u/DebateWilling7674

Hey guys, wanted to know your opinion about this

Over the last couple of weeks & months we noticed a shift in our outreach.

Every Email where we position ourself as an agency, we didnt got any replies. We never used the word AGENCY in outreach, I rather mean the whole copy, talking about "we did this for brand X","we can increase X about X%", basically a sales Email.

As soon as we shifted to "We are an 2 person senior X team helping you with X, taking responsibility for X" more replies than ever flew in.

Until now, no deal was closed because the campaign is very fresh but its still interesting to me.

Do you see something similar in your space?

Hey guys, Im (M23) originally from Germany but have been living in Mexico for 3 years now. I do speak Spanish but writing is difficult.

I have the freedom to decide where I life, because I work online. I was 2 months in Chile this years (La Serena and Santiago) and in generell since a couple of years Im looking to move to Southern Chile/Argentina.

The first half of the next year I will be travelling through this part of South America to basically find a place where I want to settle down. Until now Bairloche is the first place where I will spend a month in January.

I really fell in love with Bariloche and also the part of Chile on the other side of the mountains (Puerto Varas, Valdivilla, Pucon for example). Im looking for the bad stuff about Bariloche, is there anything you would conisder bad about the city/region in generell?

In generell Im looking for a place that is save in the future. Which means, has a lot of water, far away from any huge cities, close to nature, quiet... The only thing that worries me a bit are the vulcanos haha As I know earthquakes are not a big problem, more on the chilean side.

Also how is the government? I have heard its a bit like the mexican, you do have certain laws but in the end the infratrsucture to execute everything doesnt exist.

For example taxes (Im not planing to do this, just the first thing coming to my mind), they exist in Mexico but literally nobody pays them and the government isnt doing anything about it. In Germany within 2 months they take away everything from you if you dont pay them.

Hey, we are in a terrible situation, no new clients for over 11 months and every client we got in the last 2 years wasnt our own effort.

Our client retention is around 14-18 months, thats whats keeping us alive. What I mean with this, is that the last batch of clients we got was 14-18 months ago, we still work with 4 out of 6 stores. Got the first client 5 years ago and they still work with us.

Most of the time clients leave, the reason is more them. They dont give us our freedom needed and reject the ideas, the clients that give us this freedom havent left until now.

We target ecom founders/owners making $3m+ a year.

Normally they get 2x ROI within the first 2 weeks of working with us, at latest after 4 weeks

I cant really figure out where our problem is, people are not booking any sales calls.

For now:

Outbound volume isnt the problem, we reach our ICP's

have a strong brand with a ton of actual client videos/Case studies & in person Podcasts where we actually visited our clients

We have a working service, thats why our client retention is that long

But I cant figure out the last piece of the puzzle, we have trust, enough outbound volume and working system that creates a proven uplift.

What am I missing?

Hey guys, want your opinion about sth.

I always thought that the Email should be as short as possible because Business owner dont have the time to read through someone's random Emails.

Thats why we have always sent Emails not longer than 4 sentences.

When we partnered with an Cold mail agency we noticed that they are sending longer Emails. 6-10 sentences. It was a very generic Podcast invitation, with no personalization. Basically the contrary of everything I have learned.

But people still read and answered them, Im curious, why?

Was it because we struck their ego? "Oh Im that interesting they want me in their Podcast"

After they saw that we dont have a huge following they stopped replying, so it didnt really work out for us.

In general, what works better for you? Short and concentrated, or longer more explained emails?

Hey guys, wanted to ask around what is currently working for you.

I partnered with an Cold mail agency where we sent out podcast invites to Ecom owner. We got many replies but as soon as they saw that we dont have a huge following they stopped replying.

Now we take Cold mail into our own hands again, the Podcast angle showed that Cold mail isnt dead, people still read and reply to their emails.

We have a service that works and where the client get 2x ROI within the first 2 weeks, thats why our normal client retention is between 14-18 months. But we just have huge problems getting new clients, no new client for now 11 months and we are only surviving because our long client retention.

It just seems that we cant get our value across, or the people just dont care.

Lead Magnets never really worked, even though our most successfull campaign had a Loom video that we have sent over. The video barely got watches but the campaign still performed very well, this was also now 2 years ago.

Just wanted to know what you guys have experienced, what worked for you and what has changed in the last 12 months. I feel it got in general harder to get clients in whatever niche/business.

Hey, I want to stay in Tulum for a month, mid august until mid September.

I have been living in Mexico for 3 years and also travelled to Tulum 2 years ago, so I know about Taxi prices, scams.....

