Catherine Langman:
Well, hello there, it’s Catherine Langman here back with another episode of the Product Preneur Success podcast. And today on the show, we’re going to be really taking a close look and breaking down what it actually looks like to grow an e-commerce brand from essentially the start line to a seven figure e-commerce business. And, what does that actually look like? And, I think this is really an important discussion for any of you who are really at any point in your journey along that spectrum of growth. But particularly if you are the kind of person like I think many of us are where you’re kind of getting started or you’re working on your business, but maybe feel a little bit afraid, I guess, is the right word, a bit fearful of spending money on strategies if you don’t know if it’s going to work for you or spending money on strategies that you don’t know how to do yet.
And so there’s that fear of what you don’t know. And also, if you are the sort of person who puts some pretty high expectations on yourself, I often joke with students in our program that I’m a bit of a recovering perfectionist. So if you’re like that, I hear you. I see you, I hear you. But you know, these expectations that we place on ourselves to get things right the first time. And then, sometimes we try things and we’re not suddenly a million dollar a year business overnight. And so then we go looking for some other silver bullet strategy that’s going to work better instead. And, realistically, I mean, I think when I say it like that, we all know that’s not how it works.
And there’s that whole saying that I’m sure you’ve heard, so-and-so’s an overnight success and they’ll tell you, oh yeah, overnight success, 10 years in the making. Not that it needs to take 10 years to get to seven figure business, not at all. So what does it really look like? So to do this, I’m actually not going to be talking about this with you just myself. I’m going to welcome Kristy from Babiators and Boutique Brands back on the show. I’ve just gotten off the interview with her. She’s been really super open and honest and transparent with pretty much the good stuff, the awesome outcome stuff, but also, what did it look like before when she first got started? And, getting down and dirty, like what it really, really took to get from here to there.
And I think that what she’s talking about, it actually ties in really nicely with last week’s episode, well actually it was a couple of weeks ago when I had Kate Sutton from Uber Kate on. And so Kate was talking about how to really have that longterm success and longterm sustainable growth in a business you really have to fall in love with the work, right? Not that we need to be doing all the work ourselves. That’s not what I mean. But it’s like sometimes it’s not all sunshine and roses and fun stuff, sometimes it’s like, “Okay, I need to be doing the same stuff, but I need to be doing it better.”
And so, yeah, we do need to fall in love with the work just a tiny bit. So without further ado, let’s bring Kristy onto the show and we’re going to really talk about her journey and the detailed ins and outs of getting from that starting line to a seven figure a year e-commerce brand.
Catherine Langman:
So, welcome back to the show, Kristy.
Kristy Rigby:
Thanks, Cath.
Catherine Langman:
It’s always good to have you on.
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah. I always love it, and I’m always looking forward to these calls.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, so good. So, we’re going to have a little bit of a chat about a little bit more about your journey with Babiators and your broader business, Boutique Brands, over the years, because it’s been, we’ve just worked out, what, six years since we first started working together.
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah, yeah.
Catherine Langman:
Didn’t realize we were that old!
Kristy Rigby:
I know, right? It’s funny because I had had online stores right from when my first little one was born. So I’ve been in eCommerce for about 11 years.
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Kristy Rigby:
But we brought Boutique Brands, which is a distribution business, from another owner in 2014, when my second one was born. Boutique Brands had been one of our suppliers for our online store, and it was mostly wholesale at the time. So we had some beautiful brands on board, mostly selling wholesale, but we did have a Boutique Brands website that was selling all the products that we had available at wholesale direct to the public as well.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. So the eCommerce and wholesale combined model, which is what I used to do as well.
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
So, I guess, that was the origins of Boutique Brands. Give us a sense about what was happening in the business. What was it like running that business? I think you’d probably had it for about a year, I think, before we started working together?
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah, yeah. It’s the story that a lot of people will identify with, of trying to run a business and juggle kids’ nap times and toddler play dates and all of those kinds of things, and so I just really did have the sense that I just didn’t have the critical mass of time that I needed to make my business work.
I was also very nervous about spending money on marketing. I come from a marketing background, but I could see the tangible benefit of spending money on stock because stock was an asset that could sit in my garage ready to go out, but the problem with that is that stock assets sitting in my garage doesn’t turn into money until somebody knows about it. And so I knew I needed to tell people about it, I knew I needed to do the marketing to get the products out there, but I was always really nervous about… I felt like anytime I spent money on advertising it felt like money down the gurgler, and it’s because I was doing it in such a sporadic, inconsistent way and so it was never really building any kind of profile.
Because I’d entered the market when Facebook was Facebook, and Facebook, you could post something on Facebook. Some of you will remember this from the Instagram days, but you post something on Facebook or post something on Instagram, and everybody that follows you would see it-
Catherine Langman:
Everyone saw it.
Kristy Rigby:
… and you would get sales.
Catherine Langman:
That was the golden days!
