Happy Sunday!

If you’re reading this email, I hope you’re relaxing, feet up, pillow behind the head, weighted blanket across the lap, and a beverage of choice in your left hand (assuming I am in your right hand). This past week I spent a few days at eCommerceFuel Live in San Diego, and this email is the remainder of the points from my presentation and my takeaways for what everyone should try doing more of.

I don’t want to be oblivious to the Silicon Valley Bank issues going on, but I also don’t know enough about the US financial system to comment on it. That said, I’ve been helping a ton of portfolio companies switch to Mercury or Highbeam and get expedited onboarding. If you need help with that, please reply to this email or DM me on Twitter and I’ll get you setup.

Before we get into today’s newsletter, Moiz and I recorded a last-minute episode of Limited Supply on Tuesday. Our LA studio audio had an issue transferring the file, so we couldn’t get it up in time. Rest assured, the episode from LA (with Moiz’s brother as a guest) will go up this coming Wednesday. Check it out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube! And please, if you have an extra minute, leave a review for us! It really helps us + gets us fired up to read them and record more content.

And last shoutout goes to a company called Haven Athletic. They’re a HOOX client, and they just launched their new gym backpack, which has everything you need (pockets wise) and all the space. It’s actually all I’m bringing with me to Austin — it doubles as a work backpack, as well as a suitcase for a short trip. THIS is what my bag looks like. THIS is where you can get yours (this also uses a portfolio company of mine, called Superfiliate)! Ok, now back to the email… 

Last week, I dove deep into social proof, first-party data capturing, and angles vs. value props. That email was my “test” before giving the presentation at ECF Live. Today’s email is going to be nuggets from the rest of my presentation, given that Andrew, Sean, and Wayne thought it went really well! Also, just a special shoutout to Andrew for how he has built this eCommerceFuel community — it’s highly vetted and limited to founders who are building real businesses. I recommend checking it out and applying for yourself.

Ok, I will go into full nerd mode now and start diving into each of these things…

Get good at using every platform for DMs

Undoubtedly, every brand would prefer to use email for all customer service messages — everything stays consistent and lives within 1 inbox. Unfortunately, that’s just not normal consumer behavior. Personally, I always go to Twitter first. A lot of people go to Instagram. TikTok is also growing. We can all agree that you want to meet your customers where THEY are, right? You should strive to do the same when it comes to communication back with them.

From my own purview of companies that are currently building in stealth mode, it’s also becoming apparent that we are going to be more in DM inboxes than we are going to be using email when it comes to communicating with brands in the future, so might as well start getting good at it now. 

This also creates a real opportunity to build relationships with your customers. Follow up with them 30-60-90 days after they tag you in a story and see how they’re still enjoying your product, how you can make things better, etc. You should have a list of these people in Google Sheets and notate them as VIPs. When you have a new product launch, get in contact with your VIPs and seed the product early, or give them the opportunity to buy and receieve it early. You can also send surveys to these VIPs, get their input in product launches, etc. The more you get them involved, the higher their LTV will be — Glossier didn’t have 5 FTE’s managing Instagram DMs for no reason! The proof is in the LTV pudding (my favorite kind of pudding). 

The Kim Kardashian Red Carpet

If you’re a Sunday newsletter regular, you know this is one of my favorites.

Basically, you must treat your site visitors or customers like Kim Kardashian on the red carpet, and YOU, the brand, are Kim’s assistant. It’s your job to ensure that she has everything she needs, when she needs it, without looking for it. This manifests in ads, landing pages, homepages, product pages, category/collection pages, about us pages, etc.

If someone has to leave your site to see what all comes in the box or see a real unboxing video, there’s a high chance you’ll lose that customer. And you wouldn’t treat Kim K like that if she just walked into your store, would you? Don’t leave any room for error online, either. You already know how challenging and expensive it is to get someone to your site in the first place, don’t lose them because you were too lazy to add a section to your site.

Make things obvious for your customer

This was a suggestion I got as a reply from Edward — but he’s totally right.

Most of us focus on benefits, angles, and design and copy that we think will excite a customer to purchase. But do you know what else excites someone to go through with a purchase? Here’s a quick list:

  • Some sort of a guarantee if they don’t like the product/service (i.e., “Hassle-free returns” or “60-day no-fuss returns”).
  • Payment financing options — Putting the logos of Shop Pay Installments, Affirm, etc., in the footer, slide-out cart, PDPs, and checkout. 
  • Stating when the order will ship, where it ships from, and how long it will take to arrive at someone’s doorstep?
  • Stating the return policy clearly.
  • Showing everything that comes inside the box that gets shipped to the customer.
  • The cost per usage (For example with Hydrant, I used to say “Less than $1/day”) of the product itself, or a better way to justify the cost (i.e. “You can drink a $6 latte every morning because you’re tired, or you can sleep on Eight Sleep for $5/night”, where the $5/night is just an ammortized rate of the bed).
  • Explain why someone should care for YOUR brand selling this product vs going elsewhere. 
  • Give the average response time for customer service — it’s comforting to know how something will play out if someone needs to tap into customer service for any reason at all.

Use Shop Cash Boost Campaigns

If you open Shopify’s admin and go to the Shop sales channel, you should see the ability to run a campaign for Shop Cash Boosts. I’ve been running these campaigns for a couple of months in the beta program, and let me tell you… jump on this opportunity!! For a brand with basically no hype, no momentum, and no active marketing going on, we have a $14 CPA.

