Happy Sunday!
If you're reading this email, I hope you had a relaxing weekend, you've already cleared the meetings that don't serve you, from your calendar, and you're ready to talk about some of the tech and vendors we use going into Q4. At this point, you should be sitting down, iPhone in your right hand, feet up, and beverage in your left (maybe an Olipop Cream Soda).
This past week, Moiz and I had the honor of recording 2 FULL episodes of Limited Supply with Harley Finkelstein, the President of Shopify. We spent 2 hours together, talking all about why Shopify supports Yotpo, why they don't build subscriptions themselves, why the repeat purchase rate numbers are defined differently, and more. All I can say is... we went in. If you missed this past week's episode, you can catch it here: Why The Republicans Became Facebook's Worst Customers.
When Sharma Brands gets retained by new clients, one of the first things we do is make sure they are equipped with the right tech stack. Or, if they're overpaying for certain things like reviews or site speed optimization, we clean it out. There's almost no chance our client gets ripped off. On average, we end up saving 50-100k pretty quickly. It's great when the costs go down, but some of those costs shouldn't exist in the first place!
So for today's email, I want to reiterate the tech stack we use for the majority of our clients — CPG brands focused on selling direct to consumers online, and then go into some of the tech companies that we see good results with on top of the core tech stack. These are all apps/vendors/software that we use ourselves and we've tested the alternatives as well.
The Recommended Core Tech Stack:
Shopify. Depending on the size and stage of your business, you might use Shopify Basic, Normal, Advanced, or Plus. But Shopify is the best CMS to use for your store — it's cost-effective, they have thousands of engineers working to make it 1% better every day, and it integrates the easiest with almost any other software/ERP/marketplace out there.
Klaviyo for email. There's no better ESP than Klaviyo when it comes to eCommerce and online retail. In addition to everything an ESP does, Klaviyo is fantastic for building and adding zero-party data to records. When we launched Jolie, each Klaviyo record had every customer's local water chemicals on hand, to be utilized later in campaigns. Jones Road Beauty uses the same features for making sure they send emails with the right shade colors in creative and subject lines.
Postscript for SMS. There are few companies that support their customers as well as Postscript does — only a special company can handle the traffic Mr. Beast sends. Their engineering team also constantly pushes new integrations, making SMS even more turnkey for their merchants. Personally, I also love their ability to push branded URLs, so your brand comes off more professional.
Gorgias for customer service. Simply put, Gorgias is the iPhone. Zendesk is the android. Can Zendesk get the job done? Sure. Gorgias just moves faster, integrates quicker (they'll build a custom integration if you need it), and focus on saving the agents time, which makes you more money as a brand.
Okendo for reviews. Okendo is phenomenal and its also cost-effective, at any scale. Switching from Yotpo, we saved a client 50% of their Yotpo rate last year, and they now have NPS + customer surveys as a part of the product. We've used the survey tool to build out our product lineup for Long Wknd this year, and Okendo + Postscript's integration to collect customer reviews by text has been huge, especially for celebrity brands.
Loop for returns. You can process reviews through Gorgias, or you can use Loop and automate the entire process. With Loop, a customer can enter their order number, and be able to swap their items, change the size, return it entirely, and deal with the process to ship the item back with ease. If your business has a return rate higher than 15%, it will net you more revenue to have Loop installed.
Accessibe for accessibility. The biggest nightmare for any eCommerce store is a check-chasing lawyer coming after you for not having an accessible website. Accessibe makes it super easy to allow anyone to make their website accessibility friendly. The alternative (or safer bet if you're under a microscope) is a company called Essential Accessibility (tens of thousands per year, and they'll defend your legal claims).
Ok, now these are the core functions. But let's dive into what a lot of people don't talk about enough — and let me know if you have any questions on these by replying.
The $1M+ Tech Stack
Northbeam for attribution. If you're running paid media on multiple channels, maybe you have retail in place, you sell on Amazon, you have customers posting UGC, and more, you NEED to be using an attribution platform like Northbeam. They've been at it the longest, and their tech is the most developed. If you wondered how brands like Hexclad, Ridge wallet, Jones Road Beauty, and others continued to scale media buying after losing signals from iOS 14, it was thanks to the tech at Northbeam.
