Happy Sunday! 

If you’re reading this, I hope you have your AC on full blast, your feet are kicked up, and you’ve got a beverage in your hand (today, I have an Olipop Cream Soda). We’re going to talk about driving sales when you are sitting on a retail store shelf. But first… some fun announcements:

  • If you missed the Motion presentation Dara is putting on, I recommend signing up to get the recordings. Click here to sign up.
  • My birthday is on Wednesday this week! You can contribute to my dopamine high by tweeting me or make my year by setting a call with the HOOX team so I can pitch you a page!
  • I was on a podcast called Driving Performance with THE Ryan Serhant!! We talked all about sales, marketing, content, being efficient with time as an entrepreneur, and more. Click here to listen to it!
  • HOOX just completed a case study with a page I’ve shared in the newsletter before, Vahdam Tea — we increased the conversion rate by 68%! At their scale, it makes the cost of a landing page feel like pennies! Check out the page, ad creative, and strategy on this case study.
  • This past week’s episode of Limited Supply dove deep into Bed, Bath & Beyond’s $21.5M acquisition, Apple Vision Pro, and the fraud that killed The Pill Club’s business. Listen to it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify!

Lastly, I have to tell you about one of my favorite entrepreneurs (bootstrapped, former-agency CEO, and now known as the internet’s garbage man), Matt Bertulli. Matt and I have been friends for years now and he’s a part of probably 9 or 10 founders I look up to in terms of business strategy, marketing know-how, people/leadership, and hitting the gas pedal. He also writes an amazing newsletter (each are 2-3 min reads) with actionable insights — it’s what I wish I could read when starting my company. Sign up for his newsletter here → No Competition by Matt

Ok, that’s enough chit-chat. Did I peak with the Ryan interview? Ok, let’s get into today’s newsletter.

I remember tackling my first retail sell-through campaign just a few years ago and learning that so much of the obvious stuff just never works. And today, at Sharma Brands, almost all of our clients are selling in retail stores and marketplaces in addition to their DTC site. This is going to be what worked and what didn’t work.

9 times out of 10, if your brand is doing $25M+ in annual revenue, physical retail and retail sell-through are part of the equation. Plus, you have to remember even though eCommerce has grown dramatically over the past two decades, 80%+ of all transactions for physical goods in the US still happen in physical stores.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, only 15.1% of all US commerce happens online today. We had a COVID bump there, but I think we’re back on pace had we not had the bump at all, and retail is where a lot of brands make a big % of their revenue — stores like SEPHORA, Ulta, Target, Total Wines, etc.

One thing I’ve always thought — when retail-focused marketing is happening, it should all be done through the lens of a digital performance marketer. It still needs the balance of being good at representing the brand well, but there are so many ways to make your ad dollars work harder for you. 

Of course, you have to have the basics going for you:

  • Good product placement and merchandising on the shelf
  • Eye-catching (thumb-stopping) packaging
  • Contextual price competition and promotions
  • Signage, stickers, shelf materials
  • Demos, tastings, samplings
  • Buy-in from your retail partner to push the product

But even with that, how should you drive people to pick it up off the shelf when they’re there, or even get them excited to go to the store just to pick up your product from the shelf? It’s hard! And none of the things you think would work actually work like they should. 

So… here’s what doesn’t work:

It’s what everyone first thinks: let’s take our best ads and just add “Sold at Target” with the logo or some beautiful brand assets that you think will bring a whole new pop of color and excitement to someone’s feed when in reality, it looks like a knock-off Kohls commercial, and still write “Now sold at Target” or something similar. 

It doesn’t work. And no one will see it and think, “You know what I should do today? Go to Target and get this kombucha!” Just like with your DTC channel, a silly Kohls-like commercial wouldn’t drive any click-through or intent to purchase. Why would it for retail?!

Another one that I tested early (mostly against my will, but the higher-ups wanted it) was local radio. I can’t even remember the last time I listened to local radio, or went into someone’s car where local radio was being played. And when it comes to local radio, I tend to believe most of the listener data they sell you on is BS. I mean just look at my hometown radio’s recent blog post. Anyways, we ran it, isolating specific geo’s to understand lift in sell-through (how the radio ads are impacting sales in a positive way), only to learn it did nothing. 

