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Teespring? (38)

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Hi all,

I'm surprised there's so little mention of Teespring on this forum. Whilst I know tracking capabilities are limited, there's some real benefits to it:

- It's a real, tangible product (T-shirt)
- You can design your own product, i.e. infinite angles
- You have control over the cost / margin (goal, design)
- You have control over the perceived scarcity (tee expiry date)

All in all it seems like a fine platform and I've had some decent success on it!

Tracking is hard because it doesn't do postback beyond facebook conversion pixels so you have to keep close tabs on your traffic source reports.

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Spy on successful Teespring campaigns:
http://teeview.phatograph.com/?filter=sn

Get an account manager and ask them to drop the base price.

Set your target to 20 t-shirts when you're just getting started

Immediate payouts after your campaigns get completed, yay!

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I remember a buddy of mine scraped various t-shirt ads from Facebook a while ago - most of the ads didn't last longer than 6,7h. Not a good sign.

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My main challenge at the moment is scaling. I have a few profitable camps running on audiences from 5-20k, but these ads obviously burn out soon. Having said that, I've found that custom audiences seem to be the only real way to go when it comes to reaching a responsive public. Which makes scaling inherently difficult.

What about lookalike audiences? Anyone have experience with those?

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Just an update; I'm starting to make some good money on teespring. I realise it's a bit laborious and vertical scaling is a challenge, but I urge especially newbies to give teespring a spin. The barrier to entry is very low and you can be as creative as you want with your design / angles.

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I've seen this around the place. I like the possibilities for angles.

But it's not all as nice as it looks, I was just checking out the 50 hoodies pack, they take $21 for everyone one you sell. It's definitely a great place to test the waters, but if you're going do anything of scale you are better off cutting them out. Their shipping costs look awfully high too.

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I had a quick look then decided it was unlikely to work well for a non-US campaign, given the shipping costs were 30-50% the price of the shirt + 2-3 weeks postage. Any idea what % of their volume is non-US?

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There's fabrily.com for Europe

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I guess if you can deliver some volume they might be able to bump you (ie reduce their cut). Note that your tee / hoodie price also depends on how many colours (ink) you use. I use very simple white on colour designs and end up pricing my tees at 19.95 for a 9.95 cut. They do well enough for me to keep going at it.

I'm currently talking to them about subid tracking and implementing ym CPVlab code; not having a proper tracking setup really bugs me as I can't really do stuff like day parting, which should allow me to lift my game with them.

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Considering the extremely low quantity of shirts being produced verse the setup of each design, it's actually not that bad. I'm still not sure if these are silk-screened or heat pressed but a lot of places either wouldn't take an order that small (if silk-screened) or would jack up prices way higher for what would be considered a custom one off.

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Hey folks, am doing teespring and its really good way for a newbie, actually, i started to make profit in here for the first time online and you can really benefit from it when u use scraped audience, u can generally target anythig from nursing students up to the people born in any country and who live in usa..
The way i do it is just check teescover.com and teeview and check what designs work, modify and use it with a different niche, budget 10$/day as a test if its working am scaling, audience i use is always larger than 10k and only usa/canada targeting


Some stats ^^
Hope it helped a bit!

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Teespring is:
** the best/easiest/safest way to enter US marketing on FB
** all about the design (if people actually WANT TO WEAR the shirt, you will have much better chance of success)

I had a hugely profitable Justin Bieber t-shirt design (3 babies, then an O: baby, baby, baby, oooooh!) and I was contacted by apparently a legal rep for JB or some sort of holding company. I didn't even have the word JUSTIN or anything, anywehre in the design. It was a shirt that Bieber fans would get, and others wouldn't (these shirts rock the sales, the inside joke/language ones).

Anyway, profitable but a pain for smaller audiences, and for larger audiences it can get weird.
For hard-working affiliates doing a few designs a day and testing, this can be a very good introduction to affiliate marketing.

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Yess! Teespring is a great way to start on FB especially in terms of getting used to how to market page content effectively and engage an audience. I plan to run some campaigns as well but haven't got around to it.

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a couple of my friends are doing $75k-100k a month with it.

they got a niche,

built a funnel

collecting emails

and STILL profitable.

While building themselves a list they can market to over and over and over (easy when you know what you're doing).

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Just a heads up... Don't do any name/age related campaigns on Facebook unless you have the ability to churn and burn ad accounts. I was killing it with them until FB brought the hammer down in a big sweep a couple weeks ago. I got my account back on appeal but others weren't so lucky. Apparently a lot of people were getting creeped out by them and complaining.

If you can keep complaints down you're probably okay, but really using any scraped CA is technically blackhat according to TOS. Obviously as there's a reason you need a 3rd party scraper. TS has made it known that they are in talks with FB to get them to relax their policy, and that they seem receptive but just really hate the name/age thing. But some are still reporting getting banned even after launching new seemingly innocuous campaigns (not name/age related). Personally that's what brought me here, to find something else to pursue while the heat dies down...

