E157: Go Brand Win is Redefining How We Do Contests and Giveaways
Ah…contests and giveaways. We now know that these are brilliant ways to increase interest in the brand and consequently boost sales. I remember the first giveaway we did for ColorIt back in the day. It was $600 dollars worth of product costs plus a couple of thousand for running Facebook ads with a massive 400 percent return on ad spend.
In today’s podcast, I’m joined by Steve Chou and Toni Anderson. Each one successful in their respective ecommerce businesses but are both involved in an annual ecommerce workshop called the Sellers Summit.
I’ve spoken at this event on a number of occasions, sharing the tips and techniques, which have helped me to succeed in my own business, to people at various stages of their ecommerce journey.
Steve and Toni’s latest joint venture aims to expand on the effectiveness of contests and giveaways as a marketing tool for ecommerce sellers. Go Brand Win is a free service that partners with ecommerce brands “to offer enticing giveaways and offers for unique products and services.”
Go Brand Win allows ecommerce businesses with the same vertical to collaborate in one massive giveaway and reap the benefits of having a fresh list of potential customers to add to their existing mailing lists.
Here’s how you can participate.
- Go to the Go Brand Win website.
- From the homepage, click on the pink LEARN MORE button.
- You will automatically be redirected to a details page. Each brand is required to contribute a $200 gift card that will form part of a giant giveaway.
- Fill out the application form (Google Doc) and hit SUBMIT.
Other resources mentioned:
Thanks for listening to this episode! If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Happy selling!
Full Audio Transcript
Mike: This is Mike, and welcome to the 157th edition of the EcomCrew Podcast. Today is a very special episode with my good friend Steve Chou and Toni Anderson. We don't really have three way conversations on the podcast very often. It took us a little bit of time to kind of hit our stride when you're not all in the same room. In fact, we are all three in different places. It always makes that a little bit more difficult. Plus Steve and I naturally want to just give each other a hard time, which makes it even funnier.
So we had to do many takes to get our strides, it was pretty funny. Even though we're both used to doing podcasts all the time, we just started out, we make fun of each other. And it was it was like a circus when we first got started, but we hit our stride and it worked out pretty well. The meat and potatoes behind this episode is something that I've been passionate about for a long time, which is contests and giveaways. And Toni and Steve have come up with a really ingenious way to be able to do this on a more epic scale.
And it all stems from Toni's background doing blogging; she knows a lot of really powerful bloggers. And with that, basically the whole idea is to aggregate contest and be able to do that in a way for e-commerce owners that doesn’t cost them anything to be able to promote contests and giveaways that are way on a bigger scale than you'd be able to do on your own. It's a really cool concept. I don't want to give too much more away than that. So let's get the intro and get right into it with Steve and Toni.
Mike: Steve and Toni, welcome to the concrete podcast.
Steve: Happy to be here Mike.
Toni: Thanks for having us today.
Mike: Of course. And this is take three of this. It's actually kind of funny. The only time I've ever had to do multiple takes of anything with the EcomCrew Podcast has involved Steve. So we'll see if we can get through the rest of this without having to hit the stop button again, but it's pretty funny…
Steve: The podcast is [inaudible 00:02:59] so I always have to tone it down a little bit.
Mike: Yeah, we were talking at the beach for an EcomCrew segment we did at Ecommerce Fuel Live. And that was like a total circus act as well.
Steve: Yeah, man, that ECF Live was a lot of fun. And it's always fun to get an impromptu recording.
Mike: Yeah, for sure. So we're going to try to do something new here. We don't do a lot of three way conversations, but especially when you're not in the same room it gets hard. But hopefully this will be fun. But Steve, obviously, I've known you for a long time. I think I met you through Ecommerce Fuel originally. And then we became pretty good friends. And I've been speaking at Sellers Summit. And I think that's how I met Toni I'm sure for the first time. Maybe before that I also spoke at one of Toni's blogging events. So if you guys could just tell people just a little bit about yourselves, people can have an intro before we get into what we're here to talk about today.
Steve: Yeah, so my name is Steve. I run mywifequitherjob.com and an e-commerce conference called Sellers Summit. And I just want to say that Mike spoke, he’s spoken every year I think. And this past year, when we sent out a survey, he was one of the top rated speakers of the conference. Out of a scale of one to five, he came in at 4.833 out of all.
Toni: Just higher than his Uber rating, right?
