Your Exact Path to $20k/month in 3 Months

Good morning!

I want to talk about eCommerce today. eCommerce gets a bad wrap at times because many a guru have sold worthless dropshipping courses. Why do dropshipping courses sell so well? The allure of easy money.

Someone else does all the work and you just pop in on your Facebook ads campaign every now and then. Nope, those days are long gone, and that’s a good thing.

eCommerce is tough, but really, really fun. Like, really super fun. Of all the niches I’ve had my hands in, I probably know the most about eCommerce. To quickly recap:

1. From 2010 - 2013 I had a chain of iPhone repair stores. Our 2nd biggest revenue line was buying back and re-selling devices on eBay.

2. In 2013 I launched LCDcycle, a, 8 figure company that sold iPhone parts on a Shopify site. I ran this for 7 years before exiting.

3. In 2019 I launched Send Eats. A fulfillment company for dozens of Shopify brands in the food space. We fired all of our customers and wound it down because fulfillment is a horrible business.

4. In 2020 I launched Texas Snax. We’re the unofficial exclusive reseller of all Buc-ee’s products online, with around 90% market share (totally guessed). We’re doing over $400k/month and will do 8 figures in 2024 at around 16% net margins, if all goes well!

5. In 2021 I launched Mining Syndicate, a Shopify store for crypto miners. This is an 8 figure company and still going strong(er that it was going when BTW was at $16k). I’m also hopeful that BTC’s resurrection makes for a great 2024.

So yes, I am addicted to the dopamine hit of someone in another state or country finding your site and placing an order. It’s magical! I love Shopify. Lately, I’ve been falling in love with Shopify’s email-focused counterpart, Klaviyo.

One of the downsides of owning a holdco is that you miss things in your portcos sometimes. Especially when you’re at the “messy middle” like we are now. We aren’t yet big enough to have gray-haired CEOs at every company we own. We have operators but we step in and help a lot. Our operators are world-class, but they’re focused on operating, not growing. For now, that’s still my job. I love it, but I miss a lot of things.

Back in October I was talking to my now buddy Sam Thompson when he stopped by the office. He offhandedly mentioned a popup that could triple our Texas Snax email opt-in rates.

I was intrigued…so I gave it a shot. Keep in mind I had only been spending about 5 hours per week on Texas Snax at that point, so it wasn’t a top of mind company, but I wanted to pull on this thread.

We added the popup and sure enough, our email opt in rate went from 3.7% to 10.6%. And it also collected SMS on about 85% of those as well. So I kept pulling the thread…

“Hmm…I wonder if we could optimize our top of funnel traffic with our Google Ads?”

So I logged into our Google Ads account and what I saw shocked me. We were converting new customers at an absurdly low price. And our budget was $50/day. ONLY $50/DAY!! That’s nothing, especially when you consider around 14 million people per month search for Buc-ee’s on Google alone.

I love my partner in this biz, but he is famously very cheap, and he was managing the Google Ads campaign at this point. I kindly asked for his trust so I could take it over myself, and he relented. Over the next few weeks I scaled our adspend exponentially, and our sales and traffic EXPLODED.

It was one of those moments where you’re stoked it’s happening, while also kicking yourself for not doing this 3 years prior! Gah!

So now, to recap, we are capturing emails from over 10% of visitors, AND increasing our traffic by stupid amounts. This means that our email collection rate is getting bonkers. So I kept pulling on the thread…

By this point I’m working 16 hour days, with around 11 of them being all in on Texas Snax. I logged into our Klaviyo account to see if I could optimize our email strategy.

That was a very deep rabbit hole, my friend. Since that day in November I’ve likely spent 150 hours in Klaviyo. Tweaking, optimizing, scrubbing bad emails, segmenting good emails, etc, etc etc.

At this point, I’m clinically addicted to Klaviyo. As a typical entrepreneur, I am somewhat of a jack of all trades. My knowledge of tech tools is a mile wide and an inch deep. But when it comes to Klaviyo at this point, I’m pretty freaking great at it! It’s so fun! I’ve been using it for around 3 years for MHP Guy, Mining Syndicate, Texas Snax, Cofounders, and a project called Bizy, but I only knew about 30% of its capabilities.

Without getting too into the weeds, Klaviyo has two main mediums and marketing pillars:

The two mediums are email and SMS.

The pillars are Campaigns and Flows.

Campaigns are just that, an email campaign. Or, an email blast as a boomer might call it.

Flows are automations that will email customers at certain steps of their journey. For instance, if they subscribe, a flow will send them a 4-6 email welcome flow over the next few weeks.

Or, if a customer keeps adding apparel to their cart but never checks out, a Flow will know this and send them an apparel discount at certain intervals.

Super cool stuff.

Klaviyo has a zillion metrics and tracking features, but here are the improvements I made to Texas Snax after diving in deep for a few weeks:

1. Our email Campaign revenue per recipient went from 5 cents to 7.

2. Our email Flow revenue per recipient went from 45 cents to 72

3. Our SMS Campaign revenue per recipient went from 4 cents to 15. This means that if we send 9 SMS campaigns a month (we do), to our list of 22,000 subscribers (now growing by 275/day), then we generate $30k/month from SMS alone. And the same to be said for email, except our email list is well over 100k.