Im just searching for a cheap place to stay and work for a month, Tulum seems perfect as the prices droped so much.

I know thats also because of rain season, but how bad is it acutally? I dont need more than 3 rainfree hours a day to go walk a bit, I assume thats possible and its not raining 24/7? How likely are hurricanes? I witnessed hurricane Otis in Acapulco 2023 so I dont need another one...

I feel there isnt a cheaper place to stay in Mexico than Tulum currently. Cant believe I ever say this.... I can get an ok appartment for 500$-600$ for 31 nights (through booking.com).

Im also no clubbing or bar guy, I just want need a place to live for a month and good wifi.

Think its a good idea? or how bad is the situation really? in terms of tourism AND weather

Hey guys I believe (I know) we are undercharging the clients.

Current situation:

10months no new clients, huge problem finding new ones but we are currently on a good track...

We are doing Conversion rate optimization thourgh AB testing for Shopify stores only. But we are more like their ecom manager, we do everything in their store and never say no to a request.

We work on a month to month base without a contract or binding them for more than a month. No problem at all, customers are staying well above +1year which is the only reason why we are still in business...

We are charging 1600$ per month.... per client. We have even 2 clients we work for 1000$ (not CRO and way less work, but what are you getting nowadays for 1k?) Goal is for every new client to raise to 2500$ but I still feel this is underpaid. I believe our fair value is sitting between 3000$-5000$, we have stores making +5m sales a year and paying us 1600$.

Alone that we are avavilable 7 days a week and do changes sometimes within 24 hours is the reason why 1600k is not enough. We have a clean track record, case studies and our service is working.

We cant raise prices on current clients until we get new ones in. As we cant afford to loose anyone in the current situation. Its just frustrating currently.

Priority 1 is currently new clients, we are making moves in the direction.

Hey guys,

Backstory, half of my family are ukrainians from the Dnipropetrovsk area. I sadly dont have many information, my family told me that my grandfather was best buddies with Brezhnev's nephew. Apparently he saw Brezhnev himself, couple of times in the summer.

Also there is another family friend, who was foreseen to be a governor of some state in the UDSSR, he died in an helicopter crash....

No clue where my grandparents got this connections from, they dont come from wealthy houses and also today, got no important people in the family.

Just in my friend groups, nobody really knows Brezhnev so it never triggers the excitement I hope for haha and I finally got to learn about his eyebrows, in my family nobody mentioned them when I was smaller.

Hey guys, always like to come here for help, thanks in advance.

We have a huge client problem, no new clients for over 9 months and we only survive because our clients are staying well over 1 year on average.

But we are getting closer to the edge of the cliff every day without no new clients/sales calls.

We do conversion rate optimization via AB testing for Ecom stores (Shopify), making +$1m sales a year. Currently targeting brands above +$5m which is also our ICP. The $1m a year clients are only left overs from earlier days.

We hired an Cold Mail agency, where we saw early success and got 2 meetings out of it. Sadly didnt convert because of, 1st bad wifi from the client side and the second meeting was with the marketing manager instead of owner. Now we switched the angle of the mails to podcasts.

We are currently travelling through the US and record Podcasts with multiple acitve clients and also do outreach to brands, from the areas where we will be. Already have 2 extra podcasts recorded. Also filming much general content along the way.

Our service is necessary, especially for brands siting around that $5m area. Our client retention speaks for itself and also shows us that nobody is trading us for Ai. But we just cant get the urgency translated to new ecom owner who never heard of us.

Back in the day we had a 70%-80% close rate once they attended the call, but even back then getting calls was very hard, we got like 1/2 calls a month for 6 months. These are the clients which are saving us currently.

The analogy describing our service, is that:

every store has a leaky pipe system, begining with the click on the ad and the end where the water comes out is the sale. Along the way they loose so much water (unrealised $) that within the first 3/4 weeks, they have their investment back. We are the "Plumbers" who fix their leaks, so they get more "water' out of the tap. It seems like we cant find the right pain point for our ICP.

I would appreciate any guidance, you guys were always good help in the past

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Moved from Germany to Mexico with 20 to build a business with my brother. So from 20 onwards on my own feet and started with 4k Euro savings.

30K are divided into:
20k Physical Metals (Gold, silver, platinum), no ETF or stock, real physical metals
2k Stocks
8k pension fund my parents are paying into, its some kind of insurance company

I started buying Gold with 18 years old right when Covid hit, I invested the 4k savings mentioned in the beginning. This was money which got saved from my birth onwards, like all the birthday money...

