How Inbound for eCommerce Grew to 70K Visitors

Tom Schwab started Inbound for eCommerce about a year before this recording, after running his own store, Goodbye Crutches, on HubSpot for several years. Gray MacKenzie hosted this episode, number 4 of Inbound Agency Journey, and Andrew Dymski joined him for the recap. Tom talks through the traffic growth that got him into the agency business, how he staffs with freelancers from Kalamazoo, Michigan, and why e-commerce companies struggle with the inbound mindset.

From buying every visitor to 70,000 a month

Tom began as a HubSpot customer. He read the book Inbound Marketing, spent six months hacking a version together with WordPress, MailChimp and Google Analytics, and then moved to HubSpot.

We started on board with HubSpot and really transitioned from building our business on pay-per-click to going to an inbound strategy. With that, it took us from a regional player to a national leader. When we started with them, we were getting about 3,000 unique visitors a month and now we’re at 70,000 a month. While it doesn’t sound a lot, it’s a small niche that we’re in. We’ve gone from buying every visitor with pay-per-click to now getting high quality organic traffic.

(Listen at 01:43)

Those numbers cover about four years. Tom said the uptick in traffic and sales showed within the first two quarters, and that the harder you work at it, the faster you see it. He now runs Goodbye Crutches as an owner rather than a day-to-day manager, and anything he hasn’t tried before gets tested on his own site, not a client’s.

Build an inbound army instead of a marketing department

Inbound for eCommerce isn’t trying to be a full-service agency. It does strategy, coaching, consulting, white-label work for other agencies, and hands-on execution for stores that want it. The staffing model comes from Tom’s own experience.

What we found is that we’re out of Kalamazoo, Michigan, and not all the creative, talented people want to live in Kalamazoo. With that, we’ve really tapped in and we were able to run a multi-million dollar B2C direct-to-patient e-commerce site without using an agency or full service agency or even having a full-time marketing department.

(Listen at 05:23)

Gray compared it to the book Virtual Freedom, and Tom said it matched how he’d worked for about four years.

There’s no super freelancer, just like there’s no super virtual assistant, but the people that you can find with specific skills from e-commerce, pay-per-click, analytics, and then even some of the administrative tasks like posting blogs, doing the social media, the graphic design, it’s amazing to tap into those. You can really build an inbound army of people that you can tap into and rely on.

(Listen at 05:54)

Pay-per-click is a drug

Gray asked how Tom coaches an e-commerce client into inbound. The first job is the philosophy, because e-commerce teams are used to buying results.

They’re very good at paying thousands of dollars a month for pay-per-click, but with that, they also see an immediate return with that. I always call it pay-per-click is like a drug where you take it, you see the high, and then you go through the withdrawal the next day. So really, it’s a mind shift on not what they want to get tomorrow, but what they want to get a year from now and two years from now.

(Listen at 13:14)

Tom doesn’t think free traffic exists anymore either. Paid traffic keeps getting more expensive, and as he put it, “it’s never been easier to sell online, but harder to make a buck.” The leaders he sees are building for the long term: a strategy, buyer personas, and campaigns of evergreen content where each piece moves a persona along the buyer’s journey. The goal of his coaching is to teach clients to run it themselves.

If you take credit cards, you’re in e-commerce

A lot of the conversation is about selling directly from HubSpot’s COS, which in 2015 meant pasting PayPal button code into a page or using Foxy Cart, whose cart slides over the page so the buyer never feels they’ve left the site. Tom’s bigger point was about who should care.

Most people don’t think of themselves as e-commerce. They think of that as people that are selling massive amounts of things, but if you’ve got anything that you’re taking credit cards for, be it non-profits with the donations… it just makes a whole lot of sense to do it from the same platform.

(Listen at 09:04)

Smart content does the rest: wholesale pricing for contacts on a wholesaler list, a repeat customer greeted by name. Tom’s line was that the COS is limited only by the creativity of the user.

Two camps that don’t understand each other

Asked what the agency struggles with, Tom named education.

They’re not familiar with it, and it’s like it’s two different camps. You’ve got e-commerce that doesn’t understand inbound and inbound that doesn’t understand e-commerce. So trying to educate both of those. I’m amazed by the number of HubSpot users or companies that just don’t see themselves as e-commerce, but yet that’s all the problems that they’re having is e-commerce.

(Listen at 16:54)

He doesn’t think the education lengthens the sales cycle much, and the customers who come through it understand what they bought. He’d rather work the top of the funnel on awareness than chase bottom-of-funnel quick wins that leave as fast as they came. In the recap, Gray passed along something Tom said after the recording: he tells e-commerce clients not to put the blog in the site header, because it pulls a buyer away from the purchase.

Tom’s tools are ScheduleOnce for booking across time zones and Smartsheet, an Excel spreadsheet on steroids in his words, for templated monthly campaigns. His morning routine comes from a customer’s two-page download called Steps to a Productive Day: decide what the day should look like before it starts.