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How ForChics Scaled Past 8-Figures With High-converting eCommerce Ad Creatives With Eymel Daniel, Co-founder of ForChics

Eymel Daniel 9:08

Yeah, definitely.

Joshua Chin 9:09

But more importantly, it’s kind of the topic of creatives. It kind of goes to show that good Creatives have a framework that works. It’s the science and very much duplicable things that you can do again and again and not necessarily a guesswork. So please speak to your philosophy and your ideas behind ForChics ad creatives and what has made it so successful. You talk a little bit of books.

Eymel Daniel 9:42

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. And yeah, again, like whenever I mean these days back then it was always someone copied as we’re going to like not doing well after this all that. Yeah, but right now I am always amazed that whenever people try to copy Yes, and it It always happens regardless, whatever brands that are doing, like seven, eight figure revenue, they’re always people trying to copy it shows you one thing that while you’re doing is working, and yeah, I’m always proud of that, I guess. And when it comes to

Joshua Chin 10:17

where there’s a bad sheet,

Eymel Daniel 10:18

yeah, one thing that we are always consistent since the start of ForChics itself, we always test new creatives every single week, we always have a passion of new creatives every week without fail. And like back then being a startup, I mean, we I just use my own personal savings for this. And it forced me to do whatever I can, however, I can do it. And I don’t even have the knowledge of video editing skills, I don’t know Lightroom or Adobe Premiere Pro, whatever that is, and I leverage actually leverage from the start using my iPhone and then just edit it by an app. And to make things much more interesting, that app alone is still running until now it’s been three years. It’s still profitable. It gained like, I think over i Last time, I checked it gain of like 30 million views, and is just edited from it. And, and using my iPhone, and iPhone eight, the average score is and so back then I think like three years ago, it was definitely just a basic editing app. But right now, I mean, this is not, I’m not even paid for this

Joshua Chin 11:30

shot, nice to reach out.

Eymel Daniel 11:33

I think like a lot of intrapreneurs are familiar with Inshots, really good and quick editing. And I learned that shooting from my iPhone, we didn’t even have a lot of budget with agencies. So I shot with my iPhone, and then keep on creating variations of ad from it. And, yeah, we constantly consistently testing new things. And we do all this set at by ourself. And once things are getting better, we try to work with any agency. So working with an agency is a lot of another deep experience for us as well. We work I mean with Chronos, the reason why we work with them for like I think it’s two to three years right now, it’s because three years plus, we focus a lot on getting things delivered. And communication, I think we don’t really care much about the process, all that stuff. I mean, all clients just care about the deliver the outcome, the outcome, and, and that’s when we decided, okay, we can’t, we can’t rely on agency because the cost is like, expensive. And me being here in Malaysia, we decided to, okay, we need to do our own shoot. So overtime, I just find myself in the States and to just create our shoot. And there’s a special thing with four sheets. And all the creatives are actually being shot either by me or by our videographer. We hire freelancers, photograph rays, so all of those are actually original and not, not by an agency. So we do it all in house, whatever we can, however, we can do it, we, we we don’t outsource it to agencies, because our experience was not that great. And we test a lot of agencies before as well. And I think the reason why we know we can nail down in our on our own is because we understand the brand better. And we understand what made people convert and all the other agencies, they probably not have enough experience when it comes to the specific industry. And for us, we’ve been testing a lot of different products from different industries. So that’s why we can leverage more on that as well. And yeah, with limited budget, we we just do what we can we hire freelancers, call our friends to become a stage actor, as the be the model of our product. However, we want to do it and then I think like last year, yeah, actually last year, I mean, before the pandemic, I actually was independently I decided, okay, things can really take a we are actually we have friends approaching us to do like ad credits for them. And we have, we’ve been like helping them to scale up their brand as well, which is, I mean, I find it always amazing that what we do with Porsches is actually replicable. And I think, Okay, it’s time to take things much more serious. And I figured, okay, I might as well just start my own studio. In the middle of pandemic, where do one I can’t even be in the studio. And yeah, we started off. It wasn’t as good as I expected, because I have no experience with hands on experience when it comes to videography, editing. I’m always on my phone. That’s how I learn best. I shift my phone and not from a camera. I don’t know even what kind of model works Best right now. But yeah, there’s always a learning curve. And that’s why I learned the most. And actually, it’s, the framework still remains the same. It always works. It’s just a matter of the quality the output. And again, it’s replicable, replicable. And I think it’s, it’s, it’s always amazing for me that because the framework is, is basing off our performance, based off our metrics as well. So we rely a lot on that. And I think, especially when Apple introduced this, I’m pretty sure everyone heard about this, or nobody’s the iOS 14, that’s when things started to get really, really difficult. And shows that creative. The first touch point of an ad, when it comes to paid, paid social or tick tock Snapchat, you name it, it’s always the creative people always say, saw the credits first, and not the landing page, and not the email, not the SMS is always really first. And that’s where Kritis becoming is becoming much, much more important. And right now it’s the biggest leverage any brands can, can do. Yeah, and I always prioritize creatives over everything else worse, you could have, you could have a not so good landing page, but your credit is is engaging is have the right hook, and people can actually convert just like that. And yeah, it’s always a step by step and creative is I find it is it’s a very, very important thing for any brand right now at the moment.