Kristy Rigby:
It was awesome, it was so good. And then that slowed down and stopped working and so I knew I had to spend money on marketing. I’d met you, Cath, at a trade show years before and we’d kind of communicated online a fair bit. I’d met you when you were doing [Cushy Tushy 00:03:32], and-
Catherine Langman:
Yes. I think we supplied your original business.
Kristy Rigby:
My original business, exactly. And so, really, when I recognized I really needed to spend more money on marketing, I was like, “Okay, I really need the confidence to know what the best marketing dollars are spent on, that get me the best returns,” and so I wanted advice from somebody who had been where I wanted to go. You and I had always gotten along well in our relationships, and I was like, “Okay, well Cath’s just starting her coaching, so let’s go work with Cath.”
There was a few things that we did straight away that made a major impact, but then you also started me on what was then called your Magnetic Website Formula course, which is now the Productpreneur Website Formula course.
Catherine Langman:
That’s a bit of a mouthful!
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah. I have to say, I’m still using all of those principles and, in fact, even just this week, I was just saying to myself, “You know what? I’ve been chasing too many shiny ideas lately. I just need to go back to the pillars that Cath taught me all those years ago,” and that you continue to teach me and that you’ve even got me teaching other people.
Catherine Langman:
I know.
Kristy Rigby:
The concept of website email traffic, traffic website email. All of those things, if we just slowly do those better and better, then the business grows.
One of the things that probably you and I talked about straight away was, I had that Boutique Brands website that had a multiple of different brands on it that we were selling, and what we decided in a short amount of time was that I needed to separate the Babiators brand out and build its own website. So we built a brand level website, which was just an interesting thing in itself.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I think, from memory, and of course this is six years ago, so it’s not necessarily photographic memory here, but I think we tried some marketing onto the Boutique Brands website, but the Babiators was the brand that was selling the best and the other products didn’t necessarily share the same target customer avatar. That was my suspicion anyway.
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
What was the first thing we did before you separated that website out? I reckon it was a survey. Was it then, or after?
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, I think it was then.
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah. No, yeah. It was. I tell you what, customer surveys, you ask me to do a customer survey, I’m like, “Are you kidding me? I don’t want to do a customer survey.”
Catherine Langman:
“I don’t want to do a survey.” I know.
Kristy Rigby:
“I don’t want to do a customer survey.” But I can tell you I still like to look at that survey from six years ago, and having said that, I actually need to do a new Babiators one because I’m sure the market has changed since then.
Catherine Langman:
Potentially, yeah.
Kristy Rigby:
But all the information that I got from that customer survey was just critical to actually creating the messages that were required, especially to build out the website so that it converted well, but then also to know what the key messages that were really going to check the boxes for people who were looking for baby and kids’ sunglasses were.
Marketing that one brand, that one topic, I think really made a major difference for us, rather than trying to say, “Oh, all moms come here and check out our beautiful range of products.” What really worked for us when we were able to pin-point from the customer survey about one specific brand, what the pain points were for the customers around buying baby and kids’ sunglasses, and then speak to those pain points in our marketing and on our website and on our product pages, and on our email sequences and our nurture sequences, and all of those kinds of things, because it made a massive difference in people being able to get the message that they needed to hear in order to make the decision to make the purchase that they wanted to make.
So, definitely the customer survey, bane of my existence, best thing ever happened to me.
Catherine Langman:
I think, from memory, it also gave you the confidence to just charge what the products were actually worth because you had that clear picture of what the differentiating factors were, what was the unique point of difference, all of that sort of stuff that sets the brand apart.
Kristy Rigby:
The concept of the value proposition that you taught me even back… I still remember that concept of thinking that… Because I have a left side brain that’s very logical and so I always think that people buy from logic, from features, a list of features that people can buy from. But you kind of [inaudible 00:08:33] me and said, “Well, actually, psychology says that people buy from the right side of their brain because of emotions and the sense of belonging and all of those kinds of things, and so we actually need to teach people how their life is going to be better after they purchase Babiators.”
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kristy Rigby:
And so that value proposition concept really kind of blew my mind around our marketing and allowed me to charge the price that… Because I could establish then not what the value was, not what the calculation of, “What is my cost from supplier? And some margin for me, add some margin for a wholesaler, and then that’s the price.” When, in actual fact, you’ve kind of got to work back the other way: What is the value to the end consumer of this product, and then work the margins back from there.
So that value proposition worked in both ways, both for setting the price but also then for being able to say to people, “Well, I actually need to talk to you about the price of this. I need to talk to you about the value of this product that you’re considering, and after I’ve spoken to you about the value, you’re going to think that my price is very reasonable.”
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. 100%.
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah. I think there’s a whole lesson in the course that was about-
Catherine Langman:
It is.
Kristy Rigby:
… that value proposition. That was a big mind blow for me, big time because it allowed me to set the pricing that I needed to set, and it also just meant that I didn’t feel sales-y.
Catherine Langman:
No.
