Happy Sunday!
I hope you’re enjoying your Sunday evening, wherever you may be. Today’s email is going to be in a slightly different format. When I was on my way to Bangkok a couple of weeks ago, I tweeted about an AMA while I flew for 19 hours, so today’s email answers 9 of those (unanswered) questions in detail. It ended up being a little longer and more in-depth than initially anticipated, so I hope you’ve got your feet up, a blanket on your lap, and a beverage in your hand.
If you missed this past week’s episode of Limited Supply, we talked about the Winc bankruptcy, gift cards, and what blew Moiz’s mind! You can listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Podcasts.
Before we get into the meat of today's email, if you’ve emailed or texted me and I haven’t gotten back to you, please don’t be offended by that! I have been swamped, and it’s nearly impossible for me to get back to everyone in a timely manner. The easiest place to reach me is always my Twitter DMs! Ok, let’s get started…
Is the goal of a creative to get a click, and if not, what is the goal?
The real answer is — it depends. If you’re a programmatic ad or a pre-roll video ad, there might not be the incentive to click through, but instead, inspire a thought of how a product you just saw or the brand you just saw could play a role in your life. Maybe you start to think about how those Everlane jeans looked cozy and then end up on the Everlane site or searching through Google.
On Meta ads, I think the goal should always be to get a click out of it unless you’re running something more as a broadcast message to a CRM audience. The way the FB ads engine works (from my experience), when you set a proper conversion goal versus running ads for reach, frequency, engagement, etc., your ads are served to a much higher-quality audience. So IMO, you should always have a conversion event attached to the video ad, whether it’s an email signup, clicking to go to the store locator, or filling out your Jolie Water Report. All of this comes after a click — so yes, the goal should be a click.
If you had 1 piece of advice for someone new to Digital marketing, what would it be?
Go outside just your industry or vertical when it comes to studying other brands or marketing tactics. Don’t just look at things that catch your attention either — the bigger your inputs for good marketing, the better you can work on your own marketing.
Tactically speaking, look at what the more cash-constrained or bootstrapped brands are doing. In my opinion, they are much savvier with how they spend their dollars, and they test and learn quickly.
What's the biggest gap from going from $100k/month to $500k/month?
The punchline is really just creating more content. But tactically speaking, it’s smarter to expand everything versus just adding more advertising spend to 5x the revenue. Here’s how I would explain it with the TRACE model:
- Technology — You need to make sure you are increasing efficiency around your tech stack: your website, your page load speed, your cart, your attribution software, your pixeling.
- Reporting — Without diving deep into reporting, it’s hard to know what works well and what is just fluff. Also challenging what the report says. Do you really need 10M impressions if the CTR is 0.43%? Even if the CPM is cheaper? How would it look if we paid higher CPMs instead? You should always question the strategy with the reporting.
- Audience — You can’t just keep hammering on the same audience, value props, and pitches that you have been since you started. You need to learn how your product is valuable to different groups of people and test a variety of audiences. You can leverage first-party data tools like Quantcast Measure to see what adjacent audiences would convert well for your brand.
- Creative & content — With more ad spend, the desire to tap into new audiences, and the goal of growth, you need more testing with content and creative. This can be organic social content, written article content, Meta ads, new headline copy for Google, new formats of videos, partnerships, etc. This video is a good reminder of why you should always be open to testing new content.
- Experiences — Depending on the new audiences that come to your site and the content they saw, they’ll need unique site experiences to come to, ideally landing pages. These landing pages should be uniquely designed for the source of the traffic and the reason they’d be interested in the product. This is why HOOX exists.
When optimizing/testing landing pages. What things/sections did you work on initially?
There are a few main ones you can count on testing to really increase the conversion rate dramatically. With HOOX, we deliver pages in Unbounce FOR this exact reason — you should take our landing page and then iterate on top of it.
