Andrew is a seasoned e-commerce marketing expert with over 15 years of experience and the Founder & CEO of BlueTuskr, a full-service agency dedicated to scaling e-commerce brands. As the host of The E-Comm Show podcast and a member of Amazon’s Buy with Prime Advisory Board, he stays at the forefront of omnichannel marketing innovation. Frustrated by the inefficiencies of siloed agencies and disjointed marketing efforts, Andrew built BlueTuskr to provide brands with a seamless, omnichannel approach that drives real growth.

> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley welcomes Andrew Maff, founder and CEO of Blue Tuskr, to discuss scaling e-commerce brands beyond Amazon. Andrew shares his extensive experience, emphasizing the importance of diversifying sales channels to mitigate risks and increase profitability. He outlines a practical framework for transitioning to direct-to-consumer (DTC) platforms, starting with small tests and leveraging Amazon traffic. Key strategies include optimizing for SEO, using creative marketing assets, and exploring platforms like TikTok. Andrew also highlights the financial benefits of diversification, such as higher valuations during exits. This episode offers actionable insights for scaling e-commerce brands effectively.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:

Special Mention(s):

Related Episode(s):

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.

I started Hadley Designs in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.

I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.

If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then go to www.EcommBreakthrough.com (that’s Ecomm with two M’s) to learn more.

Josh Hadley 00:00:00  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley, where I interview the top business leaders in e-commerce. Past guests include Kevin King, Michael Gerber, author of The E-myth, and Matt Clark from ASM. Today I am speaking with Andrew Maff and he is going to be talking about how to scale your brand off of Amazon. This episode is brought to you by Ecomm Breakthrough, where I specialize in investing in and scaling seven figure ecommerce brands to eight figures and beyond. If you’re an ambitious e-commerce entrepreneur looking for a coach or a consultant who can help take your business to the next level, I bring hands on experience, strategic insights, and the resources needed to fuel your growth. So if you or someone you know is ready to scale or looking for a coach or consultant, reach out to me directly at Josh at Ecomm Breakthrough dot com. That’s e-comm with two M’s and let’s turn your dreams into reality. Today I am excited to introduce you all to Andrew Maff. Andrew is a seasoned e-commerce marketing expert with over 15 years of experience.

Josh Hadley 00:00:47  He is the founder and CEO of Blue Tuskr, a full service agency dedicated to scaling e-commerce brands. As the host of the Ecom Show podcast and a member of Amazon’s Buy with Prime Advisory Board, he stays at the forefront of omnichannel marketing innovation. Frustrated by the inefficiencies created by siloed agencies and disjointed marketing efforts, Andrew built Blue Tuskr to provide brands with a seamless omnichannel approach that drives real growth. So with that introduction, welcome to the show, Andrew.

Andrew Maff 00:01:11  Thanks for having me, Josh. Appreciate it. Good to see you again.

Josh Hadley 00:01:14  Likewise. We, recorded a podcast episode on your podcast last week, so it’s always fun to flip the script and, be on the opposite side of the table.

Andrew Maff 00:01:21  Yeah, it’s always nice. I think I mentioned on our show, it’s always nice being able to interview someone that’s got a podcast, but then it’s also nice being the recipient and and being the guest, but at the same time, kind of getting to just carry the conversation on because we always end up getting into something deep and then we can’t touch on it anymore because we hit a time limit.

Andrew Maff 00:01:35  And so we’re back at it. I’m ready to pick up where we left off.

Josh Hadley 00:01:38  Awesome. I’m really looking forward to the conversation today as well. Andrew, why don’t you give people a quick background? You know, you’ve been in the e-commerce space for 15 years. where did your e-commerce experience and training, really begin? And how did that evolve into creating Blue Tuskr?

Andrew Maff 00:01:52  Yeah, every time I tell someone I’ve been in it for 15 years or like, it’s not even been around for 15 years, but like, it actually, I mean, it has a little bit so it was actually my first, like, I guess you’d say, like big boy job out of out of, out of school. I was still, I just finished high school, and my father actually acquired a company that sold, like, automotive parts, basically. And he, bought this company and wanted to take it online. The company was not online at the time. And so he basically built this ecommerce business. And this was back when Amazon was still selling books.

Andrew Maff 00:02:18  And one of my favorite things to make fun of him about is Amazon had reached out to him about being the exclusive seller for, he was mainly doing like suspension, and so he wanted to be the exclusive seller for a car show on Amazon, and they turned it down. And it’s my favorite thing to make fun of him about to this day. because I probably wouldn’t be doing this podcast right now if my dad did that well. So instead, I helped him with, digital marketing for the most part. So I mainly started on the email side because back then that was really all we could be doing. then after a while, I actually started my own agency that was a little bit more back then. Still, e-commerce really wasn’t a big thing, so it was more on like the retail side with a little bit of a hospitality element to it. And then a bunch of my retail clients started to really go online, And that’s how I started getting back into the e-commerce side. I ended up merging that agency with another agency, had them buy me out because I wanted to go in-house for a little bit.

Andrew Maff 00:03:03  So then I went in-house with a couple different eight figure brands. over the course of like, I think like 3 or 4 years. And then one of the partners for one of those brands I actually ended up partnering with and creating another agency. That agency was, I would say like 80, 90% focused on the Amazon space. And then the other ten, 20% was obviously from an off Amazon perspective. We exited that in late 2019. and then I started Blue Tuskr, and that is where I’m at now.

Josh Hadley 00:03:26  Awesome. So what’s your premise with Blue Tuskr then with all of your experience? Because it seems like you’ve got a wide array of experience from retail doing Amazon agency work, doing, you know, Shopify as well. So, what was kind of the idea behind Blue Tuskr and what is it that you all specialize in now?

Andrew Maff 00:03:41  So, to actually backtrack a little bit, the agency before this, I had I had come up with the idea and we ended up getting really siloed into the Amazon space.

Andrew Maff 00:03:50  But originally my thought process was developing a full service agency, and the reason was back then full service agencies and honestly still to today have a very negative connotation because it tends to be if you’re hiring a full service agency, usually what you’re getting is X amount of hours from kids straight out of college that are kind of just going to do, like, hey, you’re going to get, you know, Joey’s going to do all of your marketing for you, and he’s going to allocate X amount of hours a month to doing it. And that’s basically all that it was. And no one was a specialist when I was in-house before that agency. The issue I had was I was the sole marketer in-house, and I was managing for the person I worked for, had multiple brands and then also multiple SaaS businesses that were in the ecommerce industry. So I was basically an agency and managing all of this, and I was the only marketer. And so my problem was I had several different agencies. I worked with multiple contractors, freelancers, all these different people that I could not for the life of me get to be on the same page.