Kristy Rigby:
Because that’s always been my thing. I’ve got a marketing degree, I have a background in marketing. I always had the concept that I hated the idea of sales and sleazy sales and all of this kind of thing, and flogging stuff off to people, but the value proposition idea gave me a real mindset freedom to be able to market to people without that guilty feeling like I was just using them.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. Because that’s not how it is at all.
Kristy Rigby:
No. Because I’m actually offering them-
Catherine Langman:
It doesn’t need to be.
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah. I’m actually offering to them something that they actually have already decided that they need or that they didn’t know that they needed yet and I just communicated some information to them that tweaked their interest and made them recognize that, “Oh, maybe my kids should have sunglasses,” and then I added value to their life in return for some money.
Catherine Langman:
That’s right.
Kristy Rigby:
So, I’m good with that.
Catherine Langman:
That’s it.
Kristy Rigby:
And that was a real mindset that really kind of released me to be able to do the marketing that I needed to do for my brand.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, that’s so good. You know, I really do think that particularly women do often… and maybe that I’m totally generalizing here, we don’t work with that many brands owned by men in this business. But the idea of charging a reasonable, a good, profitable price for your product is something that a lot of women do struggle with, and, “Is it worth that? Am I being greedy?”, and all of that. “I don’t want to be a sleazy sales person or any of that kind of stuff.” So, taking that out of the picture-
Kristy Rigby:
“I don’t want to be a money grabber,” and pretty much working their tails off for no return-
Catherine Langman:
For no return.
Kristy Rigby:
… which essentially takes your time out of your kids’ arena and hands it to somebody else.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). That’s right.
Kristy Rigby:
So it takes the time away from your family and your self-care, and your husband, and your life, and your enjoyment of life, and your fulfillment, and all of those things, and hands it away for somebody else’s benefit.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kristy Rigby:
And I think a lot of us do that-
Catherine Langman:
It’s easy.
Kristy Rigby:
… because we’re like, “How can I be of a benefit to somebody else?”, rather than thinking, “Well, how can we get a win-win here? I’ve got something that’s valuable, and they’ve got money. Let’s do an exchange.”
Catherine Langman:
That’s right. That’s right. Exactly.
Kristy Rigby:
There’s nothing wrong with that and I think that mindset change was really one of probably the biggest for me. I always say, “Sometimes it takes the business-owner growing to grow a business.”
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Kristy Rigby:
Oftentimes, we, in our mindset, are the biggest cap of our business. And so I was capping my business by thinking, “Oh, that’s too expensive. No, I feel terrible. I can’t ask a mom who’s a single income family to fork out that much. Maybe I should just offer a product that it’s a really great price point that they can get.” I would’ve been not making money.
Catherine Langman:
Tearing yourself in knots probably as well.
Kristy Rigby:
Absolutely. So that concept of pricing and mindset really was an important building stone for me as a business owner, that’s for sure.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. It’s quite freeing when you get past that, and I think it is pretty critical, to be honest, to scale a business to adopt those mindsets, for sure.
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
So, I guess, just thinking about your journey since then… I mean, before we talk about how you’ve been able to grown since then, describe what the business is like now because it’s not just Babiators anymore.
Kristy Rigby:
No. No. Because when we bought Boutique Brands, it had quite a number of brands and it was really hard to keep up the workload for all of the brands. So we grew the business from 13 brands to one.
Catherine Langman:
Yes. And that was quite-
Kristy Rigby:
Because what we decided-
Catherine Langman:
… profitable and it did get you a long way, but-
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah. We wanted to really do one brand really well, and then the idea was then we could take what we’d learned from doing that one brand really well and the resources that we build around that and duplicate it for other brands, but there’s no point in trying to do 13 brands before you can do one brand really well. As the learning, growing business owner, that’s what I felt like we needed to do with our business.
So, these days we have Babiators. The babiators.net.au is turning over quite significantly all on its own. We have wholesale where we have amazing beautiful stockists all around Australia that people can actually go in and try the sunglasses on and purchase through the stockists.
We actually started a pick and pack and fulfillment for other Australian brands, just to kind of fill in the gaps because obviously sunglasses are somewhat seasonal. People buy more pairs of sunglasses in September to January than they do for the rest of the year. So we do occasionally have a bit of a low season, and so when we were going through one of those low seasons we were like, “Well, what can we do? Well, we’ve created great [inaudible 00:15:40] for us to send out our orders, our lots of orders, and so let’s do that for a couple of other brands.” So we do that as well.
And then, recently, last year, we have taken on our first new distribution brand for like five years. It’s called The Brushies, and it’s a baby and toddler toothbrush and book that helps parents to help their little ones to develop a great dental routine right from an early age by making it fun to brush their teeth and taking the battle out of toothbrushing.
Catherine Langman:
Yes. Such a cool idea.
