Happy Sunday! I can’t believe it’s already December… we’re ~92% through the year. I’m still here reminding you that if you’re about to read today’s email, you better be sitting back, feet up, beverage in hand, iPhone denting your pinky with the other hand, and you’re excited to talk about what stops some DTC-first brands from blowing up.

Before we get into it, did you get a chance to listen to Limited Supply this past week? We shared numbers from different merchants’ Black Friday sales. I’ll admit, the quality of the audio… not our best work (Moiz and I were both traveling), but high-quality sounding episodes are back this Wednesday. You can listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Lastly, thank you to everyone who’s left reviews!! We see you!

As I’m writing this email, I’m flying from Bangkok to Dubai on my way to New York to go back home. I was speaking at the Affiliate World conference this past week in Bangkok, and I met so many smart eCommerce store owners. Most of the people I met were big performance marketers. They didn’t care much about the aesthetic of their banners or animations on their site… it was mainly AOV, conversion rate, and CPA. For a few that pulled their sites up, they weren’t bad, but they weren’t what The majority of them were pretty unromantic about what works and what doesn’t work, as long as they were making money.

When launching, I find that so many people are focused on the opposite — less about the margins, the goal AOV, the marketing channels, and how they’ll drive new customers, and they’re more focused on: what does the about us page look like? What is our mission for the brand? Is the font-weight slightly off? Basically, you are focusing on a bunch of things in the name of “We want to build a strong brand,” but in reality, without customers, you have no brand. Not to mention, you’re actually not a “brand” until people buy your product and love it when they experience it.

Many celebrity brands fall into this trap, where everything has to be perfectly “on brand” for a video shoot or the way a PDP is laid out. They rely on organic traffic to come on its own, and they forget the critical elements to really get the brand off the ground in a meaningful way. There’s one brand I spoke with this week that’s going through this exact scenario, so here are the 7 recommendations I would make to them in order to get a performance marketing engine going:

1. Site Optimization

Most brands don’t focus on optimizing their site from day 1, they rely too much on the design or branding agency that built the site. Or maybe they built the site themselves and just didn’t think of it! In either case, it’s important to focus on optimizing the site right away. Here are some I would start with:

  • Badges and stickers on the PDP that encourage a higher quantity to be added to the cart.
  • Use ReBuy for your slide-out cart and upsells around the site (after adding a product to the cart and right before the order confirmation page).
  • Add gamification to the cart around free shipping or unlocking gifts/rewards when you meet a new cart total.
  • Merchandise the products smartly on the site — make a “Best Sellers” collection, make a “New? Start here” collection, and make bundles based on what you see people buying together or for different occasions that someone would use your product.
  • Make the site speed quicker!

2. Put the Tech Stack to Work

The beauty of using an eCommerce platform with separate apps is all these apps have an immense number of features and integrations to use; most people just don’t come around to setting them up. These are some easy wins:

  • Set up more aggressive review collection flows across email and SMS.
  • Syndicate all your reviews, especially with Google, for reviews to show up and build trust on organic and paid search.
  • Set up your post-purchase surveys with another level of depth — instead of just collecting information that someone came from YouTube, also find out which influencer drove them.
  • Set up Elevar and Google Tag Manager to track every click on your site and then trigger pop-ups or pixel events based on a user’s activity, or just send better data back to ad platforms this way.
  • Go into your subscription app and set up a proper unsubscribe flow where if someone leaves, you’re collecting enough data and have the right message setup post churn.
  • There are so many more wins here, but basically, go into each part of the tech stack and figure out how to use the app 10% more than how you’re currently using it.

3. Creative Testing

Using your beautiful campaign video clips is great for the 4 seconds that people will care about it. In reality, what you really need is rapid creative testing to find the perfect mix of formats and hooks or angles to drive interest and intent.

  • Test different styles of videos (UGC, influencer, animation, slideshow, quick-cut production, etc).
  • Test different hooks in each video and even look at the engagement of the video to see where people spend more time watching — that should be the new hook.
  • Go through the most common customer service questions, pre-purchase, and answer those in these videos.
  • Test different variations of static ads with different copy overlays.
  • Test new ad copy based on the audiences you’re targeting — match the “why” for someone in that audience who would buy your product with your ad copy.

4. Forget Being “On Brand” All The Time

If you’re against testing something simply because it’s not on brand, you’re restricting yourself from shattering the glass ceiling above you. Better performance is likely right on the other side. The beauty of testing on channels like paid social is you can turn things on or off whenever you want to, so don’t be afraid to test something to a small audience. If you believe someone will see your ad, get upset, and never want to shop with you, and they’ll badmouth your brand… you’re delusional.

