Happy Sunday and Happy Father’s Day! If you’re reading this newsletter today, I hope you’re sitting back on a comfortable couch, you have a dad-approved beverage in your hand, and you’re excited for a quick read. Today I am answering the question, “I got my landing page from HOOX, but why isn’t it working?”


First, a shoutout to Future Commerce for calling this the “Sunday feast for investors, operators, and marketers.” Not a bad way to describe these in my opinion. They listed some other great newsletters in the eCommerce space on their website.

Also, tomorrow (June 19th) I am officially living my reality TV dream by being on a podcast with Ryan Serhant. It’ll be live Monday morning and you can check it out on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. The podcast is called Driving Performance by Adgile and we cover entrepreneurship and marketing. Ryan Serhant is a legend.

Lastly, be sure to check out this week’s Limited Supply. We talked about ShopDay (Shopify’s version of Prime Day), how pharma preys on consumers with DTC, and more. Listen on Apple Podcasts and leave us a review!

Ok, I’m done asking for you to listen to me in your ears… now let’s get into today’s newsletter!

When marketers come to HOOX, about 15% of the time, there is always the question of, “Okay, I have the landing page but it’s not working. How do I make it work?”

It’s important to zoom out a little bit and also understand where a landing page sits in your marketing stack, to begin with. When I think about the journey of acquiring a customer, I come to remember the typical flow of a customer interacting with a new brand:

Someone is scrolling their feed in hopes of being entertained and escaping their own reality and sees an ad for your product.

They go from an Instagram ad → your HOOX landing page → email flow (cause they wanted that 10% off) → your brand’s website → your competitor’s website → organic TikTok pops up reminding them of the brand → they search with Google branded search → back to the HOOX landing page → the customer converts.

It’s a lengthy journey, but that is the reality of how consumers shop. If you don’t believe me, let’s examine how you went about buying the last thing you bought online over $200. It was probably the same thing… that’s ok! Our performance marketing brains want to believe it’s just a single-interaction to conversion, but so many other pieces factor into it. Here are the ones that I think everyone needs covered:

  • Email flows
  • Basic brand awareness
  • Great creative
  • Brand positioning
  • LP iteration

With HOOX, our promise has always been that while YES we will do full research, the strategy of the page, coming up with the messaging/positioning angles for the product based on the audience you’re going after, the copywriting, the wireframes, the UI design and develop the page… the final product of a landing page is still one piece of the equation. So with that, below is what I recommend to our clients who say that the page “doesn’t work” with minimal testing and zero brand awareness.

Email & SMS Flows

When you drive traffic to your landing page, the best practice is to collect first-party data. If you are driving traffic from a paid media source, where you are paying for that traffic, you should absolutely work on collecting those emails and numbers. The shorter the attention span of that traffic source is (TikTok being the lowest), the more enticing your offer should be to get that email. Sometimes you don’t need to even focus on a discount for the product, you just need to think, “What can I put there, to where someone wants to give me their email?”.

If you assume that you should not collect someone’s email or phone number as soon as they land from a paid traffic source, you’re delusional and living in your own reality. Don’t waste opportunity with the traffic you have coming to you already.

Almost immediately, someone should be put into a pre-purchase welcome flow (meaning it should be focused on problem/solution education) where, ideally, the angle of the landing page they came to, matches the angle of the welcome flow’s first email. So if your landing pages sells Sandland Sleep, with the angle of “No more waking up in the middle of the night” or “Your Whoop recovery score is 40% higher with Sandland”, then the email flows that follow-up from that landing page should match that messaging. As much as you can, be consistent.

Have you checked what percentage of SMS subscribers have never bought from you before? How many of those have been with you past 30 or 60 days? If you know what the consideration phase is to purchase your product (i.e. less than 30 days, 30-90 days, etc), then bump those subscribers to less frequent, more education focused SMS and email blasts. I bet there are a lot of people here in this cohort for you.

