Shloka’s top advertising tips for successful selling with Teespring

Shloka originally started his journey to success by selling physical and digital products related to health and beauty. As an Internet marketer, he frequented online communities where people discussed the latest advertising trends, tips, platforms, etc. This is where Shloka first heard about Teespring. After reading about other people’s success he decided to try it for himself. Shloka hit his first big milestone after just two months of selling with Teespring.  

Two months after starting with Teespring I hit my first big listing. I sold over 400 units of one design within seven days. This moment gave me the confidence to pursue online selling with Teespring full time. I would hear about other people getting their first listing with over 100 sales and I kept telling myself that I could be that successful too if I just kept trying. Once I figured out how to create scalable designs for certain niches everything fell into place.

Shloka’s formula for success

Shloka recently surpassed the 90,000 product sale milestone. It’s safe to say he’s picked up some useful experience along the way. So what are the top tips he wishes he had learned early on?

1) First, make sure you have an audience to sell to—you need to know your niche before you create the designs. When I started, we did some designs that we thought were great but later on found out that there is not enough passionate audience to sell this design to. Niche research is very important.

2) Second, have a systematic testing process. For example, if your test budget for each design is $20 only spend that much on ads for one design. You may feel that it is the best design in the world but let your audience decide that. This way you will be able to test a lot more designs. Sometimes we felt confident about particular designs and spent too much before deciding to move on.

Speaking of audience research, Shloka and his team perform niche research the good old fashion way. He prefers to target evergreen niches because they’re better for buying throughout the year. Also, it’s easier to make extra sales with evergreen niches because buyers are more likely to become repeat shoppers—he continuously contacts past buyers (via message) with new designs for their niche to make extra sales.

Most of our research is done the hard way. For example, if I am looking for a new niche to target, I would just go on Google and type something like “Most Common Jobs in US”  or  “Hobbies of Rich People”. I will find all the information that I can get for the niches that pop up and select a few target niches from these. Then I go to Facebook and find pages related to these niches and see the audience size on these pages, the engagement, whether these pages are selling Print on Demand merchandise and if so, what is the engagement this content gets within these communities.

Shloka focuses mostly on the US market but when he has a successful design he translates it into French, German, and Italian for EU markets too.

We’ve had great success sticking to this simple strategy—once we have a winning design in the US we also try it in the EU. One difference I have noticed between these two regions is that aggressive & impactful content works great in US markets while discreet and subtle designs tend to work better in EU markets.

Online advertising tips for 2018

Teespring sellers who have been in the game for many years will tell you advertising isn’t as easy as it used to be. There are several ways Shloka and his team have adapted their advertising approach over the years to maximize online sales.  

1) For the niches where we have an established page, we often run contests to understand the content and the type of design that the audience wants. This way many of our designs are already validated by the audience and have a much higher chance of success.

2) We focus much more on our retargeting ads because they have the highest conversion rates. A person who has already chosen to look at a particular design has a much higher probability of converting than a random person who sees the ad for the first time. We also do sequential retargeting and alter the ad copy based on where the user is in the buying cycle.

3) My team uses Lookalike Audiences a lot for big niches for scaling our listings..  These lookalike audiences are quite precise if you give enough data to Facebook for the seed audiences from which they are created.

4) Lately, we’ve been having some good results from the Boosted Network (we’re getting an additional 15%+ sales) so we dedicate time to creating more designs related to the ones that are generating the most sales on the Boosted Network.

When it comes to testing new ads Shloka has a strict process which enables him to test ads effectively.

We have a strict budget of $20 for each new design and we stick to that. If we get sales while within our budget, we try to see if it can be scaled. Currently ‘conversions’ ad with ‘purchase’ as the objective is top performing ad type for us. We do run some PPE ads parallelly to give the initial momentum to the ads. We try to test our ads closer to the weekend—mostly Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Saturdays tend to be our best performing day of the week for ads.

 

Shloka’s Teespring journey

Since starting his journey with Teespring Shloka has been able to create the life he’s always dreamed of.  He’s recently hit the 90,000 product milestone and hired new people to join his selling team.

Teespring has given me a life of freedom. I am free to choose my work hours and I was able to start my own company with the profit I made from Teespring. Now we are a team of more than 10 people—so Teespring has not only impacted my life but it has also helped me create employment opportunities for other people too. Using the Teespring store feature we have been able to create brand recognition in the big niches that we sell to. It’s a joy to sell products that bring smiles to people’s faces. 😉