Hello, and welcome to another episode of whiteboard sessions with me Andrew Maff. I'm the founder and CEO of BlueTuskr are a full-service digital marketing company for E-commerce sellers. And today I'm going to go through my top eight pieces of gated content that any e-commerce seller can leverage that they can actually use to start increasing the number of emails that they're getting.
Sometimes we all know that getting the purchase isn't the easiest thing to do every time. So sometimes you have to ease them into the process by offering them something else similar to gated content, where you can gain their email and start to nurture them as time goes on. So we're gonna dive right in here, we're just going to go into my top eight. So almost every single one of these can be used by any seller. In other cases, you might have to get a little creative with it. But we'll start off with this first one.
Calculators
So a lot of these you see used in B2B a lot. So something like calculators. So I'm gonna have to pick something that I do all the time, so let's do, let's pretend I own a company that sells drum sets. So I'm kind of into this thing, and my drum sets are right there. So I'm doing it. So let's pretend that I have an E-commerce company that sells drum sets, how can I leverage calculators?
Think of all the different ways that your user can benefit from a calculator. So maybe, if you're in the pet industry, Let's go through the list of things that you need to for your new puppy. And here's the calculator of how much that's going to cost you, in my case, a drumset. I need new cymbals, I need new hardware, I need a drum stick, I need obviously an entire new set, what does that whole thing and it cost to set me up to now be a drummer. And setting up these little calculators is great because you can go through and kind of set these up.
There's a bunch of different companies out there that will create these for you. And then you can actually just set it up or the way that they get their answer at the end is they provide you with an email or something like that. And they're fun, they're interactive, it provides an experience and it's a great way for someone to obviously gain an email using a calculator.
Quizzes
Another option, of course, is quizzes, which again, is another one that you'll see used a lot for b2b quizzes, there's also well there's also a B2C like have you ever done like the which Disney Princess Are you? So like you can do a quiz like that side note. I'm an Ariel. So the quizzes are great.
So let's use the same scenario right? So alright, so I have a drum set quiz can basically be something along the lines of if you're trying to figure out how good of a drummer you are if you know the different acronyms, or if you know the different terminology, you can take a quiz and find out what level drummer you are, or amazing maybe what kit you kind of play, what level of a kit you have maybe what level you want, or we talked about the pet one too.
So quizzes can be What Kind of Dog Should you get. So here's what I like to do, here are the activities that so here's what my house is like, there's a ton of different ways that you can leverage quizzes to actually start to bring in another way of getting emails from someone.
E-books / White Papers
So another one is pretty standard. I'm actually not a huge fan of these just because to me, they're kind of boring. So I'm talking about ebooks and white papers and all that fun stuff. So basically, you create an e-book, you know, if you want to make it like anywhere between like five to 10,000 words or something like that these are usually like, like if you were to buy a book and be like a little small pamphlet kind of thing. But of course, you couldn't go bigger, but the chances of someone reading it are a little bit less likely.
But even for E-commerce, ebooks and white papers can do great. So of course, like I use the drum set as an example if I read an ebook from a company that sold drum sets, but that ebook was co-authored by a very famous drummer would always be interesting. You don't always have to write these yourself. So you can have an influencer write it or you can even have a ghostwriter.
Write it and then just have the influencer sign off on it and now it's authored by them. But it's another great way to really leverage these I personally am not a fan just because I think these got a little beat up and a little outdated now but they're super easy to create so making them and giving them a shot never hurts.
Discounts
There's something great you can always test with another one in E-commerce that is super standard. Like discounts. So this could be anything this could be here's 10% off. Here's free shipping. Here's a buy one get one free when you sign up with us like that one's your pretty standard pop up that you see is almost like a welcome series kind of thing. But it is obviously one of the more beneficial if you're willing to do the discount. Some luxury brands don't want to do that. But even luxury brands it wouldn't hurt to offer like hey, on your first order, we'll offer you free shipping if you don't already offer it at any rate, just to the weekend gain your email.
So it's going to encourage you to want to improve your conversion rate because you're more likely to see someone purchase that way. But it's also going to improve obviously the man emails you get. So the next one is calendars so this one's interesting. So this little will use the same scenario right as the drum set. So this could be anything.
Calendar
Calendar that is for e-commerce sellers, that you can go to our website, you can download or in this theory, you actually gain access to. It's a live Google sheet that we created, that basically has a giant list of every event going on that we think e-commerce sellers could be a part of that would be interesting for them to join. And the nice thing about it is right now it's relative to this current year, but we update it continuously. So next year, it will obviously be relevant to next year.
And with the calendar, it's a live-updated thing. So these people who sign up for them are not just getting like a one-time ebook, or maybe a one-time answer to a quiz or a calculator, but they're getting access to a live document that we're updating for them. So use the drumset thing as an example, it could be different live virtual things that are happening on your own business or on someone else's business. Or it could be, you know, drum, teaching lessons that are going on in your area and what days they're on. Of course, we use the pet thing as well, because my dog is sitting here, rubbing up against everything. But he, it could be when his golden retriever day when his you know, take your pet to the workday. And you could have a calendar for that's just around you and your pet. So there's a ton of things you can do here that could work really well.
Exclusive Groups
Another one is exclusive groups. So this is pretty standard, you get a lot of e-commerce sellers that do this, you think like a Facebook group, or if it's a b2b business, you know, you think LinkedIn group, something that we started doing because Facebook is getting a little outdated. LinkedIn is a little crowded and not as many people leverage the groups there is also discord which is growing pretty well. But we'll see how that does over time. Because if I had done this video, six months ago, I would have said clubhouse. And I'm not going to reference that one this time.
