The 3 Levers To Use To Exponentially Grow Your Shopify Business with Kaleb Ufton

Andy Splichal:

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. This is your host, Andy Spikel, and we are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is the three levers to use to exponentially grow your Shopify business. Today's guest is the co-founder of eCommerce Wizards, where they are busy creating 1000 Ecom millionaires through predictable growth. A big welcome to Caleb Ufton. Hi Caleb.

Kaleb Ufton:

Hey, thanks for having me. Super exciting. Great.

Andy Splichal:

Well, thanks for joining us. Now, let's start with how can you advertise on your website being able to deliver predictable growth for your customers?

Kaleb Ufton:

Yeah, great question. So my background is in digital marketing, but before that it was actually in hypnosis, and before that it was in programming. So I've sort of come from this data driven how do you problem solve background into a practical version of psychology, into marketing. And, you know, any agency out there will have their sops for how they can get a certain result, that kind of thing. What mark, my co founder and I have done is we've taken our experience and we've chunked up as much as we possibly can to what are the actual, what's the minimum set of things you need to know and understand in order to be able to get a certain result? And then how do you effectively manipulate those things so that you get the result you want? And what we've seen time and time again is if you pull on these three levers, you get a result.

Andy Splichal:

Well, let's talk about those three levers. I see you had listed its cost per acquisition, average order value and lifetime value. Now, all of these have to do with customer retention. And so why do you concentrate on these three levers so hard? And what role do customer acquisition metrics, such as new customers, conversion rates, et cetera, play in your strategies? Or do they?

Kaleb Ufton:

Yeah, I mean, I personally look at cap or CPA as part of customer acquisition, and to me, conversion rate falls under that. Although it can also fall under retention, because if you got an email list, you have return customers that is going to have an impact on your conversion. Right. But part of the reason we focus, we look at it as a triangle. Try and make a triangle, shape two corners of this triangle. I would say, yes, they are very heavily on the retention side of things. And that's because most businesses focus, let's say, 90 95% of their efforts on the most expensive part of, of a customer's journey, which is actually getting that customer to start with. And then if you look at e commerce in particular, again, most of those businesses are extremely focused on the most expensive part of the most expensive part, which is how do I get cold sales? Typically, if they have a decent agency or they've got decent amount of marketing experience, they might be using a three or five step funnel where they're actually warming the audience up.

Kaleb Ufton:

They're not exclusively focused on cold traffic, but it's still very much the most expensive part of the process. It's also the part of the process that people tend to get wrong because there's many different factors that determine how expensive that is. Once you've got a customer, all conventional wisdom and all the data says it's infinitely easier to sell to them again than it was the first time. So if you focus on LTV and you look at increasing your aov, this just naturally increases revenue over time because people come back and buy. If you have a half decent follow up sequence, if you have half decent cross sells in your email, if you do reengagement, even if you just do a newsletter or campaigns and it's half decent, you will have people come back and buy again and again and again. So if you can increase your aov, that directly impacts your lifetime value. If you can increase the lifetime value through reengagement, through SMS campaigns, through message, whatever the mode is, then you're increasing profit on the backend rather than spending more on the front end. And typically that's a lot cheaper to do than the front end.

Andy Splichal:

So what are some quick wins that you would tell listeners if they wanted to get results in either increasing their average order value or their lifetime value of their customers?

Kaleb Ufton:

Yeah, bundles for aOv, for average order value is typically a really good one, but there are other things you can do as well. So when I say bundles, I mean like, you know, buy this t shirt, get another one for 10% off, 20% off, whatever the case is, right? Or these products go together. Very common. Amazon does it. A lot of big retailers do it, that's fine. But you can also look at upsells, you can also look at cross selling into another product. It's very common in the supplement space. For example, you say, yes, I want to buy the supplement.

Kaleb Ufton:

And immediately you're offered six more of the same thing. And that may seem counterintuitive to anyone who's not been in that space, but it actually makes a lot of logical sense. If you're willing to buy this product and you like it or you want the result and you're then offered a discount to get it in bulk, it actually makes a lot of sense for you to take that so long as the trust is there. In terms of lifetime value, I think people underestimate the value of having reengagement campaigns to actively going to your list, whether it's SMS or email, and talking to the people who aren't engaged. I see so many times, oh, we're just emailing to the last 180 days of people who engaged. Okay, but your list is like 100,000 people and most of them haven't engaged in the last 180 days. So a, you're paying for them, b, you're not getting revenue from them. That makes no sense.

