$250M Ecom Marketer Reacts to HARMFUL Ecom Brand Growth Advice

Añadido: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]I spent the last few days scrolling social media to see what kind of e-commerce advice is being shared today on the internet. And honestly, there's a mix of everything. There's some genuinely good advice which is going to help you grow your business faster and there is some bad advice that if you take it is going to butcher your results. So, I thought it would be valuable to react to some of these tips live and give you some clarity on what actually might be worth following. Now, for those of you who don't know me, my name is Max. I've worked with over 250 7 to9 figure brands in the past couple years and my retention agency, Well Copy, so you can be sure that my experience and what I'm saying comes from actual experience and not some shitty theory. With that said, let's dive into the clips.

[00:00:30]>> This is probably one of the best million a month ecom stores I've ever seen. And if you want to generate $45,000 a day with 300 orders, make sure you save this video because we're going to talk about it. The product they sell is a magic mind mental performance shot. And now, this isn't a new product by any means, but the way that they're selling it and the way that they've created the product is what's truly unique. Ever since this Bradley Cooper movie came out, you know, the one where he takes this pill and becomes a genius, e-commerce brands have been trying to replicate that same hook to be able to sell tons and tons of products. These neutropics sell like crazy. I mean, the Alpha Brain on Amazon has sold over 100,000 times, multiple times. This is an insane seven figureure industry, and I love this brand's approach to it. So, while most products they sell either tablets or powders that you have to mix in water, they give a pre-made solution that's obviously going to go ahead and separate them from the pack because they're trying to be like 5hour energy, which is a billiondoll product. They're trying to do that without the energy crashes and in a more sustainable way. I mean, just look at their ads, right? Quit caffeine for good. They represent their product as the best caffeine alternative. And finally, all that traffic goes to this amazingly well-designed landing page that goes over the benefits, testimonials, reasons why you should purchase the product, gives an insane offer for new people to try, and a lot more information. For people looking to create a side hustle and build a business online, there is nothing better than e-commerce. you find products that solve real problems, advertise them in an effective way, tap into things that people already want and generate revenue every single day.

[00:02:19]>> Now, this is a fine breakdown, but one of the biggest mistakes that I see is people seeing things that, you know, Grun's AG1 are what these big brands do and try to follow their funnel exactly without understanding the numbers.

[00:02:29]Grunes has crazy funding, so they can lose money on their first few purchases.

[00:02:33]They don't even get payback until customers make their sixth order with them. If you don't have serious money, then you wouldn't be able to copy their funnel. For example, Magic Mind right here, they got significant funding to run this funnel. And so, specifically, I'm talking about the offer that he's highlighting here at the end. And I talk about using banger offers like this often. But this only works if you really know your numbers. Cuz if everybody listening to this saw like, oh, I have to offer 50% off plus like all sorts of different free gifts. You might lose like $50 on your first purchase. And say your contribution margin per purchase is like $10. That's going to take you five repurchases just to profit from one customer. And how many customers of yours are actually going to buy five times? So, it's great to be watching and understanding big brands funnels and try to take specific learnings from them, but you don't just want to rip exactly what they're doing. For example, the big subscription brands that are succeeding right now are the ones that are actually negative for the first six purchases from a customer. The only way they can do that is cuz they have money behind them. So, some of their tactics should not apply to you. So, yes, watch your funnel breakdowns, but make sure you don't take them and their strategies too literally. PS, we just crossed 180 members inside of my private community and I talk about this stuff all the time. I have daily insight posts that I post in here which are exclusive to this community and I don't talk about this in my public content. And I also answer every question that people have every single day. Whatever question you have, you can drop it in the community. Other people get to it and I'll respond to it as well. You can also DM me whenever you want. And there are live calls every Tuesday and Friday. If you're interested, you should check it out.

[00:03:55]Here's the information. I'm going to have the link below for you to check out.

[00:03:58]>> All right, guys. So, in some instances, plain text emails works really, really good when it comes to the e-commerce space.

[00:04:04]>> I agree. Plain text emails are awesome and they perform really well. Let's see what else he has to say.

[00:04:08]>> And the most important thing is plain text emails can be used for the following. If you're doing newsletter, if you want to say thank you, if you want to do opt out emails, opt-in emails, a message from a founder, a message from the company CEO, these type of emails, they look simple, to the point, not a lot of visuals, very very simple to the point emails. These are the type of emails that you need to stand out. Now, if you are talking about just the plain text with no design, no colors at all, those emails work too.