Andrew Maff 00:04:40  And so that’s why I started focusing on the on the full service side, because I realized, like, I’m spending most of my time like account managing than I am really doing anything else. So we started the agency with that kind of in mind. The person I partnered with wanted to stick to the Amazon side. So we ended up staying with the Amazon side and we exited. The first thing I thought about was like, I know that that model makes sense. And so what I wanted to develop was a full service agency, but it’s almost like we really run it like it’s 5 or 6 different agencies, because I have specialists in-house that focus on individual spots or individual strategies. So we have our owned media department oversees the departments for website optimization, CRO, SEO initiatives, social media initiatives, retention, marketing initiatives are paid. Media team has specialized departments for Google and Microsoft ads, obviously marketplace or Amazon ads. Social media. Even under that is another round of like meta TikTok. So we basically have an entire agency of specialists that you are kind of act as like an outsource marketing department for a lot of the brands we work with.

Andrew Maff 00:05:32  Back when I was at the last agency, one of the things I had noticed, and this actually stemmed from just watching my wife shop for the most part, was that the users were going from, seeing some advertising to the website and then leaving the website and going to Amazon. We ran a bunch of different tests with like, meta increases on to see, like, hey, are we going to see incremental growth on the website we’re on, on Amazon. And so after a while, basically what I started to realize is that this customer journey is becoming more and more fluid as people are getting more and more used to shopping online. So, you know, 7 or 8 years ago, I could kind of see that’s where this was headed. And so what we started to develop is these more omnichannel approaches. And that’s when I started to develop that available on Amazon button years ago. And then obviously by Prime came out I think like two, two and a half years ago or whatever that was. And as soon as I heard about that, that’s when I kind of hopped on that.

Andrew Maff 00:06:13  So really, we’ve kind of positioned ourselves as not only a full service agency from just an e-commerce perspective, but also the agency that that is very focused on the omnichannel side, since we have that expertise on both on and off marketplace.

Josh Hadley 00:06:25  Yeah, I love that you’ve got so much experience and you’ve seen what’s worked really well in other agencies and what’s worked not so well in others. And I think the overall connotation, especially as I speak with other sellers and even my own experience with agencies, hasn’t been overly positive for many of the things that you, you talked about, right? Like it’s just very siloed. You got people that really don’t really care about your brand. There’s no investment in things like that. So my question for you, Andrew, would be like, what are the type of e-commerce brands that you guys are working with? And who is it that your services really tailor themselves to?

Andrew Maff 00:06:56  you know, we keep everything as malleable as we can. most of the brands we’re working with are seven figure sellers, at least.

Andrew Maff 00:07:03  so usually, like, kind of that million dollar year mark, cut off is kind of where we start looking at like, alright, let them grow a little bit more. but that could be across multiple channels. It could be across their DTC site and Amazon or if it’s other marketplaces, obviously. but otherwise, like we tend to be more in the like 2 to 3 million a year range up to 2025 at a certain point. brands definitely get to a size where it’s like, it makes more sense for you to have someone internally for marketing. And then at that point, we actually kind of puzzle piece in and act as like, whatever they don’t have the ability to do internally. so we’ve even helped hire, internal people before, and we just end up consulting. And, you know, it’s kind of the nature of our business. So we help them get to a certain point, and then we kind of help them migrate into the next area. In terms of a product lines, it’s really all over the place for the most part.

Andrew Maff 00:07:45  There are a handful of things that we try to stay away from. or unless it’s extremely differentiated, like apparel can be very complicated. However, some of our best brands were in apparel. It’s just because their product lines were extremely differentiated. It wasn’t just like a fashion kind of thing. supplements, same thing. Like if you’ve got a ME2 supplement, it’s kind of tough. But otherwise if you’ve got something very differentiated or you’re really going after a market that we know has not been touched, that’s when we’ll get involved. But otherwise, from a product line perspective, it tends to be pretty wide.

Josh Hadley 00:08:12  Okay. Makes a lot of sense. Or most of the brands that you work with, are they in Amazon First brand, meaning they launched on Amazon. That’s where the majority of their revenue is coming from. Or are you working on the opposite side? Most of them are more DTC oriented and haven’t really scaled into Amazon and other marketplaces yet.

Andrew Maff 00:08:26  Most of them start off with the Amazon side. A lot of where we kind of specialize is helping brands figure out a cost effective way to start testing, diversifying away from Amazon.

Andrew Maff 00:08:38  obviously Amazon’s always going to be there. It’s never going to go anywhere. So we’re not aiming to like completely take them off. But we’re looking to like how can we make you more profitable in other areas? So for a lot of the brands we work with there, Amazon tends to be the larger revenue driver, but their DTC site tends to be the larger profit driver. And so we find ways to kind of get those two to work together.

Josh Hadley 00:08:53  Awesome. I love it. Well, and I think this is an important conversation to have because most people do have that fear of, you know, hey, all my eggs are in the Amazon basket. And hey, at the end of the day, I wouldn’t necessarily run. Don’t see that as like that needing to be the reason that you need to diversify away. One of the things is I attended Alex Ramos’s Business Scaling workshop. One of the things that was the biggest mistake that I made in Amazon back in 2018, 2019, when we were scaling our brand, we were already doing 5 million in revenue, but yet on Amazon alone.

Josh Hadley 00:09:23  But yet I wanted I continued to hear people say like, oh, you got to get off of Amazon because you never know if they’re going to suspend your account. It’s like, hey, if you’re not doing anything black hat or grey hat, like you don’t need to worry about Amazon suspending your account. And and if there is something that happens, like you’ll be able to work through it, right? It’s a whole other business model. If you are doing things maliciously and you’re just trying to make a quick buck, right? Yeah. And what I learned, the reason why that was such a big mistake for me is I spent two years focused on how do I scale my brand off of Amazon hiring, spending over $300,000 to try to put the cart before the horse, so to speak. Whereas if I would have just doubled down on Amazon, I would have doubled or tripled my business faster than trying to make Shopify work when our brand wasn’t ready. And so the revelation was this. And Alex Alex said at point blank, he said, like tell you across eight figures.