In 2020, I worked with a brand where we kept getting pushback from the Brand Marketing team that everything we wanted to test was off-brand… in reality, it was just optimized for conversion, so it didn’t have all the silly elements that were perceived to be “on brand”. Their acquisition cost was about $125, and they could barely get a dozen sales per day. Once we got cover from them to do a fair amount of testing, within 2 weeks, we were down to a $30 CPA and scaling without the CPA increasing. We put the company on a $7M projected finish for the year, whereas they almost shut the business down when we started.

5. Testing New Acquisition Tactics

Coming more into that performance marketing DNA, it’s important to do more than just the basics of what everyone tells you to do around Meta, Google, TikTok, etc. Here are some examples of new tests to run:

  • Run advertorials and sponsored editorial content with publishers.
  • Run TOF traffic to quizzes to collect emails and numbers, and build a 2-part funnel.
  • Build your own version of a Jolie Water Report to drive new lead capture.
  • Run some comparison-style LPs from non-branded search traffic.
  • Test new bundle formats to run on Amazon alongside the stand-alone products.

6. Create a Promo Calendar

Somehow along the way of DTC brands, everyone started to see promotional calendars as a negative thing to have. I remember when I got into DTC, it was all about creating reasons for people to come back to your site, to send out emails, and to keep customers up to date with what’s going on… promotions are an easy way to do that. It doesn’t always have to be a steep discount, either. You could run:

  • Buy this weekend, and we’ll donate 10% to XXXXX (these do really well).
  • Get a free gift-with-purchase when you spend over $XX.
  • Get X% off YYY category only.
  • Limited-edition product launches (a different color, scent, flavor, or size of an existing product).

7. Dig into CX Analytics & Insights

Once you have all these dialed in, then it’s time to dig into the insights properly. The insights aren’t just coming from your Northbeam dashboard, they’re also being pulled from organic social media, customer service, your customer reviews, etc. Your insights should help you unlock efficiencies across the business: operations, product development, logistics, marketing, customer service, partnerships, shipping notifications, and more.

The punchline is — you must have a rigorous performance marketing practice inside (almost) any brand for it to do well, especially online. PR, influencers, people tagging you, etc., are all great, but they will never be an always-on solution. You must build the always-on machine through lots of testing, learning, understanding, iterating, and scaling. No matter how big your celebrity is, trust me, I’ve seen MASSIVE celebrity brand backends; you need to have a focus on performance marketing and testing.

Ok, end rant. On to some fun stuff…

Vendor of the Week:

OpenStore — The easiest way to sell your Shopify store, get liquidity, and activate the American dream.

A few weeks ago, we had Keith Rabois on Limited Supply, and he was telling us about his new business, OpenStore. OpenStore has raised over $150M, and their goal is simple: provide liquidity to Shopify store owners, regardless of what they sell, within 24 hours.

It’s a 4 step process:

  1. Connect your Shopify store with one click
  2. Upload your P&L
  3. Connect your ad accounts (Meta & Google)
  4. Get an offer in 24 hours

Using OpenStore is a great way to end the year and begin the new year with a clean slate, ready to tackle a new project. If you’re unsure whether or not your store is a fit for OpenStore, here’s what they mainly look for:

  • 6+ months of operations
  • The majority of sales are US based
  • Over $500k in sales, with 70% coming from Shopify
  • Can be profitable in the next 12 months
  • Not advertising in a restricted category

If you think you fit the bill, you can get a free quote of what your brand is working on the OpenStore website. Nothing is binding, meaning you can get a quote and then decide to scrap it, and you’re not obligated to go through with anything.

Click here to get your OpenStore appraisal!

LP of the Week:

This week’s LP of the Week goes to Love Wellness, which is a supplement brand based in New York, founded by Lo Bosworth. Not only does the page look extremely crisp and clean, but we developed some new technology within the BYOB shopping section itself.

Click here to see the BYOB page!

These types of pages work really well for driving up AOV and conversion rate for new customers, as there’s an element of personalization built into the process of transacting.

If you’re ready to see if we should build you a landing page with HOOX, click this link to set up a call with us!

That's all for this week

I know today I originally promised to get you a full recap of Affiliate World, but I’m going to save that for next week once I get all the presentations so that I can make a list of the most important things from the talks. Cool fact — I had the most attended speech at the conference!

I hope you have an amazing upcoming week. I know I will be jet lagged like no other, but it’s ok… we’ll get back on the 9-hour sleep grind as soon as possible. Stay hydrated, get sweaty, do something nice for yourself, make someone else giggle, and have an amazing upcoming week!