Mike: Exactly.
Steve: It is higher, that's correct. It is higher than his Uber ratings. So thank you Mike, for being a speaker and one of the best speakers on my end [ph].
Mike: Well, I actually want to thank you as well for letting me come speak there because yes, I do think that I've done a better job. I've been working hard at speaking, but when you first had me come, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. And it was probably a big risk for you. So thank you for taking the chance on me.
Steve: I think that first year you came in at a 4.74, which is still pretty good.
Mike: That's pretty good. So 4.83, I still have some room for improvement. And how competitive I am, I want to be as close to a five as possible. And how about you Toni? Give a little background on yourself.
Toni: All right, so my name is Toni and I work with Steve on the Sellers Summit conference. But I actually got my start on the digital space selling on eBay a long time ago, back before digital cameras existed, and we were taking pictures and scanning them and then uploading them was crazy. And then moved to the blogging space in the mid 2000s and burnt out a little bit and moved to e-commerce after I met Steve.
And it's funny, Mike, because I met Steve at a different conference. And when we were planning Sellers Summit, he met you at either Fuel or something; I think it was at a mastermind, maybe. And he got on a call with me. And he said, I met this guy, Mike, we have to have him at Sellers Summit, we have to make space for him. He asked to do something he knows so much. He's so willing to share.
So he talked my ear off about you whenever he met you, and was just insistent that we have this 4.84, has to come and speak for us. Thank you for always being — and then thank you for coming to my blog conference too. We always get rave reviews from your talks.
Mike: Awesome. Well, no problem. And somehow, serendipitously, I guess this has turned into a good segue, because the first thing I talked about at Sellers Summit, the first year I spoke there was about contests and giveaways. And that's actually the big thing we're here to talk about today. And so the giveaway that I ran was in January of 2015. And it's actually a pretty funny story, because I had heard other people talking about giveaways. And it's just; you always have like this long list of things that you want to do in your business. And I just never quite got around to it.
And it was January 1st, 2015 and I was sitting at home a little bit hang over. And for us entrepreneurs, it's unusual actually to have a day off. And I was just kind of sitting at home and didn't have much to do. And I was like [inaudible 00:06:28] I'm going to launch a contest. Let's just see what happens. And that's like, literally how it happened. And the results were phenomenal because I had like, all these things in my head about, it's just going to be a bunch of people looking for giveaways, and they're not going to want to actually spend any money. And like, this is probably not going to work.
I was just like — and I'm not usually the one to think about the things that will go wrong, I kind of think about what will go right. But I still had these thoughts. But I was like, you know what, it's going to cost the cost of 30 sets of colored pencils. And that's what we did was giveaway one set of pencils every day for a month. And the results were kind of crazy. And that's the thing I talked about at Sellers Summit a couple of years ago.
Steve: So Mike, first of all, I find it hard to believe that you were hung over because you do not drink. But I am curious, though, what the statistics were for that first giveaway.
Mike: Yeah, but I don't have it up in front of me. But like, off the top of my head, we spent something like $600 in product costs, because it was something like $20 a day for 30 days between the cost of the product and the shipping. And we spent a couple of thousand dollars on Facebook ads. And my recollection without having it all in front of me was that we had like a 400% return on ad spend in like the vacuum of people like in the contest, right.
So, like I mean, during the time frame of when the contest was running and those ads and there's obviously like the long term benefit. Now these people are on your list, you can communicate with them over a long period of time, which is one of the things I spoke about in Sellers Summit this year. Because I think that, the reality is, is that the days of direct response, just like running a Facebook ad, or running a Google AdWords ad, or whatever it might be, I'm going to send them to a product page and hope to get them to buy like right then and there.
Those are those days are kind of gone mostly because attention spans have narrowed so much, and the days of emailing your list and getting the most out of it over time and communicating with people over a whole bunch of different circumstances works better. So for the stats, I'm telling you, that was like just in that in that one window of time. And basically, since January of 2015, we've run contests for like all of our brands every single month and the only exception is we don't do them in November or December just because there's so much noise around the holidays. But besides that we consistently run them and still see the same results.
Steve: I’m just curious, like what is the value of the email list that you've been getting out of the giveaways, just kind of off the top of your head?
