You Should Launch International Ads NOW transcript

I recently had a client that added International ads into its ad account for the first time and we saw spend double as it turns out that is very similar to what happened for ash Milani the co-founder and CMO of oby you probably know Ash if you've been around the DDC space and in this episode Ash and I wrap about how we have built out everything from the operational side of uh International building so that customers in different countries actually can shop and their own currencies and all those kinds of things on the website and get clarity to the sh timelines and passport to all the duties as well as well as the ad setup so exactly how we are building our Facebook ads account to expand our ads into different locations how many countries we're including what's the campaign set up all that stuff you probably should be considering adding International into your business at some point soon if not now and if that's what you are doing you will love this episode with Ash melwani co-founder CMO of oby talking International advertising on Facebook let's get into it Ash Milani is somebody I have talked to a lot about uh meta ads and e-commerce growth because we have a a private little slack conversation with me and him and a couple other folks and and in the conversations kind of go like this with me and Ash they go like uh like and a couple other people in here we we say how's this going for you what's new what new thing is happening in your ad account that you know somebody will hit on something and and then go wait are you seeing this also and like um eight out of 10 times the answer is yes somebody else in our group is thinking about the same thing and pursuing the same thing and today that thing is international advertising it's something I've never talked about on this show I think ever I like maybe have never even mentioned it but Ash and I both at about the same time started exploring International ads for our clients Ash is like a couple months ahead of me I think uh or for for for Our Brands and clients and so we're GNA break down on this episode what uh is working and how how to go about like tactically how do you go about um uh adding International spending to your ad account and actually making that a decent experience for customers as well all those kinds of things uh Ash is the CMO and co-founder of obvy you have seen him around the d2c internet and the DTC world and uh between obvy and chew on this um he is he is a a known figure in the space so I probably don't need to introduce him a lot more let's jump into a conversation with Ash Milani about International advertising Ash dude thanks for taking time I'm like so glad to do this we've like briefly met once but you and I were both chasing things around when that happened and then uh you were speaking and I had a client that I was like kind of hanging out with and all that stuff and so uh this is like this would be the most we've gotten to like really talk despite that I feel like I talked to you a lot yeah I know I know uh well first of all thank you for having me I know we had a reschedule a couple times both busy schedules but um very very excited I think I think the original conversation was to your original point of the intro was that hey like are you testing International and you're like wait we should totally jam on this so I'm very excited to talk about this because it's been um in the works for a while and um we're finally seeing a lot more movement um on this kind of like opening up these channels in different territor so excited to to chat more about it so give people a sense of before we jump into those details just like the quick details on obv where you guys are at anything you want to just kind of give people some context for I think it's especially when you're talking about something International it's pretty helpful to have a sense of what kind of product what kind of brand um and yeah so Obby uh for those who don't know it's a health and wellness company we we focus on collagen mostly so different functional collagens so you have your your regular collagens we have collagen for weight loss collagen for detox uh collagen we have a couple uh new collagen products that are coming out collagen greens collagen hydration um so hopefully by the time this actually comes out we'll be teasing those things but um a lot of these products aren't typically you know available internationally or the selection is very limited and it's probably the the much bigger brands that you probably already heard of right like your vital proteins are definitely International your do axes definitely International and those are the guys that were our main reason for entering this Market because they were doing anything special right they commoditized the space we wanted to make it fun we wanted to make it um uh entertaining tasty and and so on and so on so when we obviously launched into the us we had a pretty good reaction to it we've been in the space for five years now we've um just crossed around 75 80 million in in total revenue we have a Facebook community of over 100,000 members um in over 5,000 doors Nationwide between Walmart uh Riot a vitamin shop so the US definitely wanted this type of product and and the demand is there um so we decided you know what why not test international waters um just considering one Facebook costs over there are are a lot cheaper cpms are a lot lower um and the fact that they don't get uh too many of these products out there is is very uh disappointing but another reason here is that shipping is such a big problem right so shipping customs duties uh there's a reason why these uh International countries uh don't typically want to shop from the US because it is expensive so um we've been able to kind of figure out a way to to account for all of this and now we're starting to scale into you know countries outside the US and you know given we're we're heading into this uh weird timing where Q4 is about to start elections are ramping up um the US may not be the most efficient place to put your marketing dollars let's start finding other places to kind of deploy and and international was uh the place we wanted to test and so far so good yeah okay so um so for me for my I have a lot of questions about that for for the client that I was pushing on this with we um it was basically I I actually can't talk too specifically here um in this case but um but what I'll say basically is very different category with an opportunity that we saw to be International looked to us like a product that should have some International resonance got things set up and then it was just very much like let's kind of turn it on and see what happens like it wasn't I would say there's some strategic elements of like doing the operational side of things but we really weren't sure what the opportunity was and for us at least in the last couple weeks and there's there's it's pretty early for us we've really been pushing on this in the last month but like 50% of our spend has been in National and I'll say more about how we did that setup but it is only 16 countries that we're targeting right now um and so it so there's there's like we purposefully kind of dipped our toes in the water of this a little bit and wanted to see if we could get going before Q4 so when I um lay that out um like you know the the thing that went off in my head and and actually um you know before like right around the time we were scheduling this podcast I was like