BlackCrow for audience predicting and scoring. Black Crow started as a retargeting solution that scores your traffic in real-time and then makes smart decisions on who to retarget (they split into buckets of Low, Medium, and High likelihoods to buy). Now they use the scoring technology and can help you segment Klaviyo users — you might decide to share a discount with your Low and Medium, but no discount for your High bucket. If you're driving a high amount of traffic to your site, Black Crow helps you make better decisions about who to spend money on retargeting, and who to share discounts with.
Disco Network for acquisition and audience. Disco started with post-purchase cross-selling on the Thank You page of different stores, but two features of their product have me really excited. The first is Disco Audiences, where Disco will build an audience for you, and load it directly into Meta or Snapchat to run ads against. They have data on over 55M shopper profiles (who they are, what they bought, how often they buy, etc) and they know who's most likely to purchase. The second is their CPA-based customer acquisition. Similar to TapJoy, you can set a bid for the CPA you want to pay, and run it across their network of 18 retail categories.
Elevar for pixel management. Given that iOS mobile browsers are no longer sending back data to ad or data management platforms, you want to have the best shot at getting any data to Meta, Snap, Quantcast, Google, etc. We use the Elevar tag manager to make sure everything is set up and pass as much data back as possible.
Malomo for order tracking. There are lots of expensive options for order tracking, and then there's Malomo, a phenomenal product with a monthly bill that won't break the bank. As soon as Malomo first came out and their team helped us get the first couple of brands live, we never looked back at Aftership or Narvar (ridiculously overpriced). We also used Malomo as a way to educate customers while their products were on the way, and saw a decline in inbound questions asking when their orders were arriving.
ReBuy for AOV and UPT optimization. AOV = average order value. UPT = units per transaction. ReBuy helps you get more products in a cart, and uses historical data to recommend what someone might want as a complimentary item to what is in their cart already. I call ReBuy the most founder-friendly Shopify app that exists — $99/month for 1,000 orders. It also integrates nicely with Postscript and Klaviyo to scale those recommendations to other channels.
Tydo for analytics. Tydo has an incredible free analytics platform that anyone can install on Shopify. On a daily basis, one report will give you: your daily summary, operations/returns summary, retention summary, paid acquisition summary, and finance summary. They will most likely begin charging for it at some point next year, so get yourself grandfathered in.
Tapcart for a mobile app. I'll let you read below why we love Tapcart for our clients.
Outside of these, let me know what I missed. The reason I'm sending this email now is that to take advantage of all these in time for Black Friday, you have to get them set up to collect data now, versus later.
On to some fun stuff...
Vendor of the Week:
Tapcart — Making it FREE for any merchant to build a Shopify store into an iOS and Android app.
Tapcart is a software company (for their valuation), but they will go above and beyond to help merchants build an app on their platform. With a mobile app, you get the advantage of:
Going live in less than 2 weeks in the App Store
~40% increase in conversion rate
90% open rate of push notifications (and they're free to send)
If you want to get started on a mobile app, NOW is the time to get the app process started. Here's why:
It's free to get up and running before Black Friday — Tapcart is giving you 3 months for free.
The app is all drag & drop, so once Tapcart helps you build out the framework, then it's very easy to edit and finalize the app to your liking.
The sooner you get your app live, the sooner you can build your segment of high-value customers for Black Friday, Christmas, New Year, etc.
I highly recommend taking advantage of Tapcart's free app offer — you can always pause it later if you're not happy with the results!
Sign up here to get a demo of Tapcart & get 3 months free!
Landing Page of the Week:
This landing page for SkinPharm takes the cake for the LP of the week. This page does NUMBERS on ROAS (more than you can count on a hand), and it's because the page beautifully talks a consumer through what the product is, how it's different, and why it's the best option.
Through a combination of personified copywriting and visual assets, as well as strategic placement of each section, the page does a perfect job of selling paid traffic to users on why the Youth Serum will be the best addition to their daily routine.
If you want an LP like this for yourself, you can purchase one here with HOOX.
That's all for this week
I hope you had a productive week — mine felt like I was on Slack until 11:30pm everyday! This coming week I'll be speaking at eCommerce Fuel's event in North Carolina, let me know if you'll be there too.
Get those 9 hours of sleep tonight, stay taking vitamin C, stay hydrated, get a good walk in, try to make someone else's day, every day, and have a phenomenal upcoming week!