Why getting your first 1000 sales is so important and step 1 to making that happen

Why you only need to worry about your first 1000 sales now. The statistics you need to know to building your business. Why you should use Amazon's strategy in your own business. The first thing you need to do to get sales today. **Get the full transcript and show notes at: https://justaskparker.com/podcast **

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Mm,

Speaker 2: 0:01

welcome to the winning was shopify podcast with your host, me, Carolyn for the podcast that everyday people who want to fast track their way to more sales, more profit, and less work using automation and the latest strategies without needing to be tech savvy. I'll be interviewing experts in online marketing business specialists, shopify APP developers, and also we'll be providing you with case studies and marketing methods that will have you winning with shopify. Don't forget to check out ECOMMERCE marketing lab.com/podcast for show notes with information about each episode. So let's get straight into today's episode. Hello everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. I am so glad to have you. I really appreciate you tuning in. I know that your time's valuable and it really does mean a lot to me that you do take a listen to these podcasts each week. Now in today's podcast, it's just going to be may speaking. I have had the same recurring thing coming up over and over again and I thought now as a really good time to talk about it, I will be using this as my concept going forward because I do think it's really important. Now. I just want you to step back from everything that you're doing with your business and stop thinking about, you know, making a million dollars at the moment. I want you to think about making your first thousand sales. This is the thing that I really realized is the problem with a lot of people with their shopify store that, you know, while it's great to think big and it's really great that we think about, you know, how much money we're going to make long term. It's also really important that we're actually just thinking about that first thousand sales because I'm going to give you some statistics in a second to make you understand why this is so important. This same reoccurring problem comes up with clients time and time again and if you can step back from everything that you're doing and think, okay, well how can I make these first thousand sales? You go into bay a lot further ahead than other people that are jumping across the next big thing and you know, how can I make that know a million dollars? So the reason why a thousand sales is so important and the reason why I'm not talking numbers, so most people out there in the industry is telling you things like, you know, we're going to make you a million dollars a year or we're going to make you half a million dollars, whatever the number is. I don't want to talk numbers at this moment because it really doesn't matter what the numbers are because if your is$5 or if your product is$500, I still think that you need to aim for that first thousand sales. And here's why. So if you get a thousand sales on your website, and on average we're converting at about five percent. So the average conversion rates for a ecommerce store at the moment is somewhere between two and six percent. Some people are converting at a lot higher than might be converting at 10, 15, 25 percent. But we're gonna stick with the averages at the moment. So based just on that number alone, when we think of a thousand sales, it means that, and we're converting at five percent, it means that we would have had 20,000 visitors to our website. Now of course if you're converting at two and a half percent, it means you've had 40,000 visitors to your website. But let's just stick to these averages and think about this number. So a thousand sales on your website, whatever that might be for you in terms of numbers of earnings, that is going to be different for everyone out there. But these numbers stay the same across the board. So if we're converting on the average of five percent, it means we've had 20,000 visitors to our website. Now, if we've got a good opt in, an email opt in to get people's email addresses, it means that we've collected 3000 email addresses because on average we're converting on the pop up at about 15 percent. So we're going to get about 3000 emails. So I think you signed to understand where I'm going with this. So what I'm saying to you now is that yes, you've got a thousand sales there. That's what we're aiming for, but you've also got 20,000 website visitors that have visited your website and you've also got an email list of 3000 email addresses. Now the great thing about this, and this is where I'm coming from when it comes to talking about the first thousand sales, is that now you have some really great stuff going on. So once you get past that thousand, you're going to be on such a good path towards making those millions of dollars that you're aiming for. Because now what you've got, you've got 20,000 people that have been to your website. You can retarget them with ads on not just facebook because everyone's just thinking facebook, but don't forget there's lots of other places we can retarget those people. We can retarget those people on a general websites and facebook only touches on a few of them. So there are other platforms I do recommend that you start using. And again, it's very cheap to do. You can also retarget on youtube videos and a lot of people are forgetting about this, that you can actually put a targeted video in front of people who are on youtube searching for something that is similar to the product that you sell. And the other thing you can do is that you can retarget people in Gmail. So if someone's typed in or they've got an email about, um, baby socks and you're selling baby socks, then you can get an ad in front of them, in their gmail account based on the words that they're searching for or they're typing in. Pretty scary. But that's how it works. And it means that you can use that to your benefit. You also want you to get your thousand sales and means you've got, let's say you get about a 25 percent of people leaving your review. It means you've got 250 reviews on your website, hopefully more. Hopefully you can get more than that, but let's go for the sort of averages. So as you can see now you're in a situation where you've got 250 reviews. You've got 300 people on an email list. You've had 20,000 people to your website and now you're actually going