Josh Hadley 00:10:07  Honestly, it doesn’t make much sense to go and diversify your sales channels because until you’re making about $1 million a year in revenue in a single sales channel, keep doubling down on what you’ve already found to be working. And then once you cross that eight figure range, then it starts to kind of make more sense. So Andrew, Mike, my question to you here is when brands are, you know, they’re doing well on Amazon. They maybe see, hey, maybe it is time to stop doubling down on Amazon. And maybe there is some lower hanging fruit on some of these other either marketplaces or DTC. What are you seeing work successfully for brands that are saying, hey, yeah, we’ve got the Amazon thing dialed in, we now want to scale off of Amazon. Where are the first places that you have brands focus on off of Amazon?

Andrew Maff 00:10:50  So I’ve got a little bit of a framework for it, but I do want to tell you a quick story that you just reminded me of, because I used to think the same thing, right? Like, why would I diversify? What’s what’s the point in doing that? And I know that, you know, I kind of saw customers doing, you know, certain things with funnels and whatever.

Andrew Maff 00:11:02  But the thing that really, like, threw me over the edge was right when I had just started at the going in-house, I was with a good size eight figure brand. I would say I can’t remember at this point 7,080% of the revenue was coming off Amazon. I wasn’t working there three months and very white hat. We were not like, no play by the rules. Amazon’s got rules. It is what it is. It was Q4 middle of November and we’re getting up to Black Friday. And our you know, you start hitting credit card limits and stuff. So the guy I worked for had to change out his credit card for whatever reason, Amazon thought it was fraud, completely shut the account down for two weeks. And so we were like, nothing. And I’m like, I’m gonna lose this job. Three months into this, like we were, I was so panicked. I was like, oh, shit. Like, my wife and I were just looking at buying a house. There’s a whole thing.

Andrew Maff 00:11:43  And so that was kind of when I realized, like, okay, it makes sense to at least have something else in case something like that happens right now, to your point of, you know, you’re doing illegal stuff through Amazon or whatever, that’s a different problem. That’s you ask for that, but it’s the other side of like things happen and sometimes you got to have a backup plan. And so one of the things I started working on with building out this kind of framework of like, how do you diversify it? There’s ways to start to to test it, right, and start to kind of dip your toe in it without going all in because to, to 100% accurate, like wildly accurate. It’s what I’ve found is if you are a FBA seller only, let’s say you just sell on Amazon and you are doing eight figures. So you hit that 10 million a year mark, right? Your exit is probably about a 2 to 3 x. But if you’re a $10 million business, same revenue, but you have your own D to C site.

Andrew Maff 00:12:29  So you’ve got an email list and you’ve got website visitors and you’ve got social media following. All of a sudden you have all this extra data. Not only does your buyer pool open up, because all of these other brands can start to find ways to leverage your data, but your EBITDA exit actually goes to like a 3 to 5 X, because you also have these additional assets that you can now sell. So diversifying once you clear that that eight figure mark makes sense. But I would argue as well that you should probably start earlier. But maybe don’t go all in on don’t go, you know, hey, let’s double down on on building out a website right now. So what we tend to look at is how do you test selling off Amazon before you actually start selling off Amazon, right before you like invest tens of thousands of dollars into a website and then you start running ads and stuff. I mean, you’re basically starting from scratch, right? So chances are you’ve already got sponsored brand ads running on Amazon, which means you’re driving traffic to your storefront.

Andrew Maff 00:13:14  And now you probably know your storefront has the ability to convert, right? Chances are you’ve already mapped that out. Now, what I want to know, since I know that your storefront can convert, can I drive traffic from off Amazon to your storefront and get your storefront to convert with off Amazon traffic? The only thing I really want to figure out is Amazon has an entire audience of people that are there to shop. It’s a very, very middle of the funnel platform. So if I go even a little bit top of funnel, or even if I just do middle of funnel, but like off Amazon, how likely are they to convert? And so we’ll use like Amazon attribution code, set up some Google ads, maybe set up some Facebook ads, drive some traffic and just test it. See what happens. I just want to know if they can convert profitably would be fantastic, but I just want to know if it’s possible. Then I can start to figure out like, okay, let’s fine tune some things, get some data in, and really make a decision here.

Andrew Maff 00:13:52  If this is going to work, then let’s assume that I can I can make that work right. So I can see I’m getting some some traction from off Amazon. Now, what I want to do before I jump into a full website is I probably want to look at how I can dip my toe in this, which basically could be as some as something as simple as, let’s just build out a landing page, let’s focus on your top sellers. Let’s put all of you put your top sellers on a single landing page, maybe do a bundle or something like that, and let’s drive that off Amazon traffic to that, that landing page. However, I would also implement either something like a Buy Prime or have like an available on Amazon button and let people go straight to Amazon, put a pixel on that button and see how many people actually went straight to Amazon. Because now what I’m learning is, can I get people to convert from off Amazon on my own platform, probably like a Shopify or something.

Andrew Maff 00:14:33  But let’s just to make sure I’m not losing cash here. Let’s still give my users the ability to go to Amazon. Then I might a B test taking that button away just to see what happens. In some cases that might not be relevant. I’m going to leave the button the whole time, but then I’m going to start to pour more gas on a landing page. Let’s make it a little bit more proven out. Let’s see which products maybe I want to release next. Do I start building a subscriber list? Do I start having my social media following? Then I decide, is it justifiable to build out the website and start to do this? So by the time I’ve built the website, I’ve already got data backing up. Here’s the advertising channels I know work well. Here’s a tolerable subscriber list. Here’s a little bit of a social media following. So at least I have something and I baby step to the whole way through, as opposed to tens of thousands of dollars for a website, tens of thousands of dollars in advertising for months on end while you’re testing things like you’re going to burn through, to your point, six figures before you really figure out how to get DTC going.

Andrew Maff 00:15:16  And I think that’s the smartest way to really kind of just start that process.

Josh Hadley 00:15:19  Awesome makes a lot of sense. So I guess to to boil this back down here, what you’re recommending is people create some meta ads and then you’re directing them first to Amazon. You’re saying, hey, run meta ads, use your attribution link on Amazon, try to get them to buy on Amazon. And if you can do so, ideally, you said profitably all the better or just break even, but you’re saying you just want to gauge like, hey, are people interested? If you throw them an ad on meta, are they willing to be interrupted and go and actually purchase your product on Amazon? Is that the first step that you mentioned, or are you not even sending it direct to Amazon?

