Happy Sunday!

If you’re reading this, I hope you’re on the couch, beverage in your left hand, iPhone in your right hand, feet up, and air conditioning set to a comfortable temperature. Today’s email is going to focus on the basics, but before we get to that, a couple notes:

  • Sharma Brands is growing this year. We’ve just finished staffing up our team, and we’re looking for 2 more $50M+ annual revenue brands to join our roster and work with us across CRO, landing pages, ad creative, offer/messaging/pricing testing, etc. If that’s you, reply to this email, or fill out this contact form.
  • Moiz and I released an emergency episode of the SVB collapse, how it affected us, what we did as a result, and, most importantly, how to understand where the fault in the entire collapse was. You can listen to that episode on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube — if you find it helpful, please leave a review :).
  • I will be in Nashville (3/27 to 3/29) for the 2023 OOH Media Conference, put on by OAAA: Out of Home Advertising Association of America. Sounds fancy, right? If you’ll be there, DM me on Twitter and let’s meet! 

Alright, let’s get into the newsletter now.

From the last couple of newsletters I sent out, I got a ton of positive feedback for laying out the “basics” for doing well online. One thing I’ve learned over the years, which we all sort of know already, is when you’re smaller, you want to focus on levers that have a higher impact. When you’re doing $100M or $300M in revenue, you want to focus on levers driving small impact (1% increases). Those 1% impacts at that scale make a huge difference. But until then, there are a few levers that really make all the difference.

On Thursday, HOOX and Oddit got together to do a live teardown of people’s websites. We mainly looked for levers that would increase conversion rate, make the communication clearer of what is being sold, and tried to challenge what merchants had on their websites and why. From that, there were a handful of practices I realized were overlooked many times. When you have designers who want to win design awards versus designers who are focused on data, it’s easy to escape the “simple” things. But rest assured, I hope this email serves as a checklist for what you should MAKE SURE your site is doing. When I worked for Hint, our CFO used to tell me every week, “To win, we need to do 12 out of 12 things right. We can’t afford to have 11 out of 12 in this market.” That was 6 years ago; now imagine today’s level of competition!

Alright, enough teeing this up. Let’s get into it:

Your above-the-fold, homepage experience

If you think about the most valuable retail shelf space, it’s being in the aisle of what you sell, at eye-level on the shelf. With eye-level placement, someone doesn’t need to turn their head; your product is in their face. The homepage, or wherever you send your traffic to, above the fold, IS that same valuable real estate. Instead of not having to turn heads, we have one block of real estate that no one needs to scroll down. Here’s what to make sure you have:

Clear hero module. A good hero section (think the focal point of the page, above the fold) contains:

  • Clear imagery shows the product in action and the feeling you’re trying to sell. This company has a perfect example of a hero image that shows the product, what it comes in, how it looks, what you can expect as a consumer, etc. It closes the gap between what you think is showing up and what will actually show up, increasing your trust as a consumer without even realizing it.
  • A headline that sells you on the punchline and earns your interest to continue scrolling. Just having something that you would recognize in your internal marketing meetings isn’t going to sell someone who just came off the street into your store. Eight Sleep does a good job of this — from the headline, you can understand you will be cooled, and your sleep health will improve.
  • Supporting evidence. This might be a sub-heading underneath the headline, it might be 2-3 bullet points, social proof, badges or certifications, etc. This HOOX page is a good example of everything discussed so far.

You really just have to be in the mindset of, “How would I get someone from the street who saw my storefront (aka the ad or email they clicked on) to come inside and scroll?” Once you’re in that mindset versus trying just to make pretty pages, you will start winning.

Aggressive Merchandising

If you’re a long-time subscriber, you know one of my favorite examples of product merchandising is in The Office when Dwight is re-organizing which beets are at the front of his table versus in the back. The good beets always stay up front!

Similarly, with how you sell your product, whether individually, in bundles, as a BYOB offer, etc., you want to make sure you flush out a few key details in the space that you’re asking for someone to move forward with adding to their cart or purchasing.

