Let's Buy a Biz!

Head creator, writer and analyst.

Sharing the journey for buying bizs and creating generational wealth for my family.

Chief Executive Officer

Because Ventures

Buying a $10-$100m Brand 🛒 or $1m- $10m SaaS biz this year.

Investing Criteria here: https://because-ventures.notion.site/LBAB-Acquisition-Criteria-ea7f69f9a53948678b965b9cdc7be351

Managing Partner

Visually

Advisor

Chargeflow

EcoCart

Series A Investor

Manifest Commerce

Seed Investor

cadence

PostPilot

Ambassador

Thrive Lot

Miravel

Buying a $10-$100m Brand 🛒 or $1m- $10m SaaS biz this year.

I'm on the hunt for great Ecommerce brands and Apps. In the next year I'm going to Buy A Biz! 

After a decade of scaling the fastest-growing Shopify Plus Brands and Apps, it's time for me to run one. I'm acquiring Brands @ $10m - $100m and SaaS apps @ $1m - $10m Topline.


When I'm not living the Ecom lifestyle I'm learning Mandarin, and exploring the flavors of my kitchen.


I write a weekly Public Brand Teardown newsletter and share my journey 👉: 
https://letsbuyabiz.beehiiv.com/subscribe

Jeremy Horowitz'

📧🧲 Adam Kitchen

Co-founder at Content Army 🪖 Helping B2B leaders scale thought leadership, creating world-class content engines in less than 1 hour per month to predictably grow sales | Klaviyo Elite Partner & D2C Agency Owner

I've been a DTC email marketer for over 18 years. Owned my own eComm brand for 2 years. Over the last 7 years, I've built Magnet Monster to be a global retention marketing agency that's created strategies for brands such as Wild, Waterdrop, Abbott Lyon & Laura Geller + 300 others. We've achieved Klaviyo Elite Status (top 0.2% of agencies) & continue to deliver exceptional work for our clients.

We pioneered many of the leading retention strategies commonly deployed today in our industry and have trained hundreds of other email marketers through our flagship course, Monster Email Marketing: https://magnetmonster.com/email-marketing-course

I also built my agency exclusively off the back of content marketing on LinkedIn. I built a course sharing the exact strategy I deployed to generate over $10m in sales: https://magnetmonster.com/b2b-content-that-converts

I publish two Newsletters weekly:

Weekly Retention Strategy: https://magnetmonster.com/newsletter
Personal Growth & Life: https://adamkitchen.kit.com/


I love meeting other entrepreneurs and great humans and learning from them. Schedule a call if you want to chat: https://calendly.com/adamkitchen

We help eCommerce brands to scale profitably with bespoke email marketing strategy and world-class design.

Adam Kitchen

I've been running my email marketing agency for over 7 years now. After working with over 300 DTC brands & becoming a Klaviyo Elite partner, here are some of my biggest lessons about the current state of the industry.


> There is a ceiling limit on what you can charge for email/SMS that caps out around $10k in the Shopify ecosystem, irrespective of the size of the brand. Yes, you can charge more based on additional deliverables, but even high 8-figure brands are reluctant to spend more than this as the base fee.

> Servicing bigger brands is messier and often less profitable. It requires more senior strategists (less margin), and the amount of touchpoints increases significantly as you have to play politics with more role players to get things approved (CMO, coordinators, brand directors, etc). All of this erodes profitability.

> The biggest TAM is for SMBs between $1-10m per year in annual revenue. However, it's difficult to convince many of these brands to spend more than $4k per month. So the service has to be standardised accordingly in order to maintain profits.

> Design revisions are the biggest killer of profits in any agency in this space. You have need to be ridiculously strict or not allow them at all to maintain profitability.

> People sign with you to increase their revenue contribution from the channel. They may talk about UGC, zero-party data and qualitative research, but when it comes to the crunch, they simply want to send more emails & SMS that drive incremental revenue.

> Most clients don't read reports for more than 5 minutes. It's critical to assertively demonstrate the value of your work with proactive check-ins or another agency will poach your business.

> The beauty of this business is that it's an incredibly predictable channel that can guarantee most brands consistent results. The downside is the massive influx of competition because of this and the commoditisation of the work that has followed to maintain margin.

> Ecosystem & technical knowledge is one of the last differentiators and way to increase value to clients as well as increase margin for the agency. However, the addressable market that needs these services is considerably less than where the bulk of the work is.