When these didn’t work, I remember being in a hotel lobby in Austin and seeing everyone with Airpods in their ears. People were listening to podcasts. Which got me thinking, where else can we align ourselves with something that’s already influential to them? Newseltters. Internet publications. Influencers. Advertorials. Coupon programs. Bloggers. We just needed to advertise where other people were consuming and vulnerable, because they already trusted the content there. Channels that have less targeting abillities do really well when paired with retail sales KPIs due to the benefits of distribution.

Then the wheels started to turn… Here are some tactics that work well:

Use influencers to create content

This is different than how I normally speak about working with influencers. There are 3 use-cases for working with influencers, where it’s valuable:

  • Create content —  they have followers because they’re good at creating content.
  • The alignment and validation of your product and their values.
  • The reach and depth they have with their audience, as a result of their content.

In this context, you can leverage all 3 with them. I don’t think dedicated sponsored content is the way to go either. Being mentioned alongside or in the content people are actually there for, is always going to perform better for you. 

Having influencers integrate you naturally into their evergreen content strategy, sharing stories of the process, the before/after, the taste-test, the installation process, or how something is made is the best use of this. The hardest part is understanding which influencers to choose for your campaign. Their audience needs to align back to the audience of people that shop at the retail locations that you’re being sold in — not just influencers that you think will represent the brand well or that you personally want to work with.

Whitelisting Creator Content

In addition to the content you’re creating with influencers to push to their owned audiences, you should get some content that feels native to the platform and whitelist it from different content creators on paid social channels. Love Wellness does this well with their founder, Lauren Bosworth, creating content and their paid media team pushing it, even when talking about Target or Ulta.

The benefits of whitelisting creator content, is that it feels like content that should belong in the feed. It’s not an over-produced ad. As a result the CPMs are significantly lower, and the CTR is 2-3x higher than non-whitelisted content. Think entertainment first.

Sponsored Editorial Content

As you can see, the theme is lead with entertainment, and then become a relevant punchline. This works well with sponsored content where people are already reading. This could be Refinery29 or USA Today. In either case, this tactic does better when geared toward selling to women.

At 1180 Media, we do this on a performance marketing basis for all your favorite $50M+ DTC brands. 

This is leveraging a concept called, “Secondary Presence.” First-party data, audience, targeting, positioning. Third-party trust, POV, validation, and content.

And just like the branded content legends they are, here are 3 BuzzFeed examples showing sponsored editorial done in 3 ways:

Leverage your existing CRM

You probably already have an audience built out in Klaviyo, Postscript and/or Tapcart, that you’re regularly communicating with through emails, texts and push notifications. 

Within your existing lists, you can segment prior customers by location and send targeted blasts with unique offers to drive foot traffic to a nearby store. The trick here is to have an offer. What’s the incentive that’s going to get them in the door? Is it a discount, a new colorway, a Venmo payment for uploading their receipt (like with Aisle)?

I remember when MVMT Watches launched in Nordstrom, and they needed to demonstrate they could drive sales, they marked their best-selling SKU as “Sold Out” on their website and emailed people to go buy it from Nordstrom instead. 

Buying audience data of specific retail customer segments

I’ve mentioned this before with Adgile’s Polygon data product — this allows you to say “I want a Meta audience to target of people who’s mobile devices entered any Target in the country at least 2x in a quarter.” And everyone who’s opted-in, which is about 15-20% of users (through various free apps they install), gets populated in your ads platform. 

I’ve also done this with Oracle and Rakuten, where you can buy audiences like, “AMEX card holders who spend at least $150 at Whole Foods” or, “People who have an eCommerce receipt with an order containing protein powder.” You pay for the audience on a CPM basis, and, yes, this is all legal. People think that clicking “Don’t Allow Tracking” will protect them, meanwhile their soul is up for sale from a tech company they know nothing about.

Keep in mind though, this is one piece of the puzzle, not the entire picture.

Building a Store Locator Landing Page

One of the easiest downfalls in driving retail sell-through is when brands just setup a traffic campaign to a store locator, or when they run ads and it goes to a page with a store locator. Store locators tend to be the clunkiest pieces of website tech I’ve seen — hard to customize, hard to make them feel easy to use, and they have such terrible user experience. The best one I’ve seen is Stockist, but even then… hard to customize or make “fun.”

