with BlanQuil, and what we’ve done with Soothe Home.
Kurt Elster: And if I go to Faded.biz right now, it’s a placeholder. Is that-
Corey Turner: Correct.
Kurt Elster: Okay. So, when is that gonna go live?
Corey Turner: So, we’ve always worked behind the scenes. It is gonna be live probably within the next week. I don’t know when you plan on posting this podcast. I know you usually typically post on Tuesdays. But it is going to be live and ready. So, we’ve always kept pretty much of a low profile.
Kurt Elster: This will probably go live in April. Early April.
Corey Turner: Okay. Perfect. So, we’ve always kept a low profile and we’ve just decided to go a little bit more public facing with our profile now.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Wise. What was the thing that made you say, “You know, let’s do that? Let’s be more public.”
Corey Turner: I think it goes back to being authentic and trying to be… Just trying out new ideas. You always have this concept and we kind of worked within our own network of people and we brought in brands, and we’ve launched other brands. We did it with a fudge company. And we’ve gone and had an exit with that same fudge company. And it just seemed to make sense to try to go a little bit more public and see who else may want to work with us.
Kurt Elster: You did a fudge company?
Corey Turner: Yes. So, based out of San Francisco. I’ll give them a shoutout. Z. Cioccolato. Great fudge. Someone that we had known in the past and we were just kind of working with them and we were like, “Hey, you’ve got a great product. Can we help you build this up?” And we built up their eCommerce presence and we ended up selling that company back to the owner.
Kurt Elster: Do they ship the fudge?
Corey Turner: Yep. Ships nationwide.
Kurt Elster: Is the fudge melting a concern? Like if… You know, you mail it to somebody in Orlando, or Chicago, in the middle of the summer, which… Orlando and Chicago, like same damn weather as soon as you’re in July. But you know, 95 degrees some days. Oh my gosh.
Corey Turner: I’ve had multiple boxes of fudge shipped to me, and we’ve shipped multiple boxes of fudge in different promos, and I haven’t heard of any issues of the melting fudge.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Well, good to know. I’m always concerned about fudge. I love fudge! Who doesn’t?
Corey Turner: It’s fantastic. Very rich.
Kurt Elster: All right. This was a really helpful… I don’t know why it took us so long to get someone who could just give us the straight answer on influencer marketing. Well, you know what? I know why. Because it’s always someone who’s trying to plug their influencer marketing service, or software, or whatever the heck, whereas you’re like, “Hey, here’s our experience.” So, I thank you, thank you, thank you for doing that.
Corey Turner: You’re welcome. I mean, to me, it’s like any other channel that’s out there. There’s no free money. There’s no easy. You have to work at it. You have to be trying. You have to be testing. But it’s not something to be overlooked.
Kurt Elster: No, absolutely. I’m sold. Convinced. As long as you go into it with eyes open. And lastly, where can people go to learn more about you?
Corey Turner: So, as I have said that we’ve kept a pretty low profile. I don’t think I’ve updated my LinkedIn profile since 2000… probably 11. I have a very young-looking picture on my profile. Before we sold that company, Olejo, to Mattress Firm, I never changed my profile there. I don’t really have that much of a public-facing social media presence, but you’re happy to reach out to me at cturner@faded.biz. I’ll respond to any email that comes there.
Kurt Elster: Excellent. Corey, thank you so much.
Corey Turner: Thank you, Kurt.