Kristy Rigby:
So we took those principles that we’d learnt from growing Babiators and we’re now trying to apply those to The Brushies as a brand. We also have another new clothing brand that we’re going to be distributing in Australia that will be launching very soon, which is very exciting. So we’re going to try and take our learning from both what was done with Babiators and also some of what we’ve learnt just from generally being in the industry and some of our pick and pack clients and we’re going to apply it to distributing that clothing brand in Australia.
So we’re just at the point where we’re going to scale from that one brand to multiple brands.
Catherine Langman:
Multiple brands.
Kristy Rigby:
But that involves, essentially, duplicating everything that we’ve got going on from Babiators. I feel like I’ve got five businesses, not just one. Actually, it’s six.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Kristy Rigby:
So, keeping my head space around that is always in my mind, [inaudible 00:17:22] around that is always really critical-
Catherine Langman:
It is, yeah.
Kristy Rigby:
… for the process. And what I often come back to is really, I come back to the Productpreneur Website Formula course all the time because I know, and you know this about me, Cath, that I really like shiny things, which is why I’m a serial entrepreneur-
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Kristy Rigby:
… and I want to do more brands, and have all kinds of different elements to our business. But I like shiny things and so every time someone comes out to market and says, “Oh, I’ve got a new way to promote your product, dah, dah, dah, dah,” I was always running off and checking out what everybody’s saying. One of the biggest things that I found when I started getting coaching from you and the stuff that you were teaching me was working, was it’s like I could relax and go, “Great. I can stop taking the shiny things-
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Kristy Rigby:
… and I can just put these principles that are actually working into place, and I can just trust that Cath is checking out what shiny things are around me, and if there’s anything that’s actually really working, that she will let me know.” The reality is, while the processes have changed a little bit over the years, the three basic pillars that you’re still teach in the Productpreneur Website Formula course still remain the key things that are moving the needle in our business.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Kristy Rigby:
So, website and the ability of that website to convert a visitor into a purchaser is what I always call pillar number one.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. That’s crucial.
Kristy Rigby:
Pillar number two is email marketing. So, that opt-in form, that little annoying pop-up that nobody wants to put on their website but is actually one of the best ways of increasing your conversion rates on your website. Getting people’s email addresses and sending them a sequence of emails to encourage them to make the purchase and turn them from being a visitor into an actual purchaser. Regularly contacting past customers with blog posts that inspire them to get outside with their kids but also offers, so that if they have fallen in love with the Babiators sunglasses for themselves, that they can either buy them for their friends, or new colors for their kids, or all of those kinds of things.
Catherine Langman:
Absolutely.
Kristy Rigby:
So, that continually taking a visitor or a customer and turning them either into a customer or a repeat customer-
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Kristy Rigby:
… is that second pillar of that email marketing and then there’s-
Catherine Langman:
And owning that customer data and that subscriber database as well, and not leaving that audience up to somebody else, like Mark Zuckerberg for instance.
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Catherine Langman:
Love you, Mark!
Kristy Rigby:
Or whoever the Steve Jobs’ takeover is.
Catherine Langman:
That’s right.
Kristy Rigby:
Good old Apple! They’re in the mix too at the moment, aren’t they?
Catherine Langman:
100%.
Kristy Rigby:
So, owning that data and being able to utilize that to be able to leverage that to create lookalike audiences for new people, but just generally, the whole concept of you want to turn a visitor into a customer and a customer into a raving fan, and the raving fan will do some of the job for you.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Kristy Rigby:
It’s so funny. Every now and then we’ll get like a cluster of orders from some random town in Australia, and I’ll be like, “What the heck? Why are we sending so many orders to Orange today?” Orange is a big place, so that was a bad example, but some tiny little town in the backwater of somewhere-
Catherine Langman:
Yes. Only Woop Woop!
Kristy Rigby:
Exactly. And what we discover is that somebody’s worn their Babiators to mothers’ group and all the mothers at mothers’ group have gone, “Aren’t they good?”
Catherine Langman:
“I need them!”
Kristy Rigby:
And they’ve said, “Where did you get them from?”, and they go, “Oh, and let me tell you about the lost and broken guarantee. You know if we break these, that they’ll replace them for the cost of shipping? Blah, blah, blah.” And so that word of mouth thing then starts to work in our favor.
Catherine Langman:
That’s so good.
Kristy Rigby:
The money that we spend on advertising to get that person to become a first time purchaser then continues with the email marketing, and the things that we do in our post purchase sequence turns them into a raving fan and then turns into word of mouth that means that our organic SEO for the word Babiators is massive in Australia because people go out and they show their friends these super cute sunglasses that they’ve bought their baby and their friend has to have the sunglasses as well and they come and purchase from us.
But you have to have driven someone to the website first, and that’s where that third pillar of marketing comes in. So we’ve had website, we’ve got email, and then you just need the traffic. You need the people who don’t even know about you to find you for the first time. You do a lot of that in the Productpreneur Website Formula course and talking about Facebook ads and SEO, and a bunch of different stuff. And there’s a lot of ideas out there for traffic.