I’ll share an example of two pages that we used to drive to when people would search “21 Seeds tequila near me” or “where can i buy 21 seeds” in Google. We divided these into 2 groups: Tier 1 and Tier 2.

With Tier 1 traffic (click here to see the LP), we wanted these people to understand the benefits of 21 SEEDS and get them to buy in-store. The CTA of “Find a Store” was pixeled as a conversion event, meaning that the Google or FB ads that led to this page were optimizing to find people who clicked the “Find A Store” button. 

With Tier 2 traffic (click here to see the LP), we did want these people to buy in-store, but we didn’t want to lose them, in case they wanted to buy online and get it delivered. The difference was with Tier 1 stores, we needed to demonstrate sell-through, which is partially why Diageo acquired them shortly after.

You should be using a good landing page that educates someone, even when trying to drive them to a retail store. And if it was up to me, the Find A Store CTA would’ve led to a MikMak shopping experience, or we would’ve built something like it. 

Ok, hopefully one of these tactics are helpful and applicable to you and your business. If you’ve tried them out, let me know how they did. If you plan to, let me know how it does! Now, on to some fun stuff…

Vendor of the Week:

Loop Returns — The most customer-friendly eCommerce return and exchange app, built for Shopify and Shopify Plus.

Nothing makes people hate a brand more than realizing that the returns process completely wastes their time and loyalty to a brand.

Imagine you are SO excited to buy a new MadHappy hoodie after seeing your favorite influencers wearing it, you’ve become invested in the brand's founding story, and you just can’t wait to put it on. You finally get the box, slip it on, and… oh, damn. It’s the wrong size! The default thought that goes through someone’s head is, “Now I am going to waste at least an hour trying to figure out how to return this, or swap the size.”

But… plot twist! You go to MadHappy’s website and realize they use Loop Returns for all their product exchanges and returns. So now, instead of someone wanting to rip their hair out, it’s as easy as just entering your order number and zip code and choosing what to do next:

  • Get a gift card
  • Exchange your product
  • Get a full refund

All of this happens without any human interaction necessary, and within 60 seconds, a return is done. Obviously, the customer is happy here. The merchant is very happy. With Loop, they just:

  • Saved their CX team a lot of time and effort
  • Retained revenue by incentivizing exchanges, adding upsells, etc
  • Improved customer loyalty — now someone understands how easy it is to return

Since its inception, Loop has been a software that has never steered Shopify brands wrongfully. They’ve helped merchants retain over $70M in revenue and automated over 22M returns.

I had once worked with the founder, Jonathan Poma when he owned one of the biggest and best Shopify development agencies. He’s a killer operato, and with his background in the services industry, he has always focused on putting the customer first at Loop.

If you don’t have a returns solution, I promise I won’t steer you wrong here: Book a demo with Loop Returns! 


We are literally signing another big client from Sharma Brands to Loop Returns this week, and it's because the software is a game-changer. 

LP of the Week:

This week’s LP of the Week is special, mainly because I’m excited to work with a brand of this stature, caliber, and growth.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE LANDING PAGE!

This brand has been testing and iterating on landing pages for a long time, so I was really excited when they asked us to challenge their existing landing page tests. We took everything we saw as an opportunity, layered on our amazing copywriting team, and pushed out a beautiful page.


Why haven’t you signed up for a HOOX page yet? Our team does the ideation, formulates the strategy, wireframes the page, adds the copy, designs it, and develops it fully. Plus, this week is my birthday! So help me celebrate by purchasing a page — I love nothing more than a deal. We will be giving some free pages to those who purchase this week too. Just book a call on this link, we’ll make you an enticing offer!

That's all for this week

I hope you had an exciting weekend — it’s been nothing short of an interesting news cycle since last week’s newsletter. I know I am absolutely looking forward to getting a good sleep tonight and drinking my Dream powder!

Some of you have submitted some awesome newsletter ideas. Reply to this email or just email me directly with ideas for newsletters. I’ll buy you lunch for a full week (up to $150) as a thank you (the hardest part is coming up with a good topic that feels like it would be helpful)! 

Get a good sleep, break a sweat, meet someone new, and have an amazing Nik Sharma Birthday Week! I’ll see you next Sunday!