do you have a business or just a promotion?

I think POD has some of the best cold acquisition marketers on the freaking planet.

Most of the POD merchants and entrepreneurs I encounter, they build almost all of their value for their POD brand in the front end, in cold acquisition, in the person that they get to click from Facebook to their store and buy something on the spot, and they manage to do it profitably.

That's the shocking thing, because most brands would only dream of being able to do something like that profitably. But I watch POD merchants do this day in and day out.

The downside to this is that every single purchase kind of resets you back to zero, because most of the POD entrepreneurs that I see struggle with lifetime value.

There's this quote from Russell Brunson I heard, and I'll never forget it. He said, "If you don't have continuity, you don't have a business, you have a promotion." I'm going to say that again. “If you don't have continuity, you don't have a business, you have a promotion.” And he's basically just saying, if you have no recurring revenue built in to your business, if you have no way of getting the second, third, fourth, fifth sale from the customer that you acquired, you actually don't have a business, you only have a promotion.

That really hit me, like a bucket of cold water, because there's some truth in it. And it applied not only to me at the time, but also to just POD in general. I mean, look, let's do a quick self-audit here.

Ask yourself:

1. Do 95% of your sales come from first-time people, first-time purchasers?

2. Do you have fewer than two repeat orders per customer per year?

3. If you look at your revenue charts, do they spike massively during the holidays and then fall completely flat outside of the holiday? Meaning, you're highly, highly seasonal.

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you probably have this problem, right?

Most POD brands that I've seen that actually do well have about a 10% repeat customer rate, 10%. And it's rare that I see anybody hit higher than that. And these are brands that have worked really hard to get there.

But there are a few exceptions. There are a few exceptions. I'm going to talk about those in a second. Before I do, though, I want to talk about the root cause here of why I think this kind of dynamic exists.

I think some of it is the type of person POD attracts. Like a lot of those people, they're media buyers at heart. They're not brand builders. They're not business owners. Sometimes they're media buyers at heart. So that's one thing.

The other thing is people just don't understand that an acquisition does not equal a relationship. Just because you acquired somebody and they bought something from your store doesn't mean you started a relationship with them.

This is where brand comes in, right?

Brand is the thing I think that changes the game. Brand equals your story, your promise, and the community. It's your ethos, right? And that's meant to pull buyers back organically. You start to create an ecosystem around your brand. And your brand starts to mean something. It starts to take up real estate in your buyer's mind, and then they'll be more likely to buy from you in the future.

So I'd encourage anybody reading this or listening to this to try to stop only optimizing for a cost per acquisition and start optimizing for lifetime value. See if you can figure that out.

Now, here are a few different ways you can do it. I'll be honest, I haven't seen in the POD space, I'm not sure anybody's totally, totally cracked the code on how to do this, but here are some things I've seen work across the e-commerce.

• Start a subscription box. So every month, maybe a husband gets a new gift for his wife.

• Collect from the husband, you collect their anniversary, his wife's birthday, and things like that. And then you auto ship gifts for Valentine's Day, birthdays, anniversaries, etc.

• You can also do a thing where they sign up for $30 a month and they get like a mystery drop every single month.

• Build upsells in your funnel. A lot of people do that.

• Build loyalty tiers. I don't see that one done very often.

• Build communities. So you have a place where you can talk to these people in the future. So this could be a Facebook group. You could start building an SMS or a text message list.

• Send people like handwritten notes, inviting them into those other programs.

You should give those things a try and see if you can start to build some of this continuity. The brands that I've seen do this well. And like, there are quite a few if you Google around. I'm going to give you an example of three that I've seen do this well. And these are brands that you probably know already because they've been around for a long time.

So brand one is Piper Lou Collection. Piper Lou Collection has been in the print on demand game for probably like a decade now. They have built their brand around a central like avatar. It's kind of the, I don't know what you call it. It's like lake party people. And they, I mean, they just sell tons and tons and tons and tons of product to this particular niche in the print on demand space.

Another one is Gossby.

Gossby is really big in this hyper personalized space where you put names and characters on things. And they've been around for years and they run tons of traffic to their site month in month out regardless of seasonality.

Another great brand is Oak and Luna. They're not so much in the print on demand side, but I think they sell enough name necklaces and jewelry items to apply here. But again, they have a very strong brand presence. And because of that, they have continuity and repeat purchases.

So here's what I'd like to challenge you to do.

1. Export your last 12 months of orders and analyze it for lifetime value and repeat purchase count and just see where you stand. If you've never done that, it might be insightful.

2. Pick one idea that I shared earlier about how to build continuity and repeat purchases and just launch something in three days, like launch an MVP of that thing in three days and just test it and see how it goes.

3. Finally, I want you to share your results publicly somehow—share your results in our Shine On Facebook group, share your results with me, put them on your personal Facebook group, share them even with your customers, right? Just share your results somewhere so that you have some public accountability built in.

All right, everybody, hope you found today's email helpful.

We'll chat tomorrow.

Take care,
Michael