Happy Sunday!

If you're reading this email, I hope you've got your feet up, you watched the F1 race today, you have a beverage in your hand, and you're ready to get on a roller coaster of going from macro-level DTC to micro-level DTC strategy.

Before that, I have to put my weekly plug for you to check out Limited Supply, a podcast that Drew, the founder of Mad Rabbit Tattoo says "bangs". No really, look at this tweet. He's referring to our new episode that just dropped with Keith Rabois (founder of OpenDoor, OpenStore, fmr exec at PayPal, Square, LinkedIn, etc). If you like it, tweet me and Moiz or leave a review. We love seeing them!!

Alright, let's get into today's newsletter...

When I first got into Facebook Ads Manager about 8 years ago, I remember thinking, "How do more people not use this!" I was working at an ad-tech company that believed programmatic advertising was the future and paid social was "Silly".

I found a small niche that was people who were about to travel in the next 30 days, and you could select a city, like Las Vegas. Immediately, I put together a deck to try and convince the Sr Marketing Manager at Hakkasan Group (a big hospitality/nightclub management company) that we can pre-sell his show tickets using Facebook ads to people about to land in Vegas soon.

Even up until today, the game of customer acquisition follows what I call the TRACE framework:

T: Technology

R: Reporting

A: Audiences

C: Creative

E: Experiences

Here are some examples:

Technology

  • Your attribution software like Northbeam
  • Your product-feed enrichment like Marpipe
  • Your pixel management like Elevar
  • Your audience scoring like Black Crow

Reporting

  • Daily reports showing precise and accurate data
  • Understanding what each channel does for you, and how much it contributes to each sale
  • Understanding which customers are coming back, which aren't, and why
  • Digging into the insights around what a good subscriber or good customer is

Audiences

  • Building owned audiences by distributing good content
  • Exploring audience marketplaces like Shopify Audiences and Audiences by Disco
  • Buying audiences based on anonymized credit card and shopping data from larger data sources like Oracle Datalogix, Experian, Slice Intelligence, etc.
  • Enriching your own audiences with better zero-party data (attributes of your customers) and first-party data (your customer profiles)

Creative

  • Testing all different types of statics, videos, animations, GIFs, headlines, ad copy, UGC, renders, DALL-E, etc. 

Experiences

  • Landing page testing for each channel and audience
  • While your site speaks to one specific person, when you run paid media to acquire customers, you should have landing pages that do a better job of educating your brand to a potential customer, with messaging that feels more targeted to why they were served the ad.
  • If you need landing pages, hit up HOOX, and test different hooks and angles to crack new audiences.
  • Sponsored editorial testing for upper-funnel customers like 1180 does
  • Conversion rate optimization across Homepage, PDP, slide-out cart, and collections page
  • Ensuring there's a merchandised offer that's been tested and has "OMF" or offer-market fit for new customers.

Now everything in my TRACE framework above still matters today. You most likely can NOT be first-order profitable if you're not doing all of the above. From that list, these are what have moved the needle the most with our clients:

  1. Landing pages — we went from a 2.7% conversion rate to a 17% conversion rate with a landing page for a new product launch, compared to the site PDP, this past week, 
  2. Cart optimization — every time we implement ReBuy on the site, the AOV jumps anywhere from 12-23% because ReBuy does such a good job getting customers to buy more. If you can't use ReBuy, then study the sites with ReBuy (Magic Spoon is a favorite) and build it.
  3. Elevar — Immediately your data becomes richer and you have more "inputs" you can use for other platforms and pulling insights.

For all this to continue working in sync, it's important that the brand keeps its soul beating loud and constantly distributing that soul. A few months ago, maybe around a year ago, I sent questions that helped us define a client brand, and this is an extension of that.

If consumers want to buy commodities on their own, they'll usually shop at Amazon, Walmart, or whatever local convenient shopping marketplace is near them. But for brands to win on DTC channels, we are constantly competing for the eyeballs and the attention.

If you expect a customer to come to your site to buy your sunscreen, instead of going to Amazon, searching "best sunscreen" and picking the first, you have to have a real draw for them. You're asking for someone's time to come and explore your site — to me, that's a big ask! You have to earn that site visit, and the 3 minutes and 40 seconds they'll spend. So, what can you do?

We just went through this process recently for a brand that we're working on a launch for. We sat down with the communications lead, the founder, and the director of UX/UI and asked a bunch of questions, which are below.

The reason we went through this exercise, is a lot of times brands focus on the end KPI, which is revenue. The shortcut to generating revenue is running ads, but unless you have these questions answered, customers realize that you're just trying to create a transactional arbitrage opportunity for yourself. But if you're unified in your messaging and your soul as a brand, it does a few things:

  • You don't rely on the easy/low-hanging type of messaging that everyone uses.
  • Your brand allows for a connection to someone, or they see a reason to find you interesting, and you earn the time they spend on your site.
  • In all your content that customers see (ads, landing pages, organic social, emails, etc), you are aligned with what you're pushing for benefits, USPs, etc.

