Trey Lewellen has spent the last 4 years building an eCommerce business that sold $20million of product in 2016. That includes building an email list of over 1.1 million subscribers (inc 300,000 buyers) via which he makes $10,000 a day selling products to repeat customers.
Trey was unhappy in his job selling insurance, and wanted to do something different with his brother, who was going to law school and was excited to become a police officer. After looking at online marketing, Trey thought it would be cool to tackle that and have fun with it while also leading with their passion. Trey’s passion is marketing. He loves the art of selling. His brother’s passion is guns, ammunition, and survival prepping. It took four months to convince his brother to come onboard instead of becoming a police officer.
The brothers built a fan page just to see if there was anyone out there with the same ambition of sharing their enthusiasm for guns and ammunition. They started with one like, and over the next few years, grew to 300 thousand likes with a growing audience.
Building a Reactive Tribe
By feeding his brother’s passion for guns through Trey’s marketing concepts, the brothers were able to build a tribe of people around themselves. Their customers don’t want to show off their guns online, because they are in survival and protection mode. They are reactive, watching the brothers and listening to them but not publically praising them or their products.
Loss Leaders
To grow their reactive audience, Trey used loss leaders. A loss leader is an item you sell at a loss to attract customers into your store, because once inside, they’ll spend more money.
Listen to learn how to choose a specific loss leader item to attract your target audience, not a broad audience.
Funnel Theory
A funnel is a reverse cart. When a customer comes to the website, they must enter their contact details before buying. Then they can buy the product, but when they go to the next page, instead of a checkout page they land on a page offering them more of the same product they just bought for a discounted price.
The magic number is 1.2 average products per order. If the customers are on average buying less than 1.2 of the product per order, charge less. If they are buying more than 1.2, charge more.
Listen to Chloe’s notes at the end of the podcast for more information about the funnel format and magic number.
On Trey’s site after a customer has bought ten ounces of gun oil, they are offered more oil at a 20% discount. He also makes sure his funnel generates at least the amount that the loss leader costs, allowing them to break even right away.
Since the funnel collects email addresses, mailing addresses, names, and phone numbers up front, Trey can send emails and even text messages in the future.
He also invites them to a VIP Facebook group for $10 per month, which makes them feel special and gives them access to his free podcast.
Slow and Steady Wins the Race
Many people want to jump into funnels or eCommerce and build massive storefronts with lots of products and think people will buy millions of items, but it’s just not true.
Start slow. Build one funnel, and concentrate on it. Optimize everything. Make sure the headline is good and that people understand what you’re selling. Make sure your buy buttons are creating benefits, not pain points. After you hit the finish line on that one funnel, start another one, and go slow and steady on that one, too. Eventually your funnels will create one humming, vibrating V12 engine that’s all in tune.
eCommerce Book Top Tip
The 12 Month Millionaire by Vincent James
eCommerce Traffic Top Tip
The people behind Trey who are showing up to work and put in the hustle and grind every day to make it all happen
You can hear about all this on the podcast, for free – right now…
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