In this episode, host Josh interviews Will Russell, CEO of Russell Marketing, about effective strategies for launching e-commerce products. Will shares his five-step framework, emphasizing audience building through paid ads, partnerships, virality, and organic growth. They discuss practical tactics for Amazon sellers, such as using product insert cards with QR codes, leveraging surveys for product validation, and segmenting email lists for launch campaigns. Will highlights the importance of nurturing existing customers and using their feedback for product development. The episode offers actionable insights for entrepreneurs aiming to maximize launch success and scale their businesses efficiently.

Chapters:

Introduction to Will Russell and Russell Marketing (00:00:00)
Will Russell’s background, agency achievements, and book introduction.

Strategies for Building an Engaged Audience Pre-Launch (00:00:55)
Overview of paid acquisition, piggybacking/partnerships, virality, and organic growth for audience building.

Piggybacking and Partnerships Explained (00:01:20)
How to leverage existing communities and partnerships to access target audiences.

Virality and Organic Growth (00:02:47)
Discussion of viral marketing, influencer strategies, and the role of organic content.

Summary of Audience-Building Approaches (00:03:53)
Recap of paid, partnership, viral, and organic methods for audience growth.

Leveraging Existing Customer Bases for Product Validation (00:05:07)
Using current customers for product validation, feedback, and preorders to reduce launch risk.

The Value of Existing Communities in Launches (00:07:11)
How established audiences give a head start and lower costs for new product launches.

Applying the Five-Step Framework to Amazon Sellers (00:08:14)
Host introduces actionable takeaways, adapting Will’s framework for Amazon product launches.

Step 1: Product Validation Tactics (00:09:26)
Using product inserts, QR codes, and Amazon analytics to validate new product ideas.

Step 2: Audience Building and Customer Surveys (00:10:37)
Reaching out to existing customers, using surveys to identify pain points and refine products.

Step 3: Audience Engagement During Product Development (00:11:50)
Keeping customers involved in product design and updates to build anticipation and loyalty.

Step 4: Conversion Strategies and List Segmentation (00:13:05)
Segmenting email lists for staggered launch campaigns to optimize Amazon ranking and conversions.

Step 5: Scaling and Ongoing Audience Engagement (00:14:02)
Using product inserts and ongoing engagement to prepare for future launches and scale the business.

Review Research and Copywriting Insights (00:14:28)
Using competitor reviews for product development and marketing language.

Segmentation Strategies for Different Launch Models (00:15:19)
How to segment audiences for Amazon vs. crowdfunding launches, prioritizing likely converters.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts (00:17:01)
Recap, book recommendation, and closing remarks.

Links and Mentions:

Advertising Tools:
“Facebook Ads“: “00:01:20”
“Google Ads“: “00:01:20”
“Reddit Ads“: “00:01:20”
“Amazon Brand Analytics“: “00:10:37”

Books:
“Take Your Idea from Light Bulb Moment to Profitable Business in Record Time” by Will Russell: “00:00:52”

Marketing Concepts and Strategies:
“Piggybacking”: “00:01:20”
“Virality”: “00:02:47”
“Organic Growth”: “00:03:53”
“Customer Surveys”: “00:06:02”
“Product Insert Cards”: “00:09:26”
“Segmentation for Email/Text Lists”: “00:13:05”

Content and Influencer Strategies:
“User-Generated Content”: “00:02:47”
“Influencer Marketing”: “00:02:47”
“Referral Strategies”: “00:02:47”

Transcript:

Josh 00:00:00  Today I’m super excited to introduce you to Will Russell. He is the CEO and founder of Russell Marketing. Russell Marketing is an innovative digital agency specializing in e-commerce launch marketing. To date, they have generated more than 25 million in revenue for over 300 new entrepreneurs. Will has been featured on Forbes, Business Insider, Crain’s New York Start-Up nation and many more. Will also has launched the Russell Gibbs Foundation, a family foundation that offers grants and mentorship to 501 C3 partners committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. In November of 2022, Will’s first book launch in five. Take your Idea From Light Bulb Moment to Profitable Business in Record Time, was published by Nicholas Brealey. So welcome to the show, Will.

