Search, Social or Email? How to LOWER Cost Per Acquisition w/Dixxon Flannel’s Robby Keller! | Ep. 321

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Welcome to do this not that the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately.

You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. Also, dig into life, pop culture, and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this not that.

We are back for do this not that podcast presented by Marigold. And we have an awesome guest. He's actually cool. I am not cool. He is cool. Who do we got? We got Robbie Keller.

So he's running marketing over at Dixon Flannel Company. First of all, they're cool. You. You want to buy a cool flannel shirt. You want to look like you have a clue. Unlike me, Dickson Flannel.

You go to the website. I'm telling you, it's awesome. But Robbie is running a lot of their marketing stuff over there.

When I say he's cool, I mean the guy grew up as a skateboarder. I'm like the guy who tried to Ollie couldn't figure it out as a big loser. And he knows all about.

He actually went to school for all this fashion stuff and now he's crushing it at Dixon Flannel doing all this direct to consumer marketing. Robbie, excited to have you on the podcast, man.

Thanks for having me, Jay. I'm super stoked to be here. And we'll have to get you in a flannel. I think you'd be a little bit cooler in a flannel. I can't argue that.

Well, I think this is the one that didn't.

Yeah, you're not wearing one. You're wearing a hoodie.

I know, I know.

Yeah. Any step in the cool direction, I'm all for.

So before we get into the topic of the day, which is about like testing and cutting your cost per acquisition costs for marketers out there, how did you wind up becoming this guy over there running, doing all your marketing stuff at Dixon Flannel?

Oh, man. Life story short is basically raised in business by two parents that were both entrepreneurs. One's an artist, one's very business banking minded.

Started a clothing brand in high school, took me into fashion school. It did well. And I thought, hey, I could do this for the rest of my life.

And I wanted to learn how to grow it and grow it and grow it, you know, beyond my local friends and local high school and stuff like that. Did fashion school.

And right as I'm finishing up fashion school, decided creative and Production and all that stuff I had a good grasp on, but I really wanted to master marketing.

So I graduated, got into the agency world, and spent eight years right out of school, basically spending other businesses money learning how to market, how to. How to write copy, how to what a split test is, what SEO is, what PPC is. When I was hired, I. I didn't even know what any of that was.

Fast forward, you know, we've done, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spend for Fortune 500 businesses, but tons of mom and pops along the way, too. Smaller agency out of north. North Scottsdale, Arizona.

And I got that experience basically in the weeds every single day for seven and a half, eight years. And one day, just kind of wanted to get back into fashion. And Dixon is, you know, about 30 miles away. And I. And I gave the.

The owner a call and I said, hey, you looking for a good marketing person? And he said, dude, we're about to lose ours. And he gave me a shout and everything kind of stars aligned, so I'm here.

That's awesome, man. And I'm curious about something. You know, your brand that you're working at, Dixon, is cool, right? That's what I mentioned before.

If, like, a nerdy guy comes along, like a me, okay. And he comes in for an interview, is he not making it past that first round because you all are sitting across the table like, this guy's a tool.

Or will you guys accept somebody who's kind of like a nerdy dude too?

You'd be surprised. I. I am probably the most on brand person here.

And for the record, Dixon is heavily in the motorcycle world, and I don't even ride motorcycles for personal reasons, but pretty much everything else I do. But a lot of people here, like, aren't the most on brand or cool people. Like, you know, you have your fair share of, like, music enthusiasts.

Kind of like one of the girls on my team that helps style stuff like that. She's, like, in the rave scene, which is, like, very off brand for us.

But, like, I think the thing at Dixon is that we are kind of the outsiders, and we are kind of not your typical cool person. Just like, kind of, I don't know, scary cool or whatever.

Like, as far as, like, ton of people here of, like, gnarly tattoos and face tattoos and neck tattoos, and my hands are clean. I got some stuff.

There you go.

No, dude, I. I think we. We're open to anyone. Like, we just. We want the top talent and the skill. So I don't.

I don't you know, some of the art guys, some of the production guys are a little nerdy, but they're cool.

I will say if I did come in for an interview there, I would let everybody know because this is the truth. My number one favorite TV show of all time is Sons of Anarchy. And if nobody's watched that, please go watch it. It's a motorcycle show. It's the best.

Am I right or am I wrong?

You're 100% right. I'm super ADD. I can barely sit down and watch a movie.

So, like, sitting down and watching a series of TV shows, I'm like the oddball of this entire world. I just don't do it. Sons of Anarchy and Yellowstone are the two that I could sit down and watch.

Nice.

But like, all the other popular ones, I'm like, no, I don't know it. Never seen it.

Love it. All right, I'm in at Dixon. All right, let's get into setting up split tests. So you've tested a million things all through your career.

