A Conversation With Jessica Totillo Coster, Ecommerce Badassery
As a little girl, Jessica Totillo Coster slept in her new shoes. As she shares in this fun conversation about e-commerce, e-fashion and email, she was destined for this. As the head of Ecommerce Badassery, Jessica helps other businesses use the lessons that she, Zappos and other e-commerce pioneers learned the hard way.
As she says, "One of the things that I discovered very early on: most small business entrepreneurs who sell physical products are not utilizing email to its fullest potential at all. I'm here to teach you all day long on the importance of it and get you started."
Jessica is delightfully skeptical about the return of effort for social media by contrast: "It's funny because so many of us spend so much time, energy, and effort creating an Instagram post that 3% of our audience is going to see, that is going be gone 24 hours later. Whereas when you send an email, 99% of the time, it makes you money. So I tell people all the time, if you can only do one: Send an email."
This conversation is a delightfully pragmatic quasi-coaching session for retail e-commerce from a genuine e-commerce badass!
A Conversation With Jessica Totillo Coster, Ecommerce Badassery
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[00:00:00]
Matthew Dunn: Good afternoon. This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the Future of email. My guest today, Jessica to Coster. Did I get it right? You did. I got it right. Uh, badass e-commerce and email strategy. You got, you are a badass right there behind you. So I'm not
Jessica Totillo Coster: making, yeah, that's for, that's for my clients when we're on
Matthew Dunn: calls to remind, oh, is that it?
Is that it? Yeah. Yeah. So tell me
Jessica Totillo Coster: about you. Yeah, for sure. So if we go way back, I used to sleep in my new shoes as a little girl. There you go. So, and yeah, the reason I share that is because that's what led me down the fashion retail path. And, you know, when I was going to school, like Facebook wasn't a thing.
Yeah. Instagram wasn't a thing. E-com was barely a thing. Yeah. So as I got [00:01:00] older and started moving through, I just didn't wanna get left behind. I was like, you know, my background's all in brick and mortar retail. I used to own my own boutique, and I was like, I really need to get in on this digital thing, otherwise I'm gonna be in the dust.
So I just started, I, I can't not know something. So I just started teaching myself a lot of things and then eventually through work worked on e-com more and more, and it got to this place where I loved what I did, didn't love who I did it for, and just really wanted to help, you know, the small business who started their product-based business from their kitchen table and their shipping out of their basement, and kind of teaching them everything I learned the hard way.
So they didn't have to, and that's kind of how I ended up here. Okay.
Matthew Dunn: So backtrack down that track a little bit. [00:02:00] My experience of folks in retail, particularly people who wear their shoes to bed when they're a kid and, and fashion. Uh, was that in the adaptation to e-commerce, there was a very strong No, no, no.
I have to be. Fondle them. Try them on, see how it fits. There's no way to do this, uh, digitally. How'd you get over that?
Jessica Totillo Coster: Yeah. Well, I didn't, so one of the things that I teach my clients is how do we recreate the in-person experience on the internet? Okay. And if you can do. You're gonna stand out among everyone else trying to sell crap on the innerwebs, right.
And create an experience like nobody else has had before. I, I, and a lot of that comes through video going live on social media. You know, there's all these different ways you can do it, but I always approach it as how do I [00:03:00] recreate the experience, not give it up.
Matthew Dunn: Gotcha. Um, And I would guess visual content is fairly critical in that equation.
Absolutely right. Because last time I checked the thing Yeah. The last time I checked, I never, I never in fact walked into a store, read a description of a pair of shoes and bought them ever. Right. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Good. You're sing, you're singing, you're singing my song a little bit there.
Um, what's the, what's the balance these days? Let's narrow down to. More the more the fashion kind of niche, if you will. What's the balance? E-com live retail these days? Do you know? I don.
Jessica Totillo Coster: I, I don't honestly, and I think it really depends. Look, brick and mortar's never gonna go away. I truly believe it will never go away.
People just love the experience of shopping. It's an afternoon out. It's where I go to hang out with my mom, right? We shop, we have lunch, and [00:04:00] that sort of thing. So I don't think it's ever gonna go away. I think the consumer's more comfortable shopping online. Mm-hmm. And I think those that have some sort of omnichannel.
Option for them is really, you know, the holy grail of it all. Hmm. But I think that, you know, e-commerce is going to continue to grow, but I think brick and mortar will too. So I don't really, I don't have a crystal ball there.
Matthew Dunn: Anyone merging them particularly well that you know of? I think
Jessica Totillo Coster: lots of people are trying.
Uh, what's funny is in all the advances in technology we've had that creating that seamless experience is still very difficult. So at my previous day job, before I went off on my own, the last project that I was working on, Creating the omnichannel experience, right? So they started out with brick and mortar stores.[00:05:00]
Then we built e-commerce and trying to one, merge the experience for the customer through things like our rewards program and gift cards and buy online, pick up in store. It still took a ton of custom development. We worked on it for, I. I, I consulted with them for an entire year after I left. Yeah. Cuz we like still weren't done.
