In this episode, host Josh interviews Eric Kooymans, an online marketing expert with 18 years of experience. Eric shares actionable strategies for e-commerce growth, including in-depth keyword research, competitor and paid ad analysis, and cost per acquisition estimation. He emphasizes the importance of product bundling, expanding sales channels, and leveraging tools like SEMrush and Facebook Ad Library. Eric offers practical tips on using Google and Facebook Shopping integrations and provides advice for building sustainable, scalable e-commerce brands that attract long-term investment.
Chapters:
Introduction to Eric Kooymans and His Expertise (00:00:00)
Eric’s background, experience, and notable clients in e-commerce and online marketing.
Starting a Growth Strategy: Self-Audit & Audience Analysis (00:01:34)
Initial steps for developing a growth plan: self-audit, understanding target audience, and identifying customer problems.
Keyword Research and Demand Analysis (00:02:05)
Using tools like Keyword Keg, SEMrush, and Google Keyword Planner to analyze search volume, demand, and seasonal trends.
Building a Demand Growth Strategy (00:02:56)
Translating keyword research into a demand-driven business strategy, considering seasonality and cost per acquisition.
Evaluating Cost per Acquisition and Product Bundling (00:03:52)
Assessing average order value, cost per acquisition, and the importance of bundling products for profitability.
Keyword Research Tools and Competitor Analysis (00:04:41)
Comparing keyword research tools and introducing competitor analysis using SEMrush for deeper market insights.
Deep Dive into Competitor Analysis (00:05:36)
How to audit competitors, analyze their strengths, weaknesses, and identify cost-effective keyword opportunities.
Paid Advertising and Ad Analysis (00:06:52)
Conducting paid ad research using SEMrush, SpyFu, and Facebook Ad Library to understand competitors’ ad strategies.
Estimating Cost per Acquisition with Industry Data (00:08:50)
Using WordStream and industry benchmarks to estimate cost per acquisition and conversion rates before launching campaigns.
Optimizing Product Assortment and Bundling (00:11:24)
Developing product bundles and assortments that increase average order value and align with customer passion.
Actionable Takeaway 1: Activate Shopping Channels (00:12:37)
Quick win: Turn on Google Shopping, Facebook Shopping, and use plugins to expand product reach.
Actionable Takeaway 2: Focus on Product Bundles (00:13:49)
Group winning products into bundles or seasonal packages to improve ad ROI and scale growth.
Actionable Takeaway 3: Expand to New Marketplaces (00:14:44)
Leverage platforms like Faire and other marketplaces to increase exposure and test new channels with bestsellers.
Closing Remarks and Resources (00:15:58)
Eric thanks the host, offers to answer questions, and mentions show notes with additional resources.
Links and Mentions:
Keyword Keg: “00:02:05”
SEMrush: “00:02:05”
Google Keyword Planner: “00:02:05”
SpyFu: “00:07:14”
Facebook Ads Library: “00:07:14”
WordStream: “00:09:48”
Sales and Orders: “00:13:19”
Transcript:
Josh 00:00:00 Today I am super excited to introduce you to Eric Kooymans. Eric is an online marketing expert with over 18 years of experience in e-commerce development, search engine optimization, Facebook ads, influencer marketing and much more. With a portfolio boasting over 180 different companies including the American Cancer Society, passion, passion, City Church and Chris Tomlin. Eric’s specialties include WordPress, Shopify and Magento e-commerce, as well as various marketing automation tools like Activecampaign and HubSpot. Get ready to learn from the best of in this business on today’s podcast. So with that introduction, welcome to the show, Eric.
Eric 00:00:42 Thank you for having me. I appreciate your time.
Josh 00:00:44 Every single listener is going to want to hear, like, what are those growth strategies that you implement? Right? What are those the tactical things that you do that help diversify, provide comfort. But I think it’s not even just the aspect of diversification. I think it is building a comprehensive brand that private equity truly would be hungry to acquire, right? Because they don’t just see you as a fly by night Amazon seller.
Josh 00:01:14 You had success on that, but you can’t repeat that success anywhere else. so Eric, let’s let’s dive into those strategies. Somebody comes to you, you know, how do you work them or how do you start to develop that 6 to 24 month, you know, growth strategy? I guess ramp up for them.