Andrew Maff 00:15:55  No, that would be exactly that. Or I would look at doing like Google. It depends on obviously the platform. I’m focused on the problem being with this model, just like anything else, there’s a whole and everything is in this scenario, you’re obviously using your Amazon attribution code.

Andrew Maff 00:16:06  I’m sending traffic to a storefront. The storefront can’t talk back to Google and Meta. If someone converted all, there’d be a fantastic feature for Amazon to give, but they haven’t done that yet. So if you’re doing Google, the best you can do is focus on clicks. If you’re doing meta, the best you can do is focus on clicks or landing page views or whichever. So you do kind of hit a wall with that. So that’s where it’s really like, don’t put the tens of thousands of dollars a month into it. Let’s just spend a little bit. Get some traffic to the site and let’s see what happens. What a lot of people make the mistake of is Amazon is an extremely middle of funnel platform, right. Like it’s rare people are they’re just kind of browsing. Right. They have an intent. They’re usually looking for something off Amazon, especially if you do something like meta ads. It’s an education platform. You’ve got to educate them about the product and then incentivize them to go and convert.

Andrew Maff 00:16:47  You can’t just run ads and they start buying stuff. It just doesn’t work that way. Google. That can be possible where it is still very middle of the funnel platform, especially if you’re doing like search ads, but your cost per click is so much higher typically. And so while yes, your conversion rate should be higher in this scenario, Google can’t learn because you’re sending it straight to the storefront. So that’s kind of where you hit some walls. But to answer your question, yes, either start with Meta or Google and just go straight to Amazon.

Josh Hadley 00:17:07  Okay. And how much are you spending, you know, to test this out. Like and how many is it like the number of clicks that you want to see. Like, what are some good guiding metrics that we can use to say like, oh yes, we’ve got a winner here, or actually, no, this is a loser. Like, let’s not even pursue this any further. What are those metrics you’re using to determine success?

Andrew Maff 00:17:25  Just like any metrics, every brand is going to be very different.

Andrew Maff 00:17:27  especially if you’re doing Google, you’re going to have like massively varying, cost per clicks on average, through a meta side, it’s a little bit different, you know, how how how what’s the quality of this creative we’re using and you know, all the different things that you kind of have to factor in when you’re looking at marketing, but at a certain point, like, you really don’t need to be spending more than like a few thousand dollars a month in advertising just to test it out. Usually I like to say like, look, if you’re going to spend less than 100 a day, you’re really only going to be able to get like 1 or 2 campaigns going. Otherwise, at an average last I looked at, the average cost per click was like a dollar seven or something like that. so you’re going to get maybe 50 clicks if you got two campaigns running a day. So that’s not a ton of data to be able to figure out, like where’s the conversion. And then being able to optimize from there.

Andrew Maff 00:18:07  Because the other issue you have is optimizing is challenging because you’re just doing it off of really improving the click through rate as much as you can. so it kind of depends. But usually if you’re starting off with a platform from scratch, spending less than like $100 a day, you kind of hit a wall with how much data you’re coming in from an agency perspective, assuming that in this scenario, obviously a brand is coming to us. One of the things I always warn them is if your spend is too low, you’re most likely going to be spending a pretty good amount of money on our retainer for months on end while we’re trying to figure out what’s coming in and what’s working and what’s the data. Or you can frontload it, spend some more money on the budget side and get some more data in. And we can figure this out a lot faster. So it’s one of those things where it’s like, do you want to wait for your data to come in, or do you want it to hurry up and come in? You’re going to be you’re going to be paying for it regardless anyway.

Andrew Maff 00:18:48  So that’s kind of where that conversation comes in.

Josh Hadley 00:18:51  Okay. So what would be like a healthy budget then as like a ballpark, right. If somebody is a client and they’re like, yeah, let’s let’s test this out. Like what’s what’s an ideal budget because you said $100 a day. Probably not going to get you enough. Right. So 3000 is probably a little too low per month. What’s ideal?

Andrew Maff 00:19:07  let’s say we’re just doing one product and we’re doing like a top seller. Let’s drive traffic straight to that page directly on the storefront, see if that thing converts. I definitely, probably would not suggest going lower than 100 a day. Usually you want to be like at least at that five K range, on a monthly basis, just so that you’ve got some data and you can put some other things in place, right? On Google it’s a matter of that. Cost per click is going to be much higher. So you’re only going to be able to get so much traffic on meta because of that platform.

Andrew Maff 00:19:30  You got to have several campaigns in place. Typically you want something that’s more top of funnel. So it could be something that’s just like, let’s get some video views in, let’s get some engagement, and then let’s retarget people that showed interest and send them straight to the storefront. So at a minimum I need 2 or 3 campaigns for that. So that’s kind of where factoring some of that stuff comes in. But usually I’d say you want to be closer to that five day range.

Josh Hadley 00:19:47  For both Google and Meta combined or per platform per platform. Okay. So you’re looking at ten K in. All right. Now what are the leading metrics that you’re going to say. you know, hey this is working successfully or it’s not. Right. Because I know brand attribution, people have very mixed opinions on whether Amazon’s actually tracking and reporting good data from the brand attribution links. So what are like the measurements? If I just spent $10,000, how should I know whether I should continue pursuing like, hey, yes, this is working or I don’t know if the juice is worth the squeeze here to double down and do the DTC route.

Andrew Maff 00:20:21  very interesting question. the obvious. How much revenue did you bring in? Right. If your attribution shown you correctly, then great. Fantastic. It worked out well for you. That answers that question. Where it gets a little more convoluted is what did actually convert, and how close were you to at least a break even? Excuse me? And the only reason I say that, and I know that’s the last thing people want to hear, is like, why would I do this if I’m not even breaking even? But you have so little control because Amazon’s not speaking back to these platforms, so you really can’t optimize for conversion. And the storefronts. While Amazon loves to release like a random feature every now and then, they still are way off from like having any functionality that you can really control the overall experience and make sure that you’re kind of taking people where you need them to. So I always take that whole customer journey with a grain of salt, and I say, if we can get people to convert, and let’s say it’s what we just define as a tolerable level, which is going to be on a per brand basis, then we know it’s possible, and it might be worth the investment to create a landing page.