Kaleb Ufton:

Like end them, the infamous, you know, seven word email or something like that. Are you sure? You know, do you no longer want this product? Do you no longer want this result? And you'll be surprised what you can.

Andy Splichal:

Get now in your bio, it also says that you work with Shopify customers is do you work with clients who are on different platforms or are you exclusively working with Shopify?

Kaleb Ufton:

We decided to niche down into Shopify mostly because of a standardized system, but we've worked with woocommerce. I personally work with Magento Woocommerce. I built sites in Django, which I don't know if anyone knows what that is, but I've even worked with sites running. Neato. It's what we're teaching is principles. We're teaching concepts that at the end of the day they kind of come down to the basics of human psychology. I hop on a gut trust, left, right and center all the time. Like increase the perceived trust on your website.

Kaleb Ufton:

One of the biggest things that I say to people, and there's many different ways to do it, but the processes and the systems, they can be implemented on any platform that you can do split testing on. I will caveat with that. We just focus on Shopify because a, it's a, it's a big player in the market, b, there's a lot of people that seem to get stuck around the sort of ten to in Shopify, and that's normally a systems, processes and mindset barrier.

Andy Splichal:

So you had mentioned building trust in your customers mind on your website. What are some of the ways that you are able to do that?

Kaleb Ufton:

Yeah, reviews are the most obvious one. It still surprises me how many people don't display reviews. And with that, there is a little caveat. If you've got less than I say, about eleven, I've seen. Not always, but I've seen when you have a small number of reviews that can actually lower the conversion rate. So if you are haven't collected reviews, collect a few before you go publishing. That's what I'd say there. But there's so many other things.

Kaleb Ufton:

Payment icons, guarantees, confidence marks featured as seen in awards. Even if you, let's say your business is altruistic, maybe not a b corp, but you give 10% to your local charity or something like that, make it obvious. Like actually have it displayed somewhere on the product page, that part of the process, part of the profit goes to support whatever. Like there's just these little things that people forget that your product page is your 24/7 salesperson. And so you want that salesperson to be equipped with as much, shall we say, ammunition as possible to enable them to serve the customer as best as possible.

Andy Splichal:

So with all of your systems, it seems like data is really important.

Kaleb Ufton:

Of course.

Andy Splichal:

What are you using to track the data?

Kaleb Ufton:

We tend to rely on whatever the customer has. So we have some people that use triple whale, some people use hiros. I'm not plugging either of them. There are pros and cons. We always recommend it. A BM minimum, having Google Analytics set up. But then we don't trust any one platform either, because attribution is a beast by itself. And what we like to do is educate people and actually walk them through the process of being able to trust the numbers themselves.

Kaleb Ufton:

And part of the reason for that is a we don't want to blindly encourage people to believe a particular metric. We want them to actually understand how to work out that metric so they can use it as like a north star, so to speak.

Andy Splichal:

Now I also saw somewhere that your motto is that you believe that you need to be having fun in your career or your business. And so I thought that was unique. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that?

Kaleb Ufton:

Yeah, I mean this is, this is actually how Mark and I met was through play and fun in a group we were in, we were randomly assigned for a project that was quite fun, and we decided to create something fun together, which happened to be ecommerce wizards. But I've, as mentioned, I did social media marketing. I did that for seven ish years, I think, and I had some fun doing it. A lot of it wasn't fun. Before that, I did the hypnosis practice, which I really enjoyed helping people and serving them, but it wasn't super fun, especially the marketing side of it was just, I knew nothing about marketing at that point in time. So it was very overwhelming. And what I've noticed is whenever I've worked a job, so long as it's been fun, it's been fine. As soon as it stopped being fun, I would start looking for things to optimize, I would start looking for problems to solve.

Kaleb Ufton:

I would start working on something on the side. I would start playing card games at my desk because I was just bored. So for me personally, what I found is there's a relatively direct correlation between the amount of fun and play and joy that I'm experiencing in my life and my health, my financial well being, my mental health, all of these things. And I notice we actually had this on a call last week, and I just caught up with the number. When things aren't going well in someone's business, there's often, at the very least, an emotional component to it. And if we can help them get unstuck on that, whatever the answer is, whatever the action to move forwards is, it normally presents itself and is much easier to take action on than just trying to force your way through it.