Eric 00:01:34 Sounds good. Yeah. So the first off, before we do it, we basically have we want to ask the basic questions and we kind of we normally have a little questionnaire that we have that we’ll provide in the show notes. But the big question that you always want to kind of do a kind of little self audit. And we need to be able to understand, you know, who you are, who is the target audience? You know, what specifically is their problem or what are they looking for? Like what’s their big, you know, when they’re looking for your products? Kind of. What is that? What are we think of that is kind of what’s the keywords, what’s the what’s the the symptom or the problem that they’re having.
Eric 00:02:05 And then with that, also, when it comes to the types of gifts or ways that this product could be used in, if it were to be a, a type of a gift or a, you know, holiday type thing. We put together all the different audiences and we do what we call the keyword research around that. And that’s basically using cool tools like, keyword keg. there’s also, SEMrush. There’s also Google, Keyword Planner, but these are tools that we put it in there. And that basically tells us over the last 12 months what is the search volume and not just what we think we want to offer, but what are all the other things that we never thought of. And from there, we’re then able to kind of have a lay of the land of what’s the demand? Then we put together what we call the demand growth strategy, which basically is a how do we build our business around where the opportunity is. We don’t want to just go buy a whole bunch of products and hope it works.
Eric 00:02:56 We actually have to plan for it. And so the way that we do that is, is we understand what’s the demand and what how many people are searching for what. And then and that’s not just only at what times of the year as well, because you want to know what our seasonal business is. And if you have something that’s big and and at Christmas time, well, how do you get busy in the summertime? You know, how do you not have the slow months? And how do you build products in a company around a sustainable growth strategy with that? And so we really kind of look at the seasonal trends. and then lastly, when you look at the keyword research, we’re then able to understand what’s the average cost per click and, and what the key thing to note is that is that if we were to go say, let’s go do this, let’s go and put together, a strategy, what is the average cost per acquisition? And those are the things that really allow us to say, hey, I would love to do this, but if my product is $19 or my product is 14, or if it’s 29, does that work? And and there’s some sweet spots with that we can go over a little bit later.
Eric 00:03:52 But you know, those are some things that that we really have to think about with the keyword research. I offer this one product, but how do I build a bundle of products? How do I get it, where the numbers make sense? And really, when we think about this whole growth strategy, is has been how we’re going to where we’re going to go. We have to understand what’s our what is the sweet spot of a cost per acquisition, sorry, of a average order value that allows us to scale. That includes all the costs, all the marketing and all the revenue and the team that we need to manage it, you know, and that’s and that’s that’s kind of the key to that success.
Josh 00:04:25 Makes a lot of sense when you’re doing that demand, I guess, the demand growth planning. And are you using Google Keyword Planner to validate the search volume for those keywords and the average cost per click for those, or are there other tools that you’re using?
Eric 00:04:41 Yeah. So Google Keyword Planner used to be great back in the day, but they actually started limiting people’s data based off of how much you spend.
Eric 00:04:48 And so it’s not really as good as it used to be. So we use a tool called Keyword Keg. It’s like 40 bucks a month. And it allows you to do it. And it allows you to see what the search volume is by Google. It allows you to see what the search volume is on, on, on Amazon, on YouTube, on on being on all the different tools, and then when you do it, you can export the data and it’ll actually give you the 12 month trend. And so that’s, that’s that’s really kind of the goal. And and it’ll give you a bunch of different ideas and that that’s, that’s from a keyword research tool that’s kind of the primary one that we use. when it comes to a competitor analysis tool, you know, we never want to jump into pool unless we know it’s going to work. So so with that, we also do a deep competitor analysis. We’ll just say, okay, I think I want to do this product. You know, maybe we have, you know, for example, a t shirt, you know, brand.
Eric 00:05:36 And maybe we want to go look at what are some accessories, maybe that’s a hat, a hoodie or whatever that it might be. Well, in that situation we then do the keyword research around that, see what the big opportunities are, and then do use a tool called SEMrush, which allows us to put in the URLs that are there, and it tells us how this business is doing. Is it trending up? Is it trending down? How many backlinks does it have? What is the site authority. But the the last big thing and the most important big thing is where do they get all the traffic. They would gives us a list of all the rankings that they currently have. So then we can say, hey, if this competitor where they are. Against us, this is how well they’re doing. And maybe they’ve done a bad job and maybe they’re doing a great job. But the whole point is, is we want to do an audit on everybody that’s in the space that we’re going to go up against and learn what we don’t know.