Mike: Yeah, it's about half as valuable as when we run free plus shipping offers. So you definitely get that component of people that are just looking for free stuff and they're really disciplined about that. But what ends up happening is that the majority of people sign up with this intention of like, I'm just going to get free stuff and they end up making a purchase because you have cool stuff and they see emails about it, and they go into other part.
One of the things I talk about is we don't just give them value from the contest but will also offer down the line like other free content or downloads or introduce them to a free plus shipping offer and try to graduate them one step up the ladder at a time, and not just kind of go for the just buy, buy, buy mentality. But what we do see is that the value of the people on our list that come through the giveaways is about half the value of someone that converts as a top of funnel from our free plus shipping offer.
Steve: Yeah, I remember for myself actually, after your talk at the Sellers Summit, you actually inspired me to run some giveaways of my own. And I never quite got the exact same success as you did, mainly because I think we're in the wedding industry and our customer demographic is completely different. But they did end up ROI positive, not 400% like yours, but somewhere like two to three X, in that range. But your results with giveaways for all of your companies has actually inspired both Toni and I to start a brand new service. And I'm going to let you do the onus Toni.
Toni: All right. And I do have to just piggyback on what Steve said Mike. I think after — every time I hear you speak at an event, I am so ready to go implement, basically copy everything you do. I think after the Sellers Summit where you spoke, I signed up for the ColorIt email list, well first of all you were generous, you gave Steve and I both I think some coloring books at the Sellers Summit. And I loved it because I have a lefty kid. And so the fact that they spiraled at the top was a really nice feature for your books, because anyone who has a left-handed kid knows that it's hard to deal with the binding of a book.
But anyway, when I saw the quality of your products, I was really are just so much better than a lot of your competitors, which I'm sure all your listeners probably know that already. But I signed up for your email sequence. I think I entered the giveaway because I really was curious to see how you nurtured that audience because I wanted to do it for my own products. But I didn't want to waste my time or my money on email subscribers and things like that on people that weren't ever going to purchase for me. So I have to just echo that, sorry to give you another — I don't want to give you too many pats on the back.
Steve: I was going to say this show has become the flatter my show. That's the reason that…
Mike: What's interesting is as soon as I hit the off button, all the flattery will stop.
Toni: But I think just to say that it's a huge component. And what we're doing with our new business called the Go Brand Win. And basically Go Brand Win is a service for e-commerce sellers to work together with people in their same vertical. So maybe, if you're in ColorIt, you wouldn't work with other coloring book sales people, but people that like coloring might also like other things. We pair people together that way. And we create a massive giveaway.
And we then have each brand participating email their current list to promote the giveaway and say, you know, hey, look, we're participating and look what you can win some massive giveaway, $2,000 in gift cards. Now, each brand is only contributing 200 of that. So it's not a huge spend for the brand. And then at the end of it, all the brands that participate will receive the giveaway list. So everybody that entered the giveaway, all the brands will get that list. So that's a way to grow your email list for very minimal cost, because one, we don't charge anything to do this. And two, all the brand needs to do is one, contribute that gift card and then two, promote it to their list and or social channels.
Steve: What I like…
Mike: Oh, sorry Steve, I didn't mean to cut you off. I'll just say I love it because like, obviously, I'm the giveaway guy and I love doing this. But to me, like, I can't wait to launch the first one of these because what we’ve found is that the bigger the value of the giveaway that we do, the better this performs. That's probably like, not that like revolutionary. But having the ability to turn on a $2,000 giveaway, or a four or $5,000 giveaway, whatever this combined giveaway can be can be like really attractive to your list and get like a lot more people engaged. I'm really interested to see what happens here.
Toni: Well, and as a — sorry, Steve, I just want to add this real quick.
Steve: I’ll just keep quiet here.
Toni: Sorry Steve, we're going. Well, I think too, like Mike, you and I have products that are not super expensive. So for us to do, like for you or me to do a giveaway, that's $1,000, that's a ridiculous amount of product we're going — I mean, they could buy everything in my store for that, right. So I think that's a nice component for these brands that are selling products that are maybe between the 30 and 50 to $75 range. Those people really benefit from this because they can contribute that $200 gift card, but they get the power of the huge number and the giveaway of 2000, $2500.
Mike: Yeah and sorry Steve. So we cut off you a couple of times. Let's let you see, you're going to say sorry.
Steve: I forgot what I was going to say now, guys.