you know even when we had to push back and reschedule I was like this is actually kind of great because it'll allow me to have a little more time to spend and see what happens like we were ju I mean I think when we were First supposed to record we had had our International on for like two days so um so now we're seeing a little bit more and I can speak to a little bit more data but I am very curious I mean my immediate reaction to that when that happened for our client my client was like holy cow this might be a monster opportunity now let's go figure out all the things we really need to figure it out um there is kind of a low-lift way to test this and and I want to talk about that in a little bit so for somebody listening to this to think about if there's an opportunity for me there's some things you can do to to sort of find out pretty fast I think but um but I I want to like really get into a few different elements of this you with you and hear kind of how it's gone for you because you have you have talked about I think you even tweeted the other day something the effect of like International's been like like Mass like like monster for you guys like it's been it's been a huge opportunity can you talk a little bit about um about first of all sort of like what percentage of your total spend is international or maybe another way to look at it like how much spend increase did you get when you flipped those those on uh and started spending there yeah absolutely so I would say now honestly pretty dead on with what you said which is around 50% right um and the reason that is that is that is so much right like it is a lot any brand spending like if you can what we're saying is you doubled your spend like that so that's interesting that your your situation is the same as mine there okay so so keep going so that's crazy so I so here's here's here's honestly if you if you go back to I would say end of August right um we started to see uh the US like just performance volatility wise was like kind of just up in the air we saw really high spend days and we saw really low spend days and again um similar to Andrew we're like fully all in on on manual bidding so our our whole we're we're up like it's based off of Demand right so if we started to see demand kind of come down in the US um we're like you know what we have to we have to upkeep you know Topline Revenue we need to bring in profit um where can we kind of like open up some more spend and that was International right so if we were going to spend say a million uh just in the US now towards the end of August we're trying to like we're kind of like trending downwards probably spending maybe 600 we were able to make up the other 400 500 just in international and get back to where we were spending right so that's where we started to see um like it wasn't like we were spending a million then we spent a million on top of that I wish that was the case but we we were seeing some downward Trend and and I think it had a lot to do with what's happening now right elections in the US um just in general Q4 starting and typically for us we start to see a downward Trend because it's not our time for supplements it's really not our time q1 Q2 is really our time so we see this trend but it's still I was thinking you know what we're also coming out of Summer um what are some of the countries that are actually wintertime right now and you're looking at the southern hemisphere which is Australia New Zealand um and so we're like how can we hit this market and so that's when we actually started launching towards the end of August right and to give you a little bit more context what we've been doing a lot more this year is a lot of influencer stuff a lot more stuff on Tik Tok Instagram um Facebook and a lot of it is some of it I wouldn't say a lot of it but some of it is also International so we are generating a brand presence in some of these countries even through some of the retailers we are with with like for example iherb is a massive International destination for supplements um we already have a contract and we already have distribution with them so there is awareness for Obi in these countries but we wen't running any ads towards any of these things right and then the other the other problem is shipping so shipping to these countries is very expensive duties is an issue getting stuck in customs is an issue so your customers aren't having the best experience so typically you buy from them if they're going to buy from you once probably not coming back again unless you give them a good experience so what we ended up doing was we knew we had to hit International to at least test it because there is a demand there but how do we account for all these variables in which is a barrier for some of these customers to come and buy from you right so we partnered up with open border um shout out to Darwish he if you haven't heard about open border essentially what they do is they pretty much plug into your website they they adjust you know price uh for local currency they also help your 3pls find the best shipping rates um they also handle custom and duties for you so that when it actually gets to these International uh countries there's a lot less friction right and so one of the biggest things is trying to figure out how do we create a process that's super frictionless for the consumer um so taking our original landing pages and literally if we direct traffic from say Australia New Zealand uh to this to this landing page are we showcasing you know the pricing in their currency are we um within the checkout are we offering free shipping um are we you know or are we adding you know shipping costs are we adding duties to their you know to their orders or Customs or whatever it is um what open border was able to help us do is and this is this is something that I I urge a lot of Brands to do is when you've probably tested International you probably see a low conversion rate and the reason is because you probably have to charge a ton for shipping and you're passing that on to the consumer now what we ended up doing is we know that we on average spend $22 for every order that has to go to Australia which includes shipping customs and duties now what we ended up doing is we actually took that $22 and rolled that into our pricing um on our landing pages and open border helps us do this so it's dynamic Ash really fast what was your AO on that $22 order or $22 additional charge for shipping let's say you hadn't adjusted your pricing at all what what aov would that have been off of probably yeah so that is on a68 aob okay so Ma so monster amount that you'd have to charge on top compare that to your US base so like how much would you normally like like what would that $22 charge be for a US order like in terms of your guys' shipping costs and all that kind of stuff 7 to8 okay so tripled you two and a half X something like that basically all right I'm sorry to cut you off you were talking about what you guys did so you used open border so you could actually roll some of that into the into the retail price right so the shipping number you put it if I understand what you're saying correctly the shipping number you show to the customer is not so massive but you actually charging more for the product exactly it now becomes zero because if you if think about it right there's a reason why the offer testing is so huge if if somebody sees all right you know what I'm charging $90 but $10 shipping there's some friction in the checkouts like