Yeah. Um, so I think some of the best that I've experienced as a consumer is Nordstrom is really great at it. Not surprised. Yeah. I've had not so great experiences with stores like Best Buy. Mm-hmm. I mean, I remember going in to pick. A buy online, pick up in store order. And I was like, it would've been faster if I just walked in here off the street and checked out the regular way.
So [00:06:00] something's broken. Yeah. Yeah. In that system. Um, but I think that things, they're getting easier. We're just not quite there yet. Well,
Matthew Dunn: one of the, one of the not obvious hurdles in the marriage of brick and mortar and e-commerce, and you touched on it, essentially, Is that the brick and mortar has to become fully digital.
Mm-hmm. Like you can't go Oh, and they'll walk in and magically the thing they ordered will be No. That means the way you run your brick and mortar operation has to change. The systems have to ch there have to be systems. Yeah. A hundred percent to make those things meld up. Hey, true story on myself, just for fun.
Early, early days of e-commerce, I mean early days of e-commerce, 97, 98. Um, I spent about a year, uh, as a consultant on a project to help what was then the [00:07:00] largest bookstore chain in Canada go online. They were petrified that that darn American upstart Amazon might move to Canada Next. True story chapters.
So. Uh, they, they were pulling in people all over the, all over the, you know, universe. Cuz it wasn't like E-com was a widely known skillset. Um, I built a book database. This is a bookstore. Okay. I built the book database. Uh, another firm built the, um, built the e-commerce platform. Back in those days, you built e-commerce platforms from more or less scratch in a database.
Um, and we more or less turned the switch on and then someone went, oh. This isn't really connected to our inventory system, is it? Yeah. Oh, shit. Right. So, so, so, so it was all hands on deck. Christmas morning, packing packages and hoping to God we hadn't run out of. Harry Potter, or whatever the heck they were [00:08:00] ordering.
Yeah.
Jessica Totillo Coster: Right. And the thing is, inventory is, even if it is connected, inventory is never right. Mm. It's never cr, I mean, like I said, I've worked in retail 20 plus years, it's never Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, You can't avoid it a hundred percent. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn: Cuz you're, you're, you're dealing with the vagaries of the human race, aka a shoppers.
Mm-hmm. Uh, nothing else. Uh, what do you think of, of moves like, I, I, I brought 'em up already. Uh, the, the muddy Amazon beast doing, um, trying to push into just order it. If you don't like it, send it back, try then buy or whatever it's called. What do you think?
Jessica Totillo Coster: Yeah. Oh, I love that. I mean, look, so if. In in Zappo's early days.
Zappo's early days. Yep. Right. They couldn't sell a damn shoe on the internet because everyone needed to try them on. Yeah. And they didn't know how it was gonna work out. And then I think it was Tony came in and said, free returns. Mm-hmm. And they were all like, what? What? Oh my God. Yeah. [00:09:00] So they implement free returns and then all of a sudden they can sell things online.
So all it's doing is it's removing the risk for the consumer. And yeah, the main reason we're not gonna buy something online is cuz like, what if I don't like it? Yeah. Yeah. And do you know how, actually I have a good amount of packages sitting in my laundry room right now of stuff that got shipped that doesn't fit and I still haven't returned it.
Right, right. It's just the human way. Um, but if you can remove that risk for the customer, I think ultimately you'll make up, whatever you lose, you're gonna make up tenfold. So it doesn't matter. And it's the same thing with, you know, a rebate or a guarantee. We know that like 98% of people are never gonna redeem that.
Yeah. So it's fine.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Well, and, and, and. The, the, the, not just free return, but free and easy return. A simple process. Mm-hmm. Sorry guys. It's table stakes. Mm-hmm. Like my head would [00:10:00] pop off if, if, if it were, what do you mean I can't return? Or what do you mean I have to sit on the phone? Right. Fairly or unfairly.
That's table stakes. It's how it works.
Jessica Totillo Coster: Yeah. A hundred percent. Yeah. And I think of, you know, there are times. I've submitted for a return to Amazon and they're like, great, here's your refund. Keep the item Yes. Because you know it's more expensive to ship it, ship it back, and all of that, and they're just like, Ugh, it's done.
I know the lifetime value of you Yeah. Is worth way more than this spice that you don't want. So
Matthew Dunn: that's why the like 75 pound attachment that I was thinking about putting on my wife's car so she could put her e-bike on the back of a, of an. That I decided was too much work to install. They were like, fine.
Take it to the, you know, UPS store. We'll take care of the shipping. Like, mm-hmm. Ooh, ouch. You guys must hate me. Like, no, we, we like you, we actually know a lot about you, and we like you just fine. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. [00:11:00] It's, uh, it's a funny, it's a, it's a funny world. And then the acceleration, this must have done all sorts of things.