Andrew Maff 00:21:11  Landing page is not crazy expensive anyway, so that’ll really reduce it. Then you can have the available on Amazon button so that at least like you can track them going to this back to Amazon that way. So you still have the option. but then there’s some other stuff to think about. Right. So where the available on Amazon button becomes kind of interesting is if you’re taking them straight to the listing. Because if you’re taking them straight to the listing, you’re including more traffic. Ideally, you’re getting more orders and more reviews and more engagement, which is basically all Amazon’s algorithm cares about. So all of a sudden your organic ranking on Amazon starts to improve. So that’s where it becomes kind of an interesting question of like, okay, well what other benefits are we getting from this? So now all of a sudden, do I need to factor in my top line revenue for this entire product that we’re driving traffic to? Some people say, yeah, we should totally factor that in. Others will be like, yeah, but I’m testing to get away from Amazon, so why do I care about that right now? And both are sound arguments.

Andrew Maff 00:21:54  So the other thing to look at is just from a trend perspective, this individual product that you’re driving traffic to, how much revenue is it brought in? Pretty much on an average. Let’s figure out what that average is since we increased this budget targeting that specific product line, how much do you add now? Have we seen an incremental top line increase? Is there enough gray area there for us to say like, it does seem like the meta and or Google ads really helped here, or was there really no increase at all, in which case you’re like, well, we tried and it didn’t work. And then you just don’t do it or you go back to the drawing board, you look at creative and stuff and say, do we want to try this a different way? But at least you give it a shot.

Josh Hadley 00:22:23  Okay. Makes sense. So you’re trying to target what break even. You’re saying if I spent 10,000, I’m targeting at least 10,000 in revenue through brand attribution to say, hey, it’s it’s worth maybe looking into.

Andrew Maff 00:22:35  Yeah. I think if, you know, in this scenario, the thing that’s always really interesting when we work with people that are really heavily on Amazon and then they come to an Amazon approach, Amazon’s advertising and every Amazon ads agency is going to hate me for saying this, but it’s relatively simple because it’s really what keyword do you want to go after? Put that keyword into the system and run the ad like it’s not very it’s not very complicated. Or if you want to do, you know, products like great, then you put in and that’s it. There’s bidding adjustments and things like that. I understand, but it is very black and white off. Amazon is extremely algorithm heavy. Google you know, if you’re leaning in on performance Max or if even if you’re doing maximize conversions or target Roas or max clicks like it’s leaning in on the algorithm Meadows 100% the algorithm it’s all leaning in on mostly like targeting purchases or link clicks. So you don’t have bidding. It’s just a creative thing. So when we talk to a brand, we say like we just want to aim for a break even.

Andrew Maff 00:23:20  They’re like, why? Like, I’m not going to do this if I’m not profitable. I understand that, but Amazon will not talk to these platforms and tell you that, like, yes, these are converting. I don’t know why I feel like they should, but they won’t. And so basically we have to explain like it can only get better from here once we can actually control the data that’s coming back to us. The problem is there’s no data coming back to us. And that’s where we hit that wall.

Josh Hadley 00:23:39  Yeah, yeah. No, that makes a lot of sense. And again, it’s a leaky bucket. So it’s really hard to like measure. So a decent indication is like yes I know that top line revenue doesn’t factor in your Cogs and it doesn’t factor in the FBA fees. So like overall if you spent $10,000, you made $10,000 in revenue. Like it’s not even breakeven. You’re at a loss. However, what you are doing is like you’ve proven like, okay, there is some interest into your point.

Josh Hadley 00:24:00  Then it is trying to take it to where you own the funnel. You can track the data. So I like that point. Andrew. My question would be, I mean, it sounds easy enough to be like, oh, well, I just need to turn on meta ads in Google Ads. I think Google ads are a little more straightforward because it’s just very keyword based, right? Everybody on Amazon very used to that. Now I think meta is a whole other ballgame. Right. Because because it is all very creative driven. You’ve got to have videos. So what type of creative are you. Are you seeing work well with the brand? That’s like, hey, I’m only on Amazon. I don’t have I don’t have funny, you know, or viral buzzworthy videos on my listing.

Andrew Maff 00:24:33  UGC works really well. However, again, it kind of comes down to the brand, right? Like I really it’s very, very rare I ever come across a brand where I go, yeah, actually, meta probably won’t do very well for you.

Andrew Maff 00:24:44  Right? Like there’s always a way to use that platform. It’s how you do it. A lot of people think like direct purchase, right? Like I want to get them to purchase. That’s what the goal is. And that’s what I want to use this platform for. And while I understand that at the same time, you’re leaving a lot of other strategies on the table. So to give you an example, we work with a couple different like, let’s say they’re like industrial brands. Like one of them sells like, plumbing supplies. Right? So it’s all plumbing stuff. It’s people that are searching for plumbing stuff. They got a leak or it’s a plumber and he needs to re-up on some stock or whatever. So. And that’s it. So it’s very very Google and Microsoft heavy like let’s just be in the right place at the right time. They’re searching and that’s it. Why would I be on meta. Right. I’m not going to casually show someone I don’t know. It’s not about pulling a pipe.

Andrew Maff 00:25:19  And they’re going to be like, yeah, I’ll buy that pipe. Like that’s just not going to happen. But what you can do is look at other acquisitions besides just purchases. So all of a sudden, how can I create some type of like, maybe it’s like a gated content thing or something like that, run some ads and get as many plumbers onto my email list as possible and let my, let my, my email marketing do the heavy lifting just to remind them that I exist. Or like, hey, probably don’t need plumbing stuff right now, but when you do, wouldn’t you love 20% off your first order? And now I’m giving them that? So they’re getting into my email list. And so it’s kind of looking at like there are tons of brands out there that refer to themselves as like, we’re not a sexy brand, so we shouldn’t be on social media. But the fact is is like everyone should be doing it. It’s just a matter of how you’re approaching it. Will you get purchases directly off social media? Maybe not, but to me, emails are like one of your most important KPIs that you can do a ton with.

Andrew Maff 00:26:03  So looking at growing that list as well as another way to look at it.

Josh Hadley 00:26:06  Awesome. Love that. All right. So we talked a lot about meta. We talked about Google trying to get traffic to your own DTC site. What are some of the other off Amazon strategies that you’re seeing clients have good success with?

Andrew Maff 00:26:18  One of my favorite ones that actually we just started leaning into more. I think in the past a year, year and a half, what we thought about was, every, every website has a domain authority, right. So actually, in May this past year, they Google like, quote unquote, like accidentally released their algorithm or whatever. And so we read through it, try to figure out, like, you know, what can we learn from this? And a lot of it is like, yeah, we kind of knew that or like we expected that, blah, blah. But one of the things that we expected, but never really thought Google would actually explore was the improvement of like engagement on sites is a big thing, right? And so they also acknowledge that they do have, in one way or another, their own version of a domain authority as well as a page authority.