well I was already committed to $90 not going to pay 10000 but if you're showing somebody $100 up front and free shipping boom no no other you know surprises during checkout conversion rate actually kind of goes up and so that was the kind of the the half you guys do that in the US too um so for us again we're we're pretty much free shipping over a certain threshold and similar for for the international countries as well because one on on a onetime bot like a one month supply um we do want to use the aov bumping tactics so on a one month supply you're paying for shipping but three month six month free shipping offered yeah got it okay so you're just you're building different offers like that yeah exactly exactly so this strategy helps and so while our aov in the US maybe $68 for for Australia New Zealand it's like 995 but we also know that um we have to pay out higher shipping higher customs duties etc etc um but because we're actually able to improve conversion rate our return in these International countries is way higher than our break even threshold so that we're way more profitable in these countries I would say on a on a contribution margin basis it's very similar to the US but it added additional scale and spend uh into these countries right so let me just walk that back so what you're doing is you have worse margin meaning worse margin even if you bake in the shipping and duties and those things like that into into the price you have meaningfully worse margin overseas but you get a higher end platform return so your Ras goes up basically and you're able to do that at add enough scale to where the actual like net net the actual contribution margin that you're generating per purchase works out to be about the same you just go higher row so I mean you just if you just assume contribution margin is a combination of AD spend and cogs or whatever right your cogs go up you just bring your your ad spend uh percentage down and you end up at the same number um overall is that is that what you're saying that you guys end up with exactly exactly and and that's that's where setting and and now we can get into kind of like the the account structure of things where um you know setting up for before before we do that I want to actually go backwards a little um because I do want to get to the account structure and I actually like I have like a lot of detail questions in here about how you guys are doing this in part because I'm stealing your time right now to get advice for my accounts Ash so that's what's happening and we're just turning it into content um so okay so um so one of the things um one of the things I want to ask was okay so you have this increase in ad spend you mentioned that's happening during a downtime so it's not like it's not like you're actually like adding 50% or or doubling to a a forecast you were hitting what you're saying it sounds like is you're able to meet your forecast by adding International you actually probably hadn't forecasted International as part of it that ends up being what saves you to reach the forecast there's actually something similar going on for a client of mine um but but what I wonder about just tell me what your inclination is if that's happening during a downtime what is your expectation if like I mean do you think do you think this will move the seasonality is different like you said you mentioned Australia right like it's opposite seasonality so there's that um I mean it's got to make you salivate a little is really what I'm saying right for like when your us spend comes back around to go like oh man this is this could get crazy yeah I mean I think well just just Australia New Zealand alone right the the thought process there is that yep it's winter um but now you're talking about opening it up to like UK Canada other english- speaking countries and so when our time truly comes which is q1 um I I do feel like it will give us an opportunity to continue growing year-over-year right so like for example we just had a board meeting and so this year we're because of retail efforts because of a lot of things like we're up 100% year overy year now how can I add awesome more next year um you know just on the DDC side right like we're going to grow just the retail efforts and things like that but like where am I going to grow on the DDC side like I can't spend more on the US um because I feel like we're kind of hitting this plateau and the only way to really increase that is by you know diving into different channels but allow that right let's say you know getting into you said you guys were in like 16 different countries we've only really hit onto four countries right now and now we're testing more and so that is my to your entire International increas is in four countries I mean that that makes it even that makes it even more promising right cuz so okay all right okay let's back up a little bit more then so what four count Australia New Zealand what else UK Canada um do you have a feel for which one of those is the most dominant and the most uh value additive to you um I'm regret saying I'm gonna regret saying this but it is Australia it is Australia New Zealand I I do feel like Canada performs very similar to the US um UK also it is also very tough there was a lot more changes we needed to make to the current funnel to get UK to work whereas with Australia New Zealand Canada it was literally just duplicate change targeting and start running hat if you are growing your e-commerce business and you need to find incredible talent for your team I do not know I mean this I do not know why you would not consider hiring incredible e-commerce talent for your brand and your team from the Philippines with my friends at more Staffing more staff ing is the philippines-based uh staffing agency that will help you recruit onboard train and provide ongoing coaching to incredible Talent from the Philippines for your business and that is because and the reason you should do that is because uh there is there's a a large pool of talent in the Philippines people with d e Commerce resumés across every part of the organization I'm not talking about just like virtual assistant I mean like really highly talented people from the marketing side design side uh through the supply chain side like every part of the business who are can come into your business at manager and above level positions you can pay them above Market wages in the Philippines which would still be below Market wages in the US it is a way for them to win because you provide a great opportunity for them and for you to win because you keep your Opex lean uh by hiring internationally and more Staffing is the way you get access to it I work for more Staffing for over a year use them to build up my own team in various parts of my business on the agency side at this point I recommend them so gladly to everyone they are some of my most trusted Partners in e-commerce and I really mean that uh so go to more now.co more now.co if you're trying to grow your team you want to do what is right for an e-commerce business which is keep your Opex lean but you need incredible talent to your team which you do if you have a growing team you should go hire at more Staffing go to more now.co to get started today is your margin meaningfully different from one of those countries to another so let's just take those four like could you theoretically and I'm not I don't know how you've built this actually but could you theoretically drop all four of those countries into the same place