Two and four, your business, uh, of the pandemic.
Jessica Totillo Coster: So here, what's so funny is, so I, let me, how I started my business was completely by accident. It was when MailChimp and Shopify broke up. Yes. Remember? And yeah, it was chaos in the small business community. And I, you know, just hung out in a lot of Facebook groups cuz I loved to be around entrepreneurs and I knew I was gonna have another one of my own businesses.
I just didn't know what it was gonna be. I figured it'd be a product-based business cuz that's what I do. I also have to be passionate about the product. Mm-hmm. Otherwise, I have no interest in trying to sell it. So there wasn't anything I wanted to sell. But anyway, so this happens and I just start talking to people about their other options, specifically Clavio.
Mm-hmm. And then people start messaging me saying, I'm on Clavio, but I'm struggling, or I need to [00:12:00] switch. Can you help me? And I was like, huh, sure. Get, get a little side gig going, let's see what happens. And. Then I was doing that for about 12 months on the side, right? I'm old, like I have bills. I couldn't just take the leap of faith.
I needed to have a nest egg and everything figured out first, and I was getting ready to quit my job, and then covid happened. And my husband is also an entrepreneur. He does real estate photography. And in those first few weeks of Covid real estate was gotten down. Yeah. And we're like, I think we're not gonna quit yet.
Let, let's just hang on to this. Let's see what kind of happens and all that. And eventually, real estate was deemed, uh, what were they calling?
Matthew Dunn: Yeah. Uh, necessary. Vital, something like
Jessica Totillo Coster: that. Yeah. Whatever it was, was deemed that. So he continued [00:13:00] working and we live in southern California, so the mass exodus of California was actually really great for his business.
Um, but then I continued to work, but it was interesting because my clients, right, their businesses were blowing. The company I worked for, we had 25 retail stores shut down our e-com business was blowing up. Yeah. And while everyone else was sitting home bored, learning new skills, starting new businesses, me and my husband were probably the busiest we've ever been in our entire lives.
But it all worked out in the end. Um, and it was, A rapid acceleration of learning about things I already knew, but seeing 'em in a new light, right? Like marketing. So all of a sudden our messaging strategy and everything had to change because people were stressed [00:14:00] out and sensitive and didn't really wanna hear jokes.
And so it was like, here I am creating all the emails for this business, and oh, I have to approach this completely differently. You know, seeing some of those smaller companies like, oh crap, I mostly sell all my stuff at markets and now people are buying from my website. And so it was a crazy, exciting time and I'm glad it's all over.
Matthew Dunn: I've said multiple times, we, we were far more fortunate than we realized with the, the timing of that particular bug breaking out and shutting down the world because had that, Five years earlier, it wouldn't have worked the same. Yeah, we
Jessica Totillo Coster: wouldn't have been
Matthew Dunn: ready. We wouldn't have been ready. Right. I mean, yeah, everybody went, oh, jump on Zoom.
There was no Zoom five years earlier. I've used every video conferencing platform since. God knows when and they all sucked. [00:15:00] Thank you. And they all cost 15 minutes of tech support. Every time you had a call with someone, if you could coax them into it and nobody had a camera and a microphone, et cetera, et cetera, it's like we had just started to make it easy.
Yeah. We had just kind of gotten to where broadband was something you could expect. We had just this, this, this, this, and, and fortunately enough business. You almost said it enough, businesses had had sort of started saying, well, maybe we need a website. Maybe we need an e-commerce. Maybe we could also sell there.
Snap everybody, shut the door. Stay home. Wow. Even a, even a few years difference. And that would've been a, a, a much bigger undertaking. Um, you know, and I know there are businesses that kind of overgrew Zoom being one of them, overgrew. On the back of that and, you know, pulled their next five years of demand into about a one year window.
Fine, great, whatever. Um, it's rewritten a bunch of things, but we really did kind of get lucky. And where I was going with that is one of the things to my mind, [00:16:00] having been around e-com and email for a long time, um, the turnkey storefront, the turnkey email marketing platform, the kind of stuff that sounds like you advise clients on.
Hallelujah. That's a whole lot easier than when we used to build it from stone knives and bearskins like payment gateways and all the other stuff. It was just a complete fricking nightmare months of expensive consultants. Now you go sick, turn the cake. You gotta a store and you gotta store. Huh. That's cool.
Jessica Totillo Coster: And I will say, you know, Shopify did a really great job. Yes, they did during that time. Yes. And just making it even easier for people. Yeah. You know, one of the things that I always tell my clients is you have to have more than one. To sell to people. Right? So even the Amazon sellers, Hey, if your product was non-essential, that was what it was.