[00:04:40]But guess what? You have to have some sort of visuals in your emails in order to actually stand out.

[00:04:47]>> I disagree. I'll talk about that in a second.

[00:04:49]>> Now, let me show you another email saying from this brand that is very very visual, high quality, uh very educational about what the product is, what they're selling, why they should purchase the product, all that. Very visual emails. But a single plain text emails, even if you're not a designer, you can put together something that has some sort of like branding, color, shapes that you're using. These type of emails we send out on a daily basis when it comes to any new launch, pre- nurture emails, stuff like that in order to actually convert a lot of people.

[00:05:24]>> All right, I have a couple thoughts on this and plain text emails. For one, in my opinion, he did not show me a plain text email. That is a designed email. It has all these colors and it's not really coming from a real person. This is what a plain text email is. And this consistently, in my experience, converts better than those designed text emails that he showed. Cuz he says that you need some design and colors to stand out. But in reality, that just looks like every other email every brand is sending. Crazy designs, blinding, tons of colors. But what stands out is sending an email from a real person. And there's actually no design here. And it looks like it's coming from a friend.

[00:05:57]That is standing out. And this is going to outperform those designed ones in most cases. Of course, it depends brand to brand, but this personal approach is what we see works super well. Using wording like you're going to love it, happy Friday, friends, coming in hot, and then changing the sender name to Corbin, while the other ones just come from the brand. You can see how personal and how much this stands out when it comes from a person and it looks like a friend emailing you. But also, another caveat is often times plain text will perform better than a designed email, but only if you have a bad designed email. A good designed email in the right case will outperform the plain text emails. And you should be using both sparingly and for different reasons. For educational emails and showing off your product, you really want to lean into the designed emails because they can visualize and use infographics and have clear visuals and instruction sort of graphics that can help educate the customer towards a purchase. And plain text can't do that.

[00:06:45]However, plain text is going to be a lot better at sort of like brand building, building personal connection, and it usually performs better for the quick urgency messages, things like this where it's super simple and it's like, "Hey, last chance." And there's no distractions, just, hey, here's the button. Go by. This is an AB test right here with the bottom variation being a plain text email. You can see 1.73% clicks compared to 1.22. The placed order is almost 50% higher. So plain text outperformed in this case, but in this one, it was the opposite. Look at the difference in conversion rate right here. The clicks were similar. The graphic did have higher clicks, but the people who clicked bought at a much higher rate because they were properly educated from the graphics inside of the email since it was a graphic email compared to the top one which was textbased. So my point here is that you should be using both and you should be using them for different reasons.

[00:07:32]Graphic based is for visualizing the product and giving strong education. And then plain text, you want it to actually be plain text and use it for personal messages and urgency reminders. By the way, if you hear all this e-commerce advice on the internet and you don't know what to follow, you should click the link in the description to book a call with my company, WellCopy, or run a full audit of your email and SMS and full retention setup and let you know what's costing you money right now. And it's based off of the over $250 million we've made for our clients. Link will be below. Let's keep going.

[00:07:56]>> Unpopular opinion, that stupid popup you're running on your e-commerce site is killing your conversion and your revenue per visitor. Don't believe me?

[00:08:06]Let's split test it. There's going to be two versions in this test. One is going to be the control that has the popup and the other going to be the same page without a popup. You're going to have two objectives, conversion rate and revenue per visitor. Once you've got this set up, we're going to turn it on and we're going to let it run. The goal is to get enough data that we can get to at least 95% confidence that the data is correct. Click that start button and let's get the experiment going. All right, now that we have our numbers, did it win? Did it lose? If your revenue per visitor is higher with a pop-up, congratulations. You've won. No need to continue watching this video. You should just keep on doing what you're doing.

[00:08:45]But if you're like most brands, you probably have a reduced revenue per visitor at this point. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the popup lost. I disagree. First, he didn't show any numbers for us. And number two, I've never seen a good pop-up form hurt your website conversion rate. Notice how I said good. If you have a pop-up form that hurts your conversion rate, that means it's probably a bad pop-up form. A good pop-up form is going to contribute to your experience and it's going to increase the interactions on your website, increase your conversion rate, or at least keep it steady, but now you get people's email addresses and phone numbers so you can convert these people down the line. If you have a bad pop-up form that's just annoying, it's just like 10% off and you ask for people's email, phone number, birthday, and it's really distracting and it harms the customer experience, then yes, that could hurt your website conversion rate.