and end up with similar enough margin profiles to where you could just run them all together it's a great question um it is different enough because the C targets for yeah because each country is different duties is different shipping is uh different the ca targets for each country is different um which is why I'm separating by C Target in the okay that that makes sense yeah and if you're running cost Caps or bid caps you got to do that right because your aovs are going to be different and your margin is going to be different so CAC and so um cost caps and bid caps are going to be different TR might make that a little easier but that's probably going to running highest value is probably just going to really disproportionately push your spend towards um towards some places than others wherever the aov is higher because it's gonna it's going to optimize for the higher aov um Okay so um what about for open border you mentioned that because I and I'm I'm going to work back out here from there into the campaign setup so you mentioned open border did you um go and really think about that setup um we've used passport with a client of mind I think is a similar uh product um have did you basically go with them and really build for these specific countries or was it the kind of thing that you could sort of flip on and it worked across the board like how did you approach how strategic were you is really what I'm asking with building the operational side of things for these particular countries yeah so I think each country needs its own love just because my whole when we originally tested this um it completely flopped right and the reason it flopped is you see the intra funnel metrics stay the same as kind of the US maybe even better but once you hit checkout there's a massive drop off and the the only reason you can think that or assume that is because you're you're charging for shipping you're charging duties you're charging Customs they realize it's it's priced in USD there's so many problems the one thing that I said to them was is I don't want any of these customers who are shopping above a certain spend threshold to see any added costs right because on my landing pages the way that I've built them is if you buy a three-month Supply a six-month Supply we are giving you free shipping we're giving you everything and so what we needed to do is because of obviously um the currency differences in terms of um the exchange rate duties is different shipping is different uh each country needs to have a price change that is different from each other so for Australia we have to increase the price by x amount to account for all these three different fees in the UK it's different Canada is different so open border pretty much set up three different profiles and pricing structures for these different countries yeah exactly and so now when we do want to introduce something else we have to understand okay well what is the duty charge on this you know aov what is the shipping cost on this aov and then adjust for that because people see a price for the first time and they're sold on it once they get through checkout you're adding additional fees they're out yeah it's interesting I mean I especially the kinds of fees I wonder if there's like a middle ground that you could treat it more like the US where you like you show the price a little bit lower to start but then you add $5 shipping $10 you know something that is not so like something that's more normal to people although it may be interesting to see what sort of standard practices for businesses in these different countries like I don't really know what the answer to that is so um okay so you're really going country by country and you see the opportunity those places and going and setting it up okay so um so you were saying now when you look at the opportunity for how you're going to grow your DDC business next year what you're looking at as going like okay I got to open up more countries I'm assuming that's what you were you were saying when I rudely cut you off yeah I I think that's probably the next step here right so especially with Australia New Zealand with given how well it has done um I because looking at the ad account the last 30 days just in Australia alone was 300,000 in spent right and so what I would say is crazy I mean Australia is like I think smaller uh smaller than California yeah 26 million like it's just not that many people in Australia like that is that is a perance exactly the thing with this is is is testing is is a must right so we're constantly refreshing uh creatives every week um are you building any Australia specific creative um so just building your us creative and dropping it in everywhere exactly that but now what we're doing is we're trying to get Australian creators um to kind of you know enter our influencer ecosystem and not only kind of build on that end but also get that created for the ad account and so it's a little bit more localized right um so on on top of that what I was saying is if we're consistently seeing this scale right um I saw a few tweets the other day saying like listen hey shouldn't be forecasting based off of initial success totally fair because when we first launched it was like this and now it's coming like this and now it's plateauing which is where we want to be if it continues why are we not opening up Amazon Australia right why are we not opening up those channels because one in my opinion I think having being on Amazon is incremental so can we squeeze a little bit more juice out of that and and and you know enter those channels there so that's one way of kind of expanding it so getting into Amazon Australia getting into Amazon UK Canada now all right what are some of the other countries that we can get to obviously the lowest hanging fruit are English-speaking countries but what about the Spanish speaking countries what about you know you know Mexico is massive for us in retail we haven't even touched it yet but to be fair it's it is primarily skewed Spanish speaking so a lot of our ads have to change our whole landing page has to change um things like that so I think when we get into it starting next year it's opening up these these um these GEOS and really getting specific with creatives creators uh landing pages and and and things like that let me tell you who the exact right customer is to be exploring landing pages and full funnel builds with format uh it is a brand who is who has products that appeal in different ways to multiple kinds of customers if you have one product that has multiple values to different kinds of customers then you should be considering working with for mod I'll give you an example of this I recently had an interview on my podcast with a CEO of a company where they had a a lighting setup and the light was really good for home offices but they discovered that the exact same product was also really good for tattoo artists if you think about that at the level of AD and at the level of landing page it's really easy to separate those audiences at the ad level right you could create tattoo based ads and you could create home office based ads but once somebody clicks on that ad if you're just sending traffic to the PDP you're going to get the tattoo person and the L and the home office person on this weird PDP that has this strange mix of all this stuff and so what that CEO had found was that the more that their team built tighter more consistent funnels all the way through to reach these different subgroups of customers