I want to pay out the pension fund, just because I want to have control over my money.

Mentally I can't have more than 500Eur in my bank account, talking about savings not my day to day money. Don't know why but my mentality is: if I don't hold it I don't own it, that's why I get nervous having my money in digital numbers on a screen. I earn $3000 USD and another $800 with which I buy gold or stocks every month.

My costs are not low, as I don't live at home and currently travel around South America, so I spent most of the 3000USD.

No debt

Posted this because I know that's not the normal everyday portfolio even tho the amount isn't huge. But this "portfolio" got build with blood, sweat and tears, believe me.

I also don't come from money, no-one in my family ever owned property or even a apartment

Let me know your thoughts.

Hey, this is post 2/2 here, the other one was more about outreach questions for our agency, this one will be more business related.

Not the first time I ask for help here and always got good advice from you guys, so looking forward.

Introduction:
I M23 and my brother M31 have a Conversion rate optimization agency. Our clients always stay at least 12 months if the fit is right. We also have an 60-75% close rate once the person had a call with us, so offer isn't the problem either.
My job is to do all the client fulfillment, so my brother can do the work that brings the agency forward in general. Like: In what direction to go, where to optimize....

We didn't got a new client for 8 months, which is a problem, as many clients get to the end of their lifetime which we also feel in the relationship with them. Then of course the whole AI topic gets bigger and bigger everyday.

We basically analyzed the AI situation for our niche and I want to ask you what you think of it.

So generally speaking, manual coding was wiped out in the last year, that's why we fired all of our developers (2) and I do everything now. Good that our value isn't just coding but our understanding of marketing + Website, basically just sales psychology for e-commerce.

But AI is also taking that away more and more. The work of analyzing data was also wiped out as any tool now has their own analyzing tools. But this is still not very accurate, Ai is talking 40% shit and the other 60% are good advice. But when we talk about complex connections it's still shit.

So for smaller stores, everything less than 1m gross sales, I do think that AI is good enough for you, to not need someone looking at your store. But for everything above, you still need a brain behind analyzing and building structures.

Even if not, an ecom founder still doesn't have the time to do it, or they just want someone to lay off the responsibility. So I don't believe that AI is really taking away our job completely. I think as always, it just gets harder to find clients but I don't believe that this will fall off generally speaking.

We believe that AI is a kind of bubble, just that at one point people (in business) will get a tired and want to go back to people doing some kind of work and not just AI. Bubble is maybe the wrong word but I hope you get what I mean.

We are currently thinking of, how to restructure our agency and until which point to implement AI in our service but also just client work. Is mentioning AI still helping selling your service? I mean there was a time where just mentioning that you use AI was a huge selling point.

Generally what do you think about everything I wrote down here and which steps would you take next?

Hey guys,

not the first time I post here and always got good feedback, so looking forward to your opinion/help.

Introduction:
I M23 run an agency with my brother M31, last year was our best one where we nearly surpassed the 200k gross income. Which we also only achieved because of a partnership with an Ecom-Growth Mastermind group. we ended the partnership ourselves last month because of various business hurting reasons.
We have an A/B testing agency for Shopify Ecom stores only.

Our main problem ALWAYS was client acquisition. As soon as the client gets into a meeting with us we have a 60-75% close rate and the clients stay at least a year when the fit is right.
So our service/offer isn't the problem.

Now we hired a Cold Mail agency to run our outreach because we are filled with client work, more or less. We are now into week 2 of sending Emails and got 3 positive replies which resulted in 2 calls. Until now, no Client or answer after the call, stores were a perfect fit. So Cold Email isn't dead for our Niche.

The goal is that I do all the client fulfillment and my brother brings the agency forward in all possible ways.

My brother is currently still helping with client fulfillment because Im still learning, before my job was doing the outreach etc, which we outsourced to the agency. So this is sth I have to improve in.

We are looking for a new Client acquisition channel and agreed to following system:
Gathering a small list with perfect fits, maybe 20/30 stores/contacts. They also need to have a more or less active Linkedin account. Than we contact them through Email & Linkedin, with a recorded Loom video attached, going through the store listing main conversion problems...

We want to contact the owner and other employees until we get a clear NO. In this time we recycle the video to upload on all Social Media platforms, short form content on Linkedin, Insta, Youtube.. When we get the final "not interested" we can upload the full video to YT.

Basically splitting up the main video in smaller short form content so we have content for Instagram and YT, to reach more people and finally start some organic inbound efforts.

Let me know what you think of this.

This is Post 1/2, in the other one I will rather ask more business related questions and not outreach.