I struggled to spend money on marketing. I struggled to spend money on traffic specifically, on paying somebody else to send people to my website. But the thing that gave me confidence to do that was that I had built a beautiful converting website based on the formula that you’d given me, based on the solid data of a customer survey and knowing the message that the customer wanted to hear.
I knew that I had the optimization of having an email opt-in and a nurture sequence and things like that set up on my website so that when they visited, I had the highest possible chance of getting to share a whole lot of messages with that person so that they would understand the value of Babiators so that they would then… it would be an easy decision for them to make that purchase regardless… not regardless of the price, but identifying that that value was very much equal to the price that I was asking.
Catherine Langman:
Yes. It was priced right. That’s right.
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah. It was priced right. So that whole concept of traffic, website, email, I could spend money on the traffic with confidence then because I knew that I had a highly converting system in place to make sure that that traffic money, money that I was spending on traffic, was well spent, and that if I sent people to the website, that people were very likely to purchase, or as likely as I could possibly make them to make that purchase. Because not everyone that visits Babiators sees the value as being equal to the price that we’re asking for, and that’s okay.
Catherine Langman:
No, that’s fine.
Kristy Rigby:
They’re not my ideal customer-
Catherine Langman:
Exactly.
Kristy Rigby:
… and that’s all right. I don’t need to convert everyone, but I quite like converting 6.5% of people that visit my website, which is awesome.
Catherine Langman:
Which is astounding.
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah. Because I think the benchmark… isn’t the benchmark about 2% to 3%-
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, about 2%.
Kristy Rigby:
… of website visitors?
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). So, yeah, good-
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah. So we were able to, with the Website Formula, we were able to basically get to a point where we are, and continue to convert well and truly over over 6%. Sometimes in the summer it’s up around seven.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, it’s a bit crazy sometimes in summer.
Kristy Rigby:
High sevens. Yeah. So that way I had the confidence to spend that money on marketing, which I think is one of the other mindsets of a growing business owner that people really need to overcome.
Catherine Langman:
Well, it is, because this idea of just hustling, “I’m just going to do lots of Facebook lives and network in Facebook groups, and really just kind of hustle,” that’s kind of just making a job for yourself at the end of the day. If you’re going to grow a business, you can’t, as the business owner, be doing all the things all the time. It’s actually impossible to scale.
Kristy Rigby:
It’s not scalable. You’ve got to put all of that time into it all the time, and I see new business owners kind of… Like I speak to people who are about to launch businesses and I’m like “Oh, so what’s your marketing plan?”, and they’re like, “Oh, I’m just going to post on Instagram,” and I just kind of get that internal sigh where I go, “Oh, listen, I really hope that their visual storytelling is super brilliant and they’re able to really build a great following just from an Instagram following.” And I think that was true probably… I can’t remember how many years ago, maybe seven years ago on Instagram you could get that kind of following and you literally wouldn’t have… If you were really good at that engagement stuff, you wouldn’t have to spend much money on marketing but it’s not how it is these days.
Catherine Langman:
No.
Kristy Rigby:
It’s a pay to play situation. And also, like you said, it’s a time-consuming process. I know recently, because of all the stuff going on with Apple versus Facebook in the advertising stakes, and how Apple are making it difficult for our Facebook ads to convert because of the data share between the two platforms and all the rest of it, so I’ve kind of gone, “Okay. Well, maybe I need to spend some more time on organic social media,” and that’s 100% true.
We always need to be doing our best marketing on organic social media, but I think I’ve flip-flopped for a while because I was a little panicky. I chased a bunch of shiny things, I bought a bunch of courses and, at the end of the day, what it boiled down to in those different things was, know who your ideal customer is, which I do know from my customer data surveys that I’ve done with Catherine previously, and then really know where they hang out and make sure that you can get a message to them that really speaks to them.
And so it’s back to the Website Formula again. It’s back to your course again, Cath. There really is nothing new under the sun when it comes to marketing. Yes, there’s new platforms-
Catherine Langman:
There might be new platforms.
Kristy Rigby:
… there’s [crosstalk 00:27:47] and there’s Pinterest and there’s SnapChat, and there’s all of those-
Catherine Langman:
There’s [crosstalk 00:27:50] and blah, blah, blah.
Kristy Rigby:
Reels and stories and IGTV and reels that go to IGTV, and all of those kinds of things. They’re all new, but the principles are the same.
Catherine Langman:
That’s right.
Kristy Rigby:
You need to have engaging content, and not because you can do a super cute, exciting, authentic little dance on a reel somewhere and get people to go through the website, which I’m not dissing that because I’ve seen some really cute ones and I’ve seen some really effective ones as well, and that is part of good, engaging social media-
Catherine Langman:
It’s part of a content strategy, that’s right.
Kristy Rigby:
But if you are doing 100 of those a week, it’s not going to get you the same return on time investment-
Catherine Langman:
Time.
Kristy Rigby:
… that you’ve invested as putting a little bit of money behind it to turn that engaging content into actually scalable visitors to your website.