the more they would see conversion rates increase 30 and 40% those kinds of numbers post click way better than any c test they'd ever done that is the exact right use case for something like fmat fmat allows you to build serious funnels with consistent messaging from ad all the way through Lander and actually all the way through the cart you can build custom carts custom pdps relative to each ad and Lander at incredible scale because it is both the best landing page software of which I am aware it is really robust it loads incredibly fast for customers we click on your ads uh and the testing environment that's built in for ongoing split testing is really smooth really easy plus they combine it with essentially an agency service where they will give you an account manager who will build the pages for you bring all of their knowledge of what past tests have worked across all of their brands so they they come in advance to guide you to the right kind of testing uh opportunities for your business and then and like I said they'll build the actual uh Landers in for you so that you don't get bogged down with a really good idea that just creates a bunch more work for your team you can move insanely fast and build really tight funnels and when I've done it with my clients we've seen doubling of spend as a major part of our work with Vermont uh sending pretty much all of our ad traffic at least for one of my clients now uh who is exactly like the situation I described before uh sending pretty much all of our ad traffic to format Landers and we're really exploring using it across the entire site go to format commerce.com forat commerce.com if you're getting serious about building landing pages and funnels it is the best software and the best service of which I'm aware you should explore it today it but what it feels like to me and this is similar to what I'm seeing is that the sort of cost to impact ratio of that calculation like the bet you're going to make there is that essentially it's a much smaller lift to go add a bunch more Revenue in those places than it would be to add an equivalent amount of spending Revenue in the US like it's just like like you get those things set up and there's some work on the front end but it's not a crazy amount and if you could do that you could end up like really adding a lot of profitable spend pretty fast like that's that's at least my feel for the opportunity in those places that it's just like an outsized opportunity relative to um relative to adding the same thing in the US do you think that's true for you for you guys as well I agree I think I think like if you could let's let's let's say you could dial four those four countries that you're already in right you could just sort of take the operational build better right you get you get a you have a real method for getting influencers and creators in those spaces and you do some translation if you need to what I mean whatever it is I guess those four you didn't you know should be fine on that but like um you know you add a u to all your words that end in o r um so that you can you know speak to the UK and the whatever uh but like uh like you know then if you want to do Mexico like there's a world here right where you go to like obvy MX or whatever and you like you actually get a translated site and all the things that's a much bigger lift yeah but once you have that done and there's got to be a service that does this once you have that done um you potentially have a whole bunch more spend and a whole bunch more people you can reach um on that side and this is I'll tell you what this is like the thing that's actually the most compelling to me about this is like if I want to build a really big business um is that you could actually take that to another level which is like what happens when you start setting up 3pls and DCS in in those countries so that like you you end up just like with really fast shipping you know because you can ship from Mexico in Mexico like I remember hearing this a long time ago about Lumen the men's skincare brand that like in their early days and I don't know how true the story is but that like their founder like a big part of his strategy was um was to build International from the beginning because the opportunity was so big and um and you're shaking your head I wonder it sounds like you might have heard the story too but the the U or you're nodding I mean not shaking um the and so it was like I had heard something that they were like $120 million year business like a while ago like when nobody was a $100 million business in Dy and um and it was like uh it was like 40 million us like the bulk of the spend was elsewhere and they had set up I think the founder had T I heard the founder had taught himself Korean or something like that like and so he he was like actually building you know serious really good really native um stores and and fulfillment in the countries negotiating with in their native languages and and because for him it was like this massive opportunity to go do that um and I mean maybe one way to look at that is if somebody told me I'll pay you 80 million a year to learn Korean I would probably do it so um the um the anyway um that's kind of where my head is going with this whole thing is that I think it's possible that there is obviously some work involved and I think for a lot of Brands they ought not go pursue this too soon because there's just some standing up of your brand your value that you you do but I wonder if there is a possibility here in a pathway to Growing internationally much better and much faster much much better much much faster people think like when you think about the idea that a midate figure brand sometimes like a good growth year is 20% I don't know I mean like you just mentioned 100% your over your growth in general that's obviously Monster by adding a channel especially by or by by adding retail basically um man what happens if you go International that could that's the way you create giant step growth in your business it's not just by getting a little better at the things you're already doing at that stage in the Mida figure stage it's by actually expanding your ability to reach net new people in places where they are which is what retail is Brick and morar is right it's that there a a lot of Commerce happens uh in you know in person and so uh if you're only online you're going to leave those people on the table that's fine for a while you can grow a really big business doing that um but now you got you know Omni channel for that reason but I tell you what I think that's probably a lot harder than International DDC you know ret I don't know I mean that's at least my experience yeah yeah it's been it's been uh challenging but also having uh a good board is is very important because like and that's why we raised not to get off topic but that's why we raised at the beginning of the year because not only did we need cash to obviously get more inventory we needed um and one we can get cash anywhere uh but we wanted the right team and the right um for these large initiatives right exactly right right you wanted the you wanted the guys that know Target you want the guys that know Sam's Club Costco and so that was a strategic race that we that we did and so yeah to your point it's it's very important and and it can create that growth like we just reset in Walmart now um with our top performing uh skew we went into 1500 stores last year um over the last 52 weeks we were doing really well they