Essential, that's a word. [00:17:00] If your product was non-essential, they weren't shipping it. Mm-hmm. Right? So you needed your own website to be able to continue to sell and make that stuff. So, yeah, you know, there's, I think it taught everyone a lot of things about a lot of things. A lot. Yeah. The tech. Clutch for sure.
Matthew Dunn: And that, you know, like, uh, yes, it's slightly hard. Yes. Why is it this complicated? You know what? Sit down and figure it out. You can sit down and figure it out, right? Mm-hmm. I mean, the, the, not, the not urban myth is like every school district in America was still working on their 10 year plan to go digital, and then they implemented it in two weeks.
Guess what? Guess she figured it out, right?
Jessica Totillo Coster: Yeah. When you're under pressure,
Matthew Dunn: When you don't have a choice, especially, I mean yeah, for sure. The small, uh, local, uh, grocery co-op that my, my wife, uh, loves and shops at, did a curbside pickup like overnight. And it, you know what? [00:18:00] It worked and I think it was, yeah, one really nice lady holding the damn thing together was rubber bands, but she held it together.
We could go there stupid masks on and park at the curb and get,
Jessica Totillo Coster: and I, you know, I tell people something similar like about their employees, cuz I, I've experienced this many times over spending so many years leading other people and all that. And at my last job, I was there the longest of most of them.
Yeah. And I was involved in so many different parts of the business. I was the go-to. Like any question, go to Jessica. She'll know, Jessica, she'll know. And when we were in the office, it was constant phone calls, knocking on the door, all of that stuff. And I used to remember like we would have, I'd be sick, but I had too much work to do, so I'm like, I just can't be there to get everyone else sick.
This is pre C O V D. But I need to work, right? So I work from home and I'm like, wow, I got an entire day [00:19:00] and a half of work done in about four hours because nobody is interrupting me. And so when we went to moving to working from home, I was like, this is great. Like I could do this all day. Because when people don't have easy access to the answer, they will figure it out.
They just need the space to figure it
Matthew Dunn: out. Yeah. Yeah. Which, that, that opens it, that opens a couple of fun segues. I agree with you. But, but by contrast, I have mostly what we now call work from home, like 20 plus years. So when, when we first decided to shut the globe down, I was busy working. I'm like, What are you guys also bothered about?
Like, this is the same I No, it wasn't the same. Yeah. But for me it was like another day in the office. Cool. Yeah. Right. So some, you know, some of us were kind of already there. I, and I, and I obviously agree with you about the, uh, [00:20:00] the work from home thing. I, I talked to colleagues who were at, you know, agency, small companies, et cetera, et cetera.
And I'm, and I detect more than a little emotion when you say the word slack to them because the figured out yourself gets, gets taken away again when they're, when you're just one flipping slack message away. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm, I'm pretty disciplined about like, you know what? In the morning, shut up.
Leave me alone. I'm actually doing stuff. I'm not available. Figure it. Sleep quietly. I'll get to you in the afternoon
Jessica Totillo Coster: unless it's burning down. Yeah, yeah. You need my attention
Matthew Dunn: right now. Yeah. And an actual emergency is a pretty rare thing, um, in business. I, I wonder, this is, this is the segue. I, I wonder whether one of the things that the advent of chatty AI will take off our places.
Go, like, go ask Skippy the ai. Don't bother me with this
Jessica Totillo Coster: stuff. Well, I'm, here's the thing, [00:21:00] you don't even need AI for that. Just Google it. Yeah. Really. Okay. Like, and there are, I tend to be a little passive aggressive, which people either love or hate me for and I'm like, let's Google that answer for you.
Like I send
Matthew Dunn: them nice. It's a link to the search. You know? Yeah, yeah. Uh, but yeah.
Jessica Totillo Coster: Yeah. But hey, ai, I mean, I just had a little chat with chat g p t the other day about some coding things. Yep. To see, you know, how does this work? And then I was like, oh, okay, so what you're saying is X? And they said yes. So use this code to do that.
I was like, Thanks.
Matthew Dunn: I, I have, I'm paying my, I'm paying the 20 bucks a month and I've got a G P T three and four top and bottom window, right on that monitor most of the day because it's such a great learning tool. Yeah, I'm stuck. I, I don't really get, fill in blanks. Hey, Skippy, how [00:22:00] the hell does this work?
Right it out. And I'm like, could you type faster? You're pissing me off. Sorry. We're capacity. Oh, well. Yeah, seriously. Like Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a big change. Doesn't, not gonna put, as we were talking about before, we started not gonna put human beings out of the human being.
Jessica Totillo Coster: No, definitely not. I did, I recently did a very deep dive into all of the AI for my own podcast and I, so I teach people email and people are always asking me for swipe files, right?
They want some kind of template, and I never wanna give it to them because ultimately we're all overthinking what needs to go in a marketing email and like, just think about what your customer needs to hear and speak to them like a. So I always resist it, which is also the reason why I resist things like ai, but everyone's asking me about [00:23:00] it and chat.
