Working at Beachbody was one of the most valuable jobs of my career where I really learned online marketing and ecommerce in Los Angeles. The company was growing like crazy and I had a front-row seat. As mentioned previously, I had effectively been with the company since its inception, and I was now getting the ultimate education in direct response marketing and applying that to the Internet. In fact, my team had to invent things.
Traditionally, direct marketing companies like Beachbody air infomercials that feed into busy call centers. The customer service representatives take orders over the phone, and they use a fairly complex script with a series of questions that offer customers a variety of related products and services in addition to the one advertised on TV. Depending upon the offer, this is often referred to as an up-sell or a cross-sell. It’s fairly standard. My team was given the task of replicating this process in an ecommerce environment. The challenge was that no one had ever tried this online, and ecommerce platforms in the early to mid-2000’s did not have this capability.
Our solution was to work closely with Marketlive, our ecommerce platform, to custom code an elaborate way to dynamically generate up-sell pages for each product after the customer makes an order and enters his credit card information. We could create elaborate decision trees easily navigated by customers using buttons or checkboxes that would then result in additional offers. What’s more, we could track the whole thing and adjust the offers based on sales results and click-through rates. Generally, we could increase the average cart size from $59.85 (3 payments of $19.95) to well over $80 or more.
At Beachbody, we were also aggressive email marketers. In the four and-a-half years I was there as an employee, my department grew the email list to about 1 million, sent emails 2 and 3 times per week, and regularly generated weekly revenue in the low to mid six figures. We were the absolute leaders in selling in-home fitness products online. We were constantly producing, testing, and refining our landing pages, conducting usability studies, and helping to build Beachbody.com into an online direct marketing juggernaut that effectively integrated television, direct mail, and the Internet.
The founders, Carl Daikeler and Jon Congdon, really showed everyone (and me) what entrepreneurship can produce.