expanded us Nationwide and so that's a that's a 3X in that business right there and so now adding in you know different retailers and you know grocery we're getting into and things like that it can drastically change things and I think it it allows us to spend even more online because that is where the the generation and the demand gen is happening um and you can kind of ease up on some of the targets as well so makes my life easier the uh it makes it makes it makes a lot of sense the way you're framing that um we probably should I'm um I I actually am interested in talking more about like well one question about when you guys used open border and you stood up the operational side of things and the sort of customer experience side of things before flipping on the Facebook ads and I've had the same experience as you by the way like if you don't do all that stuff people technically can buy internationally but it's a terrible experience and they don't yeah um and in my experience by the way at the Facebook level in fact um the CPC is way lower cpms are way lower but conversion rate is a lot lower overseas as well um than than you get in the US and so it ends up being really worth it uh all told um now you may have solved the conversion rate thing in in the way that you've sort of built the offer which I think is really interesting definitely going to go back and think about that um let me how long do you did it take you guys to sort of build out what you needed with open border to make that customer experience work and and similar question are you shipping from your standard us3 PLS when you do yeah so to answer that question yes we're shipping from our standard 3pl um the setup think probably 30 to 45 days like open border came in they connected with our 3pl um they essentially now help them Source the I guess the lowest or the most affordable uh shipping rate possible because they they scan multiple carriers so they're in that sense you know that you're getting your best the best price um the way they also do it is that they they kind of bulk uh batch all your orders that going to that country so you get even more savings too um and then just on the dev side on the front end side is you know making sure that um pricing is dynamically up uh updating and and things like that so honestly probably a month to two months depending on how fast you can move how fast your 3pl moves um any you know content you want to get created how much of your how much of your time did that take up like like did you have to get really into the weeds with that but it sounds like I mean you had to think about that offer building but it sounds like also this open border did a really good job I mean this they should be paying us for this it sounds like they did a really good job of making this uh this happen yeah no um they no they did they they they really did I mean shout out to Darwish I mean and and to your previous story uh Lumen Darwish was actually at Lumen and that's kind of what inspired open border oh no way okay so so that's what he wants he wants all of these Brands to go and hit International and make it you know a big chunk of Revenue but they did a lot of heavy lifting um the only thing I really did was like Hey like yeah I got to make some changes on the offer can you guys do it yep cool done that's uh that's I mean that's just like the dream a relatively easy lift with things that can have a really big impact that's awesome um all right let's go to the ad side of things because I think people uh will be really interested in that so tell me so let's let's let's just talk about the campaign setup so you're running manual bids in the US first first question running manual bids in international as well correct yep um okay and then um do you have each country broken out into its own campaign or do you have a c or like like how are you doing that so the way that I thought about it at first was to initially go by uh country right and um so I was like you know what Australia New Zealand similar audience similar you know seasonality uh let's group that right I think New Zealand audience is way too small to be targeted Alone um so group that with with au um so that was the first test when I did that that was a separate campaign right so our our typical structure is I have a scaling campaign I got a testing campaign so I literally made an additional scaling campaign I duplicated my main scaling campaign kept all the same ads just changed the targeting to Australia New Zealand and I I lowered the bid a little bit just to see where we're at and uh day one it just started ripping and it was the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life um obviously goes after the kind of the lwh hanging fruit the the people that are very in market and kind of know about your brand um but we were it was it was actually insane I think we like 3x Revenue that day um and it was something that yeah it was nuts but again we were monitoring the margin very closely right um we knew where our break even was and we were well above it and so we just continued where we were at we kept the bids where they were at let rip and and we're like you know what the next week let's launch the next Country Canada was ready UK was ready uh so we launched Canada Canada didn't do Insane volume like Australia did because it's very similar this is what I normally see with Canada there's there's there's some value there but it's typically rarely like a real Difference Maker exactly so it's it's efficient spend it's probably an uptick a little bit but again something that you kind of set set your bid Let It Rock it spends great if it doesn't whatever right then the following week was UK um again separate campaign so now I'm I'm separating by region just to keep it clean um if I were to say if I were to do this again and maybe restructure it if it kind of like takes a dip is I would probably put you uh I'd probably put Canada and UK together because the CAC is uh CAC targets are similar um Au and New Zealand are different so like I said I'd probably do it by CAC targets but UK is uh when we launched the first time completely flopped and I believe the reason was because the pricing that was being shown on the front end showed USD right and so and it was translated into okay well this is what the price is in USD and then you would have to like they would have to calculate for themselves well how much is that in GBP right and so we saw a drop of conversion during checkout so we're like all right before we give up on this let's let's redo the landing page let's recalculate okay well this is what the price should be in in pounds um this is what we should be saying I guess you know the the British are deal Seekers so can we add in a a free a free gift on you know the three Monon Supply six month supply how can we make the offer better and so that those changes helped us get cacked down in the UK and actually made it a viable viable Channel but like I said not every not every country is going to be duplicate the campaign push live and you're printing money it's you got to make sure you understand the the consumer behavior of each of these countries because they're way different from the US and they're way different from each other and so keeping an eye on you know your in funnel metrics well all right from adding the cart to getting into checkout is that you know in line with what you're seeing everywhere else from checkout to actually completing your purchase where is there a drop off what what is