All of the right work behind your email and SMS flows ultimately allows your landing page to work as hard as it possibly can, and you can even link back to it in these flows.

Basic Brand Awareness

Remember that part of the journey where people will search your brand or product on Google? That is real. In fact, it’s not just Google, it’s 4 main places that you need to show up with social proof and content:

  • Google
  • TikTok
  • YouTube
  • Instagram

Let me explain what & how:

With Google, if someone searches for your brand and you have nothing except your website, your brand’s newly made social profiles and maybe 1 piece of content, it’s not enough. You need to build trust with someone; this is someone’s hard-earned post-tax income dollars that you are asking for. You cannot give them nothing when they want to learn more on Google and verify your legitimacy, and ask for them to pay you. Get bloggers, editors, review sites, and affiliate sites to write about you and include you in their content. The more that shows up when you are searched, the better off you will be.

With TikTok, depending on what you’re selling, there is a good chance people will just search in TikTok to see if you are well-known, legit, if your product works, what the unboxing looks like, etc. You are a fool if you sell a CPG product and don’t believe your customer is on TikTok — 1 in 2 Americans is on TikTok. In addition to your own brand pumping out content, make a goal to seed your product to 75 people on TikTok who will unbox it, review it, install the product, taste it, smell it, give their reaction and show potential customers the information they might be missing. Did you know Jolie has 5,000 pieces of creator content on social platforms in the last year?

With YouTube, it’s very similar to Google and TikTok, although when you search the brand on Google, YouTube results will pop-up. Here, again, is where you want to emphasize product reviews, including products in hauls, unboxings, or addressing skepticism. YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world — if you have nothing listed when someone comes to learn about your brand, your landing page isn’t going to magically make everything work.

With Instagram, because Instagram isn’t entirely recommended content, you can treat it a little different. With IG, I like to make sure there is a highlight full of similar content as above (unboxings, reviews, beautiful product shots by other customers, etc). It should be near the beginning of the profile, easy to find, and clearly shows that as a new customer, you’re not going to be alone in this purchase.

Even if you’re not heavy into brand marketing, having content in these 4 spots is a must. Your ads will not work as effectively, if you don’t have this set.

Great Ad Creative

If no one is clicking the ad itself, then what does the landing page even matter!? You have to make incredible creative. Most people get excited with a 1-2% click-through rate (CTR), meaning that 98 to 99% of people see your ad and give it no attention. That’s why your creative needs to have a great hook, an angle, be optimized for performance (not to look pretty and match your brand book), and be iterated on.

Some easy metrics to look at:

  • CPM (cost to reach 1,000 people): This tells you how much the ad platforms like what you are uploading as ads, for the audience you’re targeting.
  • Hook rate (the number of 3-sec video views, divided by impressions): This tells you how engaging your video is to get people to watch it in the first place.
  • CTR (click-through rate): This tells you how much the consumers of the platform actually like what you’re putting out there.
  • Bounce rate (% of people who land on your site, but then leave): This can give you a general direction of how well your ad matched back to the landing page.

These are all metrics you can, and should, be tracking on your own, in the ad platforms, or with a tool like Motion.

Brand Positioning

Brand positioning is about shaping how your audience perceives your brand and differentiates it from competitors. It's the promise you make, the unique value you offer, and the emotional connection you create. By understanding your target audience, conducting competitor analysis, crafting a compelling brand story, and ensuring consistency across touch-points, you can carve your competitive edge in the market. Stay adaptable and continuously evolve your brand positioning to remain relevant.

Good brand positioning is what allows TUSHY to have so much fun selling a bidet, or Jolie to sell a filtered shower head as a beauty tool. If you come to HOOX and have no depth to your brand, we will do our best, but you need to have consistent brand positioning across the board — on your website, in your emails, on your social media, etc.