  • Make the discount obvious. Make it obvious whether it’s 10% off, free shipping, a gift with purchase, or a sitewide sale. Include graphical call-outs of the discounts, use strike-through pricing, or even change the CTA to read something like “Save 20% & Add to Cart” or “ADD TO CART FOR 20% OFF | $18 $20”. The more reassuring you can sound, the higher your click-through rate will be.
  • Note the cost per use, if applicable. This works best for consumables, but it can also work for higher AOV products. If you’re selling an electrolyte powder for $29, with 30 sticks, then calling out “Less than $1 per day” makes a huge difference in increasing the conversion rate. Similarly, an Eight Sleep mattress, amortized over 36 months, comes out to ~$2.10 per day, which is cheaper than the latte you have to chug because you don’t get good sleep already! $2245 feels a lot more expensive than $2 per day to get significantly better sleep!
  • Reinforce the benefits. I learned this one from Oddit’s PDP sections, where they focus on reiterating the benefits that might just get someone over the fence as they debate whether they need that product. This Covey LP does this right above the Add to Cart button in the shop section of their routine. You can’t assume that someone will remember everything about your product as they continue going down the funnel — this could be their first time browsing your site!
  • Add the social proof and/or delivery info. Today I went to Casper’s website and you can absolutely tell it was redesigned with a private equity firm’s direction. Right below the ATC button, you’ll see “In stock, ships within 1-2 days”. This Miracle Sheets LP does the exact same thing. If you can provide when it ships, where it ships from, and how long it takes, you’re just building more trust. The social proof example would be “XX ordered in the last 30 days” like Amazon does on their collections pages, or “Over 6,000 sold!” 
  • Make the variant selector simpler. Nothing is more annoying than trying to choose the color, size, flavor, scent, or weight of a product and the variant selector is annoying, or requires too many steps. Aim to have MAX 2 decisions someone might need to make (color + size) or (color + weight) or (size + flavor). In-n-Out is the best inspiration here — just keep it simple!

Understand which funnel you’re playing in

At any time when you’re selling something, there are 2 funnels you could be playing in:

Funnel One: You’re educating someone on why there is even the need for the product you’re selling. If you’re selling Jolie’s shower head, then in this example you’re hyper-focused on educating WHY a Jolie makes a big difference in your water quality. Overall you’re more focused on getting someone to understand what the problem is that you’re solving.

Funnel Two: You’re trying to win a customer who’s educated and interested in the category, but needs to be sold on why YOU are the better option in the market. With this funnel, your messaging should be completely different, and focused on what makes your product better or more innovative than others. We see this a lot in supplement or personal care brands, or even ice cream! Look at Halo Top ice cream, they don’t care to educate people on why they should be eating ice cream, their entire focus is on how their ice cream is significantly better than traditional ice cream with ~200 calories per pint.

A lot of times, your website will be focused on the first funnel (education of what you do), and landing pages will be focused on the second funnel (why you should be the product solving someones problem).

If you want to see all the other notes from our session, you can click here to read them (shoutout to Colin on my team for putting these together). I hope there were some good nuggets in here that you’ll re-work into your website.

On to some fun stuff… 

Vendor of the Week:

Highbeam — FDIC-insured banking, built for eCommerce merchants and brand founders.

When you aren’t an expert on the recent news in the banking sector, its key to have a banking partner you can trust, who understands the financial needs and concerns of your brand (and job as a busy founder).

Highbeam’s ecommerce specific banking platform ensures you have instant access to your funds, a working line of capital, and real-time insights to keep you on top of your business.

They provide the best banking tools I’ve seen for ecommerce with features like:

  • Instant payouts from Shopify and Amazon
  • 4% high-yield deposit accounts
  • 2% cash back cards
  • Free wire and ACH payments
  • High limit revenue-based lines of credit
  • Free insights and forecasting tools

And of course, they’re fully FDIC insured!

The last thing they don’t talk about enough, is how easy it is to run a DTC business with Highbeam as your bank… you can see costs rising (3PL costs, shipping, ads, etc) with alerts, you can get Shopify ACH’s paid instantly, and you also get higher credit limits (I highly recommend checking out their credit product comparison to other lenders).

If the recent banking headlines have given you a reason to rethink how your cash flows are secured, I’d strongly suggest you setup a free banking consultation with Highbeam to learn more.

I know they’ve been super busy over the last few days onboarding brands from SVB and others, but if you mention my name they will bump you to the top of the line.

Go ahead and book a demo, or click here to learn more about Highbeam!

LP of the Week:

If you know me, you know I’m a sucker for working on fun pet brands — for this example we’re going to look at Pet Honesty. This brand is huge on DTC and Amazon channels, and wanted to test a more efficient funnel for allergy support.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE LANDING PAGE

My two favorite parts of this landing page are the hero section and the shop section. The hero does a phenomenal job of explaining what a pet parent is looking for in a supplement, and the shop section is fully custom built to play between one-time purchase, or subscription, but never forgetting the discount!

If you’re tired of spending money on ads and having a 2-3% conversion rate, then book a demo with HOOX. With NORI, we got a 7.1% CVR and that’s not an abnormal result for HOOX pages. Let’s setup a call and see if we can be helpful!

That's all for this week

I know today’s newsletter was a bit short, but please forgive me — I got sick this past week amongst moving into a new office, new apartment, and onboarding new employees. Next week I’ll be back with the HEAT!

Again, if you’re a brand doing $50M+ in revenue and want to work with Sharma Brands on growth, we are looking to onboard 2 new clients for April. We’re fully staffed up and ready to rock. Just shoot me an email reply to this email, or fill out our contact form.

I hope you have an amazing upcoming week, get everything done on your to-do list, break a sweat, and get 9 hours of sleep! I’ll see you next Sunday!