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We actually are pretty good friends with the founder of this company, and he told us they have some affiliates doing 10k+ days.

On a call with them, they mentioned that they are very strict with legal (as are all clothing and products of this nature), and that the biggest niches there are with names.

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I never thought about names. I can see how that would be very profitable.

FB Graph Search: Men who live in United States

UID-checker script to check users with first name Michael. Now have list of most Michaels in the US.
?? (Teespring)
Profit!

You don't need to have the name in the ad... but the CVR rate will be through the roof if you cloak it and have them arrive at a page with their name and city (geo script) on it! Damn, this would work well for female horoscope type shit... even diet. fuark.

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Sssshhh! Lol. Simple: pass name in querystring > dynamic insertion into lander > ??? > ;D

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You can do multiple variables in graph search. Men named "Michael" who live in United States. I'd do a batch of 20 of those at a time.

Guess I need to get serious and figure out this cloaking business. Calling out by name really is powerful, people get super excited in the comments. And a few super mad.

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Yep, that seems to work. Men named "Michael" who live in United States.

Wish we could just let the scrape happen all day long. Doing 300-400 a day, will get you 12k in a month. You can also sell the names. This task is also easy to outsource with MicroTurks etc.

I know my sister is like most women - she believes in horoscopes, laps it up. And if she landed on a page that said:
"Facts: Your name is either Martha, Jenna, or [actual name inserted with encoded URL variable]. You're not truly happy with your life. Have you thought about moving away from [geo-city] recently? Let me tell you about a new type of horoscope system..."

Everyone thinks about moving, it would be so easy to mindfuck people into reading every word of a sales letter. But the product needs to be there (I can't find any horoscope stuff that's decent). Even for weightloss this would work. "Your name is [name] and you're 27 years old. You're also disgustingly fat. Let's change the last bit."

On my landers I always call out the exact age of the people I am targeting (if I am otherwise targeting broad, and that age has a decent demo size). If advertising internationally, you can sneak it into the ad by typing out the words (e.g. Thirty-one and alone?)

There are millions of ways to cloak and it's really not necessary for teespring campaigns, but can help with an ROI boost for sure.

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True I suppose it would be difficult to sell a shirt with a name on it without showing the shirt in the ad anyway. Also now FB won't let you upload a CA with too many of the same names. Although it's easy to dilute to get past the filter it's basically asking to get banned.

Those are great ideas though and I'll certainly try it once I get something going in another vertical.

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Names are still working, just cloak it, dont mention they re name in the ad copy and they are good to go-> they go after the ad picture,
And btw ! I dont know if i was lucky but i had no impressions for few days, i sent an email to fcb to check whatsap and for some reason they didnt see any of my name campaigns looool ->impressions showed up immediately

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Based on the top sales http://teescover.com/.

The formula looks like.

1. Think of a music artist or occupation.
2. Create a "Keep Calm and..." design.
3. Insert the music artist or occupation. E.g "Keep Calm and Listen to Bob Marley", "Keep Calm and Gangnam Style" "Keep Calm I'm A Pet Doctor".
4 Create an FB campaign targeting the corresponding music artist or occupation.
5. Profit!

BOOF!

Man teespring have created a nice little business. This could be duplicated for a lot of other products too.

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This strategy works, but many of the most profitable markets have been saturated (i.e. nurses, engineers, etc...). Also the most profitable campaigns are hidden from teescover and phatograph as it is an option to do so in the Teespring backend. If you can still use custom audiences on your FB ad account then you can make a killing in any of those niches by scraping passionate users from related pages/groups/events. Unfortunately Facebook has stopped approving any custom audiences that are running to teespring (or redirects) on my account. I'm still doing pretty well just using regular Facebook targeting, but hopefully some day I'll be able to use custom audiences to teespring again.

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Sounds like they are moving closer and closer to removing the UID-based custom audiences :-(

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Okay, someone, quick!

Make some T-shirts and become a gazillionaire!

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Haha I actually think you could get a few sales with that!

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http://teespring.com/stackthatmoney

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https://www.sunfrogshirts.com/ I've messed around with this and it is definitely more aff friendly. There are no minimum orders required but you will make about 20% less per sale. This video is what made me want to give it a try. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niVnA1VY4gg

Still not sure about the quality of shirts or pressing compared to Teespring. It doesn't look as nice and it is more work to setup the shirt. Right now I'm using it as a catch all and about to try some media buying on it. Something that is not as easy to do with Teespring.

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U can actually promote others ppl designs in there, so no need for a design just promote other ones!

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Man, that's a lot o' t-shirts!

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That is some serious $$$$.

Starting to focus on the massive niches, grandpas, gun lovers, nationalities, etc. That's where the money's at if you can find winning designs.

Did you do everything yourself or have a team? I know I should be outsourcing parts of the process but I just can't bring myself start doing it!

Thanks for the tips,

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I’ll tell you a fascinating story about the original “name campaign,” that happened back in the 1960’s, and resulted in the most mailed sales letter in history, the famous Coat of Arms letter.