[00:09:29]So, you need to set up your pop-up form, right? Here's an example of some numbers from Shan at Alia pop-ups, big clothing brand called Pacted, and he made a post about this. Many e-commerce brands disable pop-ups to protect conversion, assuming that the pop-ups distract high intent shoppers. But this creates a hidden cost. Visitors who don't convert immediately leave anonymously if you don't have their pop-up, which limits your ability to send them emails to get them to convert. So, they leave and never come back. And then in this AB test that they ran, added to cart rates were nearly identical. It was actually higher. 9.44% 44% with pop-ups and 9.32% without. And purchase rates held steady 1.75% with pop-ups and 1.76% without.

[00:10:06]But with the pop-ups, now they have people's emails and they have people's phone numbers and those people are going to convert down the line, which is actually going to increase the long-term website conversion rate. So, how do you set up a pop-up form that contributes to the customer experience? We use pop-ups on Alia right here, alia.com.

[00:10:20]You can take a look at some of their pop-up forms where they actually contribute to the customer experience.

[00:10:25]They are really welldesigned. They ask you a question and they engage with you before asking for your email address.

[00:10:31]Let's walk through one example here.

[00:10:32]Here we have Obi who uses Alia. They do this scratch to win gamified sort of answer right here. So, it's kind of fun.

[00:10:39]You can enter your birthday in your email. I'll enter my phone number. But notice what they do at the end here.

[00:10:45]They take you through a further experience. Want 25% off. Then it takes you through an educational sequence right here. What's your goal with obvious? Say I want to slim down. And then I'm getting educated experience.

[00:10:56]I'm getting experience based on what I'm answering in this quiz. And it's part of the pop-up form experience. This is contributing to getting me to convert.

[00:11:03]Look at the social proof that is aligned directly towards my pain point. It's that simple. I get a claim 25% off, apply my discount, and this is all through all of that platform. And this is how you get pop-up forms to contribute to your conversion rate. So you can look at all these examples. I always like doing this quiz so you can get that information from the customer and it makes the customer feel like they're getting a personalized experience which again helps them convert.

[00:11:25]>> It's possibly the most stupid thing you can ever do and yet it's so prevalent and the reason it's prevalent is even sadder. It's a combination of two things. Companies don't realize the damage it does and they don't think of anything else that they could offer.

[00:11:41]It's such an obvious I mean I've gone through it with mini MBA. Occasionally I'll think well if we ran a special offer and knocked 30% off blah blah blah blah blah and of course you think well we can do it and it'll be fine and then you go hang on a minute I've seen all this data of course it won't be fine but it's easy to do.

[00:11:56]>> Yeah >> and it's intuitively tempting and I think it's probably yeah the dumbest thing you can do. Not that it's avoidable. Every brand's going to be sold somewhere on discount even if we try and stop it. But I think marketers attitude has to be, I'm heartbroken whenever I see my product sold not at the recommended rate, which often isn't the case.

[00:12:18]>> So, I just looked up here. Gruns just sold for 1.2 billion. Let's go on their homepage. Oh, limited time offer. Save up to 52%. 49% off right here and 52% off. Always available on their website.

[00:12:30]Buy two, save 5%. $65 Mother's Day special bundle. Up to 52% off everywhere. Okay, AG1 20% off and $43 of free gifts. So that's 100% discount for these free gifts. Fenty Beauty, I just landed on their website. Unlock 15% off your next $35 plus order. Now, this guy's a brilliant marketer, but he comes from the world of corporate and extremely luxury brands. Not running an ecom brand competing with thousands of others in your niche. In an ideal world, yes, you never discount, but that just doesn't convert in 2026. Everybody knows it. The customers know that all the discounts are [ __ ] but it still just works. Now, you can absolutely get away with not doing it, but it's going to be a lot more difficult. And the one thing that I found is testing your offers is literally the biggest lever that you can pull as an ecom brand. This is a brand who was running an acquisition offer of free gift for years. They were offering people a free gift on their first order to see if that helped with getting people to convert.

[00:13:27]You can see it was a 3.3% placed order rate. They ran that for years and we ran a simple offer test for them and we found the $25 off offer which their AOV is over $300. So that's less than 10%.

[00:13:39]So it's actually less than this. This just $25 had a 10.7% placed order rate.

[00:13:44]The crazy part is we were also getting three times the amount of people on the pop-up form. So we had three times the amount of people on the pop-up form and a three times the placed order rate. And this just absolutely changed the brand.

