Making the most of a 400% sales boom with Chris Meade from Crossnet (episode 290)
Chris Meade is one of the three co-founders of Crossnet, a business started in September 2017 that hit over $2m in sales in 2019. Crossnet is a business based on a game the 3 invented in order to escape the 9 to 5, which they’ve grown in a low-risk, life-friendly way!
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About Chris
In college, Chris worked for an Amazon business that exclusively drop shipped products.
Using a website calle Portlite, the company would upload thousands of products daily and Chris himself would find, list and fulfill hundreds of orders daily. The process piqued his interest in eCommerce.
About Crossnet
- 95% of sales to United States
- 500% increase of sales during Covid
- Founded in 2017
- Shopify Platform
Favorite Widgets and Plugins
Covid 19 Success
Crossnet had an unexpected surge in sales from Covid-19. Because of the quarantine, families and quarantine friends have been looking for ways to spend more time together and less time on the couch.
Crossnet can be played with just a few players and is easy to set up in a range of environments. This turned out to be appealing to people stuck inside looking for something fun to do in the backyard.
The result is that Crossnet outdid their entire 2019 sales in a single month in 2020. While success is always exciting, this huge increase in demand has stressed the supply chain.
After selling out of three months of inventory in a week, Chris says their biggest challenge has been replenishing their inventory. They’ve added customer service to deal with expectations and have been hustling their manufacturers to produce at capacity.
Dealing With Inventory Lags
To deal with the crunch, the team started selling ahead of inventory in a totally transparent way. To bridge the wait, they’ve added several different email flows in an effort to be proactive and keep people happy.
Besides keeping customers in the loop on their order status, Chris is making sure they stay pumped. They’ve added everything from instruction flows to MVP Facebook groups and are introducing their own Podcast soon.
Taking advantage of this in between time has increased engagement and kept waiting customers happy.
Marketing
Chris says they’ve ramped up their marketing by leveraging user created content and segmenting aggressively. They’ve also increased Facebook Ad spend and focused on retargeting where possible.
They also ramped up their capture on site with aggressive pop ups that follow through with email and SMS abandoned cart flows. Chris says they are focused on marketing differently to people depending on where they are in the funnel.
Chris wants people to buy into the game for the long term.
10%-15% Email Capture Strategy
10-15% is pretty ambitious for email capture. Here’s how Chris says they do it.
- Home Page Pop UP 5 seconds in with 10 discount code that expires 24hrs
- exit attempt- use spinner wheel with different prizes
- Segmented pop-ups —flash sales, ebook offers etc.
Running Lean
Chris and his partners use data to drive their decisions. When an opportunity arises, they have no problem doubling down as long as they can prove something out.
The company was bootstrapped with less than $10,000 and Chris says they continue to run in a really frugal way including being risk averse.
eCommerce Book Top Tip
- Double Your Profits by Bob Fifer
eCommerce Traffic Top Tip
- Email marketing—In the last four months revenue from email has gone from 1%-15%
Tool Top Tip
- Notes on iMessage and FaceTime for the completely remote team.
Growth Top Tip
- If there is an opportunity to ramp up your ad spend if you can keep your CPA even. Reach out to customers directly and ask them where they found the product.
Interview Links
Related episodes
- 289
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