to be making the big money. This is where you can start to sit back and say, okay, now I'm in a situation where I can start hiring people. I can start getting more help. I can start looking at other ways to make money from my business, other things that I can do to promote my business, and you're going to be in a much better situation. So sit back for a moment because this is what I'm finding from a lot of people are feeling overwhelmed. They're feeling like they're struggling. They're feeling like they don't know what to do next and what I keep saying to people now is just, wait, let's just think about these first thousand sales work with that. What can we do with those people that have been trialed website? How can we target them? How can we reach out to them? Retargeting is getting. They say that people are 70 percent more likely to buy from you from a retargeting ad. Then if you've just sent them a normal addict, they've just seen your normal ad so you can re target them for a very long time afterwards. Ninety days is sort of the norm of the most places. Sometimes you can retarget them for 120 days. This means that you're in a situation where you can keep getting in front of them. People need to see something from a business. Now they need to be advertised to from the same business between seven and 15 times, so that means that you can get a lot of ads in front of them and still get them to buy. You've still got a potential to get these people buying from you. So now you're sitting back going, okay, great, caroline, sounds fantastic. I'm going to intimate my thousand sales, but what next? So I just want to give you the very first step that you need to think about and if you'd listened to any of my little lot of training videos, I've done a lot of webinars. I've got a lot of information out there. If you're in my facebook group and I might sound like a broken record to some people, but I can guarantee you that most people are still not doing this and I stress it so much because I still think that most people do not follow this advice. And the first thing you need to do when you think about getting your first thousand sales as you need to know your audience and you need to know where they are. This is so important and I cannot stress enough how much you need to think about this. I'm going to give you a couple of stats. So I've thought about this and I thought, you know, as a good example, everyone tells me, not everyone, but a lot of people are telling me that they want to be like Amazon, I want to be the next Amazon, I want to solve these products. First of all, you're never going to be Amazon because Amazon is where it is at a very lucky time. It's sort of like facebook is where it is. Not that these days, facebook's doing all that well, you know what I mean, you know it's going to be very hard to get in that and beat those sorts of companies. But what I can tell you about companies like Amazon, Amazon started as a bookshop. They didn't sell a million products. It only sold books in the beginning. So they were targeting people who like to read, people that wanted to know that they could buy a book and get it delivered to them quickly. That's how Amazon actually started. So now we fast forward years later and Amazon is currently a marketplace where you can buy lots of different products, but Amazon knows their customer. Amazon knows that their customer is not everyone, so most people come to me and they tell me that their customer is just everyone between the ages of 18 and 100 and men and women and it's just everyone and I can guarantee you it's not. So if you want to see this information, I'll put it in the show notes for your, put the actual diagram if you need to actually see it. Um, a picture of it, which I'm like, that need to see some visual stuff so you can go and look@theshownotesandthatisatecommercemarketinglab.com slash podcast. And in there I'll actually put the show notes for this podcast episode. So once you understand that Amazon knows their customer very well, you can start to understand that they know how to target these people. So as an example, Amazon has got prime membership and their prime membership is$99 and it allows people to get fast free delivery and also watch movies and music on their system. Now they know that the people who are actually using Amazon prime, who have actually signed up for Amazon prime, that 82 percent of households in the u s that earn over a hundred and$12,000 a year, have a prime membership. Now, this is at nearly saturation point. 80 two percent of households that earn over 112,000 have a prime membership. They're paying$99 a year to have this membership. Now at the same time, what they also know is that households that make less than$41,000 per year are amongst the lowest people taking up these memberships. So what did Amazon do about it's, here's all my clients coming to me and maybe you've done the same thing and thought, I'm just going to sell to everyone and it doesn't matter like my products.$100 and everyone will buy it. Amazon realized that was not going to happen. They realized that they were not going to sell these memberships even though 82 percent of household over 112,000 a year took up their memberships. They know that they're not going to sell those memberships to these lower household income brackets. Now they've called it the Walmart customer. So what they've done is with the Walmart customer, they've actually offered them a huge discount on this membership. So I don't, I don't have the exact figures of what they actually offered it to, uh, to them at, but it was a huge discounts and let's say they're offering it at$50 a year. So they've half the price now they had to do that because they know that they're not going to get them any other way. Now you have to think about this as you being a business owner. If you really think that your audience is everyone, can they afford what you're selling? Do they have enough disposable income to buy what you're having? Are you willing to lower your price to get those people? Because that might be what it takes. You might have to do what Amazon did. So once you understand that Amazon realized that they're not just targeting everyone in the same way, you need to realize that your business is going to be very similar to that. So another thing that people don't understand is where their audience is at. So you've got to know who your audience is, how much they're willing to spend their information, you know, how much they like your product, how much did they desire it, but also need to know where these