Andy Splichal:

So where do you think that most e commerce companies get it wrong when it comes to running their business?

Kaleb Ufton:

I would say they turn into a job. That would be the easiest way to answer that is, they got started for a reason. They had some wins. That was exciting. And then the reality of marketing kicks in. The reality of fulfillment kicks in and it becomes a job. And they forgot what, they forget why they started. They don't have the skills to put systems in place.

Kaleb Ufton:

They don't know when to outsource or when to automate. And so they're wearing 20, 30, 40 different hats, and it stops being fun very, very quickly.

Andy Splichal:

So we've gone through a lot of changes, especially AI coming in. Where do you see e commerce going in the next twelve to 18 months?

Kaleb Ufton:

This is a really good question. I asked it on another, another podcast. Twelve to 18 months. I think we're going to see more automated shopping. And what I mean by that is you can ask Alexa, for example, to order some more laundry powder for you and based on your shopping preferences, that'll just be handled. I think we're going to see more of that. I think once Apple allow that level of functionality with Siri, we'll start to see that really take off. I'm not as in the Android space as I used to be, so I'm not sure where that side of the market's at, but I imagine it's either ahead slightly or it's not too far behind.

Kaleb Ufton:

So I think there'll be a shift for certain types of products where it just becomes a very conversational, easy. This is what I'm looking for. Minimum this kind of reviews, and it needs to have these features. Okay, I found these things. Oh, I recognize that brand. By that one purchased, it'll be hit your door and two to three days kind of thing. I think that's where we're heading.

Andy Splichal:

Now. What about business books? One of my favorite topics I like to ask every guest is, is there a business book out there that you can attribute to your journey as an entrepreneur?

Kaleb Ufton:

There's probably a few. So I really would credit if you want to be rich and happy, don't go to school for setting me on the path of entrepreneurship. I am very grateful to my dad for giving that to me when I was twelve years old. My teachers weren't, but I was. The next big one was probably trading in the zone. I forget the author's name, but that really taught me a lot about how when your income is in your hands, which is the case when you're trading, but it's also the case when you're in business, all of your, I don't know if I can swear on here, so I'll just on the polite side, but all of your stuff, all of the things that you don't necessarily want to deal with will come to the surface and they will do it in very confronting and uncomfortable ways. And that certainly has been my case on the entrepreneurship journey. The business really is a reflection of you in more ways than most entrepreneurs want to admit.

Kaleb Ufton:

And then the next one would be scaling up. It's a really, really good book about just systems and processes and how to think about delivering a repeatable outcome, whether it's through a product or a service.

Andy Splichal:

Now, let's switch a little bit and talk a little bit more about your agency. In your bio, it says that you're busy creating 1000 ecommerce millionaires. So tell me, tell me about that 1000 number. Where did it come from?

Kaleb Ufton:

It came from a planning day that mark and I did. We mapped out our sort of meta model for how we get results for people and who we want to serve. And we found that there's this like pocket of businesses around that ten to, up to about seventy k a month where they genuinely enjoy the business, but it's not fun anymore. So there's this cognitive dissonance going on. They really want it to succeed. They want to have this outcome for financial freedom, time freedom, etcetera. They believe in their product, but they're blocked for whatever reason. And having taken businesses from zero to seven figures, and Mark's taken them from sort of his classic example, he gives us month to 3 million a month.

Kaleb Ufton:

We know sort of the pathways and what can go wrong. So it's very, for us, it's very simple to map that process out. But there's something about that million dollar figure, whether it's a year or a month, and people listening are going to go, hold on, those are two very different numbers. Yes, but it's also not depending on how you want to look at it. That figure is a flag for a lot of people in the ground of, like, I've made it, I've achieved some level of success that is meaningful. And if done in one of the right ways, I wouldn't say the right way. There are many ways to achieve this outcome. If done in a way that enables and supports freedom in time, then you have the financial freedom and you have the time freedom.

Kaleb Ufton:

So now you actually get to live the dream life that you wanted to, which means you can do more good. And for me, I want to do a lot of good in this world. So helping business owners, it's kind of like a leveraged, leveraged way of impacting people, if that makes sense.