Eric 00:06:24 And that’s how we that’s how we scale. We get everybody’s good nuggets and all the good stuff that Google provides and put together a great strategy. And not just the best, the best, the top ones, but what’s the cost effective ones, you know, what are those tail terms that are middle of the road, that are good, that are cost effective, that we could then go and scale on and be able to go from there?
Josh 00:06:42 I love that makes a lot of sense. All right. So we’ve now got our demand growth strategy based on the keyword research. Then kind of what’s the next step from there.
Eric 00:06:52 Yep yep. So the last piece or the second piece of this, we just talked about the we had the keyword research and then the competitor analysis. The next piece is also we need to do a little bit of a paid analysis. And what we mean by that is that we want to know all the ads and all of the, the if we’re going to do look at doing paid marketing, we need to understand how are things going and who’s doing it.
Eric 00:07:14 And what we mean by that is on SEMrush, there’s also another tool called spy fu that allows us to put in the URLs, and it will show us all of the Google ads and the search ads that people are running. And that tells us to say, what’s their hot button? Are they offering free shipping? Are they not, you know, are they offering whatever discounts? You know, kind of what is it? And then with that, on Facebook, they have a tool called Facebook Library, and it will show us all the ads that somebody run. And, and you can really see it where they have like one version and they like change it to 100 different times. They’re like, hey, that’s probably got some legs. So that, that that’s a good one that’s working for them. Or if it’s just only one and done, they’re using video or not, you know, what are those opportunities. Because if we’re going to go do some that do some ads and pay for some marketing, we want to make sure it works.
Eric 00:07:59 We don’t want to like hope it works. And so that’s that’s kind of the big thing. You just need to know what we got going up against and to understand how many competitors what’s the average cost per acquisition. And can we afford to play in the space and maybe we need to take some. Make some tweaks. Maybe we need to make our average order value a little bit higher. Maybe we need to not do that $59 price point, which is kind of that sweet spot that we have found. Maybe it needs to be 79, maybe it needs to be 99. But that’s that’s kind of the the phase one. That’s the that last phase of of the strategy when it comes to that.
Josh 00:08:30 Makes makes sense. How do you determine what that cost per acquisition is going to be without having data or actually having done that and tested it right and getting actual data, like how do you come up with, hey, I think this is going to be 40 bucks compared to this. You’re looking at 150 bucks per acquisition, right? Like there’s a wide range.
Eric 00:08:50 Yeah, that’s a great question. So there’s actually a there’s a new part about the stats that are out there. There’s actually ways that we can pretty much estimate, not like based off our conversion rate, but industry standards, we can get it pretty good estimate. So there’s a tool, a company called Word Stream. They provide, paid marketing services to around 550,000 businesses. And they run a survey twice a year in about 17 different industries. And they put together what is everybody’s average CPC average. and I’ll provide these links in the show notes. But what their average cost per click is, what their average, click through rate is and then what their average cost per acquisition is. And, and the need part about that is, is that then if we were to take our keywords and let’s just say we’re, you know, we, we, we’re going for, you know, let’s just use, for example, a t shirt or a women’s t shirt, for example, or, you know, whatever that it might be.
Eric 00:09:48 There’s a CPC number that’s on there and that’s where we can basically there’s a formula that can be run that says, okay, based off of, you know, the number of people searching, and the average click through rate that potentially we would have this many click thrus. And then from there, based off of that, you know, and based off the industry conversion rate and maybe you even know what your conversion rate is on your website, then you can say based off of that conversion rate, that’s how many people would actually buy something. And then we can then do the math based off the cost. And I there’s a whole formula. But needless to say, we run it for every single keyword. And and the whole goal of that strategy is, is that maybe we want to go for women’s shirts. And that sounds like a great idea, but but there might be something a little bit lower down that’s like, for example, a, a, you know, a, for example, slim cut shirt that might be half the cost.
Eric 00:10:42 And we then have to save on those types of things. And so that’s really or maybe it’s for example, a mother’s day gift or a whatever that it might be for the audience. And we try to find what the opportunity is and to find, okay, if this cost per acquisition is $35, then how can we get that down to $23? And if it’s $23, how can we get it down to $9? You know, for example. And then we would say, okay, does a $36 cost per acquisition average order value work? And we can do the math, you know, but that’s kind of the goal that we want to have a plan A, a plan B and a plan see because nothing goes as planned. Does that make sense? said, you know, when you do marketing. But the point is, we can guess and not try to jump in and say, oh, well, that just means we didn’t plan, you know? And we didn’t have a good plan for step one, step two, step three.