Catherine Langman:
That’s right. Frankly, when you are running a million dollar business, or more than that, you’re not going to have the time.
Kristy Rigby:
No, I don’t.
Catherine Langman:
You really don’t. So, if you want to be running a business of that capacity, and scaling to that capacity, you actually need to work out how to do that, what is a scalable form of traffic, and can you get that driving traffic and sales, so converting that paying traffic? That’s how you kind of get from start to that seven figures.
Kristy Rigby:
Exactly.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Kristy Rigby:
Exactly. And it’s not by producing something new every day. You use organic traffic to work out, “Oh, wow, that one really moved the needle for some people. Maybe that’s something that I can develop more content around that and then find the best content around that and actually turn it into an engagement ad or turn it into a traffic ad.”
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Kristy Rigby:
And then that’s scalable. So, it is great to rehearse your content, to work out what the best, most engaging content is, the message that’s really meeting people’s pain points around the product, all of those kinds of things. Organic is absolutely 100% perfect for that and we need to be doing that well, and it’s good to kind of invest in working out how to do that well, but it’s not scalable all on its own, and that’s what I… And it doesn’t convert the sale for you. Just because people like the picture of your product doesn’t mean that they’ll buy it. There’s a big difference between liking a picture and actually going to the profile, clicking on the website, getting to the product-
Catherine Langman:
That’s right.
Kristy Rigby:
… and then actually making the decision to press purchase.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Kristy Rigby:
There’s a lot between there and there, and you’ve got to make sure that that website and all of those kinds of things are ready for the sale, and so you need website, email, traffic, website, email, traffic, not just traffic, traffic, traffic.
Catherine Langman:
That’s it. Yeah, exactly. And I just wanted to sort of chime in with one extra thing, which I know you do, but is often missed, and in order to keep improving your website, email and traffic, is to be reviewing the performance of it, and just, I guess, also accepting that it is always going to be stuff that you do focus on improving.
I think trying to put expectations on yourself that you are going to try and get it right the first time or that you should be able to just do it and then never look at it again is just going to stress the hell out of you and not get you anywhere, whereas aiming for that 1% improvement every day, if you possibly can, the compound interest of that over a year is enormous.
Kristy Rigby:
Absolutely. And that-
Catherine Langman:
But you do have to look at the data.
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah. You definitely have to look at the data, and often… Even with our post purchase flows and our nurture sequences that we have for turning leads into customers, we review those… Like ours convert really beautifully. We’ve had them for years and they convert really beautifully. But we do, we review those regularly, and go “Hey, what’s that subject line like? What’s the click-through rate on that? Is there a subject line that could get more engagement? Do we AB test that subject line to see if get a better click-through, a better open rate, if we changed the subject line? Okay, how’s the click-through rate once we get people to open the email? Is the content interesting enough or does it tick the boxes enough for people to actually then click through to the website, and then does it actually get them to make a purchase?”
Even going back over the different flows that we have for our different businesses and going, “Okay. Is that moving the needle for people? How could it move the needle just a little bit more?” Because if every one of those different flows was to convert just a little bit better, then each year as we scale, as more and more people know about the product, as more and more people have purchased from us, if each of those flows is making just a little bit more money, then this is we get, like you said, the compound interest.
You asked me a question earlier, like, “What was our business like before working with you and doing the Productpreneur Website Formula, and what is it like now?” Well, before we built our Babiators… separated out our Babiators website off a different site, we were doing about a five figure a year maximum, and in this financial year we’ll do a seven figure year.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Kristy Rigby:
But that didn’t happen, that wasn’t straight away.
Catherine Langman:
No.
Kristy Rigby:
So we got close to six figures one year and then we spent quite a few years in six figures, and then an almighty effort to push us up with the momentum that we’ve gained over the years and all those small improvements that we continually make on our conversion rate and on our emails and better traffic for our websites. Sally [inaudible 00:34:29] me the other day and said “Hey, listen, I think we can make your Facebook ads convert better. Here’s some content I want you to think about creating so that we can improve the return on ad spend for your Babiators.” There’s always those little things that you can continually be doing to build the momentum.
So it doesn’t happen overnight. There is no silver marketing bullet.
Catherine Langman:
No.
Kristy Rigby:
I know, as an entrepreneur, I’m always looking for, “Oh, has someone found a new silver bullet for getting more sales?” I’m always looking for that. I love the shiny things; they intrigue me because I’m an entrepreneur and that’s how we’re designed. But the reality is, there is no silver marketing bullet.
Catherine Langman:
No.
Kristy Rigby:
There is doing things consistently well and improving them over time. I always say, “Find out what’s doing well for you and do more of that.”
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Kristy Rigby:
What I find interesting now that we’ve launched a second brand and we’re onto a third, is that what works for one brand doesn’t necessarily work for another brand because you take two different products. Let’s take kids sunglasses and baby toothbrush, the baby toothbrush pack for The Brushies. Two completely different products. Exactly the same price point on some of our products, but two very different products. Everybody knows what sunglasses are.