Talk to us about how do you do it? Why is it important? And is this really the secret sauce to cutting your acquisition costs?

Yeah. So someone told me early on, mentor of mine, that marketing is always just like reaching the right person at the right time with the right message.

Sometimes that message is complemented with an offer. And for the rest of my career and to this day, pretty much whenever something's not working, I asked myself, am I reaching the right people?

Okay, yeah. Am I reaching them with the right offer and am I reaching them at the right time?

And usually if something's not working the way it should be, one of those or two or three of those could be off.

And so high level, like, I just got into, you know, pulling levers and ad accounts, both PPC and on the search advertising side, and social media on meta and stuff like that. And the more campaigns you build, the more tests you run, the more familiar you get with it.

But basically I said, all right, we got to find as many constants as possible in this experiment.

And once you have a constant locked in, which first usually being the audience, then I'm going to start testing different things to say to them or creatives to show to them.

And with digital advertising, literally too easy, you get real time data being fed back, you know, cost per impression down to the penny and conversion rates down to the, you know, tenth of a percent point. Like it, it just, they make it too easy.

So I kind of obsessed over those numbers early on in my career and started to build out these experiments and chalk them up on, you know, literally whiteboards or you know, scratch pad and notepad. And I said, okay, so if I do this and this becomes a constant, this is the winning audience.

I'm not going to mess with any other audiences until I get my messaging right with this audience or my offer right with this audience or my creative right with this audience.

And as you run down these A, B, C, D and so on, split tests, you ultimately will get to the point where, all right, you're running an effective campaign. You will be able to cut. I've taken on ad accounts, I've taken on campaigns that, you know, you've cut by like a thousand percent cost.

Just like I, I said how to cut your CPA in half. But like really it's like you can, you can do drastic stuff, especially with smaller brands.

That, and we did a lot of service based industry stuff too at the last agency I was at. And you can cut it way, way, way back. And then you get to the point where, okay, now how do we scale this?

And so then you kind of go back to square one and it's just like rinse and repeat, okay, let's find a new audience to test. Let's find new messaging that's gonna work with them and whenever, what's the right offer and what's the right time?

So when you find a winner on Facebook, can you just take what you did on Facebook and run it on, you know, TikTok or even just run it on Instagram simultaneously Or do you have to treat each platform as its own kind of test and figure out thing?

There's so many different like optimization settings within each platform that you can Mess with from TikTok to Snapchat to Meta to Google.

But for the most part, like the, the audiences should, should translate across the messaging should translate across platform to platform, the offers, the timing, etc.

All right, now I want to ask you, I've never asked this for on a podcast, but I feel like I could ask you because like you're cool. I want to play F marry kill with marketing for a second.

All right, this is terrible, but F marry kill, are you ready for email search, social marketing? Email search, social marketing.

So first I'm gonna answer it at, at Dixon, but the answer would definitely vary size of business, market, industry, everything. Like there a lot of service based stuff. It's Google all day long. Like I had so much success in PPC with law and home services and stuff like that.

So I'll answer it for D Dixon. So we are going to.

You're struggling.

What is. Is it?

You said F means like you're into it, but it's not. Not something long term. Marry. This is my go to. I got to be with it forever. And then kill is like, I can live without it even though I don't want to.

And my three options are Google, search, search, social, email. Okay, I, like, I will f. Email. Okay, I will kill social.

Wow.

And I will marry Search.

Wow. Search is really, I mean, it's amazing how powerful that is. So let me ask you a question about search.

Is it a constant, you know, bidding battle, different times of the year where you're like, oh, man, the word flannel, that's going for a zillion dollars now is, Is it like an everyday battle?

No. So it's all obviously all demand based, right?

Like, you can't hold a gun to someone's head and say, hey, go search for flannels right now or go search for a competitor. Go search for us right now.

It just, I think it's, I think it's where people go to, they go out of their day to day routine, they go to Google, they go to whatever search engine they want to use and they're going out of their way to look for an answer or look for a product or look for something with intent to, you know, if you're looking for a men's flannel shirt, like, are you just doing research on blended patterns versus Buffalo? Not really. No. You're probably somewhere deep down looking for a shirt.

You don't, you don't hop on Facebook and start scrolling and you're just on your break or late at night in bed or whenever you're on Facebook, scrolling, and you're like, oh, yeah, I remember why I came here now. I was looking for an ad to buy a flannel. Like, no, it just happens. It's impulse buy. It's, you know, it obviously it does really, really well for us.

It's, you know, probably 20% of our revenue comes from meta. But also it's a different level of intent than somebody hopping in a search engine. And that's why I say I'd keep that for sure for life.

Totally makes sense. So let me ask you a question. I want to talk about email for a second because I get your emails and they're awesome and I like your subject lines.

You guys cross you with your subject lines. I'm a subject line guy, so hit me with where you're like, listen, this is my favorite subject line. Tactic.