G P T is just like blowing off and I'm like, oh, okay. I need to just, let me just make an episode on it. It'll be fine. I will say that by the time I was done researching them and playing around with them and. Hmm. I don't really hate this as much as I thought I was going to, but one, there's a, like a good way to do it and a not so good way to do it.
And two, it's never gonna replace human. It's a freaking computer. It doesn't understand all the nuance, right? And it's only as good as the information it was given, which is also not always accurate. So I think they have a place in content creation and learning and getting answers and all of that good stuff.
But I do agree that they're not gonna replace humans anytime.
Matthew Dunn: Yeah. They'll augment, they'll extend, they'll, mm-hmm. Assist they [00:24:00] interesting choice of, uh, interesting choice I wanted there. And other thing that, you know, to your example of being the indispensable, longest time person at a company, most of the knowledge that made you indispensable, was the knowledge unique to that?
Hundred
Jessica Totillo Coster: percent. Right. So Have any videos I made when I left there? Yeah,
Matthew Dunn: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And we're at, we're at the beginning of a, it's an interesting timing for ai. We're at the, at not the beginning. We're partway into the generational retirement wave of, of, of the big boomer bulge, leaving the workforce with a whole bunch of stuff between their ears.
It's not written down. And there's a lot of companies that are facing a world of hurt when, you know, bill and Wilma walk out the door and they're like, wait, wait, wait a minute. How do we, yeah, yeah. I'm retired. C bye. Not my problem. For sure. [00:25:00] So, and you're not gonna get that from an ai. Why? Because what makes a most businesses particularly valuable is, Inside the company, you know, knowledge and IP and intellectual resources and things like that.
Mostly, you know, mostly employees and relationships probably at the end of the day. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's a bit fun watching this kick off and it's fascinating and it's useful, but it's no cost for panic at all.
Jessica Totillo Coster: Right? A hundred percent. I agree. And you know, there's all the jokes and the memes about. All the, you know, duplicate content and the crappy content we're gonna start seeing on the internet.
And there's one, I can't remember who created it, but it's a cartoon and it's basically a comment thread about ai and everyone's like, yeah, AI is really great. And the next guy, yeah, AI is really great and the comment is all exactly the same from everyone. Uh, so that'll be fun. Yeah. Edit your AI
Matthew Dunn: [00:26:00] stuff.
Yeah, don't, don't, don't panic. It's only gonna be helpful. Um, it's a bit more. When someone realized that graphical interface was better than a character interface, it's got, it's got that kind of, oh, you're making this machine more useful. I'm fine with that. Right? Not, yeah. Oh my god, the world's gonna change completely.
Plus we know where the off switch is. Last time I checked, in fact, Chad g p t was down yesterday, day before was down for an hour or something like that. I'm sure it was server capacity cuz everyone on the planets, you know, jumping on the bandwagon. I thought that's probably. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That being said, got got my cheat windows up here.
Whether it's learning or find another way to say this cuz I don't think I'm phrasing it very well or any of those like just an assistive, assistive tool. Hey, jump back to something you said, cause I'm curious about this. You, you help, you, you help entrepreneurs, uh, business folks who are running businesses similar to the kinds [00:27:00] that you have created yourself.
Just sort of get up on the step with e-commerce and. Probably Shopify and Clavio especially, right? Mm-hmm. Yes, for sure. So what is, uh, what is new customer X walking in the door tend to know and then not know about the email side of running a business?
Jessica Totillo Coster: Yeah, so one of the things that I discovered very early on, Most small business entrepreneurs who sell physical products, like if you're a service-based business, I can't help you, but if you sell physical products that I know they're not utilizing email to its fullest potential at all, which is fine because it keeps me in business, right?
I'm here to teach you all day long on the importance of it and get you started. Happy to do that. That was the biggest thing is they're either not using it, not using it enough, just not sending enough emails [00:28:00] or didn't really believe in the power of it. Hmm. And what I find, because most of the people that I work with, right, they created a product to solved their own problem and it turned into this business.
Or it's their hobby and they love it and it's fun and they just wanna be around. But they're not product and retail people. And one of the big things that hangs them up is they're afraid of being salesy and just showing up and asking for the sales. So there's always a little bit of mindset work that goes into that.
Like, this is a business, not a hobby. You've gotta sell. And if you're selling to them, your competitor is selling to them. So let's just get in their inbox more. Okay. Uh, so really it's just like the actual doing it and getting in. And then I really like to focus on obviously the automation piece, cuz none of us started our own businesses to create another job, [00:29:00] right?
We wanna make more while doing less. And one of the ways that you do that in e-commerce is through email automation. Make money on autopilot while you sleep. Who doesn't? So that's always the first thing. And then just getting people really comfortable with sending emails all of the time, multiple times a week.
Mm-hmm. Sending more until your people tell you to stop sending them.