- Hero section — test new version of the copy, new imagery (the image or video in the hero should really show the product in action or the benefit it brings), the hierarchy of the benefits, the way the social proof is laid out, and what the actual social proof is (a quote, aggregated review score, award badge, etc.).
- Why section — At HOOX, we consider this the second or third section of the page. This is where you should make it easy as possible for someone to understand why they should care about what is being sold here.
- Social proof section — Sometimes, this is called the brag bar. This is where you have scrolling quotes from customers that demonstrate the value of the product (positive and negative sentiment), or you might have quotes from notable publishers to your demographic. This is a good section to test and rotate because you might find that the audience you’re targeting doesn’t trust certain media publications, finds customer quotes more trustworthy, or vise versa.
- Shop section — You can move things around, make the buying experience easier, change the way you message pricing, change the way you select a variant, etc.
Currently, what's the main way brands validate demand for new products?
Outside of general surveys, there are a few things I would do to test if there is an appetite for a new product:
- Run a partnership with another brand, to launch a product and see what the interest is in the partnership. For example, Chamberlain Coffee did a matcha beverage in a can, and through the reaction and sales to that collaboration, they can see what demand could look like for an RTD (ready-to-drink) Chamberlain Coffee product.
- Run polls on Instagram Stories! This is the easiest way to just directly ask people who care enough about your brand to follow them. You should also run these with a tool like Okendo, where after someone rates your product, you can ask them to fill out a short survey of what they want to see next. For Long Wknd, we got all our product innovation based on what customers said they wanted!
- Send content around the new potential category or product via email, and see what the click-through metrics look like. This probably isn’t a statistically-significant way to do it, but it might inspire you to think there’s something there.
- Do a limited edition run of the new product, and see how it goes. Position it as something that will sell out, and if it ends up sticking and doing really well, then you bring it back for a limited time, repeatedly, or make it a part of the starting lineup. Peach Raspberry hint water was an example of this strategy.
When a brand is protective of price cuts/ special offers, would you say the value proposition can count as the "offer," or should they focus on a value-add/content offer instead of $$ off?
Look, I want your brand equity to be high and thriving as much as you do, but offers don’t really destroy brand equity. If you think that they do, you have too much of an ego about how your brand is perceived by consumers or even category buyers at retailers. That said, here are a few promotions you can run that “lessen” the discount perception:
- Get a gift card from us when you spend a threshold. For example, spend $100 and get a $20 gift card back to our store.
- Run a donation promotion — when you shop during this time period, we will donate XX% of your purchase to a charity that closely aligns with the mission of our company.
- Run a GWP (gift with purchase) instead of a discount. In this case, the customer is getting an additional product for free, but it’s noted as a gift and can allow you also to liquidate some inventory that’s not moving on its own or sample a new type of product, new flavor, etc.
Promotions don’t also need always to be huge discounts. You can run special promotions for current events (i.e. Mother’s Day bundles) with or without a discount. Just putting out messaging that matches current events in your customers’ life will automatically life revenue.
Thoughts on SEO over the next 3-5 years? Invest more, equal, or less than in the past?
SEO will always be a competitive edge for the brands that get it. It doesn’t just mean Google, but it’s also: Amazon, TikTok, Pinterest, and any other platform where consumers go to discover something based on what they know about it, be it a brand, a phrase, or a keyword.
TikTok is starting to take SEO seriously now with captions and copy posted alongside a video. The platform already does a phenomenal job of SEO based on their analysis of the content in a video (at a scary-good level). Currently, 40% of Gen Z go to Instagram or TikTok when they want to look something up, not Google Maps or Google search.
I don’t think you need to go out of your way and create a ton of content for the sake of just ranking for keywords, but when you figure out why your customers love your product, how they can find you, etc., then it's worth going all out with an SEO strategy to attract more like-minded customers.
What are your thoughts on brick-and-mortar stores for D2C brands?