This is what I stick in the subject line when I this is gonna work almost every time. What is your go to that you think gets your emails open more than anything else?

Man, we're so. We have it so easy at Dixon because our emails is our drop announcements for everyone that doesn't know Dixon is a limited edition flannel brand.

And so every time we do a drop, things sell out fairly quick. We'll never restock stuff. And so there's this plus or minus half a million people on this list waiting to get these drop announcement emails.

Check the flannel. Hey, I like it. Buy. Hey, I don't. I'll pass. I'll wait for the next one. Totally, you know, totally not everyone's cup of tea every single time.

Depending on callers or collabs that we're working with on that said flannel. But we have it so easy. Urgency is like it comes with every email we send. Like it there's built in urgency.

Everybody that signs up for emails knows if I don't act now, I might miss the opportunity to buy that flannel. And then later I gotta pay double on ebay or some marketplace group or something like that.

And then during holiday season we do a ton of discounted flannels. And so I, I love throwing in like the old 29.99 is, is basically half off flannel plus, you know, full collection of discounted goodies.

Those have been crushing the last we do 13 days of Dixon.

We're, we're coming in on our last day here, but basically anytime we throw out an offer in a subject line, urgencies built in so they go and snag it and then collab stuff. We'll do, you know, a collab with Metallica or Sublime or Bob Marley or big, big, big names and we get to drop those names.

And as soon as you can do that in our world, it makes it a ton easier. So I, I just, I always use emojis and subject lines. I think it's like the more friendly way to play. I always like to keep it human. Not so.

I don't think I've ever, I don't think I've ever been so stuck or my team's been so stuck that we go to chat GPT and get like a list of 10 subject lines. Although that could be a good starting point to at least get your wheels turning. I like to just humanize it as best I can. Always create urgency.

Ours is built in and always throw in like the personalization you Know nmoji tie it back to the product or the price or whatever it might be is pretty foolproof recipe.

Yeah, man. I encourage everybody and we'll put in the show notes. You got to sign up for Dixon Flannels emails. They are, they're different. They're different.

They're awesome. I really dig them. All right, so before we wrap up here, I got a question for you. Back to you're now 16 year old kid. You got your skateboard there.

All right. Was the dream to like do the X Games? Like what was the dream when you're sitting there, I mean, were you that level of skateboarder? Yeah.

It's pretty crazy how my life changed. I play golf now. It's like so, it's so boring.

But yeah, I mean you asked me, I think I skateboarded every day unless I was in crutches or a wheelchair for 13 years.

And wow, if you ask me, I was, I was going pro and tons of kids that I grew up skating with, Jagger Eaton, one of them, he's won like now two gold medals in the X Games. The, the dude's like the face of, of our new skateboarding. He's Red Bull sponsored athlete, stuff like that.

And a ton of other friends like take it and run with it.

But I idolized a lot of those guys and a lot of them turned into smart business owners or, or some sort of entrepreneur like in their different little niche where they either started a skate company or partnered up with somebody or like the barracks. And what they're doing is, is this basic community of, of, you know, keeping skateboarding alive.

So I, I, I, at 16, I mean I, I actually started getting kind of phasing out of skateboarding into motocross and into some other action sports like wakeboarding and wake surfing, some off road stuff. I, I kind of was transitioning from, you know, one group of friends to another and meanwhile I could still skate well.

And then I started to learn this other stuff and then, you know, along came golf three, four years later and you know, now I'm, you know, playing a ton of golf and enjoy that.

It's, it's, it's probably, you know, between that and like snowboarding, you know, there's like, there's like a few things that get me completely out of reality and those, those things I enjoy doing. It's my escape from everything. So.

Well, I imagine somebody on your text chain with all your old skateboarding buddies is shredding you every time you see I'm going out to play 18 they're like, you're an old man. You're a tool. Why aren't you at the skate park?

And every time I'm on the golf course, I'm like, man, I used to make fun of myself.

That's 100%. That's amazing. All right, listen, this has been awesome. We're going to put everything in the show notes. But where should everybody, like, follow you?

Follow Dixon. What should they do?

Oh, man. Follow Dixon. We do all the fun stuff. Stuff that you really shouldn't be doing from a marketing team. We do.

We always like to push the boundaries a little bit. And we don't have any red tape here. So we get to. And then my Instagram too. I. I post a lot of our work there.

Just what I'm doing and up to and happy to chat with any of you guys. So my Instagram is Robby Cartel. R O, B B. Yeah. C, A R, T, E, L. And then Dixon Plano co just at dixonplannelco.

Awesome. And we're gonna put all in the show notes. This is great. Robbie, really appreciate you being here, man. Thanks a lot.

Yeah, likewise, Jay. Great talking with you, man.

You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over.

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