Catherine Langman:
That’s right.
Kristy Rigby:
Everybody knows what a toothbrush is, but let me get to that in a second. Everybody knows what sunglasses are, and it’s a pretty easy… like there’s no education involved. You want sunglasses for your kid, let me tell you why you need sunglasses: because their eyes need protecting: “Oh, these ones look really cute. Aw, that’s so gorgeous. My kid would look so cute and then it would be very Instagram-worthy, and I’m going to buy them.” Great. Purchased. Gone. Done.
Kid’s toothbrush. The packs that we have, there’s a little more education that needs to go into that because we’re not just selling a toothbrush, we’re actually selling a process that will help you learn how to get the kids to brush their teeth without a major battle.
Catherine Langman:
It’s behavioral change.
Kristy Rigby:
We’re essentially selling a behavioral change, like a tool for a behavioral change. That takes a lot more education.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Kristy Rigby:
And so there’s a lot more effort. I have a beautiful lady named Heidi who does our social media for The Brushies, and she is so good at communicating all of those nuances around kids and brushing their teeth and what the struggles are, and then we give some tips and what the solution is and we talk about different aspects of our product and how that will help take the battle out of getting kids to brush their teeth, and all of this stuff takes quite a long education process. So they’re completely different.
Catherine Langman:
Very different buyer journey.
Kristy Rigby:
Same price point, like in some of our products, but a completely different buyer journey, and so that’s the critical thing about doing those customer surveys and then building out the customer journey that you have in your Website Formula course because every product is going to be different.
Catherine Langman:
It’s tailoring it to that different-
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Kristy Rigby:
And I’ve had people in your masterminds and things like that go, “Okay. So what email do you do next?”, and I’m like, “It actually doesn’t matter-
Catherine Langman:
Doesn’t matter what-
Kristy Rigby:
… what email Babiators does next.”
Catherine Langman:
Exactly.
Kristy Rigby:
“What does your customer want after they’ve taken this action? Because what your customer needs after they’ve taken this action is completely different to what a Babiators customer needs.”
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Kristy Rigby:
And so as a-
Catherine Langman:
It would be nice to not have to think about that stuff-
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah. No.
Catherine Langman:
I totally get that. This is why we suffer from shiny object syndrome!
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah, yeah.
Catherine Langman:
No, we’ve got to-
Kristy Rigby:
But we have to-
Catherine Langman:
… follow the process and tailor it to our own business.
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah. We have to fall in love with our product and we have to teach other people how to fall in love with our product, and communicating that is a slow and steady process. Communication can always be refined. It needs to be measured, how effective it’s been, how well it’s being received, and then tweaked.
It’s quite interesting actually. We don’t do consumer fairs very often, like your baby expos and all of those kinds of things, because I figure if I could spend that same amount of money on digital marketing, I would probably get a whole bunch more sales than going and standing at a consumer fair for four days. But, every now and then, I have done a few over the years, and one of the things I really get from that is that I get to stand in front of the customer who’s looking at my product and I get to see the expression on their face.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Kristy Rigby:
So I get to say-
Catherine Langman:
You learn a lot, don’t you?
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah. Absolutely. I say a word, I give a sentence, part of the information that I share with them about Babiators, and I get to see which bits of information bring the lights on in their eyes.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. That’s pretty good.
Kristy Rigby:
And in a way it’s like kind of like trying different content strategies on organic social media is a little bit like that. It’s like trying to see what piece of information lights up people, lights people up and makes them go, “Yeah. That’s what I really need. Let me put my hand in my pocket.” Pull it out and give me some money!
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. So, yeah, that’s a different way of testing out the messaging, and in some ways it’s equivalent to getting traffic to your website. Obviously it’s not scalable in the same way because it’s a-
Kristy Rigby:
No.
Catherine Langman:
… short, time-limited event.
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah. I don’t do them over and over again. I just do them occasionally just to get the feel of the market.
Catherine Langman:
I used to do seven in a year and it was extremely taxing! I don’t really miss doing all of that.
Kristy Rigby:
I’m like, if I have the 40 hours that it takes me to organize one of those and the money that it costs me to do it, and I actually apply that to my marketing, I’ll probably make a lot more money. So I’m like, “I’m not going to do that.”
Catherine Langman:
Definitely. No, I agree. So good. So, we’ve covered an enormous amount of ground today. It’s been really, really fantastic to hear all of this detail and just how you’re able to now replicate to roll out and introduce new brands to the market, and all the while continuing to optimize and scale Babiators as well because you’ve got that system in place for being able to do that.
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
I guess before we-
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
You go.
Kristy Rigby:
I was just going to say, when I’ve got… Obviously I can’t do it all myself these days and so-
Catherine Langman:
No.
Kristy Rigby:
I’ve got some new staff working on stuff at the moment, and what I do when I get new staff who are going to be working on the process with me, I’m like, “Okay, you need to look at module three, lesson four out of Cath’s Productpreneur Website Formula before you start that because then you’re going to have the understanding that you need in order to do that.”
