Alexander Skibinskiy Talks About Ecommerce Marketing & CRO

Thank you, Harshit. My name is Alexander Skibinskiy, and I’m the owner of a marketing agency called ALLDGT.COM. It comes from All Digital. And I am also the founder of an e-commerce jewellery store, which is called Le Adore, where we sell pre-owned jewellery. And recently I also graduated from GIA, Gemological Institute of America, and now I am an expert in diamonds and colour stones too. This is a short background about me.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I’m trying to do my best within the niche and I’m very passionate. But we also cover not just jewellery, we do cover almost all the niches. But this is my main passion. Yeah,.

Oh, my life before marketing agency and before e-commerce store, that successful e-commerce store was quite crazy. My father passed away when I was young, so I had to do all sorts of jobs. I also was selling jewellery on the streets many years ago. And while selling jewellery on the streets, I was dreaming about making money online.

Right now we are four people. Me, my brother, my mom, and stepfather as well.

I just have a brother who is working with me as well.

Older brother. Yeah, okay. I was dreaming about making money online. So, I started my first online blog. It was a blog about motivation, psychology, and creativity. And this was when I first made money online. I was working with Google AdSense back in time. So, I started just with making my first dollar a month. And then a few years later, that blog became viral. And I was making thousands of dollars easily a month. And at that time, paid media marketing wasn’t as competitive as it is right now. I was investing money in Facebook paid ads. And I was making more money from my blog using Google AdSense and other affiliate programs.

So, that blog and also besides that I was running paid ads, I had social media pages that helped us to get the traffic right. We were collaborating with other pages, building our own followers, and we were able to drive traffic from social media to the website. And then Facebook introduced the new algorithms, and my business model wasn’t so sustainable and the paid media market also changed. So, I sold the website, sold the pages, and I moved to other businesses. Yeah, this is the same experience as you almost moving to another business.

Yeah, definitely. I was thinking back in time that, okay, this is not a $1 million idea. I have to find something else.

Yeah.

Yeah. Since a young age, I was crazy about… I grew up differently than my colleagues because I had to think differently a little bit because of the situation in the family. I was crazy about reading all the books about how to make money, be rich, all the stuff. And yeah, basically I was passionate about the internet and I started to Google everything. I started everything just out of curiosity. How to make this. I made my first website on my own and Lord in that way. So, this is how everything is done step by step. I made my first dollar, which gave me crazy motivation. Okay, I can do more than that.

Yeah.

So, marketing was my main passion mostly, right? When I just started, I liked online marketing, blogging, and paid media, so this was my passion. Then I had to step out of this passion to create my e-commerce business, a family business. But there I am also only focusing on marketing. And then I said, okay, a few years ago I said, okay, now it’s time to develop my own marketing agency because this is something that I like. Everything that is related to my family jewellery business, marketing-wise, everything there is automated and when needed, my marketing team, I have quite a few people in my team, they help me to execute everything. But everything, the strategy and the business model that we have, everything is automated. Right now, it gives me time to invest in other businesses or explore other ideas that I have. For example, I was able to go to study properly, study what I like in London. Right now I have this opportunity, so I created this opportunity for myself.

Definitely. But this is when you already have something that is proven and it’s working. But otherwise everything is done manually.

Yeah, it makes sense.

When it comes to done for you service, I don’t have any fixed packages when it comes to done for you services. Every client for me is unique and I try to figure out solutions or a number of services which I consider will help that brand to figure out if they have a scalable business model or not. Based on my knowledge, I can advise, okay, you should go with Google Ads first to validate the product, see how it goes. Okay, you should go with Facebook ads, see how it goes. Okay, you shouldn’t invest in paid media. Try better marketplace strategies. So yeah.

Yeah. First, I try to offer, if I have a new brand, first thing that I try to do is just to offer them services that will help to understand if they have really good business models, scalable business model or product that is suitable for paid media, because majority of the strategies I work with, they’re related to paid media. Paid marketing, right? Yeah. And I’ll also do organic strategies, let’s say, email marketing, conversion rate optimization, which you don’t need to pay money, for the clicks, there. You pay for subscriptions or something like that.

When it comes to onboarding, do you want to know how clients came to me or what do you like?

All right. So majority of the clients that came to me, they are mostly people who found me on Google. Right now at this moment, I have one of the largest blogs about jewellery marketing in the world. Basically, if you search for jewellery advertising, jewellery conversion rate, jewellery, email marketing, link and others, I will be on the Google first page. This is how they find me. Then on my website, I have a pop-up where they just can book a free consultation. Obviously, I have a qualification process. I don’t consult everyone for free. I do select businesses that I consider are suitable for my services that they can afford me. I have a qualification form that doesn’t need me to call them and qualify them. So, everything is done automatically in that way. And if I see that okay, I like this product, I like this brand, I will accept the consultation. And during the consultation, we will discuss suitable strategies for this brand. And if we have a good feeling about each other, we just start working and see how it goes from there. I don’t promise anything. I always say, okay, this is the risk you should assume.