To make this easier, let's name the brand "Plushy". Here are the questions we discussed and narrowed down answers for

  • Who would Plushy follow on social media?
  • What kind of exercise would Plushy do?
  • Gym membership? Outdoor/parks? Fitness classes?
  • How does Plushy like their coffee? What's the Starbucks order?
  • What does Plushy wear to the office? What is their style?
  • If Plushy was going to dinner, what type of food would Plushy want to eat?
  • What type of cocktail would Plushy order at the bar?
  • Is Plushy an aisle seat flyer or a window seat flyer? Why?
  • What would Plushy gift their mom for Mother's Day?
  • What is an ideal Friday and Saturday night for Plushy? 
  • How does Plushy respond to being rejected? Or adversity in general?
  • Why would people not want to meet or hang around Plushy? How can we overcome that objection?
  • What does Plushy do to recharge and rejuvenate?
  • What does "success" feels like for Plushy? Is it an $8M house in Calabasas or being happy with a small family in a good school district?
  • Where does Plushy go to meet people, socially? 
  • How does Plushy respond when someone is rude to them? Is it sassy and savage or is it with kindness?

These questions took us about 1.5-2 hours to discuss and agree on, and it created a holistic understanding of who the brand is, who it's for, why it's for them, why they would be attracted to our brand versus a competitor, and makes sure that we aren't going to just tout the same USPs as competitors (especially those who haven't gone through this exercise). 

Let me know what you think! This was something that we did at the beginning of the week, and it's been something I'm finding to be really helpful for everyone I've recommended it to.

Now, on to some fun stuff...

Vendor of the Week:

Okendo — The easiest way to collect and display reviews, understand customer concerns, and now, collect zero-party data.

Okay, I'm really excited to give you the rundown on Okendo, especially because there are some new features launched that I got to beta test with Feastables.

So we all know Okendo for being a phenomenal platform for customer reviews and UGC collection. In addition to having a far-superior product than any other player in this space, they have founder-friendly pricing. It's about half the cost as its largest competitor, and the platform is 10x better.

Their engineering team is also always pushing new custom integrations (keyword: custom). It's not something table stakes for a review like making sure that reviews sync with Google Shopping. Its integrations like allowing you to collect reviews without a link, with Postscript.


Most recently, they launched Okendo Connect, which is the product we got to pilot with Feastables. Inside Okendo Connect, you get a suite of tools that help you collect customer insights around

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS) — The holy grail of how you're doing from the POV of a customer.
  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) — A KPI for customer service and product quality.
  • Customer Effort Score (CES) — A number to measure how much effort a customer has to exert to get an issue resolved, a request fulfilled, a product purchased/returned or a question answered.

You also get a post-purchase survey you can attach to your customer journey, which all ties back to your Okendo customer profiles.

In short, here's the use-cases for Okendo Connect. If you need these, you'll benefit from it:

  • Customer profile enrichment
  • Customer experience management
  • Conversion rate optimization
  • Post-purchase attribution
  • Market research from your customers

Thanks to their amazing team, they've given me a 90-day trial to share with you. You'll join an amazing roster of brands like Feastables, Skims, Lemme, Liquid Death, Brumate, Buck Mason and more.

Fill out this form to become eligible for a 90-day free trial from Okendo!

Landing Page of the Week:

Perfect Draft by Anheuser-Busch

This page is our clone, so the CTA isn't a live CTA, but you can see the full page we built out at HOOX for Anheuser-Busch. Their audience of shoppers is small, given the distribution is focused on a couple cities, so they needed a landing page that gave them the best at-bat/chance to convert a customer who showed any interest.

The HOOX team did a beautiful job going above and beyond with the design, compared to the original website, and messaged the product in a way that a consumer would be enticed to buy the Perfect Draft machine.

This week, we're running a HOOX Black Friday sale — get your landing pages ready NOW for Black Friday, to maximize your conversion rate, units per transaction and order value. Don't let the most important days of the year not convert for you. 

Get a HOOX Landing Page here.

That's all for this week

I hope today's email was helpful. What are your thoughts on farming and automotive industries moving more DTC? It's something I find so fascinating. At the wholesale level, they are commodities, but at the DTC level, they bake in retention, much stronger.

Also, I'll be speaking at Affiliate World Asia, in Bangkok, in a few weeks. If you're around, grab a ticket and get 10% off with my link. I can't wait to meet so many awesome marketers out there.

Anyways, I hope you get a great sleep tonight. I am exhausted from bouncing around Austin the last few days and can't wait to get back to NYC to go heads down and build. 

Have an amazing upcoming week!