It was written by Gary Halbert, and after 12 or so failed attempts, he finally tested his way into this letter:

http://swiped.co/file/coat-of-arms-l...-gary-halbert/

It was mailed first class, and it was the first use of a personalized mailing in history, a very important part of the magic. More importantly, it referenced the name and the family history of the recipient, leading to the sale of the report.

How successful was that letter?

At its height, it brought in over 20,000 checks per DAY, and Halbert and his partner Dennis Haslinger had to hire 32 housewives just to make their bank deposit. The local bank in Bath, Ohio had to add on a second story just to accommodate their deposit.

Strangely, that’s not where the lasting money was, and this is an important lesson. If you think of it in modern terms, Halbert and Haslinger had a successful “offer” they burned through in a few years. BUT, because they knew what “back end marketing” was (sales to existing customers, “front end marketing” is the first transaction, and vastly more expensive to get), they created a whole catalog of “Coat of Arms” products for their list. They had coffee mugs embossed with family names, t-shirts, even expensive, hand carved family crests. They built an asset that paid off long after the original letter became too expensive to mail, and that’s where the lasting profit was.

Dennis Haslinger was smart, and recognized early on that Gary was a great marketer and terrible businessman. So, he bought Gary out in the early 70’s, and continued to run the company (called, ironically, “Halbert’s”) until his death around…2007! That company continued to prosper, and even added on group tours where everyone named, say, Fudpucker, would go on a trip together to trace their ancestral heritage. Many of these excursions went for $10k or more, so they had some very high transaction value products that started with the sale of a simple report and follow up marketing to that buyer.

While I’m not sure on the exact numbers, I believe Halbert’s was grossing about $28 million per year up until Dennis died, and you could rent their mailing list, which was very substantial. Sadly after Haslinger passed, Halbert’s was taken over by a big dumb company full of MBA’s, who ruined it in a year’s time, proclaiming the internet had made it “obsolete.”

The real money is in the back end, and often smart direct response companies will “go negative” on the front end (meaning they lose money with every sale, sometimes a lot) just to get the customer, knowing they will profit on the back end with follow up sales. If you look at what Halbert’s was able to accomplish by getting a customer with a simple report, you realize how much money there is in marketing to existing customers.

Also, understand that a buyer is a buyer is a buyer meaning that they are someone with the innate behavior of buying via distance marketing. They know what to do when an ad, or banner or sales letter or email shows up, and that’s to get out their wallets and buy. Not every name is like this—some are just lookers, some are retail only buyers, some are chronic refunders, and each of those is an innate behavior like buying is. But if you try to market to these people, you will get a lot of looking and a lot of whining, but no buying. That’s why the name of a buyer is so valuable because they know what to do when an offer shows up, as they did in the case of Halbert’s.

Most people think in terms that customers are there to sell a product to. Sophisticated direct marketers reverse it, viewing the product as the thing that merely acquires the name of the customer who will buy over and over and over, and that’s where the money is made.

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Damn, that's interesting. I'd heard of the letter, of course, but didn't know the whole story behind it.

Presumably since they were mass-mailing, Halbert and Haslinger just kept a card-index file of people who had bought from the initial letter, and then subsequent follow-up mailings only went to them? Or did they have more sophisticated methods to determine likely buyers?

The money's in the list, indeed!

(And in other news, people have been talking about how personalised product, made possible through just-in-time ordering, 3D printing, CNC milling, etc, was going to be the Next Big Thing for years now. Always interesting to learn that the Next Big Thing was in fact a big thing quite some time ago!

Makes me wonder what you could do these days with a few thousand dollars' worth of hardware for the customisation and a big-ass import of generic goods from Alibaba.)

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That's a crazy story!

I'll tell you another one.

I've told my dad MANY times not to get too excited when he sees 'you've won an iPhone', or similar pop-ups. I told him, it's just an affiliate trying to collect leads. He's been ignoring them for years now. The other day however, he called me over and showed me a 'You've won an iPhone' pop-up', this time it had our suburb on it and said 'you're a lucky winner of 1 of 10 iPhones currently being given away to people from 'suburb'.

I have to admit, every time I see my age/geolocation or something personal called out, I give it another look.

The whole personal appeal works great, and will continue to work great for ever imo.

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The interesting thing too is it makes a great example in the age old (dumb) debate of long copy vs short copy, when someone new to direct marketing questions whether or not "anyone would read all those words." The answer always is, "I can get you to read a 7,000 word ad or letter with just one headline, and you will read ALL of them, no matter how small the print." The headline is the person's name-- say, Joe Blow, so the headline is "This Page All About Joe Blow." Since it's personal and therefore relevant to them, they will read every word...and the people it's not relevant to will not read a single one. Personalization is actually a subset of relevance in copy, which is what makes it so powerful...a prospect sees it and mentally thinks, "that's for me," the first step in the selling process (Attention).

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Awesome share John! Halbert is a true pioneer.

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I haven't seen many money-making ads on FB in the last couple of months.

Only those 2 angles worked a while ago.

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