Ongoing Landing Page Iteration

As you launch and then scale up your HOOX page, you need to continue to evolve the landing page. Use tools like Microsoft Clarity, GA4, Quantcast Measure, and more. You should also be looking at quantitative data around how your landing page is performing relative to your control (likely a homepage or PDP), and how you can continue to increase the page’s performance.

We got a ton of asks for on-going support and ended up adding that to the HOOX product lineup. If you are interested in being in the first cohort of iterative HOOX clients, please fill out this form, and we’ll reach out on Tuesday.

A lot of the pages we’ve made have done well out of the gate, but as time goes on, they need some iteration to continue staying updated, relevant, and with valuable information to the consumer.

In Conclusion…

When your landing page doesn’t “work”, look at the full customer journey and see what puzzle pieces aren’t in place. The entire customer journey is like a puzzle, and every piece needs to not only be carefully put in place, but it has to exist! And if you have most or all of these pieces are you’re spending more than $250k per month in ad spend, then let us pitch you a landing page!

On to some fun stuff…

Vendor of the Week:

Microsoft Clarity — The MUST HAVE website heatmap app, made by Microsoft, and completely free.

If you don’t know what Clarity is, please allow me to explain it, beacuse it is a must-have in my book.

Microsoft Clarity was something I found a couple years ago when I was hunting for a good page analytics tool that captured basic data (like sessions, location, devices, popular pages, etc) but these are some of my favorite features that Microsoft Clarity provides:

  • Dead clicks — this allows you to see where are people clicking but it’s not a real link. This data allows you to undersatnd what should be hyperlinked and lead people somewhere.
  • Rage clicks — this is where people click rapidly out of frustration. Also a good thing to know as it means you need to improve your page’s UX.
  • Quick backs — this tells you how many people went to a page, and then immediately clicked the “back” button to go to the previous page. This tells you where you need to improve the content of your site.
  • Heatmaps with percentages — this tells you where people are clicking and hovering on the site.
  • Scroll-depth maps — this shows your on your page how far down people are getting before dropping off. Very key in good landing pages to understand your scroll-depth and how to improve it.
  • User session recordings — Clarity records user sessions, allowing you to watch them back and understand what sections draw people’s attention, and which don’t. Our Sharma Brands design team spends at least 6-8 hours per week watching these.

I am probably the biggest fan of Microsoft Clarity for a few reasons:

  • I came to recently learn this is a personal project that Satya Nadella is a big fan of and likes to oversee.
  • The product is completely free, and will always be free — which is great when their competitors charge by sessions.
  • It’s a small dedicated and fast-moving team inside Microsoft that runs and builds on Clarity. I’ve had the pleasure to spend some time with them and talk through the product side, and they are all so obsessed with Clarity, which is why it gets so much better every few weeks.

I highly recommend checking it out. You can easily install it on your site by adding a pixel to your site, or if you’re like me and don’t want to break anything, just setup an account on their website, and then add the tracking code to Google Tag Manager (instructions here).

Go check out and install Microsoft Clarity today — you’ll be replacing your TikTok time with watching user sessions and getting inspired, in no time!

LP of the Week:

Today’s LP of the Week comes to us from a repeat HOOX client, Vahdam. Last time I shared one of their pages, it was for their tea. This time, they’re using this HOOX page to launch a new product.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE HOOX PAGE!

In this page, selling a new product means educating until someone feels like they can sell it themselves. This page is a great example of our Advanced Landing Page product. If you’re ready to buy a HOOX page, click here and book a call. If you want us to pitch you a landing page concept, fill out this form. And if you’re not convinced these work, then just see how Nori went to a 7.1% conversion rate.

That's all for this week

I hope today’s newsletter was helpful and inspired an idea you’ll try this week. I hope all the dads felt loved and appreciated today, and continue to serve burnt chicken with a side of buffalo sauce and ranch.

Have a great upcoming week, get a good sweat in or a long walk, and stay hydrated. I’ll see you here next week with DTC-related learnings or tactics from VidCon, THE creator conference.

See ya!