Andrew Maff 00:26:57  So every website has a domain authority, but every page has its own page authority. And so one of the things we thought about was, hey, you’re spending a ton of money from an SEO perspective, building out all these blogs and different content to try to rank for certain keywords? What if I created. I’m never going to run ads on my own blog. I’m not a media company for most brands, but why can’t I put my own ads? Why can’t I create a custom image that’s a clear CTA incentivizing people to go to a certain product? Shopify has got the ability to like, add to cart and stuff directly from a blog, but even then, like, why can’t I make my own display ads? And so we actually started doing that. But sending people to Amazon in some scenarios, for some brands, they were totally fine with it. Like, yeah, we want to improve our Amazon. Great. The page authority side. What became very interesting is while we’re focused on an SEO perspective for their DTC site, we would actually start to sprinkle in backlinks to their listings on Amazon.

Andrew Maff 00:27:40  And what we would monitor is the page authority of their listings. Would that start to improve over time? And what we started to see was their individual listing would actually improve organically on Google at a much higher rate, because it’s getting all these backlinks, it’s getting a higher page authority. And so obviously, if it’s starting to rank better on Google, it’s getting more traffic from Google, which is going to show up as organic on Amazon. And so the organic ranking on the actual Amazon platform would also go up. So just by linking to our Amazon products on some of these articles. We actually saw improvements directly on Amazon as well as on Google. This was a great way, from an SEO perspective to do that without having to do anything like too crazy. Then the other side of it is kind of what comes with the buy side, which is that’s where like some brands really like it. Some brands really don’t. I always try to stay as neutral as possible and like there’s definitely brands I’ve spoken to like, don’t do this.

Andrew Maff 00:28:22  It doesn’t make sense for you. But the nice thing about the buyer, the prime size you finally get, Amazon lets you keep that data. That was the big thing that I was like, thank you. Because I would send I do that available on Amazon, but we just custom make it and send them the listing. But then the problem is, is like that’s it. Like I don’t know if they converted. I don’t know anything. Even if you use the attribution button to your point, like does it really work? And so we’d have that issue at least with by Prime. It integrates with Meta and Google and Klaviyo and MailChimp and whatever else we’re using. So that way I can actually start to segment out that audience. And then it’s a matter of of all that data and all those audiences I’ve segmented out. How am I using whether it’s like for product launch strategies or if it’s like a Prime Day sale, or if I’m trying to sell through stuff at a warehouse, like anything like that, that’s where that data becomes very interesting.

Josh Hadley 00:28:57  Yeah. No, that is very interesting. So are you seeing what are most people doing with buy with Prime? Are they seeing success with by with Prime and they enjoy it. I think the challenge with by with Prime is that in an ideal world, and I think this is important for our listeners to understand the brands that are having success in the DTC world that are not yet on Amazon have a very completely different business model than what most of us Amazon sellers think Shopify brands do. And the reason being is this if you’re a DTC native brand and let’s say you’re not an Amazon first brand, your main Mo is you are really good at either creating blog articles to drive traffic, or you’re really good at creating really good creative right from either Facebook, Instagram, or coming from TikTok as well. And then that ends up coming to your site and you have your site, and it’s probably not even a site. It’s more of a dedicated sales funnel that is very CRO optimized, meaning it’s very optimized for a high conversion rate.

Josh Hadley 00:29:56  Then the way that you actually monetize it with how expensive it is to advertise on meta and all of those other platforms. You need to have an average order value somewhere between 60 to $75. So if you’re selling like a $25 product, how in the world can you do that? Well, you do that by doing the following things. You have upsells immediately following as soon as they add to cart, or as soon as they check out, you’ve got one click upsells, right? Either that gets them into a continuity program, a subscription, or gets them to increase. Hey, you bought one of these? What if you add three more? I’ll actually take off like buy, buy two get get three free or whatever it is to try to get that average order value up. I think from what I’ve seen with buy with Prime is like there ain’t no upsell features. Sorry. Like you just either check out but sorry there’s no one click add to cart. There’s no hey, let’s add you into a reoccurring revenue stream here to be able to offset the expense of ads, right? To be able to make that customer lifetime value has got to be greater than the cost of acquisition.

Josh Hadley 00:30:53  So how do you manage that, Andrew, with hey, yes, let’s add the buy with Prime to our site which really like really damages your opportunity to really grow your upsells. Yeah.

Andrew Maff 00:31:03  So the first thing I want to say CRO, bothers it just bothers living hell out of me. It’s such it just drives me crazy. It blows my mind how much brands will spend on advertising and marketing dollars and not a dollar improving their website. I think you should be doing CRO out the gate AB testing, constantly improving your website. Amazon’s doing this at all times, but they’re doing it for you. That’s partially part of their fees, I imagine. But that’s the thing that always drives me crazy is these brands that you know, oh, you know, I want my ads to perform better. I want my SEO to perform better, I need retention to perform better, blah, blah. But then you send people to a website and it’s like, well, that’s your problem. And to your point, the big differentiator is on Amazon, you only have so much control, right? And it’s very little.

Andrew Maff 00:31:43  Whereas off Amazon you could upsell them on this. You can email them about that. You can do whatever you need to do to extremely, extend that lifetime value or, and or increase that average order value. And so that’s where things become a lot more profitable now. the stuff you mentioned about Prime is actually not accurate. So as the, biathlon is very confusing and it’s something I talked about all the time. They have a Shopify app and then they also have a I just call it like the widget. Right. So if you’re on WooCommerce or BigCommerce, they give you like a different thing for a while. The Shopify app, in my opinion, and I hope I’m saying this, but I hated the Shopify. It drove me crazy. It didn’t have all the functionality I wanted. The widget had everything the widget had, so it had a cart. And the cart has an option to turn on upsells. So as long as people are buying from you through Buyer Prime and you have other buy the Prime products, you can turn that on.

Andrew Maff 00:32:30  And so when people add to that by the prime cart, it’ll show you like, oh, add to this card, add this to your card. So it has those upsell opportunities. Then of course you also have the reviews. You can pull the reviews from Amazon. We usually do like a tabbing system. So you have like website reviews. And then someone can click and then they show Amazon reviews. And that helps from a social proof perspective and SEO and all that fun stuff. Then they also like six months ago released that you can use the actual Prime logo as well as, you know, the expected delivery date on collection pages as well as your page. So if you click the Buy Prime button, it would add to the cart, and then you would go through the cart and you would check out and you would buy through the prime stuff. The problem that I had with that was it was lacking the ability to purchase other stuff outside of the prime products. So if you’re a company that only has certain products that are available for buying the Prime, you couldn’t let your consumer buy something else at the same time they literally check out twice.