the drop off are they seeing you know extra charges that they shouldn't be like Customs or duties or V how can you account for that and maybe build it into the price point that they initially see and so there's a lot of changes that are to be made it's all very simple stuff but you know it allows you to kind of scale a bit further um but to answer the question the account structure is you know different campaigns um per country or per C Target and then we also have a different testing campaign for each country we're testing the same creatives but we're testing them separately for different countries because again different people are going to react differently to different uh pieces of creative so you might have a winning creative for the US which may not have won in the in AU or or UK but and then vice versa you might have one that wins in the UK but not in Canada so we want to make sure that we're giving everything a chance and um not just like oh well this worked in the US let's go and deploy it worldwide so that's that's the account Truck Yeah okay we so so what we did did partly is a way to just test this as fast as possible and even actually get some data back sort of from some real sales to figure out where a margin was coming in at because some of these things you sort of guess at but like for example it could be really hard to predict the aov one thing we've seen that's been really interesting is that like like CPC and aov are like wildly different in different places depending on all kinds of different factors um you know CPM in part but then also just like um actually because because we duplicate every campaign that we run to have both a l cost and a highest value version the lowest cost with bid caps the highest value with tr- targets um and and one of the interesting things for us with the international thing is we've seen seen some highest value um some some countries work better in one rather than the other that like essentially in different places one of them is getting more reach than the other and that's very similar to what I see with like us-based accounts in general like some accounts I I run tros and bidc cap side by side and my tros campaigns get all the spend other places it's like 50/50 other places my bidc get more spend um and so or other other brands right so this that's sort of happening at the country level within one brand and one of the things that's been really fascinating for us like on the highest value side like we are clearly reaching some rich people in some places because there are some countries where like we're getting double the aov in this other country that we would get in the US like it is it is doing ve is very different consumer behavior and for those people high the highest value campaign is going right after them so it's it's kind of all over so what we did was we launched with 6 different countries and there was very little science to it we picked some of the obvious ones that where there's you know plenty of English speaking and stuff like that um we tried to cover a lot of different um regions of the world so it's like once okay we had Australia New Zealand and there we had Canada that was an obvious one Mexico because the shipping is close you know in both of those places um and then you know added a few European countries added a few South American countries put the UAE in there just because I thought probably a mix of people there in the Middle East seemingly some money I don't you know I don't know like um and just kind of like did that and then um stayed away from a lot of Asian countries uh mostly because of language issues uh most of those places there just less english- speaking but um but um and then and then and then this is probably a really important thing here stayed far away from China and India um and entirely because they're so big that it will just eat up huge huge amounts of spend and in India I've seen this in particular and in some other countries I've seen the cpms be like like two cent clicks because their cpms are so cheap and just traffic that does not convert um and so um so I I would think of places that are that populous as sort of being their own strategy and you'd really want to be able to control the spend volume separately in those kinds of places um but that that could be wrong I just would want to be able to see it separately because it's just you know again we said Australia was 25 million people you know India is a billion and a half so it's just like a different universe so um so we we put all of all 16 countries into both the lowest cost and highest value and then what's been interesting is the actual distribution of the spend giving meta the freedom to pict between those countries has been very similar to what you just described Ash like um really heavy Australia Australia by far the number one in this um and the best performing as well then UK then Canada then actually for us is Mexico which is interesting so I'll be curious what happens when you guys go to Mexico as well despite that as you said Mexico I mean that's Spanish speakers you know obviously there's some English being spoken there but but it's overwhelmingly Spanish speakers so um did you make changes for Mexico like different ads different landing pages no no all all of those countries are in the same campaigns so it is like 16 16 um countries one campaign and I'm just letting meta go find people basically um now there's some ways in which this is creating some problems like different aovs means you need different CA targets Etc different duties and things like that but what what our plan is to do is to I mean I quickly got on the phone with an Operations Logistics supply chain person in the company and said hey let's Circle let's actually let's let's keep spending we'll try to keep it somewhere around a number that we think is going to be at least break even and especially for this brand we wanted to be ready for Holiday um and so it's like let's get data back from where some of this stuff is coming in at analyze these orders and then go okay what targets do we need and what I think we probably will do to your point going forward is end up splitting things back out over more time but the thing that makes me so excited about this is like I'm turning around to this this brand and going like hey guys we probably ought to turn around now and like make this like the major effort of 2025 essentially solving this problem because if this is a possibility to double our spend uh like like that that it could be a huge impact plus once you've done the front end of the work right there actually isn't that much ongoing work to keep it going at least to some level um the front end is where all the work is here but once you have things set up then it's like okay great we've got it now at some point maybe you do go spin up three PLS in different countries and and you know relationships to where you actually improve all of this over time and really build a lot of time and effort into it but um but you know for for us I think is a big point for retention that's the that's the key for retention it's not like okay well you know not necessarily you don't have to go like the month after like if you if you find in six months that you know people are like you know what I'm I'm ready to buy again but like I don't want to wait two weeks for me to get the product I think that's something where you have to do that that consumer research and Survey like hey like well one why haven't you bought again and if the