Happy Sunday!
We’ve got 1 more Sunday newsletter after this, where I have something special planned. We’ve got 2 more episodes of Limited Supply until the close of Season 2 (we recorded both in person, and they’re 10x better!). I hope you’re sitting on a couch, a weighted blanket over your lap and a beverage in your hand. Today’s email is a bit different… more of an excerpt from a conversation this past week about how the quality of ads needs to elevate going into 2023 and why you can’t just stop at the ads but move through to purchase.
Before we dive into that, Moiz and I talked about ChatGPT, the marketing tactics we presented to a Sharma Brands client, and what Theranos and FTX taught us about diligence when investing in DTC brands. You can listen on Apple or Spotify!
This is a much different style email than I normally send, but I hope you can grab one or two nuggets from it that’ll help you. Reply with what you thought about it too!
Using ad platforms in the same ways that large companies use them doesn’t work for most brands under $100M in revenue. The companies whom we tend to admire their advertising have larger budgets and can play into the full AIDA marketing funnel. In fact, if they were to deploy their budgets the same way more DTC brands have, they’d run out of places to spend money pretty quickly. With their budgets, a properly segmented funnel of advertising spending makes sense. Uber can run a TV spot during the FIFA World Cup finals with a punchline that their deliveries are 95% on time, without mentioning what Uber Eats does. But for most DTC brands, that makes no sense.
Digital advertising has gotten so much more competitive, which has led to somewhat similar effects of banner ads or highway billboards — we just learn to ignore them. The next step is that the engagement from the ads performs worse: CTRs go down, post engagement goes down, looking up URLs, etc. Most people’s first thought is, “We need to start spending on another platform with better CPMs.”
In most DTC brands’ cases, the full journey is built in a segmented manner, so the experience feels turbulent to a new customer. Most people who run traffic directly to their website don’t update the site as the brand evolves and new learnings emerge. Ad creative, however, is churned out every week with updates and learnings.
With ad creative, a new batch means new hooks, new tests, new audiences to tap into, more placements to try out, etc. But once someone clicks it, it goes to the same old boring page. This is literally why we started HOOX, why it’s also said like “hooks”. You have to complete the testing journey if you’re going to do it. Aside from the easy misses on an ad to LP experience, like showing a different product in the hero than what someone clicked on, most sites don’t stay up to date with customer objections and the learnings to crack them.
All that said, my point is ads need to be more like… well, not ads. They need to feel like entertainment and a journey — something that’s bringing someone value before it’s selling the viewer on a click. In the simplest of words, this just means making your hooks address the problems of the people you’re targeting with the ad itself. Once someone clicks, then you need to continue that journey and solve that problem.
This Jolie ad perfectly explains the problem that someone is looking to solve. The ad is entertaining and explains the side effects of hard water, and then it goes into selling you a Jolie showerhead. When you click the ad and end up on the PDP, the messaging on the page is consistent around removing contaminants before it goes into pricing and social proof. If you’re having trouble sourcing the hooks, look at customer service inquiries, customer reviews, and questions through DMs.
The punchline of this rant-style email is to focus every ad on being entertaining first. How can you constantly provide value to where someone realizes it's in their best interest to become a consumer? When you’re competing with an unlimited stream of content and paying to place an ad within that content, you have to compete from an entertainment-value standpoint. And even after someone clicks, if you don’t have the brand awareness behind you, you should continue that storytelling onto the PDP or the landing page you’re driving to.
Ok, end rant and on to some fun stuff…
Vendor of the Week:
Loop — The most convenient way to do returns for customers and merchants.
If you wanted to start a business, you’d have to register with the government, take an ad out in the paper, fill out a bunch of paperwork, take that to a bank, and take another 15 steps. Stripe Atlas decided… we’ll make this a 10-minute process. To raise capital, you must go through a lengthy legal process and complete a ton of paperwork. AngelList decided… we’re going to make this a 20-minute process.
If your customer wanted to make returns without the complication of getting on the phone to explain problems or send an email and communicate with a customer service agent, AND you wanted to build more trust with that consumer, you would use Loop for returns.
Implementing Loop is easy as a merchant, but the real benefits are in the customer-facing experience Loop offers. Loop makes it easy for someone to return an item if that is their ultimate goal, but otherwise, there’s a good chance Loop will help you save revenue by turning a return into an exchange. It’s a no-brainer software to use if you have any volume of returns, and Loop is a software that I’ve recommended since it launched.
If you are curious how to turn returns into a retention channel, click this link and set up a demo with Loop. Instead of just returns, you’ll build more trust, retain a customer, and eliminate simple customer service tickets.
LP of the Week:
This week’s LP is for Jones Road Beauty, the bootstrapped beauty company launched by Bobbi Brown. We focused on their best-selling product, What The Foundation.
You can click here to see the HOOX Landing Page for JRB!
For this page, they wanted to optimize heavily for getting cold mobile traffic excited about filling out a quiz. We focused the entire page on getting through the shade finder quiz, which lives on their site.
We developed this page directly in Shopify for Jones Road Beauty.
If you’re ready to see if HOOX is a good fit, book a demo with us by clicking here!
That's all for this week
I hope today’s newsletter was valuable for you and you got a nugget from it for yourself or your team. We’re almost at the end of the year… 1 more week of sprinting, and then we’re there.
Separately, my friend Marshall Osborne sent me a delicious new snack he’s been working on, and it tastes like Taco Bell’s Cinnamon Twists, except it’s healthy. It’s called YouNeedThis on Amazon. Highly recommend it if you like a good crunch without the calories.
I hope you get 9 hours of sleep tonight and are excited for the coming week. Reply, as always, with any thoughts or any quick help I can provide. I respond whenever I can and help. Have an amazing upcoming week!