Dim Niko Reveals The Future of Dropshipping, Email Strategy And Building Brands

Dimitri Nikolakakis, more commonly known as Dim Niko, is the CMO of Ape Athletics and was the stage opener at Affiliate World Asia. In his interview with Benjamin Yong he discussed his thoughts on the future of dropshipping, email strategy, plus a couple more knowledge bombs.

This post, “Dim Niko’s Shares His Thoughts on Dropshipping, Email Strategy, And More” first appeared on the AWC Facebook Page.

AWAsia Interview with Dimitri Nikolakakis, CMO of Ape Athletics

Introduction

Dim Niko:: Hey guys, I’m Dim Niko and I own Epoch Agency. It’s a direct response agency that helps private-label ecom brands scale and I’m also the CMO and co-owner of Ape Athletics, a fitness apparel company.

Dim’s Start In Dropshipping

Benjamin Yong:: ?️ So I heard that you had started dropshipping at the age of 16.
Dim Niko:: Yeah, that’s correct.
Benjamin Yong:: ?️ Tell me more about that, like how did you get into dropshipping while everybody was still running other stuff?
Dim Niko:: Yeah, so I was actually watching a lot of YouTube videos at the time on “make money online”, you know that whole thing, like a lot of us I guess. And I watched an Alex Becker video, he’s another internet marketer and he was talking about dropshipping and I thought, this is a super cool model. I’m going to give it a go. Started dropshipping survival products and I mean, it worked pretty great. It was pretty easy back then, there weren’t many people doing it in the market so, yeah very different landscape to what it is now.
Benjamin Yong:: ?️ So like how long have you actually spent on the dropshipping business before you took a break and returned back to the business?
Dim Niko:: Yeah, that’s right. So I did it for probably about a year or two at that stage. I was in high school then right.
Benjamin Yong:: ?️ I thought you were actually one of the pioneers when it comes to dropshipping.
Dim Niko:: I suppose, I didn’t — we didn’t actually get to do any massive scale or anything like that. Like I said, I was in high school at the time right. So I had to leave temporarily. Ended up studying law and doing everything that people want you to do, right, instead of dropping out and getting into entrepreneurship, doing the right thing. What I thought at the time was the right thing, right. And then in the end I ended up dropping out of law school so that I could return back to starting the agency and doing all this cool stuff with Ape Athletics.

Dropshipping Then and Now

Benjamin Yong:: ?️ So back then, how would you say or what would be the difference between 5 to 7 years ago, the dropshipping scene as compared to right now?
Dim Niko:: Yeah, yeah. So it was still very much the same technically, right. It was still Facebook ads, it was still Shopify, it was still AliExpress right. The main difference was there were not many people doing it right, the market wasn’t very sophisticated in that stage. So people were just buying online. Facebook ads were super cheap. So what that looked like in terms of strategy was people were just sending traffic directly from a Facebook ad to an offer to a page that didn’t have to be that great even, and customers were buying.
Benjamin Yong:: ?️ They didn’t even have to put up Pixels or retargeting.
Dim Niko:: Yeah, I don’t think we did much retargeting at all. It was literally direct, in the very sense of the word. Now it’s completely changed of course. Multi-touch point marketing, where it’s very much focusing on brand building. You need an epic product, an epic offer, and you need to be really granular on your Facebook ads to can crush it. That’s it.

PayPal in Dropshipping

Benjamin Yong:

?️ So we actually have some questions coming from the audience. So the first one will be, how do you maintain a PayPal relationship and not get banned every time?

Dim Niko:

For sure, at the end of the day it really comes down to the value that you’re providing right? A lot of these dropshippers unfortunately, and it is what has developed as like a bad rep for some dropshippping, is they just start sending a hell of a lot of traffic and scale to a crappy offer and they might send a crappy product out and that’s when the chargebacks start coming in and you struggle with, obviously PayPal and getting banned and stuff like that right.

So on the flip-side, you see something like Ape Athletics, where customer service is like the paramount, the most important thing because we do want higher lifetime value and we want the customers coming back and when you do treat them well, and really take care of them, you’re not going to have problems with PayPal. We do get some chargebacks, but it’s nothing like dropshipping.

Benjamin Yong:

?️ So would you say that like, moving forward you would recommend people to start providing more value instead of like, doing some shitty products and getting chargebacks.

Dim Niko:

Yeah, absolutely. Well at the end of the day, I mean it comes down to your personal goals, right. If you just want to make a lot of money in the short term, then sure you can go for dropshipping and trying to find a winning product as most people do. However, if you want to create a really sustainable long-term company that actually impacts peoples lives and has some meaning and value then definitely go down the route of brand building, that’s completely different.

Benjamin Yong:

?️ Fantastic.

Facebook Ad Tools

Benjamin Yong:: ?️ So the next question. What Facebook ad tools do you use, if you have any, like to run 15 to 20 ad sets every single time?
Dim Niko:: Yup. Right so we’ve played around with a couple of these. We’ve played around with of course, the rules on Facebook. So you can set rules to turn off ad sets or scale ad sets depending on the results and that worked quite well and there are a lot of ad scaling tools that essentially let you set up automation. So we’ve played around with a lot of those but at the end of the day, they do still require a lot of very microscopic management from like our media buying team and stuff like that.
Benjamin Yong:: ?️ For the daily maintenance?
Dim Niko:: Exactly, so most of it is done by humans. We don’t do that much automation with these other software but we have played around with them.
Benjamin Yong:: ?️ Do you trust these software? Or is it like no matter what, they are never able to replace a media buyer?
Dim Niko:: Yeah, well I mean the software is good because you can’t have someone behind a computer for 24 hours a day right? So we can set certain rules in so that we don’t blow out ad sets and blow out client spend when we’re scaling and stuff like that. That’s when it’s good but when we can have a human there, we’d much prefer to have human eyes on it, taking care of it.

Email Marketing

Benjamin Yong:: ?️ So is email still a big driving force behind the sales for your company?
Dim Niko:: Absolutely. Email probably does about 30% of our revenue so I know Ezra Firestone, another ecom marketer, is a massive proponent of email. Definitely still a massive driving force, even though we’ve got ManyChat and tools like this, email you can send a bunch of follow-ups, you’re not really annoying the customer in the same way that you were because the landscape for email has completely changed right. People expect to get promotional material in their email.
Benjamin Yong:: ?️ So you’re saying that they’re ready to be sold as long as you develop a good relationship with them?
Dim Niko:: Absolutely. That’s it. If they’re opening an email it’s because they’re curious about what you have to offer at the end of the day right.
Benjamin Yong:: ?️ And I believe that like, having an email list is kind of like building your own asset. So in case something changes in the traffic platform, you’re not going to be to affected by it.
Dim Niko:: Absolutely. There’s that, there’s also, if you’ve got your own email list, you can create similar audiences on Google and Lookalike Audiences on Facebook and stuff like that so it has insane value when it comes to your paid traffic as well as email direct marketing.

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Dim Niko Reveals The Future of Dropshipping, Email Strategy And Building Brands