I think it depends on your brand and what you’re selling. You might decide that wholesale is a better route for your brand (i.e. Sanzo or Native) or that having your own store is preferred (i.e. Alo Yoga and Everlane). You could also do both (i.e. The Ordinary). Depending on what your product is, who your consumer is, the frequency of their purchase, how much someone needs to experience your product before committing, etc., you can make an educated guess on if it's right for you.
Whenever I talk to someone who’s got their own retail store, they love it for a few reasons:
- It brings legitimacy to the brand as nothing else can. Having a storefront address or a photo of it on your site or landing pages just immediately validates that you’re not running a drop-ship quality brand.
- They get an added layer of data from the consumers who come in. You can see how customers arrive at decisions of what to buy, why they buy certain things, how they decided what to buy, etc.
- Higher AOVs, since people can do the sampling right there and then make an informed purchase decision knowing what they’re getting, versus using their first purchase as a sampling purchase.
- People love a good retail store. Whenever I wear my MadHappy hat, people love to talk about the brand and, most times will mention how they loved going into the retail store in LA or NYC.
What productized service (eCom specific) would you launch in 2023 if you had more time?
For context, the productized service is similar to what Oddit does or how we designed HOOX — you take something that is normally a services model and makes it easier from a transaction and deliverables standpoint. Here are some that I think could work:
- Reporting and insights as a service — you could run a pixel audit and implement missing tags/triggers. Then have clients plug their platforms into something like Tydo, put their data into a Google Slides report cleanly, and then add insights. You could charge a tiered fee based on the brand's revenue or how many channels they have running.
- Welcome series
- Post-purchase
- Abandon cart
- Abandon checkout
- Post 3-purchases
- Post-subscription
- Subscription order notification
If you are going to start either, let me know!
Ok, on to some fun stuff…
Vendor of the Week:
minisocial — the easiest way to create feed-friendly content for your customer acquisition channels
When you scroll TikTok or Reels, the best ads that drive the highest CTR (I’m not making this up, you can check the TikTok ad library’s stats) are those that feel like native influencer content being shared on the feed. The only issue is that it’s nearly impossible to reach out to creators one by one by creating assets to run.
That’s where minisocial comes into play. With minisocial, brands like Corkcicle, Plant People, Native, Olipop, and Harry’s are able to gather a high volume of high-quality assets from creators on their platforms. These aren’t just influencers, but they’re videographers, live shopping hosts, photographers, and more.
minisocial content doesn’t just have to be limited to ads, either. You can use the content on your homepage, product pages, emails, or even a TV commercial (the content is fully-licensed to you). Micro-influencers have always been a buzzword, but minisocial is one of the first platforms I’ve seen that pairs brands with creators in a cost-effective way AND also delivers high-quality content. There are other platforms, but we haven’t found the content to be nearly as good as minisocial’s creator network.
LP of the Week:
This week’s LP is this week’s feature because of:
- The hero section
- The why section
- The selection of the UGC on the page, and its alignment with the benefits a customer would experience
Click here to see The Plunge’s HOOX Landing Page!
This is a much higher AOV product with different variants, so the LP is built to push the education of the brand itself, and then when you click through, you can make your choices around exactly how you want your Plunge to be built.
If you’re ready to build a landing page like this, make a purchase directly on the HOOX site, and our account manager will reach out for a kickoff call. If you have questions, then reply here with them!
That's all for this week
How was today’s email format? I don’t think I will always do this — there were two topics I really wanted to go even deeper into, but I couldn’t make today’s email unbearably long.
Andrew Foxwell, Alex from NBP, and I decided to tag team and host a webinar that is super tactical going into 2023. We’ll talk about all things acquisition, retention, profitability, customer experience, etc. I guarantee you will get at least 1 or 2 nuggets from it. Sign up on this Zoom link, and if you can’t attend it live, you’ll get a copy of the recording!
That’s all for this week. I hope you have an amazing sleep tonight and have a great upcoming week. I’ll see you in a week!