Andy Splichal:

So you had mentioned, I think, your target market there between 10,070 thousand a month. When somebody comes to you, I mean, what are you doing it for them? Different marketing aspects. Are you doing it with them? I mean, what services are you offering?

Kaleb Ufton:

Yeah, I mean, ecommerce wizards isn't an agency per se, it's a mastermind. We do have a boutique aspect to it, but that is extremely limited. That's purely whether or not we think we're going to enjoy the project. It is literally based on how fun we think it will be, and then we put a price to that based on the value that would be given. But the mastermind itself, we have two calls a week. We run through whatever blocks people are going, and then we teach as well. So, for example, a woman who just joined up with us doing about forty k a month. She, as part of a free challenge that we ran, she got a 43% increase in her conversion rate as part of this seven day challenge and immediately realized, oh, wow.

Kaleb Ufton:

First of all, a, hitting the month milestone that I want to hit is incredibly doable, especially working with us. But more importantly, b, I am not set up to do it. If I do that now, fulfillment is going to kill me. Margins are going to kill me, my suppliers are going to kill me. Nothing is set up to actually do that much revenue. So we just walk through, okay, here's how, here's the things that need to change in your business for you to actually reach this in a way that you're going to feel good and you're going to have the margins you want. And so we come from a very, yes, there's tactics, but the tactics are like nothing compared to the strategy and the mindset and the emotional component to actually get you to where you need to be. If you don't have those things in place, it doesn't matter.

Andy Splichal:

So how many people are in your mastermind?

Kaleb Ufton:

It's pretty intimate at the moment. I think we have maybe eight to ten people, something like that. Yeah, I like it. At this size. I think we could grow it more, but probably not more than about 30 or 40 people. We really want to make sure we're supporting everyone. And if you've got 150 people on the call, it's very difficult to serve them all in the way that's needed, especially with the level that we dive into things and help unstick some of the things that are stuck.

Andy Splichal:

And how long have you been running this?

Kaleb Ufton:

We started this in February last year. So I guess that makes it 13 months.

Andy Splichal:

And you said it's two calls a month or two calls a week.

Kaleb Ufton:

Two calls a week.

Andy Splichal:

Two calls a week.

Kaleb Ufton:

Okay.

Andy Splichal:

And I guess if somebody wanted more information on that, I mean, guess first, what would make somebody like a really good candidate for it? That if they're listening, they should check it out. And second, how can they check it out?

Kaleb Ufton:

Yeah, a really good candidate. You gotta be again, that ten to month minimum in revenue, I would say I'd spend three to 5000 week. We were down 5000 simply because there's an element of traffic consistency and traffic and consistency in sales that's needed. This isn't how to get started in e commerce. This is, you have a proven product, you've got business experience, but you're struggling to break through a revenue, what feels like a ceiling, and you're wanting to smash past that, basically there's an element of spirituality involved that I think is important. It doesn't matter what your faith is, but what's important is that you're open to the idea that there is more than just zeros and ones, math and physical matter involved in creating success and willing to learn, willing to try something out and see if it works. I think that's really important. We do get people come through who don't have the result they want but are very convinced that they know everything.

Kaleb Ufton:

So we just politely, we're not for you. And how they get started. Yeah, that would be reach out to us. So either reach out to myself or Mark, go to ecommerce Wizards Dot club. There's a contact form on there and. Yeah, great.

Andy Splichal:

Well, that's been very enlightening today. Is there anything you would like to add before we wrap it up?

Kaleb Ufton:

I would just like to say if you think ecommerce is the way to you and you have a business, find joy, find love in it somehow, because ecommerce is a great model. It's a great vehicle. It's not the only one. There's many vehicles that work, but commerce in particular is about value exchange, and you can do that at scale. And if you have a good product, you can make a significant impact in people's lives as a result of that. And I think that's worthwhile, personally. And so I would say don't give up on your dreams. Keep going.

Kaleb Ufton:

Great.

Andy Splichal:

Well, thanks for joining us today.

Kaleb Ufton:

Thank you for having me.

Andy Splichal:

For listeners, remember, if you liked this episode, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information or connecting with Caleb or ecommerce wizards, you will find links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our podcast resource center, available at podcast Dot make each account.com. We have compiled all of our different past guests by show topic and included each of the contact information in case you would like more information, any of the services discussed during previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing and I'll talk to you in the next episode.