Mike: Well, I have something I'll throw out there since Steve is not prepared. The thing that's interesting with these giveaways is we've seen really big success with them with ColorIt and Tactical but we haven't seen it with our baby line. And I've kind of come up with a theory of why that is. And I'm really interested to see what happens here when we do this with baby through you guys because I think that there's — you were saying Toni like you're dead on. Like, I think it's the value of the product. I also think it's the demographics.
So I think that when we advertise to older people, it seems to work a lot better because they seem to be more sucked into these types of things. I think that like the millennial type age people are like more skeptical of giveaways or just anything on the internet. And I think that when this prize pole like jumps up to like mid four figures, or whatever, it's going to hopefully get them to want to jump in two feet. Because the Wild Baby market is 20 years, 30 something year old women that just had a kid, it's a lot different than 45, 55, 60 year old women that are coloring, or in the case of Tactical, I think it's older or middle aged men that kind of gravitate towards that. So I think it's going to be cool to see the results once we launch the baby one with you guys.
Steve: Actually my experiences confirm your theory actually. At first, I was running these giveaways for wedding people. But then I found that a large portion of our repeat customers are over the age of 45. And so once I started just running these giveaways to the older demographic, those are the ones that started working.
Mike: Yeah. So that kind of confirms that. And I think that the other thing that we struggle with as online store owners is, I think the younger demographic also gravitates towards something like Amazon more frequently to buy. I think older people are more apt to purchase on a third party online store. We find that getting the younger demographic to buy directly from our store versus Amazon also as a struggle.
Steve: Yeah. One thing that Toni forgot to mention also is we are also reaching out to influencers. We have a pretty large blogger database. Toni used to run the blogger network at savings.com, and so we're going to use these bloggers to kind of amplify all these giveaways and get more email subs in the process.
Mike: So I'm like, we're on the same page here that the idea here is that basically everyone wants to grow their email list. And so you work with let's say there's 20 people participating in the giveaway whether it's influencers or brands that have a product to sell, or whether it's digital or physical. And the idea here is that a rising tide raises all ships and everyone gets access to that list. And do you see any conflict there though? Like I mean, if multiple brands are emailing the same person, like they're getting bombarded from different directions like how do you think the best way to handle that is like post giveaway?
Steve: Yeah I mean one of the largest components of our business which is GoBrandWin.com is the education component. After you get this email list, you have to kind of nurture them along to make sure that you don't get lost in the crowd and they recognize your brand, and they accept the messages that you send. And I've actually looked at your autoresponder sequence in the past for your giveaways, and we are going to give away I guess, templates of post giveaway sequences that all the brands can use to promote their products.
Mike: Okay. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think it's really important. I mean, obviously, if you've seen what we've done there, and I obviously talked about that at Sellers Summit as well. But it's just, this is just general email marketing best practices, which is you give someone your email list, you have to continue to communicate with them, they'll forget about you, especially in today's noisy world, like, just as quick as they found you. And our policy here is that like the 80/20 rule, at least 80% of what we send out is value to them, and not just like, buy this thing. This is on sale.
If you think about your own habits with email, the things that you open are things that are interesting and valuable to you. And the people that do nothing but spam you with this product is on sale, or here's today's sale, or whatever it might be, you unsubscribe from those, and that's what we want to avoid. So I think that that's like a really cool thing that you're going to be doing for people, and I'll be happy to help throw in some of those templates.
Steve: Yeah, absolutely. And one thing that we haven't mentioned also is once someone signs up for this sweepstakes, we're going to put them on a sequence that basically introduces all the brands and what the value propositions for each of those brands are. So that way when you finally get your list, they should be already familiar with your brand through this autoresponder sequence and more receptive for your emails.
Mike: Got you. That makes a lot of sense. So yeah, I mean, I think that's probably a good segue into let's just talk about like how this works like specifically step by step. So I own WildBaby.com, I'm interested in participating in the giveaway, what's like steps one through 10 here, how do I get involved with this?
Steve: Basically, you would contribute at least one gift card towards your products valued at $200 or more. And then what we're going to do is we're going to assemble other participating brands that have the same customer base or a similar customer base, and we're going to combine all those gift cards into one gigantic giveaway. Now, as a participating brand, you will have to send out our sweepstakes email to your entire list of followers and drive them to a special landing page on our website, GoBrandWin.com, and we'll also send these sweepstakes entry forms to related influencers in our blogger database that apply to your brand.