So there are different ways that you can approach it. But the one thing that I have in my opinion that is sticking pretty well is also something that we have also. So we have something called Seller Slack. And basically, we created a workspace, that's simply for e-commerce sellers. And the way that we do is it's gated, so you can't get in there without proving attorney commerce seller, or we won't allow you in because I've been a part of other e-commerce sellers groups, and there's always vendors and everyone's trying to sell me stuff. And I hate that.
So basically, that's a way that we were able to just consolidate our entire group into one area. So again, in the drum sets scenario, you can create an entire exclusive group for just drummers in Facebook, or in Slack or Microsoft Teams, if you wanted to go that route. The same thing with pets, you could actually theoretically do want in Slack and create a channel for almost every type of dog breed. So you can keep people in there that are relative to every dog breed like there are so many ways that you can do it. But it's a great way to keep your audience in one place, get their email for the obvious reason that we're having this video, but also a great way to control the conversation so you can see what they're talking about. It's also a nice way to do some market research.
Checklist
Next are checklists. So this one can work pretty well. It's kind of going in the way of the e-book and the white paper unless you can make it really awesome to have something that people don't realize that they're always forgetting. But this you typically want to create as like a PDF is like a one-pager because sometimes you will actually have people who print things out. But with the checklists, this could be what the drum set of like if you're a drummer and you're doing gigs.
Did you remember your cymbals? Do you remember your sticks? Do you remember your kit? Obviously, you remember your hardware? Do you remember everything else? Do you mean microphones? Did you bring those? So that could be a checklist if you're doing it with dogs, and you're a pet? So you're going out on the day with your pet? Do you have water? Do you have their leash? Do you have poop bags or your treats like you could literally just have a checklist for anything? And then one thing that I'll mention about these two, about every single one of these is that there is almost no challenge to setting these up.
Some websites that will allow you to set up calculators and embed them on your site are really not that expensive. The quizzes really are not that expensive ebooks and white papers, we have four or five of them at this point at least. And what we did is we hired a writer to go and do the research. They did all the writing, they did everything we obviously provided what we want them to do. Then we'd read through it and then I'd have our designer knock it out. So not too expensive there. But you can kind of template these just have your writer fly through their discounts.
Basically free except for the cost of the discount, of course, calendars you set that up once and then you just have someone keep an eye out and update it,s groups. You set that up once and it just stays and none of the groups cost any money. And then same with checklists. You just have put the checklist together have a designer make it nice and now all of a sudden you have something that you can get someone's email from and the last.
Newsletters
So there's actually another one that is newsletters. And so this one's interesting. This isn't like, Okay, once a month, I'm going to send you another discount, I'm talking more about an informative newsletter, something that is a little bit more targeted towards the community and less targeted towards trying to get transactions. So I'm referring to something like a weekly newsletter.
So again, let's use everything I've referenced today, we're doing drum sets, like, Okay, once a week, here's, you know, top covers that we found on YouTube of people doing drum covers, here's some stuff that's going on in the industry, here's a obviously, you could still keep the eye out of like, here's the product that here's a brand that has released a new kit, or is thinking of releasing a new kit or something along those lines.
Even with pets, you can do something with that, like it's seasonal. And it talks about like, hey, during this time of the month, you might want to think about doing this. Or maybe you have a golden retriever section and a golden doodle section or something along those lines, but something on the informative side where they look forward to it. And it's actually a piece of reading material for them as opposed to just a standard discount.
And then the ninth one is interesting because it doesn't always grab emails unless you set it up correctly. But the nice thing about emails is that you can pretty much reach out to them whenever you want. And you can take that email and leverage it, whether you're doing Facebook ads, or ads, or Google or whatever. And you can create lookalike audiences and all that fun stuff.
Chatbots
Chatbots are relatively similar in the fact that you can get to know your audience, you can reach out to them almost whenever you want, you can't really leverage the email side of things because you're not getting an email in this scenario unless you've set up this chatbot to ask for an email. Now, that would obviously be best practice. But obviously getting people to sign up for a chatbot, in general, is great, because now you can send them to push notifications, and you can reach out to them for people that actually leverage Facebook Messenger.
Now Instagram messenger is also something that you can run chatbots through. So this is another great way we'll call this kind of like a bonus one. But I always set up chatbot flows where within like the first you know the flow of them, stop subscribing to the chatbot that we're requesting their email, in which case obviously, it's still relevant to all of these. But it's still a great piece of gated content to set up.
Sometimes what we'll even do with sellers is we'll offer certain discounts or something like that to people who solely are on our chatbot or to people who are solely are on our email list or another video for another day people who are solely on our SMS messaging so that basically they're in tight, they're encouraged to join us in every scenario that they can so that they always get the opportunity to get a discount but another video another time.
These are my eight and bonus top nine gated content pieces that every commerce seller should at least test at one point and then that way it will definitely help you increase your email list but that's all I want to go through today. I'm not going to be a dead horse these are the top nine thanks for joining and please rate review and subscribe make sure you comment to let me know if I missed any that you've used before. I'd be more than happy to redo this video and update this. But if not also make sure you comment to let me know if there's anything else you'd like me to cover but per usual, appreciate your comment and I will see you next time.
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