[00:13:54]You can see the welcome flow $33,000 in January to $210,000 in March. And look at the difference in the brand's revenue right here as a result. Testing your offers in different discounts can be one of the biggest levers for your brand.

[00:14:06]Dollar off, percent off, free gifts, bundles, mystery offers. It is such a high lever for your brand that you can crack. That's not to say you should always be discounting. Discounting and having a special acquisition offer is great for getting first-time buyers, but we want to avoid discounting as much as we can for people who are coming back and buying again. That's where you have your educational emails that you're sending three to four times per week for people. You have your crosses and upsells that try to nudge people without an offer. You're constantly releasing new products and give people a reason to buy without discounts. Discounts are great because they feel special and so you need to engineer that specialty with new products releasing. And you can also just get natural sales by being top of- mind and being in the right place at the right time, which if you send strong educational emails and you send them frequently, then you will be in the right place at the right time for a certain amount of customers every time you send an email and you will make sales. So yes, ideally you don't have to discount, but it is the biggest lever for every single brand is the offer testing you do. It can change the fundamentals of your business. So it's not something you should ignore and don't follow a playbook or advice from somebody in a completely different business than you. If you increase the frequency of your email to a point where you no longer match the subscriber expectation when they give you this email address, they will unsubscribe will report you as spam to a wider extent than before, which will drive your email more often than not into spam. So always put yourself in the shoe of the subscriber. What are the expectation? Again, some people subscribe to daily newsletter or twice a day newsletter. it's financial markets or stuff like that. People may be happy to do this, but if I sign up to a bed sheet newsletter, I don't need you to send me your new bed sheet every week, right? It's about just respecting the human behind the mailbox. Sending two emails will hurt your deliverability and your metrics. It's something I hear a lot, but that's usually what people say when their content is bad. Strong content plus proper segmentation plus good infrastructure on your domain and account is what makes highfrequency email marketing work. If you create emails that people actually like, then they won't care how often you email them. If I told you that somebody knocked on your door every single day at 9:00 a.m., you would probably be like, "Hell no, that sounds terrible." But what if I also said he gave you a $100 bill every single time? You'd probably be inviting him to come back. And so, it's all about what you deliver to people. Do you give them dopamine with the type of stuff you're sending? Do you have a good voice? Do you have good design that gives them dopamine? Do you always have fun stuff that you're doing as a brand to keep them updated? That's the sort of stuff that can allow you to send at a high frequency. You see, the top brands literally send daily emails, some of them even two times a day. I mean, for example, look at Fenty right here. They're pretty much sending every single day. But you absolutely can mess this up and hurt your deliverability if you're using the wrong segmentation.

[00:16:38]Deliverability is just how often do you land in the spam folder versus the main inbox. Essentially, Google will put you in spam if you have a history of people not engaging with your stuff. And they'll put you in the main inbox if people engage with your stuff. So, if you send emails and people don't engage, you go to spam. How can you be sure that people engage with your stuff? Send good content and only send to people who are actively engaging with your stuff. So, instead of just blasting emails to your whole list, that's how you're going to get terrible open rates. You're going to get 20% open rates. You're going to get spam complaints because you're sending to people who don't want to receive your emails. Instead, you should be sending to things like your 30-day or 60-day engaged email list. People who have interacted with your emails at your website in the past 60 days. And that's who you send your general email campaigns where you're sending three to four times per week. And then a couple times a month, you spread it out to the whole list and try and re-engage some of those people for big brand events. If you send to just your engaged list, you're going to get good opens. We want to aim for above 50% opens cuz that tells Google, hey, over 50% of people who received this email actually opened it and engaged with it. So, we can send this person to the main inbox. But if you send anything with like 30% opens, then you're telling them seven out of 10 people who received this email didn't want it. And then you're more likely to end in spam. So, really, all you need to do is create good content. Make sure you have proper segmentation so that you get good engagement metrics and then people will keep coming back. All right, so that's my take on some of the most popular ecom advice out there. If you found that helpful, then I have something infinitely more helpful and that's my school community which I talked about earlier in this video. It's going to pop up on the screen here, but essentially you have access to ask me questions 24/7 whenever you want. I give a daily insight that I don't post anywhere else. And we have live calls every Tuesday and Friday, just masterminds where I walk through advanced email marketing, ecom strategies, then do Q&A to help you with what you're struggling with. We have over 180 active members in there and I hope to see you in there as well. Thanks for watching this video. I think you'll like this next one popping up on the screen.