And right now we have almost 1,000 bloggers in our database. The consumers will come on our site, they'll enter the giveaway, we’ll select a winner, and at the very end, everyone shares the entire list of email addresses. And this is a free service, like we're not making any money off of this. We just think that the whole collaboration aspect can really drive down the cost of these giveaways as long as we work together and combine forces.
Mike: Yeah, and then I guess the value to you is that you also have access to the email list and can email people from your contacts as well. I mean, it has value to you guys as well. So that's where I think you get the value and then everyone else gets the same value.
Steve: That's correct.
Mike: Okay. So again, going through it step by step, I mean, I go to Go Brand Win, how do I like apply to be one of these brands that's going to be involved in this giveaway?
Steve: Yeah, right now there's an advertiser tab in the header. And you can either click on that, or the big pink button on the front. That will take you to a Google forum where you'll enter in some statistics about your company. And once we have critical mass like enough companies within the same niche, or a similar customer base, we’ll reach out to you to participate in the giveaway.
Mike: Okay, so you guys are just like manually curating this on your own?
Steve: Yeah, in the beginning we're going to do this manually, and at some point we will try to semi automate this with technology.
Mike: Got you. Okay. So you'll go through, you'll pick, let's just keep on the baby thing, you'll pick 10 or 20 brands that are involved somehow with baby and influencers. You're going to set up the landing page, so it'll be like GoBrandWin.com/baby or something along those lines. So you'll have a landing page where I'll direct my traffic from Wild Baby and I could even use it I suppose, as like a Facebook ad.
I mean, it sounds like it would be a good way — it seems like to me, it would behoove me to, even though I'm sharing a list to still send my own Facebook traffic to a landing page like this, because I'm going to get that email address, and I can use the power of leverage. Will I be able to, is there any way to like to pixel that data, though? I don't know if there's a way to do that since it'll be on your guys landing page.
Steve: Yeah, that's a good question. Those are some details that we haven't worked on, but we're definitely going to pixel them on our end. Whether or not we let the brands actually put their pixel on that page remains to be seen. That's actually a good idea that I actually had not thought about.
Mike: I could think of like a way to get away around that by like having it go to like one of my URLs that like forwards off. So it’s just there for a split second to pixel it. And there's also some services I think that does that out of the box where you can just type in…
Steve: It’s like a redirect link.
Mike: Yeah, like a redirect link yeah.
Steve: Oh, interesting. Yeah, that's a good idea that we actually haven't thought about, thanks Mike.
Mike: Yeah, of course. I can think about like when I was talking at Sellers Summit about like that whole trifecta thing, right? So, I can see on my end, I can tell you for sure, if you guys select Wild Baby, which I hope you do, I can see for sure you running a Facebook ad to ManyChat, like get them on my ManyChat list, and then giving them the link to Go Brand Win. But it would go through some, either go through a redirect or I have the ability to pixel them on your guys thing and then I eventually get the email address too. So I would still complete my trifecta. I would have them on my ManyChat list, get them pixelled, and I would eventually get the email address as well. It's pretty intriguing to me. I mean, I'm definitely interested.
Steve: Yeah I mean, that shouldn’t be hard to do at all, actually. Yeah, it should be quite doable.
Mike: Excellent. So what other niches are you guys finding success? Because you've had you said, 1,000 people sign up so far for this? What are the other big things? Like you mentioned baby, what other things are people looking at here?
Toni: Yeah, so some of our — so we basically, we divided into 10 or 12 verticals that we feel like we have the most traction. So we have a home and kitchen vertical. So anything from kitchen gadgets, to pillows, to shower curtains. We have a health and fitness, we have a beauty and fashion, we have travel and outdoor. So we tried to find niches that we knew we had bloggers that we could work with, and that we also felt like there was a decent number of e-commerce stores that we could reach through talking about on the podcast, blog post, and things like that. So those are just the main ones that we're working on. But I think we have 12 total, and if you go to that advertise tab, it'll list all the niches.
And if you're not in one of those niches, you have something it's a little bit off, you can always email us. We do have a gifts and gadgets category. So that kind of encompasses some of the more random things. But if you feel like you want to participate, we actually got an email this last week about a company that's a little bit different, but they might be a good fit for us. So you could email Toni@gobrandwin.com or Steve@gobrandwin.com and we can talk about ways if you don't think your brand fits exactly in one of the niches that we have listed on the site.
Mike: Cool. And it's Toni with an I.