It’s unclear how much spend can be dedicated to this channel or what its LTV/repeat-purchase rate will be, but for such low CPAs, why not turn it on?

You can learn more about Shop Cash here. It appears to be in early access only, so if you don’t have it, let me know, and I’ll see if I can get them to turn some stores on for y’all!

Run whitelisted content as ads

There really shouldn’t be any other required reasons outside of the fact that this is modern-day storytelling in social channels. You might want to run your big beautiful campaigns, but unless you’re covering a city in billboards, or running a TV campaign, leave the billboard and TV creative OUTSIDE of paid social! Why? It doesn’t work! You need to run ads that fit the context of the social platform.

But if you really need another reason to work with creators and whitelist their accounts, here’s one: The CTR is 2x a non-whitelisted ad. The CPMs are slightly lower for video too. But the CTR makes it all worth it. And no, this doesn’t make your brand less attractive or special — no one is going to spend more than 2 seconds gosspiing of what they thought was “on-brand” or “off-brand” for your company, I promise.

Test beautiful static ads on Meta & Twitter

For the last few years, we were always directed to focus on creating more video content to feed Meta. But in the last few months, it’s become apparent that statics are also crushing. The CPMs I’m seeing for static ads are about 80% lower than video ads. The CTR is definetely lower, but the overall CPC is much cheaper. If you look up your favorite direct-response-advertising brand on the FB Ads Library, I promise you’ll see a good amount of static ads running with different variations.

The beauty of static ads is once you have a few templates setup, you can alter the copy and test pretty rapidly. That said, I highly recommend still having the templates look stunning before you start iterating and deploying them. Bad creative, even if it’s a static, isn’t going to help you in any way.

Test the $216/day channel that can catapult your brand awareness

What if I told you there’s a magical channel that you could put just $216 into each day, and there’s a high chance you’ll see tens of thousands of users in your target demographic. You would do it, right?

This channel is … hire a creator and have them post to TikTok, IG Reels, and YouTube Shorts on a daily basis. $216 is virtually nothing if you’re spending 2-3k/day on Facebook & Google, and it gives you a couple huge benefits:

  • You have a high chance of your content landing on the algorithm and riding that wave to tons of impressions.
  • You have someone who can quickly crank out videos or ads when you realize something is working in the ad account, from a creative or messaging standpoint.
  • You have someone who can quickly create content around current events, trends, or news related to your brand, product or industry.

If you haven’t already seen, a friend of mine JT Barnett, helps brands match with creators as a business. That’s how I found my FT content creator too. Check him out if you’re interested.

Ok all this, plus my email from last week, were the golden nuggets for/from ECF Live! On to some fun stuff…

Vendor of the Week:

minisocial — The fastest and easiest way to get a library of content to run on paid social ads, email, and more. 

You’ve heard of Imperfect Foods, right? They had recently set the bar high for killer, high-converting ads. Their team tests new concepts frequently, so they needed an easy way to scale their content production.

One of the quickest ways they’ve found to scale their ad content is by working with minisocial. Within a single campaign, Imperfect Foods received back 100 fully-licensed video assets that they tested, iterated, and refined to perform well on Meta and TikTok. 

With minisocial, getting hundreds of assets is (surprisingly) a painless process, and you can use that content for way more than just ads! We often use that content for organic social, as well as email campaigns or flows. The content is fully licensed for use across ANY channel you’d like — organic social, your website, billboards, b-roll for a TV ad, and email. 

The process minisocial has created is one of the most streamlined UGC solutions out there. You simply submit a brief, and they handle the rest. Their team books the right creators for you and manages the back and forth. All you have to worry about is how you will use the content. 

Plus, they have no long-term commitments, so you can get content on demand with no strings attached. Take my advice and get 15% off your first minisocial campaign by using this special link. If you’d like to speak with Kirsten, the founder, to learn more about the process, you can book a time on her calendar here.

Take my advice and get started with minisocial and get 15% off, thanks to your discount for being a dedicated reader! 

LP of the Week:

What’s the hardest part about selling beautiful, high-quality furniture online? Conveying the efficacy around the quality, the beauty of the design and justifying the cost to the consumer.

Sundays, a beautiful furniture brand, recently signed up to build a page with HOOX. Because their product is a much higher price point and a longer sales cycle, we built the page to interact well with consumers who are still in the upper funnel for them — maybe haven’t heard of Sundays or are still in the early process of evaluating if they want it. 

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE LANDING PAGE BY HOOX!

You’ll see this page does a beautiful job addressing many things that pop up as blockers in someone’s mind and allow consumers to click through to the product they want to learn more about. 

If you’re tired of having web pages that just don’t convert, and you’re ready to get more out of every dollar you’re spending on paid media. Book a demo with HOOX here! We’re a bit overwhelmed with inbound demand, but if you book a call, we can at least get started in figuring out what type of page we can build for you. 

That's all for this week

I hope today’s newsletter was valuable, or you found 1-2 nuggets. If you want to see me give the full presentation from ECF Live, jump into the forum and I believe they’ll have them all shared there.

I’m in Austin today riding shotgun with Dennis! if you are too, shoot me a DM on Twitter! I hope you get 9 hours of sleep tonight, break a sweat this week, and have an amazing upcoming week!