Add some of your own thoughts in the comments section and let me know if you agree/disagree with mine 👇 



#emailmarketing #klaviyo #shopify

🧲 Adam Kitchen

Founder @ Magnet Monster 🧲 - Klaviyo Elite Partner & Retention Marketing Agency for D2C brands

Why do all my agency friends speak as though this is the worst business model imaginable and uniquely hard compared to other industries? 😂 

Maybe it's the time of year grinding all of us down, but...

Have you ever run a restaurant?

Worked in retail?

Slaved away in an office 14 hours a day in finance, being forced for "drinks in the city"?

There's even a guy who has to climb into my septic tank once a year.

His job is literally to clean up mountains of sh*t from holes in the ground every single day.

Let's stop pretending the agency model is somehow uniquely difficult compared to other industries.

ALL BUSINESSES ARE HARD!

I've never heard another business owner laughing about how easy it is to make money and how little they work.

We get to work from wherever in the world we want, run great cashflowing businesses that require nothing except a laptop and an internet connection.

Yes, there are headaches with managing people & client expectations.

But that's ubiquitous across every business: you manage people and serve customers.

Stop moaning or find another industry to invest your time in.

"The perfect ratio between flow & campaign revenue is 50/50" - let's stop this nonsense.

The reality is it doesn't matter.

Yes, in a perfect world, flows would do a LOT more heavy lifting.

But there are too many variables for most brands to use this as a benchmark.

Examples:

🧲 Your traffic/ads are down MoM >> you'll now need to rely on campaigns to drive returning customer revenue since fewer recipients will be entering flows

🧲 Key sales periods >> BFCM being the obvious ones where you'll be sending a LOT of campaigns

🧲 Purchase latency of your product >> if you sell mattresses, you're not going to drive a lot of revenue from campaigns until you have a massive list; most of your revenue will come from first-time customers who enter flows


I think aiming for a generic split between flow & campaign contribution is utterly pointless.

Just drive more revenue overall through retention channels - that's what matters.


#emailmarketing #ecommerce #klaviyo

There are only 2 key things you need to make BFCM email campaign strategy.


1. Plaster the offer above the fold - the bolder the better
2. Repeat winning offers which have worked well in the past


After 7 years of running these campaigns, I continuously see this playbook be the most effective for brands.

You don't need fancy designs.

You need to make the offer IMMEDIATEDLY visible and easily redeemable.

The inbox is a busy place at the best of times, but it's ridiculously crowded at this time of year.

You also don't need to get too clever with offers.

Simply pull up a report of the last 12-24 months of campaigns.

What drove sales?

Repeat those.

You want predictability to reach targets, and keeping it simple is often the best way to achieve those goals.



#emailmarketing #ecommerce #klaviyo

BFCM email designs

Something I'd love to see more brands do that rely on habit formation to drive repeat sales:

Set your customers a challenge 👇

When we worked with waterdrop®, this was something we worked on with their team to hold customers accountable.

There was a series of check-ins for first-time buyers designed to hold them accountable.

It included collecting UGC, surveying and daily tips to maintain motivation.

Not only were these emails highly engaged with, we also noticed a marked uplift in 21-day repurchase behaviour for people who took the challenge.

If you're selling supplements, food products or even cosmetics, running these challenges is one of the most powerful tactics you can deploy.

Drop me a message if you need help setting one up for next year 👊



#emailmarketing #klaviyo #ecommerce

Why do most survey emails fail miserably?

I'm talking sub 3% response rates.

That's pitiful when you're sending to tens of thousands of people.

There are 2 reasons this happens.


1. Your request came far too late in their journey

2. There's no context or benefit to the user


Let's deal with the first one.

If somebody buys a product and doesn't buy again, you'll want to find out what's holding them back from purchasing to improve your feedback loop.

Most people will send out a generic campaign to a segment at random who meet this criteria.

But at that time, they've already received probably dozens of campaigns and their engagement has plummeted.

The solution: message them much sooner to increase response rates.

Don't wait until it's 60 days after their purchase.

Secondly, the harsh truth about survey emails >

Without an incentive (or context), response rates will always be low.

You see it in SaaS all the time - free gifts or rewards for filling out forms.

Will it produce biased results?

Probably.

But is some form of response better than no response?

I'd argue yes, despite the efficacy of the data (it depends on how the survey is structured).

The bottom line is: most of these survey emails are well intended, but produce zero practical results.

The only way around this is to send them much sooner, with context, and incentives tied to them.



#emailmarketing #ecommerce #klaviyo

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