Toni: Yes, Toni with an I. Sorry about that.
Mike: No worries. The thing I think that's really cool about these niches that you mentioned here is that you have competitors but like they're not competitors. Like in the baby space as for instance, like you could have one company that sells strollers, another one that sells baby bottles, another one that sells clothing like we do, another one that might sell a crib or whatever.
So like, they're in the same niche, you're not really competitors but you're kind of like in the same areas but it's not like a conflict of interest when you're working with these types of companies that they aren't stepping on each other's toes. And it's again, the whole rising tide raises all ships thing, it's really cool.
Toni: Well, and that's really important to us. And one of the reasons why we're manually doing this in the beginning is because we want to make sure that we're not putting two baby brands that sell almost the exact same product in a giveaway together, because that doesn't make sense for either of you guys. You probably don't want to share your customer list with your competitor.
So, that's one of the things for us that's really important is that we're looking through, that we're going to these people's websites, their Facebook page, their Instagram, we're seeing what they're talking about. And we're really trying to find companies that complement each other. And we're doing that manually initially. So we make sure we get it right.
Mike: Got you.
Steve: Not only that, but the success of the service really depends on our ability to put together companies that have the same customer demographic, right? I mean, the last thing you want is a list of completely unrelated customers that aren't going to be end up purchasing from your shop.
Mike: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I mean, obviously, someone that buys a crib or a baby bottle would be interested in our clothing. So I mean, I think that you're right. It's like just close enough, but it's not a business threat to the people that are participating in the conference together.
Steve: Yeah, and I guess the tricky part in the long run is to take this secret sauce. And Toni is really good at grouping companies together, is to take the secret sauce and somehow automate this with technology, which is kind of where I come in since I have a technical background.
Mike: Yeah, you're the rocket scientist there.
Steve: Not the rocket scientist, but I need to extract — so what is hilarious is I was chatting with Toni this morning. And she had a conversation with a fellow blogger. And I asked her for the notes as can you just email them to me. And she had written all these notes down on post it notes. So there's like this massive array of post it notes on her desk. And I'm like, wait, you didn't like type this up? It's all handwritten on post it notes on your desk. And so now I have to wait for that to be correlated into a nice document.
Mike: So Toni, just so you don't feel bad, I'm also a post it note child. I don't know what it is, but, yeah, I've actually cut down on it a little bit since we rearranged our offices. I don't have as much room on my desk anymore. But I definitely gravitate towards post it notes.
Toni: Well, it's funny, because I've always been, I love to write things. That's how I learn best. But the post it note thing, actually, I hate to give you another compliment. But I'm about to.
Mike: Oh, boy.
Toni: When I was working on — my after I was subscribed to your email list and I thought, okay, I need to do this for myself for we sell totally different products. And so I thought, well, how can I do this in a way that's similar to what you're doing but for my audience. And I was starting to do it in a Google spreadsheet and it just got very confusing and overwhelming to me. So I basically started writing ideas on post it notes and putting them on the wall in my office. And then I could move stuff around really easily on the post it notes, and I was, hey, this is going to come after this, and this email is going to come here and this email needs to go in this funnel.
And I think I had 100 post it notes on my wall at one point. But it allowed me to see everything like big picture. And so that sort of got me into this. Okay, I just think in post it notes, apparently. So that's how I operate and people will have to wait for my Google Docs now. But hey, it works. And honestly, I think if you're struggling with an email sequence, and you want to create a pretty robust one, I personally if you are a little bit of a visual learner, that's a great way to do it.
Mike: Yeah.
Steve: Do you know that you can cut and paste?
Toni: Yeah, Steve I appreciate that.
Steve: Just checking.
Toni: I might not know how to make a Skype recording, but I do know how to use Google Docs.
Mike: You might actually like Klaviyo’s new Flow Builder, because it's all visual.
Toni: I do, I love it. I do, yeah.
Mike: Cool. Well, guys, this is definitely awesome. If you guys haven't been convinced yet, go over to GoBrandWin.com and check it out. Again, it's completely free, which is cool, like not many things are free these days. So kind of a no risk or low risk way to try it out. If you don't like it, don't do it again. But for me, I think again, I've already applied. You've complimented me a bunch, but I haven't gotten my invitation yet for my first giveaway.
Toni: Well, we're still working. We're working on the baby giveaway right now because we want to make sure everybody really fits together.