4. We were also only emailing about 5% of our SMS list, once per month, instead of 100% of the list, 9 times per month! That was an easy fix.

5. Our daily emails sent from Flows increased by 230%.

6. Our email and SMS lists are now growing by about 40,000 and 9,000/month, respectively. Which means that a year from now we’ll be generating over $500k/month from Klaviyo Campaigns alone, which we’ll be paying around $5k/month for at that point. When you include revenue from Flows, it increases that amount by about 15%. And this assumes I won’t keep scaling our Google Ads (I will).

Anyway, you get the point. What I’m saying is that Klaviyo is awesome. I’m not an affiliate or a referral partner, I just think it’s insanely underutilized by over 95% of users, and here’s how I know.

I’m in a private group for $1m+ eCommerce store owners, and I asked a handful if I could audit their Klaviyo accounts to see if they were doing things I could apply to my own brand. When I dove in I was shocked. I didn’t see one brand that was well optimized.

One brand sold over $10m/year worth of drone parts, and he was leaving $300k/month worth of revenue on the table by not optimizing. He was also paying thousands per month for dead emails that needed scrubbing. he was very grateful.

Another was sending way too many emails and burning through her list.

Another didn’t even know Flows existed.

And that’s why I’m writing this email.

There is a MASSIVE OPPORTUNITY out there to learn Klaviyo and charge phat monthly retainers to make brands more money.

How does one get rich? By helping others get rich, and this is exactly that opportunity.

Klaviyo just went public this year, so I took a peek into their S-1. If you’re a nerd like me, have a gander. This was my favorite part:

130,000 customers! If you divide that by their revenue then the average customer is paying around $475/month, which is an email list of about 50,000.

That’s a decently sized eCommerce store. You’d be shocked to learn how many 7-9 figure Shopify brands are out there.

So, you need to learn Klaviyo. How? Three ways:

1. Klaviyo has a ton of learning tools on their site. Start digging into these. Also, find the YouTubers that specialize in this niche and learn from them.

2. Open a free Klaviyo account and start messing around. Create a handful of test emails and use them to practice with.

3. Join some eCommerce groups and start asking around. Find someone that will allow you to get read only access to their account so you can learn with it. Tell them you’ll work for free, but just want a case study. You can also create a test environment within their account so you can run all kinds of experiments without messing anything up or spamming their customers.

You just need 1 case study.

Then get a Carrd site and throw up a landing page with your case study. Now you can start looking for customers. Go back to those eCommerce groups and offer your services for performance only. As in, they only pay you if you bring them more revenue.

This is all very, very trackable within Klaviyo. There will be no question.

Once you exhaust that avenue you need to find more customers via cold email.

How do you find all those customers? Oh, that’s the easy part. BuiltWith.com

Built With tells you what all websites are…built with! For instance, you can export a list of all Shopify sites, that include owner contact info, and scrub out all the ones that don’t use Klaviyo. It’s all right there.

Built With is priced at around $450/month, but it’s okay, because I’m cheap, and I don’t want you to spend all that. So go to Upwork and find someone with an Upwork account to run this export for you for $20. Or just buy the list off someone on Upwork, like I counsel here.

Now you have at least 50k potential Klaviyo customers, but you need to email them. How? Use this guide.

What’s your pitch?

“If I can’t make you an extra $50k/month from Klaviyo then my service is free. Give me read only access to your Klaviyo account and I’ll send a free Loom with my plan.”

If you dig into their account and see it’s already well optimized, then you don’t take them on as a customer because you don’t want to work for free.

This is a $5k - $10k/month service. You don’t think you can find 5 - 10 customers willing to pay you that out of 130,000? Especially when you consider that almost all of them have no clue what they’re doing.

You could be at $20k MRR within 3 months of reading this email.

Or, another opportunity?

Buy an under-optimized eCommerce store. My friend Connor encapsulated by thoughts exactly in this tweet.

I think this is a massive opportunity. I would find a store that has:

1. Been around for 5+ years. I want to see how it did before, during and after Covid.

2. Gross margins of 60+%.

3. Low SKU count.

4. Under optimized with paid ads, email/SMS collection and marketing.

That’s it. Buy it with some cash down and a seller note and add an insane amount of value in the first 90 days.

I might actually be talking myself into doing this as I type this. Who’s in?

Conclusion

Man, that was fun to write. You can take this playbook and apply it to any software like Klaviyo that is growing like crazy and making people rich.

Where there’s software charging thousands per month and growing like crazy, there’s a ton of opportunity around it.

It’s similar to Salesforce integration agencies. People need help with this stuff, and Klaviyo really isn’t that hard. The feeling of hitting send on an email and watching live visitors go from 80 to 800 in 5 minutes is truly magical.

As always, I hope this email causes you to act on something.

Thanks for reading! You guys are the best.

Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner.com