Yeah, so everything pretty much happens mostly through WhatsApp as a main communication channel. And then we also use Slack a lot.

Yeah. It depends on the clients. We have clients, we have like… clients who don’t want to use Slack or they are not familiar with that. They mostly use WhatsApp. I don’t prefer to communicate via email. It takes too long to get an answer. I always try to provide faster communication. What’s up? Zoom, Slack, those are the channels we are using to communicate. And mail just mainly for reporting, sending documents.

So, the most successful case study right now for me, obviously, is my family business because there are more than six years of intellectual and physical work to develop it. And this brand is growing organically and is growing with paid ads as well combined together. So, right now it has 27 ROAS, which is a good, pretty high number for a brand in six years. When it comes to the most successful campaign, I would say that product is the king. And I don’t consider a campaign itself to be a success. I can consider that the product is the king and the product makes the campaign successful.

In my case, for example, for this specific case, the product itself, like the design of the jewellery. When running paid media campaigns, I do select products that can bring the highest possible level of attention. Marketing for me starts with attention. So, the higher the level of attention to your product, the less you will pay to acquire a client in the end. My rule is to use products that have a very attractive design and you can form… I have experience already for many years and I can see just visually analyzing the product and I can say, Okay, this is something that is attractive for me. Or basically when I have a client, they can send me all the products they have. I just can’t scroll, scroll and then stop. I see something that attracts my attention and I just use it in the campaign.

Yeah. And I think for every marketer, this is something that they do subconsciously. They’re searching for something that… this is something that will give me a high CTR. So, the higher the CTR, the less you’ll pay for the click, the lower it will be your client acquisition cost. And then obviously, once you figure out the product that brings you a high level of attention, then you can come up with different creative angles like you can order videos and stuff like that. But first comes product design, and then I can develop something further based on that product specific, like videos or something else.

All right. Yeah, got you. So, there is a story. Actually, the money that I made with my first block, I wanted to invest in something else, which was the e-commerce idea. So, I started to invest in my e-commerce idea, my own jewellery business. And then back in time, I had no one to learn from, specifically e-commerce for jewellery. I had experience with paid media, with marketing, with SEO, email marketing, so I already knew about that. But I had no experience specifically in the jewellery business, e-commerce. And I had to learn everything on my own by investing money on education, by investing money, practising some strategies, and then obviously losing money. And before actually learning everything to get the knowledge that you need for the success in the e-commerce niche, I spent around $300,000. So, this is the money I just… Not including even the years that I have to practice everything that I learn. It’s not including even the years that I have to practice everything that they learned.

This is the money that I invested without actually getting profitability. I was minus. Obviously, I was getting sales, but not at the profitable level. I was trying to do all the stuff. And in marketing, one single detail can make a significant difference, significant impact. So, back then in time, I didn’t have enough knowledge about e-commerce analytics. I was just spending money without even analyzing if I’m doing something right or not. Then I had to learn the analytics, the economics behind the product, and this made a significant impact on how I see the business or how I scale the business.

Yeah.

I would say what gets measured gets improved. I always measure everything, every KPI. When it comes to e-commerce, for example, you can start with just taking a simple cost per cart. It’s just your first KPI that will give you an understanding if it’s something that is worth investing in or if something is working or not. You don’t need to wait until someone buys. Just by analyzing cost per cart, you just can clearly say if it’s going to work or not. Maybe targeting is wrong, maybe marketing objectives are wrong. So just by simply analyzing one simple KPI, you already can understand what’s the key area to focus on.

When it comes to marketing agencies, I mostly always start with paid media and my methodology is very simple. Everything starts with product validation to see if it’s economically suitable for paid media. And also if that specific project or brand will bring me and my client satisfaction to work together. And usually one to three months is enough to understand if the project will be something that is something that brings pleasure to you and your client. One to three months depending from business to business is enough to understand if the project is scalable or not for me.

Once a product is validated and has positive return on investment in early stages, then we start scaling it with different marketing channels. This could be Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google ads, Pinterest ads. We do scale with these channels. Then we also advise investing in SEO as a long-term strategy because this is something that brings long-term results. The combination of strategies, including email marketing and conversion rate optimization to improve all the performance. I would say we have a multichannel marketing approach and different strategies that actually help each other and improve overall performance of each other.

When it comes to paid media, let’s say, Facebook and Instagram, of course, our strategy is not only bringing clients, but also nurturing them on different levels. You have different levels. For example, you have people who interact with you on Facebook and Instagram, but they don’t visit the website. So, we do interact using different marketing campaigns. We have marketing campaigns, for example, for people who engage with you on Facebook and Instagram, but they don’t visit the website. So, we do have nurturing campaigns, let’s say, as well. So, there’s the actual entire structure. We call it… In our language, we call it prospecting and remarketing.