Mike: I’m just giving you guys a hard time.
Steve: If you think about the economics, if you contribute a $200 gift card, it probably cost you like 50 bucks, right? And if you get a couple of thousand subs out of it, that's like pennies per email. And so for me, at least, I think this is a no brainer, especially since the service is free.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, I think, again, as soon as I heard about it I was like, I couldn't apply quick enough because the reality is, is that we're doing these giveaways anyway. I already know all the economics and I can't imagine any way that this doesn't lower my cost per lead, which is basically my most important thing, right? Because I mean, if I can get more leads cheaper, that's better than paying more.
Steve: Yeah, no, absolutely. And Mike next year, I hope you are going to speak again. And next time I expect a 4.95 out of five.
Mike: Well, that means I have to do more razzing on you because that's what I think it's the higher scores.
Steve: That’s true. You know what threw off your score actually, I think you got like one person gave you a two or a three and that threw everything else off. Everything else was like fives.
Mike: Interesting.
Steve: I wonder who that one person is. The survey is anonymous.
Mike: Toni. I did include you on purpose so you would give me a five.
Toni: I’ll go back, I'll change my score.
Mike: Cool. Well, just so everybody has the URLs, again we'll throw them in the show notes as well, but GoBrandWin.com for the giveaway site. Mywifequitherjob.com if you guys are in commerce like, I'm sure you're all listening to this podcast. It's an amazing blog of all kinds of just I mean Steve; you write about more stuff that we do. It's crazy. Like how the heck do you do it, man? Like how do you like write so much stuff like all the time and it's like super high quality on top of it?
Steve: I just write once per week Mike, and it's whatever I happen to be working on at this moment.
Mike: It feels like it's more than once a week because I'm on your newsletter and I feel like you're — but maybe it's just — maybe this is once a week. I just know it's really good, like the things I've read, it's just like man, you kind of set the bar for the industry and including us. So, congrats on all that.
Steve: You know what’s funny about this is like we flatter — we're like flattering each other right now on this podcast. But as soon as you stop recording, it's going to be back to the old bag, like on each other’s stride [ph].
Mike: That's not true. I've told you more than once. I think that you're an awesome podcast host and you write good content. I'll give you crap about something else like — though I can't talk about the podcast. I was going to say something that was going to be inappropriate.
Steve: And you're not even like inebriated.
Mike: No, I've actually I haven't talked about this a lot, but I stopped drinking for a month. I wanted to see if I can make it through one month without drinking. And I'm 18 days into it and I haven't gotten the shivers yet. So I've made it so far.
Toni: Nice.
Steve: Congratulations. Hopefully that will be gone by the time we go to New Orleans for Ecommerce Fuel Live.
Mike: Well, yeah, it's just the month of June so will be good by then.
Steve: All right good.
Mike: And Toni…
Steve: There's quite a lot of fun. There’s lot of fun normally, but…
Mike: I think everybody gets looser when they have a lot of tequila. I was going to say Toni, is there anything that you wanted to talk about and promote?
Toni: No, I think I would love to see some more e-commerce brands. I'd love to match people up. That's actually something I really I’m passionate about is helping brands grow and it's something that I feel like I've learned so much just from you and Steve Mike, and other people in the industry and to be able to give back and work on that for other brands. That's to me worth it.
Mike: And where do they go to sign up?
Toni: GoBrandWin.com.
Mike: GoBrandWin.com. All right guys, thank you so much for coming on.
Steve: All right, thanks, Mike.
Mike: And that's a wrap guys. I hope you enjoyed our episode here with Steve and Toni. If you have any questions or comments, you can go to EcomCrew.com/157 to get to the show notes for this episode. And again, we're always looking for reviews on iTunes at the EcomCrew Podcast. I know it's a pain in the butt and you most likely got something better to do right now. But if you could just take a moment, it would really mean a lot to us if you go to iTunes and leave us an honest review.
I feel like a hypocrite sometimes asking for that because I don't really go do that myself, but as a podcaster I now realize how important it is. And we're so close to 100 reviews. I really appreciate you taking the time to go do that. Let us know what you think of the podcast. Leave a suggestion of what we can be doing better too. It's not all about just letting us know what we're doing right, let us know what we could do better to make this a better podcast and be more valuable for you, and we appreciate the feedback. So until the next episode everyone, happy selling, and we'll talk to you then.