Joshua Chin 16:34

And it’s so resilient, like good creators this resilient because it doesn’t matter what happens on the algorithms front. Yeah. And you have, like you mentioned your career does that one iPhone creative? As lots of new thought was removed tree tree years? Yeah, generated over 30 million view, isn’t saying, So then you’ve been through the trenches. You’re, you’ve created stuff from scratch with sign with absolutely no experience. And from what I can tell, basically, and I’ve been behind the hood, right, looking at the actual results, and I’m super impressed every single time I kind of looked at the results. And you’ve been through the trenches, done things from scratch, learned everything from scratch. And now you’re kind of coming out of the the shadows and brands, yeah, scale with your proven frameworks. But now, what type of, you know what type of ads or frameworks work work well? Or what’s your philosophy when it comes to the type of ads that work for each stage of the funnel? I mean, that’s top of funnel obviously, with, you know, capturing and generating attention first, and then middle funnel and bottom of funnel. How do you break it down when you start first?

Eymel Daniel 17:55

Yeah, I mean, our main focus would always, always always be on top of funnel, we aim to at least spend our ad budget 70, 70 to 80% on top of funnels and break down as easy as top of funnel being the people who actually have the problem, they actually know that they have that problem, but they don’t know your product, whose product can solve it for them, and middle being the people that actually know your product, but they’re just not convinced yet. And the bottom funnel are the people who knows how good your product is, but they not ready to make the purchase. So how is separate these three levels stage of the funnel into when it comes to the ad creative? So for a top of funnel, it’s always problem oriented. It’s always always problem oriented. It should be a text driven video, and we should showcase the hook as a problem, and how can your product help them and it’s more like an education video where they we just amplify their problem and then we show the solution. So for the middle funnel, it’s always going to show a it’s always going to be about showing the your product to purity, where you could have a benefit call out feature call out user generated content. Yeah, even like still images, you can just have a product call out I mean benefit call out in the imagery. And for the bottom funnel. Usually we just use clear offer and a discount code. So if that’s what we prioritize, prioritize a lot on spending for a funnel because that’s where we can leverage the most data based on that data with the the metrics that we have. And we will optimize even better after that. So yeah, a lot of this pen goes to the top of funnel because we want to get the cold traffic. When we started launching ForChics. I will say around 2018 90% of our cold traffic was from Pay media paid social. That’s where we find that a lot of our spend goes to the top of funnel and and it’s important to all brands out there to just focus their focus on making their first touch point, the best as possible, because the middle funnel or the bottom funnel, wouldn’t, you wouldn’t even get to that point, if you don’t even have a good top of funnel app.

Joshua Chin 20:23

Make sense. It was one of the things that caught was that, from what you’ve shared, it doesn’t seem like the best performing creatives are necessarily the highest value production type of creatives, you don’t necessarily have to spend 100,000 bucks on an incredible production to generate the most returns for your brand. And it’s tried and tested because you’ve generated the results yourself. So what are some of the other secrets or tips that most people wouldn’t know about high converting high quality creatives?

Eymel Daniel 21:03

Yeah, and yeah, it’s it’s crazy that one of our actually, it’s our best performing ADS has always been the the ones that has been shot from an iPhone. So it shows that whatever startup, whatever brand, you’re just starting out, have like that kind of leverage or advantage that you can do by just using your iPhone to just shot your products. And it could be a hand point of view or anything and how we like when it comes to like secret. I I don’t believe in like having a secret when you are about to launch the ads. I believe in the optimizations the after launching part. Yeah, so we the secret comes from learning the from the metrics that you get. Yeah, that’s the best secret. It’s it is the it’s always has been optimizing. And that it, it tells you what you need to do next. That’s how you can get the best idea of what you should implement after working on the first one, because everyone needs to know that their first is never going to be great. You you can be you can. I mean, it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity if you had the first ad being generating like a lot of revenue, but it’s almost impossible. Yeah. So it’s just lucky. Yeah. So when it comes like reading the metrics, I focus a lot on the tom, tom stop scroll, which is the three second view divided over the impression. So I have like specific benchmarks. benchmarks that we set for our team, the scroll stock rate should be about like 30%. So if it’s below, that’s where we know we should test our different hooks. So that’s where we can leverage simple headshots. It could be like asking questions, or shocking facts, or even like demonstration of product, or you can even like test it out with user generated content. So it’s great that the secret is matrix because you actually know what you need to do next, and what’s working and what’s not working. And after that, I will say the second. The second secret not so secret, I will say the average watch time. So the average watch time is definitely after the hook, whatever average watch time, we aim to be three seconds or more. So the hook should generally be one to three seconds. average watch time, we can increase it by having someone to talk about the product best where we see best. So when it comes to like increasing the average watch time, we often include educational clips where someone can buy a product, or a user generated content, or even a product showcase to just unboxing and show making people much more intrigued to see the product. Other than that it’s outbound CTR, we aim to be at least 1.5% And yeah, and like how can we increase the album CTR is that we should have all on all of our ads. People always think like the call to action should be end of the ad. It’s not like that we should you should have a call to action in the middle of the ad itself and the call to action is not like sharp now try now it should be like very, very call to action oriented such as Yeah, let me think for it could be turn your shower into a sanctuary. So it gives you the idea of oh, I need to turn my shower into a sanctuary. And yeah, so it gives you the idea of like in the ad creatives itself, it doesn’t have to be your call to action doesn’t necessarily have to be at the end of the at the end of the video you can have get instantly smooth curves or get instantly clear face within the first few seconds and he shows that it is a subtle call to action that you should have. And people always loved the word like new instant all All those things that we often test out. And other than that the last one would definitely be robust. And in for the top of funnel to be around like 1.5 and 1.5 is good indicator, the the, the ad itself is working, we just need to optimize further. So like, it’s not really a secret, but I think it’s a more practical way of getting a better overview of how you are doing with your current ads. And, and that’s what we usually do, we have way too small to just talk about the metrics.