Andrew Maff 00:33:15  The problem I had there was, the obvious, but with the Buy Prime side A, having them check out twice was just insane. But then even then the you’re, you’re basically asking them to complete their purchase, like be done here on the Shopify side, for whatever reason, reviews weren’t available for a little bit. They are now finally and then literally as of today’s as of recording, this is Wednesday. So a week ago today. So I was recording this was in February. They finally announced, they finally released a new Shopify app. And the new Shopify app has mixed cart. So you actually still something I’m trying to figure out with them. The Buy Prime button is actually a one click checkout. So you click it, it sends you to like hey, login real quick. And then you’re you check out and you’re done. What you can do, though, is get rid of the button. Have add to cart just like you normally would. Let people add to your cart into your cart.

Andrew Maff 00:33:59  There’s nothing different there, but once you get to Shopify’s checkout, there’s an express checkout option that is by with Prime. And so now it has mixed cart. People can buy stuff that’s just by the Prime, and they can buy stuff that is not by prime. And they can check out one time, and then Amazon will just ship whatever’s by prime eligible. And the other stuff will obviously ship on its own. So they finally fixed that problem. There’s still some stuff about the experience and like the ways that they say certain things and like kind of confusing for a consumer, but it’s getting there. I have their fee structure, so there’s no FBA fees, but they do have a small commission, which as of right now I think it’s like 3%. But then they use fulfillment fulfillment costs, right? So I have typically found if a product is less than like 30, $35, it doesn’t always make sense. What’s making it more complicated now that while it’s a benefit, it makes it harder for me to figure out the math.

Andrew Maff 00:34:45  They did also release now that if someone if you have a product line where people order like 4 or 5, six units at a time and they get that many through by the time they reduce your fulfillment costs. And so that’s where it becomes kind of complicated. So you could have a $20 product, but if you’ve got so many upsells and people are getting 4 or 5 units per order, it might be justifiable. So that’s where that becomes kind of complicated. But typically what we see and what we usually suggest from a marketing perspective, like that’s all from a user side of things, but from the marketing perspective, we suggest integrate it with everything you can and start to build out that audience so that you own Amazon’s data so you can have a segmented audience in klaviyo of Amazon seller. So you can have a direct purchase conversion and Google that is segmenting out prime purchasers or same thing through meta, so that if you do a product launch on Amazon, when you’ve got that like 30 to 60 day honeymoon period or whatever, you can drive traffic straight to Amazon to get the benefit there.

Andrew Maff 00:35:30  Or maybe you’re having a Prime Day sale, or maybe you have warehouse issues and you want to sell out some certain products. So having that data is very interesting. And then as of September, they announced that if you have DSP and you have Byward Prime on your website, you can actually drive traffic from Amazon back to your website using DSP. So brands that have subscriptions, I find that to be a very interesting approach. And we’ve seen a lot of brands really starting to lean in on that or if you have clear upsell stuff. So it’s great to use if you really view Amazon, kind of like I do as a customer acquisition channel, a great place for people to find your product where you’re probably not going to get fantastic margin, and now you can just upsell them to come back to your site to either subscribe or purchase something else so that you can keep that margin going forward.

Josh Hadley 00:36:06  Awesome. Love that. All right. Final thing here, Andrew, as we start to wrap things up here would be what’s your experience with TikTok shop and even with your clients.

Josh Hadley 00:36:14  Do you do much on TikTok shop? Where does the TikTok strategy come into play here for any of these brands?

Andrew Maff 00:36:19  it’s very similar to the meta side. In fact, usually one of the things we suggest is basically if once you find something successful on meta, it’s a little bit easier to replicate this very similar concept on TikTok. They’re basically direct knockoffs of each other. If you’ve ever gotten a TikTok ad platform like it’s almost like meta. So it’s a great way to kind of take the big audience, learn, and then move over to TikTok and go from there. TikTok shop is very interesting. It’s definitely a certain product types that do really well. Very differentiated things do very well, very things that look really interesting, do very well. Obviously anything that would do well that could potentially go viral and social or something like that is what does well there. It’s the other stuff. If you have like a MeToo product or, you know, really anything that’s just kind of like it’s speculation of whether someone likes it or not.

Andrew Maff 00:36:57  TikTok job can be very challenging. but there are still ways that you can obviously kind of correlate all that stuff together too.

Josh Hadley 00:37:04  Awesome. Great, Andrew. As I wrap things up here, I’d love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. So here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. You let me know if you think there’s something missing. Action item number one is it sounds like, as you talked about moving off of Amazon, one of the foundational pieces that you’re going to need to have is going to be really good creative. It’s going to be do you have UGC? Do you have like if you’re going to start advertising, whether it be on meta or on TikTok, right, that you’re going to need some creative. So my first action item is this if you’re only on Amazon right now, my first thing word of advice for you is to double down on reaching out to creators. And you can easily do this through Amazon’s Creator Connection program. And then you could also do that through TikTok shop, right.

Josh Hadley 00:37:48  And you can also do that on Instagram, but go and find creators. And I would just do micro-influencers at this point to just give them free product and say, hey, will you create some some videos for us? And in that one thing you do need to make sure that you do is when you give them those samples, say, hey. And in exchange for this, I want the ability to be able to repurpose these videos because if something’s good, I want to be able to run an ad for it. And so if you do that first and foremost and you’re already succeeding on Amazon, A, it’s obviously going to help your sales on Amazon. But be it becomes the foundation for scaling your brand off of Amazon, which then leads to action item number two. If you’ve already got this UGC creative, what you mentioned, Andrew, is like you help people dip their toes in the water to see like, hey, is there room for growing off of Amazon for your brand? And so take some of those UGC videos that have that have tended to get a decent amount of views.