people are. So here's another diagram that I will put into the show notes as well. And what I talk about in this one is the statistics of where people are your customer. So if you've got a customer and you, once you actually honed down and say, okay, now that I'm taking it seriously, my customer is a 35 year old male and he is, he loves golf. Let's just say it's a 35 year old male who loves golf, is your audience. So when you look at the next diagram that I've got in front of me, which I'll put in the show notes, you'll start to see that the percentage of adult population that use facebook, instagram, twitter, and Pinterest, other for social media that I've got in front of me, that 75 percent of the male population use facebook. Now, if you look at the instagram column, 28 percent of the male population use instagram and 24 percent of men in the adult population use twitter and 17 percent of men of the adult population use pinterest. Now going back to the 35 year old male who likes golf, you automatically can see from this that facebook is going to be the main place to find him and definitely not pinterest. That's the worst idea out of all of the different social media. So now you can start to say, okay, well I'm going to concentrate my time on facebook, but then there's another column here and it says the percentage of adults in this income bracket that use this particular social media. So let's say you are tagging a 35 year old male who loves golf, but he also has to buy, you're selling some sort of golf clubs or golf shoes, whatever, and it's very expensive and he needs to have a high income bracket. Then you start to look at this chart and you start to see what these people are earning and you can start to see that I'm 75 percent of the adult population that earn over$75,000 a year are using facebook. Whereas only 37 percent of the adult population earns over 75,000 are on instagram. So you can start to see where people are at. And what you'll start to find is that pinterest actually has a lot of high earning people on that. And so does instagram. Now, facebook of course, is more of a general websites where people are, they're more, um, to socialize with their friends. So there's just a lot more people that anyway. But when you start looking at the other columns, you start to make up, okay, well now I sad to see you know, how much their income is. And then I've got another call on there and it's the percentage of people in the age group that you use this particular social media, so you can start to see that if we're looking at a 35 year old male, like I gave the example of that generally across the board, 84 percent of people in that age group do facebook, but then you go down to only 33 percent of people between the ages of 30 and 49 are on instagram. About the same on twitter and about the same on pinterest. So this chart is a very, very good chat for you to have a look at to start to understand where your actual target audiences. And I can't stress enough how important this is. And if you. Like I said before, if he listened to me a lot, you know that I do go on about this a lot, but I can tell you that you will save so much money. You'll save so much time. You will actually start getting way more sales just by cutting out a whole audience that you don't need to target. A lot of people are telling me, oh, but I'm scared if I cut those people out, then I might lose sales. You're not getting sales anyway. And if you're targeting, um, if you're selling golf shoes and a$500 and you're just trying to target everyone with that, I'd, you're never going to get anywhere with that. And if you just think I'll just tag it all men with that ad, you're not going to get anywhere. And then you've got to think to yourself, okay, I like these shoes because they're really cool to play golfing, but really does a 35 year old male have the money for it? Or should you be targeting a 40 or 45 year old male for that golf shoe? So take away your pride, take away your ego and start to think, okay, as much as you'd love the whole world to want to buy your product, it's just not going to be the case. And just like with Amazon, not everyone is buying the Amazon prime membership. As much as everyone knows what Amazon is, as much as everyone wants fast shipping, as much as everyone wants to use their services of the TV and all the other services that they offer in that membership, they're still not getting the sales. So take your pride out of it and say, okay, where is my customer? Who is my customer and where are they? And let's target them properly. So that is a first step to actually getting your first thousand sales. I think that if you follow this advice and you sit down and you know too that when you really think about it, you will actually be at a talk with the right person. What I'll also do in the show notes underneath the, um, this particular podcast, I will link to video training that I did do recently and it's a seven minute video and it tells you how to find out who your audience is. So if you're sitting here and listening to this thinking, okay, well sounds great, but I don't know who my audience really is. Go and watch that video because that will really help you understand exactly who you should be targeting. I'll also put in the show notes, this particular graphic and the other one that I spoke about as well to give you a better understanding on where you can target people and um, where they are and what chance you have got of actually getting in front of the right person.

Speaker 1: 18:26

Okay,

Speaker 2: 18:27

so that's it for today. I hope that I've helped you think a little bit more about how to get your first thousand sales, how to target the customer properly, how to find more of the right buyers and people who are going to end up being your raving fans. Once again, thank you for your time. I know how valuable your time is, so thank you for being here today. I'm always here to help you and I'm so grateful that you tune in to this podcast and I look forward to connecting with you personally at some stage in my facebook group. Have a wonderful day and see on the next episode. Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. For more information on the episode, head over to ECOMMERCE marketing lab.com/podcast, and don't forget to join my free facebook group, ECOMMERCE marketing lab to sign up for my 14 day free instagram challenge, instant sales for more sales with instagram, and also you can ask questions in the group to me, my team, and other shopify store owners. Until next time, keep smiling.