Joshua Chin 25:35

I like that I like how data driven build process is. But for people listening, if you’re curious about what the end product looks like, it sounds simple sounds like a scrappy video being made. But it’s not. If you go to Sudiyo.com and check out the sample created. It actually looks really good. It’s actually really high quality stuff. And that I suppose that that’s where experience comes in, and your your, your you and your team’s expertise comes in. But I like that, you know, one thing that I’ve, that I’ve learned from you just is that you’re aiming for a 1.5x role. So not something crazy, like five times 10 times yours right off the bat. I’m assuming that’s for the testing phase where you’re trying to look for your readers that are gaining traction, and then you move to optimize them. Even soda. Yeah, I liked it. Because, you know, people often get caught up with Oh, I’m getting for us. Yeah, we look at it as like part of the funnel retargeting ads, obviously getting three or four times.

Eymel Daniel 26:44

Yeah, the way like one way we see I mean, yeah, I mean, that’s where we need to, like, make sure everyone knows when it comes to working with us. It’s always you don’t look at the front end. And that’s why we always say that to whoever, even for ourselves, the best way that you can maximize your top of funnel ad is just by having a good back end. That’s where email marketing SMS marketing plays in. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that’s where all that will help us a lot when it comes to recovery. And it would get us for, like higher ROI as after that. So yeah, that’s, that’s where the fun starts. Actually.

Joshua Chin 27:24

I love that. And just kind of relaxing on the four shakes example. It’s, I think, from an outsider’s point of view and having some kind of insights into what’s happening behind the scenes, I’m just going to shed a bit of light. From my perspective here. I think the number one thing is having a an excellent product, a product that people love. That’s number one. And then number two is getting, getting the right amount and right type of attention with high quality, high frequency creatives testing. And that’s getting the word out there and you having a lot of eyeballs on your very excellent product and having people try your product. That’s conversions. And then the profits come from the retention and a back end retargeting, the retention, the rebuys, the repurchases, and that’s why even SMS and all that fun stuff comes in, in the in a post in a cookieless future, which is seems like it’s going to come very soon. It seems like a lot of brands are worried about what’s going to happen next, when we don’t have cookies anymore. What do you think is gonna What’s your prediction?

Eymel Daniel 28:38

Yeah, I mean, I agree. And it’s like, the iOS 14 is just a star. And, yeah, we are always preparing ourselves. And the way that I see a lot of, well, yeah, even our friends, my friends, we working with a lot of people what I see for a successful brand, they often have a product market fit. And other than that, there are three things actually product market fit, and a high creative production, and also consistent optimizations. So optimizations can be on the website on the backend, email marketing, SMS marketing, even the creators itself. So all those three builds great brand and great product and and regardless, whatever, in the coming future, even though we couldn’t even predict what kind of metrics that we’re going to get. So it’s always back to the basics. We always test different things, test different audiences, where we can leverage the most and yeah, I think, yeah, it’s it’s a very, it’s a very, very scary future indeed. But I think when it comes to like a lot of testing, there’s always way some ways that we can leverage the new the new data or the new placements, whatever the future brings us.

Joshua Chin 29:58

A lot of Sudiyo currently offers up to 1000 bucks off the first month isn’t what I’m seeing on the website anywhere between 350 bucks off to 1050 bucks off the first month. What is the best way for people wanting to find out more to connect with you and find out about Sudiyo? They reach out to you?

Eymel Daniel 30:22

Yeah, you can just email me personally is that hey@Sudiyo.com? And I’m more than happy to have a call. Yeah, because you can see for yourself on our site that we are not just doing the post production we do from the pre to the production to the post production every single step of the way. We are, we don’t outsource we do it in house. So we are more than happy to see how we can help your brand to scale up to reach the new level. And yeah, looking forward for it.

Joshua Chin 30:54

Incredible. Dan, thank you so much for being on the show.

Eymel Daniel 30:58

Thank you so much for having

Outro 31:03

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