Will 00:00:52  Thank you. Thanks for having me, Josh. It’s a real pleasure to be here.

Josh 00:00:55  When you talk about building an engaged, you know, audience or, you know, building it up a The following. What are what are the channels or strategies to kind of build this following of people before you’ve even launched a product?

Will 00:01:15  By and large, most people are going to lean heavily into paid acquisition.

Will 00:01:20  And so, you know, that means paying Facebook or Google or Reddit for ad space and driving traffic using those methods. Now, not everyone has big budgets. They can just plug in. To do that, I always suggest paid acquisition because frankly, is the quickest and easiest way of getting from where you are to where you need to be. But I understand not everyone has the budget. So for those who don’t have those budgets, or for those who don’t want to rely entirely on those budgets, there’s a few other avenues you really look to. One is piggybacking. And so by piggybacking, we’re looking for partners or like minded communities that already we have the people we want, and we want to build a connection with the managers or the founders of those communities and essentially piggyback on top of the success they’ve had to get access to these people. So examples of that might be, maybe you don’t want to put $10,000 into a Facebook ad campaign, but maybe you could purchase an advertising spot or in a particular media websites newsletter, or you could write a guest post, or you could do some sort of exchange post promotional exchange with them over a period of six months, where maybe front end of that relationship, they’re helping you, but then towards the back end, you’re going to balance that out more and start helping them in different ways.

Will 00:02:47  So piggybacking and looking at those kind of partnerships is a really good route. Another effort we’re going to look to is virality. It’s a tough one because it’s you know, there are obviously elements to what makes something viral and, and checkboxes that you can go through. But there’s always an element of luck there. You don’t really know for sure whether a big effort to go viral is going to work. And so it can be a bit of a risk, but virality and that can be things such as word of mouth, marketing strategies, referral strategies and fun content, user generated content, things like ambassadors or affiliate marketing. We might even include some influencer marketing in that. So we’ve got the virality is certainly a good a good path to go. If you don’t want to lean into pushing too much of your budget into paid ads, and then I mean, the fourth and longest one, I suppose is is the organic, you know, people that don’t have big budgets and and maybe don’t excel. I don’t have any partners or I don’t have.

Will 00:03:53  I can’t make things viral. They can’t get great videos created. If you get pushing back on a lot of different areas, then the way to go would be organic and that’s going to be slow and steady, but it’s going to be going through your social channels, posting relevant content. Being an interesting person, being interesting brand. And over time we’re then going to build up that community. If you’re going to go that route, you wouldn’t be working with someone like us, because the whole point of working with us is we’re going to do this quickly and in a short time frame. But organic is a perfectly good way to go. And many, many of the early brands in e-commerce did exactly that and have been very successful through that methodology. So if you’re not going to get paid, I would go. Page. That’s always my recommendation. But if you’re not going to lean heavily into paid acquisition, then we’re always looking at piggybacking in partnerships and looking at virality and opportunities there, and then also looking at how can we organically get visibility.

Josh 00:04:48  That’s awesome. Makes makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense. Will you’ve shared a lot of knowledge with us. And I love your five step framework here and process to launch new products. Is there anything that we haven’t covered yet that you think our audience needs to know about launching products and having success from the get go?

Will 00:05:07  I think the main thing I would note, and this is very applicable to folks that already have existing e-commerce businesses and existing customer bases, is to is to use them, you know, in a, in a, in a positive way. But your answers are there and, and and if you’re a new entrepreneur, you do have to spend money to build up your audiences. If you already have an audience because you already have a community, then you don’t need to invest that time in doing it. You can run a validation with your own community without spending any evidence, and you can understand what does your community want. You know what product advances, accessories, upsells are really interested in purchasing? What’s missing in your existing, product set that people are people are seeking? you can do that through simple things like surveys.