Josh Hadley 00:38:37  Light up some meta ads behind them. Even some TikTok ads. Turn on some Google advertising. Try to send that traffic just directly to Amazon using your brand attribution link, as you mentioned. And hey, if you can break even, that’s that’s a good sign that, hey, if you were to actually build out a dedicated sales funnel for this, you’d probably be able to be that much more successful. So Action item number three is exactly that, rather than, I think, one of the the big things that you touched on is a lot of brands think, hey, I’ve got 20 different SKUs, I need to go create a custom Shopify site that I’m featured in all of these 20 different SKUs. I think if you’re taking the baby steps into the DTC world, your best thing to do is take your best seller and try to move it off of Amazon, which means creating a single standalone sales funnel. It’s not coming out with a custom code and Shopify and end all be all storefront. It’s can I build a sales funnel? And there’s lots of different apps that you could do this through, build a standalone sales funnel, then direct some of that meta ad and even the Google ads into that sales funnel.

Josh Hadley 00:39:31  Can you increase your average order value? Can you increase your customer lifetime value through maybe introducing a membership program? One of our recent episodes, we talked about how some of the best brands and the smartest brands right now are creating membership and reoccurring revenue streams into their business, even though they don’t have a a product that people need to have on repeat subscription, so to speak. Right? It’s easy for us to look at like the supplements and say, hey, yeah, I need this is a 30 day pill bottle, right? I needed every 30 days. But can you take something as simple as like, hey, a t shirt brand, right? And we use that as the case study and they’ve got a simple membership program that you pay. I think it was like 25 bucks a year. You get discounts and free shipping on their their website, but now you’ve got reoccurring revenue coming into your business. So that’s the strategy. When you go DTC, you’ve got to be thinking more than, hey, I just need to sell this one unit for $25 or whatever that price is it.

Josh Hadley 00:40:21  I want to sell 3 or 4 of those items and get them to cross purchase other items and ideally get into a reoccurring revenue model. That’s where the juice is worth the squeeze on the DTC side. And and Amazon truly does become kind of like your foundation and funnel to just get traffic into your brand awareness. And then a lot of the magic happens in this dedicated sales funnel. So those are my three action items for people. Andrew. Anything you think I’m missing that we need to share with the audience?

Andrew Maff 00:40:44  No, I think you nailed it. I think the only thing I would say to kind of blanket over all of that is that brands just have to be wary of the, the meta concept. Right? Like, and I realize now saying that out loud why that doesn’t sound not the you know what I mean. So like they they hear these things at like, masterminds and stuff and they’re like, oh, this guy crushed on TikTok. This guy’s doing great on his website. This guy is doing this.

Andrew Maff 00:41:04  And these guys do that. And they go, oh, me too. Let me get on that and let me also go do that. It doesn’t work that way. Right? That’s their business. That’s a very different. Every product, every customer and every business owner are extremely different. So just because you know some person who did their meta ads in this way, with this creative and this approach does not mean it’s going to work for you every time. Meta ads may not work for you right out the gate. You might want to start with Google. I know some brands that crush it on Microsoft ads because they have an older audience, and it’s not the most tech savvy people that use it, so that’s another fantastic way. So while the concept is there, the execution of it is where people can really hurt themselves. So that’s that comes down to the standards of knowing your customer, knowing where they’re at, and knowing that platform that you’re leaning in on.

Josh Hadley 00:41:41  Yeah, I love that. I think that is a super valuable principle.

Josh Hadley 00:41:44  Just because it’s working for one other brand doesn’t mean that’s the exact playbook that you need to go rip and steal. Now, it can be some good inspiration, but you’ve got to go figure out what’s going to work for your own brand, and that’s going to require testing. And you got you got to venture out into it yourself. So I love that. All right Andrew, I’d love to ask each guest the following three questions to wrap it all up. So number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve run and why?

Andrew Maff 00:42:06  there is a book, Top of Mind by John Hall that I really liked. That was, you know, it’s very much from a marketing perspective, how to stay top of mind. But he also kind of touches on, like, just throughout your life sort of thing. But it’s a very like, you know, a lot of brands they’ll do stuff to like, hey, I want the purchase now. I want the purchase now. But think about this scenario.

Andrew Maff 00:42:24  to give you an example, we work with a pretty good sized paint brand. Unless you’re painting a room, I don’t you’re not going to buy anything from me right now, so I need to be top of mind. That book was really good to kind of have some of those principles at the forefront.

Josh Hadley 00:42:35  Awesome. I have not heard that book yet, so I added that to my list. Check it out. All right, next question. What is your favorite AI tool or ChatGPT prompt that you’ve been using?

Andrew Maff 00:42:44  Oh man. ChatGPT. I mean, that thing is amazing. It’s just become like a buddy of mine. Sometimes I’ll just message him like, how’s your day going? it’s, Is that a prompt? we we, I would say that we’ve had a lot of success with Jasper, which has been around, I think even possibly might have been like right at the start of ChatGPT or even before. I’m not sure if they’ve been around for a long time. but when you’re trying to build out content on a very consistent basis, copy can be monotonous after a while.

Andrew Maff 00:43:14  And so what we run into is, like people start to kind of venture off and let you know their creative juices kind of go in different areas. And the nice thing about the Jasper AI side is, you know, you can really segment brand voice and explain, like, you know, for this brand, this is what we want to stay focused on. And as you edit it, then anything else we create for that brand stays that way. So we lean on that. so like our writers oversee the still the process, everything still accurate. But that platform has been really nice for cooperation.

Josh Hadley 00:43:37  Yeah, Jasper is a really good one for copywriting. All right, third and final question here. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?

Andrew Maff 00:43:48  I mean, Kevin King was on the show. I’d give him some love. That guy’s awesome. Every time I read something from his, like, should I follow him on LinkedIn and stuff? I’m like, genius.

Andrew Maff 00:43:53  That makes a ton of sense. he tends to be, one I’m leaning on. Then there’s the marketers that are that are kind of blanket across everything. Like Neil Patel is fantastic. Gary Vee, when he’s not telling me how to wake up in the morning, I do appreciate everything he does from a marketing perspective. so but yeah, if I had to pick someone strictly on the e-com side, Kevin King, knows his stuff.

Josh Hadley 00:44:10  Awesome. Great recommendation as well. Andrew. This has been a lot of fun. If people want to learn more about you, they want to learn more about the agency. Where can they contact you at?

Andrew Maff 00:44:18  wherever you want. Andrew at Blue Tuskr.com. Or just head over to Blue Tuskr.com. It’s Blue Tuskr.com or even Andrew Maff. Com I’ve got my own stuff up there too. so whichever you prefer.

Josh Hadley 00:44:28  Awesome. Well Andrew, thanks for coming on the show today.

Andrew Maff 00:44:31  Thank you. Thanks for having me.