Eric 00:11:24 And and that’s the goal, you know, with that. So when it comes to and one thing we didn’t mention about this whole piece of that keyword research is just because you do this one set of products, does it mean that you can’t venture out into a couple other categories because you want to have a group of products that’s a success, and maybe your average order value is a good price, and you’ve got a bunch of great margins and you can just do one, and that would be great. But unfortunately, you know, in today’s world, we have found that you really need a couple of different products in a bundle. And it can’t be like ups up like your kind of car salesman upsell tactics. It actually has to be something that helps not just improve somebody’s life, but change somebody’s life. They’ve got to be passionate about it, you know? And that’s the thing that that we’ve really tried to find. Okay, let’s look at the product development and how do we get a product assortment that, you know, and maybe it is a shirt a hat and a hoodie.
Eric 00:12:17 But the point is, what’s the why behind it? What’s the passion that makes somebody want to go and do that? Not for them, but their kids or grandkids and everybody else. You know that that whoever is the person shopping. And once we do that and we do the keyword research, we can then build a bundle that gives you a cost per acquisition that, sorry, gets you an average order value, that a cost per acquisition would work and go from there.
Josh 00:12:37 That makes sense. Eric, before we wrap up today’s episode, I’d love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from each episode. Here are some three actionable takeaways that I noted. But Eric, you let me know if I’m missing anything. All right, so action item number one is you just touched on this. Turn on Google Shopping. If you’ve already got your Shopify or WooCommerce set up, the first quick win would be just replicate that, all of that with Google Shopping. And I think you also mentioned to there’s a plugin that will do the same thing and just turn on Facebook shopping and all those other Are shopping platforms as well.
Josh 00:13:19 Is that correct?
Eric 00:13:19 That’s correct. That’s correct. So there’s there’s plugins for each of the different platforms. that will go to every feed, not just those two, but any feed that’s available. It will allow you to build an already pre-made templates for those feeds. And then if you want to use just one, there’s a tool called sales and orders that they have a self-service and a full service. They’ll take care of it all for you. You just call them up, set it up. They’ll take care of it. You’re done. So those are the kind of two things. And I’ll in the show notes, we’ll provide links to all the different plugins so that you have those as well.
Josh 00:13:49 Awesome. Super valuable. Action item number two would be to start focusing on, you know, what are those bundles of products that you’re going to need to create. And so I think that’s an important aspect of all of the conversation that we had today, is take the ones that are winning and group them together, whether they be seasonal items or whether they’re serving, you know, a particular holiday or Mother’s Day or Father’s Day group things together because that’s where you’re going to need to package things together in order to be able to pay for and afford the cost of those ads that you’re going to be driving traffic to as well.
Eric 00:14:29 So that’s that’s bundles and ups and upsells across cells are the key to scalable growth. And honestly, no marketing budget. You just want to be able to scale and grow. Do people spend $30 million a year in Facebook ads because they’ve worked out the funnel? You just got to figure that out. What’s the formula?
Josh 00:14:44 You’ve got to come up with that. Yep. And then action item number three I’m going to put this as as fair I think you mentioned that this is just another kind of correlates with action item number one of just like you’re just putting yourself out there right. Like just put more fishing poles in the water so to speak. And I think fair does that. And I love what you talked about. Instead of getting caught up with, I’ve got to change my UPC code. I’ve got to come out with just specific designs, only for fair. I think that the easiest thing is just take your best selling products, put them out there, see what happens, understand what some of the potential risks could be and then start pivoting accordingly, right? If you see somebody that starts selling on your Amazon listing, you could take it down and not not sell back to them on fair.
Josh 00:15:32 Right. and but continuing to pivot. So Eric kind of I guess my biggest takeaway is just start with the low hanging fruit of just get out there even further. And there’s so many tools that allow us to do that. Google shopping, the different marketplace plug ins, and then you’ve got fair that just allow you to kind of expand your presence outside of just Amazon as well.
Eric 00:15:57 Said.
Josh 00:15:58 Well, Eric, thank you so much for your time today. I know I took a lot away, a lot of action items for myself. And I think our audience saw a lot of value in this as well today. But thank you for your time and coming on the podcast.
Eric 00:16:11 Absolutely great. We appreciate your time and feel free to reach out if you have any questions with the show notes, or we’ll provide all of these details so you can look at that. And if there’s any questions, feel free to reach out. Take your time today. Thank you Josh.