Matthew Dunn: Right, right, right. Is one of the, uh, points of resistance to already being there when someone, you know comes in your door that they're not sure it's gonna pay.
Jessica Totillo Coster: Sometimes, yeah, sometimes. It's funny because so many of us, and I do this too, we spend so much time, energy, and effort creating an Instagram post that 3% of our audience is gonna see and is gonna be gone 24 hours later buried in the.[00:30:00]
And we're like, Hmm, that didn't really make me any money, but tomorrow I'm gonna post again and see if it goes different. Whereas when you send an email, 99% of the time, it makes you money. So I tell people all the time, if you can only do one. Yeah. Send an email. Yeah. And just the other day I was on a call with one of my clients slash students and.
She, you know, the q1, she was kind of stepping away from her business and just taking care of herself. She was like, I just need a break. She sells candles. So most of her business happens in Q4 anyway, but she's like, you know, the other day, like, I was just thinking I hadn't sent an email in a while. So like, I sent an email and guess what happened?
I was like, what? She's like, I got orders.
Chick. So it's like we need this constant reminder that it actually works. And I, I [00:31:00] mean, I haven't really figured out like the root cause yet, but working
Matthew Dunn: on it, you know, I remember it's more, it's more technically available and more common place now. But one of the first businesses that I launched where the website was the face to the.
There was this strange, like, I don't know what's happening. I don't know if this is working or not, right? Because you could sit there finding a zillion things to slave away at, but you're not really getting any stimulus. And I found a, at that time it was pretty technologically novel. Uh, wra um, was the first realtime webs website monitoring.
See, I literally had a map sitting on a monitor here, and it would light up when someone from that place was visiting the. And it wasn't the data out of wra, which I routinely ignored. It was more the sense of, oh, like someone's actually freaking there, someone's looking at that, or they're going from this page to that page [00:32:00] that, you know, it helps you say, uh, okay.
You know, stay at it or do the next thing. Why? Because there's actually someone, you know, someone paying attention to this and, and emails, same thing. It can stay all too invisible and just seem like yet another thing in your to-do. Yeah. Until you get the, actually got orders or someone wrote back or something like that.
And, and, uh, there's a friend of mine in the email space, Della Quest, who, who he, he says a lot of smart stuff, but one of the things he said is you're making an impression even if they don't open it a hundred percent right, they're gonna see your name or your company name and they're gonna see the subject line.
And even if they delete it, cuz they're really busy that. Did, did. Like, it's part of, it's part of just showing up and being part of their life kind of a thing. It's
Jessica Totillo Coster: just being top of mind. Yeah. So that when they're ready to buy, you're the person that they think of. Right? Yeah. There's a reason why companies will send you, [00:33:00] you know, branded calendar magnets to stick on your fridge.
Right? So you're always thinking about them, even if you don't need their services right now. Yeah. It's ju. Consumers are inundated with information and they cannot interact and respond to it all the time. But that doesn't mean that they don't see you And I, I get reminded of this all the time, you know, being a personal brand or someone who teaches stuff on the internet, like I'm just putting out content, content, content all the time, and sometimes it feels like you're just putting it out into a.
And then that person comes and is like, oh, I've been listening to you following you doing this for a year. Yeah. And I'm like, I've never even seen your name before. Like you've never engaged with anything. You've never commented. You've never messaged me. Yeah. But there is this person who's been paying attention to literally everything.
Yeah. So they're there, even if they're not clapping
Matthew Dunn: Well, and and [00:34:00] the, the numbers, the numbers really bear out what you just said. Like it. It often feels like everybody is in the flipping content creation business because any, any digital channel you can name is just fire hose, right? Yeah. Truthfully, it's a, it's a single digit percentage of people who actually write something, draws something, make something post something like it's, it's in the single digits.
If you get off your button, that includes sending email. By the way, if you get off your button, do it. You're already kind of moving to the head of the class just by going ahead and, and, and doing something and saying something. And, you know, whether or not that feels like an intimidating move. Um, yeah, it's, it's, it's worth, it's worth that leap.
Yeah. It's, uh, yeah, it's a funny balance. Back to your Instagram example for just a second though. Not that I've ever actually posted on Instagram. No interest. Uh, You don't, you don't have any ownership of that. You don't have any control of that. No. [00:35:00] Right. It's an algorithm's gonna say, here's a few people who are gonna see it.
And then as you said, it's gonna scroll off and that's all she wrote. You're done. That's it.
Jessica Totillo Coster: It's, it's just, you know, it's just like if you have a product, business, I'll never tell you to bill it. Build it solely on someone else's platform. Right. If you wanna have an Amazon business, cuz that's what you wanna do and you're Amazon FBA and you're chasing every trending product, that's a whole different model.