Will 00:06:02  You can do that through driving traffic, from the email newsletter to them to seven pages and seeing what their intent is and so on and so forth. And then to tie that back to something you mentioned earlier, Josh is releasing new products, and I think that that ties in nicely with the fact that it’s so much easier, especially in 2022, to sell more to a customer than to get a new customer. And that’s always been the case. You know, that’s something that best practices existed for a long time. But I would say especially in the last couple of years, we’ve dealt with the way things are going with the competitive costs of the digital space. with some of the challenges we’ve seen this year with the economy and recession and this and that, there’s no one it’s going to be easier for you to generate more revenue from and provide more value to than someone who knows you and trusts you. So when it is about, launching your products, when it is about generating revenue, as you said, and I would just point wholeheartedly to an existing community, if you want to go through this launch system and you have an existing community.

Will 00:07:11  You’re already so far ahead of all the entrepreneurs that don’t. And that this is such a, a low cost and and verifiable and tangible path to just rolling out new products. And like we spoke about before, you don’t even have to develop the product, you know, especially if you have an existing community. It can be a case of, oh, we are thinking about X, Y, and Z and encouraging feedback on those, on those thoughts and even collecting down payments or deposits or preorders. So you are, in fact, getting that revenue before you’re even manufacturing the product. So that’s all to say, you know, if you have an existing community or if you’re about to launch a business and you’re building a community for that business, and you’re thinking longer term, thinking about what those additional products that you can add to that development timeline and using your customers to make those decisions for you. This is so important and such a cost saver in longer term profitability.

Josh 00:08:09  Yeah. Well, I think you summarized things really well there.

Josh 00:08:14  Especially for many of our listeners who are established business owners, this isn’t their first product launch. They’ve already got a portfolio or a catalog of products. now will at the end of each episode, I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode. What I’m going to do a little bit differently today, though, is I’m going to take your kind of five step framework or model that you talked about and really kind of apply it to our listeners that are primarily launching products on Amazon and dive even deeper to kind of what you just recently talked about there with an existing audience. So number one is you’ve got to validate that product. This goes back to the importance of creating product insert cards, right? So that when your customers with all of your existing products, when they when they get their product and it arrives, there’s got to be some type of product insert, or maybe it’s on your product label or packaging that shows a QR code with some type of hook, or enticement to get them to join your email list.

Josh 00:09:26  Or preferably, they’re a text list because your SMS marketing is going to be much more responsive. Higher open rates, higher click through rates than email. But you’ve got to start gathering your audience. So while you’re in the validation phase, you can reach out to your audience just like will mention. And you can say, hey, we are thinking of creating this type of new product. If you’re interested, respond or click this link or whatever it is so that you can start to gauge interest. That’s a really, really good way. But then number two, you can use the validation tools that we all have on Amazon Go. Use Amazon Brand Analytics and go determine right what type of market market opportunity is there, how many keywords would be there supporting that type of product? What is the search volume for those keywords and? And how many different keywords can you find that are truly relevant that would drive traffic to that product, right. Those are all the components that would comprise your validation stage. Then you move into number two is kind of building up that audience.

Josh 00:10:37  So again, as an established business, you should already have, your target audience, you should already have a list of customers that have previously purchased from you. So reach out to them, like I mentioned earlier, and send them a quick email or text that says, hey, I’m thinking of doing this. Complete this survey if you’re interested. And here’s one of the most powerful things in that survey. One of the best questions I would recommend that you ask is when it comes to whatever product this is, when it comes to using, you know, kitchen spatulas, for example, what is the biggest obstacle, frustration or challenge that you face? Write and let customers respond in their own words and hopefully you will find patterns in there that will then help you kind of pivot and even reformulate what your new product offering could be to truly solve the pain points of the customers. then you move into engaging with that audience. One of the best things that we’ve done is we’ll kind of follow that similar pattern in our own business.