main reason is well I like the product but I don't want to wait you know x amount of time then there is some signals where it's like yo you should get out there and and have some type of um presence there yeah I think that's right and I me anything you can really do to make the customer experience better is probably a good idea you know like if you can just go figure out how to make it so that it's like hey if we can reduce your shipping cost and reduce the price of the product then we can get it to you f faster and yeah retention and acquisition both I think there's just and plus like if you can figure out a way to do that that actually creates more margin as well like that's just the real game changer because if you already know you can get a really high return on the ads like man it's it's uh it's um really big possibility look the US is 350 million people there's a lot more people in the world um and and the possibility of being able to reach way way more of them is just a very very big deal I think um so yeah um okay um any uh I I have all kinds of thoughts about next but I think what we should do actually Ash is you keep do you keep working on it I'll keep working on it with my team and then we'll see you here in three months to like circle on it we've got just just a few minutes left and here's a question I like to ask people when when there's just the end of the conversation okay um tell me what is the top thing besides International that's on your mind about meta ads or about just DDC growth doesn't have to be meta ads DDC growth uh e-commerce growth retail growth any of it like what's like top top of mind for you that you can just sort of leave people with as like a good thought to chew on yeah um Soo what you did there um I think the um the biggest thing for us has been focusing on organic so how can we build more organic visibility for our own social profiles but more so how do we get more into like influencers how do we nail creators how do we get Tik Tok shop to pop off right I think the brands that are crushing right now are the ones that have you know dedicated creators the ones that have you know uh a very engaging social profiles on Tik Tok Instagram etc etc so while we may have like a really um uh engaging Community just through Facebook there's not a lot of discoverability for that right um I think meta is going to continuously um go after loow hanging fruit for the most part I think figuring out ways to open up up your top of funnel getting more eyeballs into the brand is going to be super beneficial for people now I I I I talk to a lot of people now and it's like listen everybody who's running ads on meta is running conversion objectives right it was built for bottom of the funnel traffic it was built for middle of the funnel traffic there's a reason they have brand awareness campaigns reach campaigns it's because you are meant to fill your funnel now can you get a better CPM outside of meta yes can you get it through influencers Tik Tok uh building on your own organic social profiles 100% so don't rely on just meta to grow your your business yes you can get it to a certain point but if you're trying to scale to that that 50 100 million 200 million it's not going to be done on just meta it has to happen elsewhere so I think um the biggest thing on my mind for the next year is how do we get influencer to really pop off how do we get other channels involved how do I bring more eyeball to the brand CTV Billboards out of home whatever it is um that's what I'm focusing on and let meta do what it does and and capture people that are ready to buy um you just got to fill the fill the bucket okay so in next week I'm having Jack ruin on the show for the third time uh who's the founder of PR and fig and he just tweeted something really fascinating which was basically like hey I resisted going Omni Channel with my advertising for a really long time focus on meta focus on meta but then once we added Omni Channel and they're look they're mid Aid figures like that's a monster business he's like once once we did that uh or uh once we added Omni Channel we saw like 300% growth and spend at the same profitability or whatever um he had he had seemed to have sort of unlocked it after waiting and waiting and waiting and now I think I'm I'm going to get to this with him and so subscribe right now if you're watching or listening to this because um that's going to be a good conversation if you if you've heard my interviews with Jack before you you know how insightful he is and just how great he is like you have been in this conversation Ash about sharing real data but um the um the the possibility there is really fascinating to me and it just seems like um people are finding ways to to win like that more and more um while while being really conscious of the fact that their spend needs to produce profit um if you can combine those two things together like getting really really good and and again for most brands I think this is like really a mid eight figure time to do it like I I what I tell people all the time and what I'm curious to ask Jack uh is like what I want to ask Jack is would you if you go back would you have done this earlier um my my my instinct is that most people shouldn't diversify their ad spend um until they're in that sort of midate funnel stage um because getting good on Facebook and getting awesome at it is hard work um and pays off really really big uh and that's usually the next best place to spend your next dollar for a long time but there is a point where it's not where it actually is better to go somewhere else and so yeah I'm really fascinated to jump into that there so Ash thanks thanks great great thought to leave on perfect lead into a next episode of mine you should get more of Ash's Thoughts by following him on Twitter at ashin Milani I'm going to link that in the show notes of course and see all the things that uh is happening with Obby there Ron Ron uh from from Obby also shares a lot of thoughts there um and uh and of course the whole DTC um sort of thought leadership and crew at chew on this uh which Ash is also part of is also something you should go check out podcast newsletter there to stay on top of everything that's happening in the DDC space these guys are really in the conversation in a lot of different ways so um if you have liked this episode with Ash you should definitely go follow up and get more content from him Ash thanks so much for your time man I appreciate it appreciate you man thanks for having me yep all right we tried to get tactical in that conversation there's a lot there but right when I hung up I reached out to my client who was doing International I said hey look jica had a conversation with Ash I really think we could be um considering putting the main part of our resources in 2025 into uh building more International ads because I think it's that big of an opportunity so um I think there's a huge opportunity here and I hope that episode was helpful to get you started do follow up with Ash he's a great follow on Twitter um and make sure you stay up with his content uh of course you can stay up with my content by subscribing here and don't forget to follow up with my sponsors with formont and more Staffing they are awesome go check them out links for those are in the show notes go to ajg.com to see everything that I'm doing you can reach out to me at podcast a jf.com or on Twitter at andrewj Ferris thanks so much for watching or listening and I'll talk to you next time [Music]