I I does not compute for me. Yeah. But if you have a product that you love, And you wanna sell on Amazon. Cool. But like have your own website too, so that when Amazon decides not to ship your product, or they decide to knock you off because it's selling really well. Yep. Uh, yeah. Right. You still have this backup, but it's the same thing with your marketing channels.
Yes. Like, I mean, does anyone remember.[00:36:00]
Matthew Dunn: Wow.
Jessica Totillo Coster: You know, like, I mean, I'm sure all of those creators were able to move over to YouTube or whatever else came up, but I mean, it basically fell off the face of the earth and was no longer So, uh, to put all your eggs in someone else's basket just doesn't seem like a smart idea to me. Now, I hang out on Instagram because the person.
Be there, you know?
Matthew Dunn: Yeah, no, that, and that, that select channel for audience, not the other way around. Yeah. A hundred percent. Right. Makes, makes, uh, makes perfect sense. One of, one of the, one of the multiple reasons that I, I hang out in email is I like the fact that it's still. Free-range quasi deic, like pick your moniker.
Right. You, you still got an astonishing degree of [00:37:00] individual control over that channel. Yeah. And so many of the others, there's a board sitting at the front door, you know, saying Pay up pal. And uh, you don't really own it and I might shut it off and all that other stuff. And it's like, Bugger that right.
Web. Yeah, web less so, right. Searches the gatekeeper to the web for better or worse, but at least, you know, Google can't take your website away. They may lower it in their rankings, but they actually can't take it away. They don't actually control that. And an email very much, as long as you behave well and then deliverability gods don't smack you.
Yeah. Yeah. Um, so did you have, you must have had gone. Uh, pretty fast. Uh, learn the platform curve when you jumped into the Clavio, Shopify.
Jessica Totillo Coster: Yeah, well, let me tell you a story. So at my previous day job, so I was the E-com manager and for the first three years I was the only employee. We had some [00:38:00] consultants, but that were, that was just more people telling me what to do.
Um, and because I had come from the brick and mortar side, I was still very involved in that side of the business as well, so I was wearing more hats than I could probably fit on my head. An email was a really big one because we were in a restricted industry that could not do social ads, so email was our bread and butter, right?
Yeah, yeah. Um, we were on an enterprise platform that had. Feature requests from like seven years ago, and they just weren't updating it. And they had recently been bought out by someone who then decided to retire it and were like, we're not gonna support this anymore. So I had no choice but to leave. Yeah.
So I started doing my research and I came across Clavio. And it was all ready to go in on Clavio. And then [00:39:00] someone, some sales rep from this other company called our C T O, and we all got starry-eyed at this other enterprise platform that we went with. So this is a couple of months before Black Friday.
So we move to this new platform, we get everything set up. Friday rolls around and my boss is emailing me like, how come I don't see any of our Black Friday emails? I'm like, what? So I go, and we had every other Friday off, so I think technically I was like basically on call, but at home, not in the office.
So I'm logging in, I'm trying to figure everything out. Our emails didn't freaking send. So Black Friday weekend, I migrated. 200,000 subscribers. Wow. And all of our weekend campaign emails to [00:40:00] Clavio. It was rough. Yeah, it was definitely rough. But I did it, it helped because I was emailed. Like I knew exactly what I was looking for.
I knew the right questions to ask. Right. I knew what to Google to get my answer. Yeah. Um, so I was able to get all of that set up and finished. But, um, it was very stressful. But I really did fall in love with Clavio after. And I spent so much time in it, and it's just so powerful. And the integration with Shopify, which we were on Shopify Plus after a horrific stint on Magento, which is a whole other story.
Yeah. Um, you know, look, some of the biggest brands are on Shopify. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for you. And if you ever scale so big that you're like, oh, this out of the box thing isn't right for me, there's a whole lot of custom stuff you can do as you move up. Um, it's fine. So [00:41:00] just go to Shopify.
Yeah, yeah.
Matthew Dunn: It's fine. No, I, I, I, uh, I think highly of what Shopify has done to, I'll quote myself from a second ago, kind of democratize e-commerce. Mm-hmm. Like, there's a whole bunch of obstacles that aren't in the way, and they, they don't tell you what to do, and they don't say, we'll charge you more than, we'll charge him because you're making more.
It's like, look, you're, it's like buying a hammer, right? You're gonna pay for a hammer, and then what you, what you build with it kind of on you after that.
Jessica Totillo Coster: Yeah, totally. It's, it's cool. The only thing I would say is it's also. Made it because the, the barrier to entry is so low. Yeah. Every Joe Schmo right, can have an e-commerce site, and so it does create some not so great experiences on the internet.
And for someone who is super serious about it, your competition [00:42:00] is not just the person who sells what you sell, right? It's literally. Everything else in that person's life and every poor experience they've ever had with another business, which there's more of those, I feel like. Yeah. Um, I do think that part of that came from, you know, the boom of drop shipping a couple of years ago.