Josh 00:11:50  We’ll say, hey, we’re thinking of creating this product. We’ll send it out to our text list, and we have people join a separate text list if they’re interested. Then we keep them updated with the product development. All right. So we’re thinking of coming out with five different types of variations or designs or whatever it is. And we show it and we say, hey, here’s ten, but we need to narrow it down to five. Select your favorite five. Right. And they feel like they’re part of this process. And then we ask them various questions. Do you think this needs to include any racer or does it need a marker? Or you know, what extra accessories do you think would would make this the complete package for you? Right? Ask all of those questions and you’re building this engaged audience that is honestly going to be chomping at the bit asking, when is this going to become available? Because they’ve been so invested in the product creation at the same time. Then when it comes to conversions, specifically on Amazon, one of the things I would encourage you to do is if you have a list of 100,000 email subscribers or people that have or let’s boil it down to even 1000, right? Because this this applies to no matter the size of your list.

Josh 00:13:05  But break them up into individual buckets. Because if you go back to the way when we all were launching products five years ago on Amazon, there was that C.P.R. number which still does exist today that gives you like, here’s the average daily sales that you should be meeting in order to get ranked on page number one. And so spread out your lunch over a seven day period to say, hey, I’m going to send, you know, I have 1000 email, you know, subscribers. Break that up into, you know, I’m going to send out campaigns Monday. It’s going to go to 150 people. Tuesday it’s going to go to 150 people, so on and so forth. So that you’re continuing to prime that engine day after day, and Amazon will start picking up on that rather than seeing one huge spike, one huge blip on the radar, which Amazon doesn’t really give a whole lot of love to at this point. So spread that out. And then last but not least, is being able to scale that.

Josh 00:14:02  So that goes back into including product inserts on your new product to continue to engage and build with that new audience in preparation for your new launch. So those are some of my ideas. That’s how you can specifically apply it to seven figure sellers that are looking to scale to eight figures and beyond. Will, what are your thoughts? Is there anything you think I’m missing there or anything else you would like to add on to those thoughts?

Will 00:14:28  I mean, you just spot on and we could we could speak about each of those in in so much depth. The two things you said that I want to reiterate because I think they’re so important. You talked about, collecting open ended responses and using that information to understand pain points and so on. I think along those lines, something we do a lot of is, is review research. And so we spend a lot of time on Amazon reviewing competitive products and understanding what are people saying about those products and the reviews and then using those, those open ended responses, not just to help decide what exactly what product we want to knowledge, but to actually speak about that product in the same language and colloquialisms that the customers have been using elsewhere.

Will 00:15:19  So I think that research period of collecting open ended answers is useful not just to help decide what path you want to go, but for the specific copywriting you want to be using in that launch approach. So I thought that was a very valuable insight you added. And then you also mentioned segmentation. And when you first mentioned it, I was thinking about it in a slightly different way than what you said, because you did apply it very specifically to Amazon, which is that’s exactly how I launched my book. I had a, you know, list of 200 people and 30 a day over that first week. When you’re thinking about launching in different ways, you can consider segmentation, perhaps in slightly different manners. For example, if someone was crowdfunding versus Amazon, then you are going to want that big book. And so rather than thinking about segmentation just in, kind of chronology, over the course of a week, we think about segmentation, those launches in terms of priority to convert like likely to convert and and we do it over the course of a day rather than the course of a the week.

Will 00:16:23  So first thing first segment is going to go out is going to be the people who we feel extremely confident are going to convert the last people. We send an email to you that day or text message to that day, are the people who we think are probably the least likely. And and the reason that is, is because those people who are least likely are going to need more social proof, more credibility to make that purchasing decision. And so we want sales to come in comments to have come in. You’ve used to have come in before that segment reaches the page and the sales offer. So those are both very good. specific things you mentioned, Josh, that I thought was spot on. Yeah.

Josh 00:17:01  Awesome. Thanks for tying that up in a bow there, Will. I think you did a great job even expounding on a couple of those ideas. Well, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much. I, you know, recommend our listeners go check out your book, give it a purchase, and help out another fellow entrepreneur.

Josh 00:17:21  So thank you, Will, for coming on the show today.

Will 00:17:23  Thanks so much, Josh, being a real pleasure.