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, totally. It’s like you’re-
Kristy Rigby:
So you’re literally like, “I’m going to-
Catherine Langman:
… standard operating procedure.
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah, exactly. I’ve got a staff member who’s building out a new website for our new distribution brand, and I’m basically saying, “Watch Cath’s videos and then apply them to the website.”
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. That’s so cool. I love that. Well, I do that too-
Kristy Rigby:
Because it’s worked all this-
Catherine Langman:
… with my team!
Kristy Rigby:
It’s worked this far for me and I just really… I feel like those three pillars of traffic, website, email, are the things that move the needle in eCommerce, and you’ve got them nailed in your course. If I speak to anybody who’s starting an online business, I’m like, “You would be crazy not to spend the small amount of money that you need to invest to do Catherine’s Productpreneur Website Formula course because that stuff is going to set you up-
Catherine Langman:
Save you years of learning.
Kristy Rigby:
… for your entire business life.” Six years, six years I’ve been watching your videos, Cath, and I’m still watching them. I was listening to the [inaudible 00:42:25] one the other day and I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s right. We need to do that.”
Catherine Langman:
It’s like, “What’s the cost per watch for this?” It’s like me justifying new shoes: “I’m sure I’m going to wear them every day for years. That’s cheap.”
Kristy Rigby:
Exactly. Listen, I used to think, when I thought about spending money on coaching or spending money on courses, I’m like, “Oh, that’s money I can’t spend on advertising-
Catherine Langman:
It’s always-
Kristy Rigby:
… or it’s money I can’t spend on stock, or whatever.”
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:42:52]
Kristy Rigby:
But I look back over the years and I look at the money that I’ve spent on advertising or paying Productpreneur Marketing team to manage our Facebook ads or anything like that, and I look back and I go, “You know what? If I compare that amount of money that I’ve actually spent in a year to the growth that I’ve got in a year based on…” Even if it’s just a few ideas or a few mindset changes that I got from that coaching, it was 100% worth it, and those mindset changes are cumulative too every single year.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Kristy Rigby:
So you can’t just look at the cost of a course or the cost of coaching or the cost of someone managing your ads for you and nickel and dime it, and go, “Oh, I need to get $2,500 worth of value out of this,” you know?
Catherine Langman:
Or, “I need to-
Kristy Rigby:
“This is what I need to get.”
Catherine Langman:
… I need to be making multiple-
Kristy Rigby:
$2,500 to cover that.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. “Multiple six figures before I can afford that.”
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah. It’s like, well, you actually can’t afford not to get that information because that information is actually going to move the needle so much quicker for you, that if you tried to work it out yourself or patch together a whole bunch of free webinars from multiple different gurus who slide into your inbox every day-
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. It is pretty tiring trying to do it that way, for sure.
Kristy Rigby:
It’s exhausting. It is exhausting.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kristy Rigby:
It doesn’t stop me looking but-
Catherine Langman:
No, me neither.
Kristy Rigby:
No matter how many webinars I watch, I always come back to, “Oh, yeah, that’s just what Cath says. I already know that.”
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. That’s good.
Kristy Rigby:
So sometimes I pick up an idea about content or an idea about kind of like brand essence or something like that, I watched a great one the other day, but really I don’t need to go ahead oftentimes and buy those courses or anything like that because it’s actually nothing new.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Kristy Rigby:
But you can kind of get a different voice of someone saying it from a slightly different perspective, which is always a good way of tweaking what you know, but the fundamentals are in the course-
Catherine Langman:
Thinking about it differently.
Kristy Rigby:
… that I did all those years ago and continue to do.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. So good. Well, thank you again for joining us on the show. We’ll share the links to Babiators and The Brushies on the page if anyone wants to go and check out just how Kristy is applying what she’s learned and seeing how it’s done in real life, and we will watch this space for the new brand to be launched. What’s the ETA on that one, just to give us a little bit of a-
Kristy Rigby:
I’m hoping the ETA is about two or three weeks.
Catherine Langman:
Ooh!
Kristy Rigby:
The stuff landed last week and it’s beautiful, and we’re a bit in love with it. We’ve got the essential range of the clothing brand at the moment and we won’t get the summer stuff until August, September, but we’re going to start talking to people about the beautiful gifts and essential clothing for babies that, I think I can say, that burrowandbe.com.au will have.
Catherine Langman:
Yay!
Kristy Rigby:
Yay!
Catherine Langman:
Oh, that’s fantastic. Well, as soon as that one goes live, we can add those links as well.
Kristy Rigby:
Awesome.
Catherine Langman:
There all fantastic.
Kristy Rigby:
So good. Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
Well, thank you again, and-
Kristy Rigby:
Hey, pleasure.
Catherine Langman:
… it’s always great to chat. We’ll catch you later.
Kristy Rigby:
Yeah, definitely. Thanks, Cath.