Everyone's like, oh, just starter Shopify. Like, Shopify's just a platform. That's all it is. There was like this misnomer about what Shopify was. Um, I think some of that's falling off now. Hopefully so the people who are in it are really like in it to build great businesses, customer-centric and all that good
stuff,
Matthew Dunn: so, well, yeah, you, it does not do the swinging of the hammer for you, right?
Mm-hmm. You can sign up and you can, you know, pull out your visa and plug it in there and say, I've got a, you know, subscription for this. Guess what? Now the work. [00:43:00] Right. Yeah. You're gonna have to make decisions, you're gonna have to write copy, you're gonna have to resize pictures, you're gonna have to watch if it's working and change it and all that other stuff.
And like doesn't do, doesn't do that. And that's why
Jessica Totillo Coster: I don't have an e-commerce business cuz I'm not passionate about anything right now. Enough to make me wanna do all that work.
Matthew Dunn: It is. And it never stops, right? No. I mean even a simple website it. It never stops.
Jessica Totillo Coster: It's never complete. No, no. It's never, it's, everything is a work in progress.
Yeah. And I know you had Chloe on the show recently, right? Yeah. Yeah. Uh, her mantra Keep optimizing. Yeah. Yeah. Because that's all you're ever doing. Always and forever. Always. Yeah.
Matthew Dunn: And forever. It's a, it's a, uh, it's a process. It's not a product. Your, your website, your store, et cetera. Yeah. Which, which is probably true of your email list as well.
Where does someone hunt you down if they go, dang, she knows what she's talking about. I want, I want some help.
Jessica Totillo Coster: [00:44:00] E-commerce badassery.com. On e-commerce,
Matthew Dunn: eCommerce, badassery, badassery.
Jessica Totillo Coster: All the places. Yes.
Matthew Dunn: Did you, did you have any He, I love it. This is I, it's kinda the way I talked too, but did you have any hesitation about hanging badassery on the end or were you like, yes.
Domain available? That's me. So this was
Jessica Totillo Coster: actually my second business name. And the first one was the business badass. I was always gonna have some sort of badass in it because I, I also have quite the potty mouth, you know, and all that stuff. Um, that's just who I am. And if that offends you, you probably don't wanna work or learn from me anyway, so it's fine.
Uh, but what happened was people kept. You know, for me it was about the person I work with becoming the business badass. And then everybody thought I was referring to myself as the business badass, and I was like, no, no, no. That's not what I meant. I need to change this. This, that's weird. I'm, I mean, I'm not that cool.
Right? Yeah. So then I just like brainstormed and brainstormed and brainstormed [00:45:00] and it came to me and I was like, that's it. It's the one I just. But yeah, no hesitation. It's funny too, cuz my, in my podcast intro, there's some expletives. Yeah. And it just sort of happened naturally and I left it and I remember my mom saying like, oh, it sounds really good, but, and I was like, well, you're not my customer and it's fine and I don't care.
Matthew Dunn: There's, I didn't think I'd ever get to meld these two live and on camera, but there's a, there's a, um, email newsletter that I'm a big fan of, Strat written by a guy named Ben Thompson. Leave that aside. There's another guy named Ben Thompson who wrote a book called Badass. Oh. My wife somewhat innocently brought home for our relatively young [00:46:00] boys.
Like, oh, it's got great stories from history, not realizing it was sort of Conan meets a frat boy version of history. Um, quite good by the way, like really quite probably a
Jessica Totillo Coster: more fun way to learn
Matthew Dunn: it. Oh, much more fun. My, my, my sons have like some extraordinary grasp on history because Ben Thompson made it really fun with the kind of language you expect for the title, like Badass.
And we actually got to hear him. Got to hear him speak, uh, at the local, local bookstore. And, and he was like, yeah, I couldn't do any of this without, without Google Book search. You know, I find obscure guy from, you know, Viking, period X, and I could go find the one book, you know, that was parked in the Harvard Library and read up on him and stuff.
And so, yeah. So there are, there are bad asses out there in your club. I am glad to see you. Flying that flag. Yeah.
Jessica Totillo Coster: I mean, look, this is for anyone, right? If you are creating a brand on the internet, like yeah, just be you. It's repel the people that are not the right fit [00:47:00] for you or your product. The right people will find you and you know, like what is such a cliche, but why?
When you where to stand out. So there you go. And people love it. You know, they work with me because of it, not in spite of it. So,
Matthew Dunn: yeah. And the ones who are don't like it can go find, you know, someone, someone else. Yeah. Yeah. It's gotta bigger world of choice out there percent. Well, so, so someone who enjoyed this, uh, enjoyed this episode, whether video or audio can go hunt Jessica down at e-commerce badassery.com.
Jessica was a delight speaking with you. Thanks for making the. You
Jessica Totillo Coster: too. My pleasure. Thanks for having me, and I hope everyone had been listening.