For content, mostly we are focusing on the traffic. This is content marketing. Let’s say we do focus mostly on the traffic a specific keyword can bring us. Based on the number of keywords, we came up with the strategy. This is… We don’t measure too much on need, but we just try to achieve as much traffic as possible with every keyword that is related to our niche. And when it comes to conversion rate optimization, this is a very good topic and a very important strategy for us. I did hundreds of conversion rate experiments to achieve the highest possible performance for specific brands. For example, when you have a brand that is even, you need to do something about it. And then you try to do different conversion rate experiments to make it profitable. And as a tool, I always use Google Optimize. It’s a tool, it’s free, at a certain level. So, when we have high-end products, the most important metric for me to measure is add to cart ratio, the percentage of people clicking on add to cart. I don’t wait until they buy that specific product because we need to invest even more to validate that hypothesis. So, we do measure the percentage of clicks to cart clicks.
But when we have let’s say $100, $200 product range. We focus also on the conversion metric itself, like purchase. Out of hundreds of experiments, the most efficient for me was when you… I had the brand when we did an experiment and I asked the owner of the brand to create a video about the product when the owner had to speak about that product, just one-minute video. We did A/B testing, just running simple product page and page with the owner speaking about the product. In that way, we doubled the number of conversions.

Before conversion rate optimization, it was 0.87, and after it was 1.67, something like that.

Yeah. So, this was one single thing that helped us to make that brand feel a little bit better. But even like that, the product wasn’t scalable with paid media, even like that. So, it’s not as easy as the majority of business owners think. When you try to do all your best, but still the product is not scalable with paid media, especially right now and paid media is changing, the cost of paid media is rising. And in order to succeed, you need to have a really good business model or really good product that has economical potential or scalability.

Yeah. So, lead nurturing for me can happen on paid level, on organic level as well. On paid level, the most important thing, as you already know, is segmenting your audience based on their journey. You can do that with paid ads and you can do it with email. By segmenting, you can show different advertising campaigns, for example, for those people who just visited the website and you can show different campaigns for those people who just added products to their shopping cart but haven’t completed the checkout process. In that way, you can nurture them with different creatives and persuade them to buy. This is the most important thing that you can do with paid media and with organic, like email marketing. Also, another thing is segmentation by number of days. You can segment by number of days and you can show different creatives by number of days. For example, you show them one creative seven days and another seven days you show them another creative. In that way, they are not getting bored seeing the same ad. And in that way, you avoid your potential client ignoring you as a brand.

Yes, definitely. Every client is complaining to you. I don’t think that anyone in the world, like in our niche, has someone who is not complaining. Very rarely happens that they’re not complaining. But this is something normal, a part of the process. When it comes to velocity, it’s really a very hard question to be honest to answer, but it really depends on the marketing strategy, the platform you’re using, your business model, your product. There are so many details to consider and right now I don’t have an answer that will work for everyone. So, the answer will be different for everyone. But just giving you some ideas. I have projects where we convert potential clients into a real client in a matter of days. In this case, we have, let’s say, for example, we can sell unique products. It’s just one product, one of a kind. We are not able to produce more than that. Then the customer has higher intention to buy right now.
This is, for example, detail when it comes to product detail. That will influence your marketing performance. I have projects when we have potential when we sometimes can take years to convert a potential client into a buyer. I have multiple examples. For example, even in my family business, we have people, buyers, like high-end buyers, who spend a lot with us. They buy only after two, three years of constantly seeing, interacting with us. After purchase, we are asking for feedback and they are saying, Oh, we were following you for years and right now I just decided to buy. You can force them to buy. Some of them are also skeptical about buying online. But then constantly seeing that they’re becoming more familiar and familiar with your brand, especially when we are using dynamic ads. They’re always seeing new products. It’s different from business to business. You obviously can improve this metric, like velocity, the speed of buying by using different techniques like low stocks on discounts, if it is suitable for your brand because discounts are not suitable for every luxury brand.

Yeah. It depends from brand to brand. Also the product is the king as well here. I have businesses like they sell luxury, but their product is not so appealing to the market and they don’t sell at all. I have businesses who sell luxury and they have unique products, good photography, pictures, designs and they sell. I would say that product is the king here as well. Product will make your brand. And finally, clients will build your brand if they buy.

Yeah, this is my first time doing rapid-fire.

Okay.

My mother.

Build my marketing agency to eight figures and build my own high-end jewellery brand. High selling diamonds, big diamonds, big jewellery, big stones.

Elon Musk, Tesla.

I do a lot of sports in my free time to be mentally healthy. It helps.

Test as many ideas as possible. Invest in every idea. Don’t regret.

Thank you a lot for inviting me. I really appreciate it.