Hey you, happy New Year’s Eve!! 

I hope you’re currently pregaming your New Year’s party, with a beverage of choice in hand, this 23 page Sunday email rounding up 2023’s best insights, and you’re ready to dive in! 

This year, for the last Sunday email, I wanted to go back through all my newsletters this year and pick out some of my favorite insights from them. The result was a 23 page email, with gold. If you enjoy it, please let me know — DM me on Twitter/X or just reply here to this email — I’ll turn it into a deck and share it with you all!

By the end of Feb, I’m hoping to have a fresh website to share all my past newsletters, so stay tuned for that! Ok, I’m not gonna drag this on any longer. Let’s get into today’s newsletter…

Here are my favorite 2023 nuggets:

1. Understanding Contribution Profit 

I still think the top takeaway for most brands will be Ben Yahalom’s equation for understanding marginal, incremental, contribution profit. This is one of the more sophisticated things that we talked about this year but it’s worth understanding for all founders and marketing leaders as we head into 2024. 

I wrote 8 pages on this topic in the email titled “Lessons from Ben, the President of a $250M bootstrapped business.” 

Here’s a highlight from that email: 

The Most Important Metric in All of eCommerce

Ben strongly believes that traditional CAC and ROAS numbers don’t matter as much as we think. Instead, he believes the most important metric in all of eCommerce is: Net Contribution Margin or Net Contribution Profit. 

Ben views business as a math problem and wants to know every single detail about the true cost and benefit of every dollar spent and earned. To calculate Net Contribution Profit, you need to consider every single expense on your P&L.

Not only does this include all of your standard COGs for manufacturing, shipping, packaging, etc. + all of your standard marketing costs for creative, ad-spend, team spend, and your 3rd party vendors, but that’s not all. 

It also includes payment processing fees, any sale discounts you might be running, calculations on expected returns and exchanges, and all the other fun and sometimes “hidden” expenses for your brand.

The reason that Ben likes to do this is because it gives you a much, much more accurate picture of profitability for your brand. ROAS simply tells you how much revenue you generated in proportion to how much you spent on digital ads. Whereas, Net Contribution Profit tells you how much PROFIT you generated on a product-by-product basis (with every possible expense considered).

If you can understand these metrics and see where all of your costs are coming from, you can quickly identify initiatives that can move the needle on driving more profit for your business over time.

2. Mastering email flows:  

This one comes from my newsletter titled “Everything you MUST have ready when you launch a brand (bootstrapped edition)” where I cover everything you need to do pre-launch to set yourself for success. Beyond setting up your pixel and data passback, the next biggest component is preparing your initial email flows. Here are some of my thoughts on it below: 

When you launch, it can be challenging to have every single email flow built out from the get-go. So, here are the 3 pieces I recommend making sure you have before you launch:

1. Email capture popup on your website.

Emails should be treated as assets on the balance sheet. Once you have someone’s email, you can remarket to them with new offers and campaigns forever (or until they unsubscribe) with direct deliverability. 

When it comes to how you ask for it, you have to give something to them. You can either give them something like Jolie’s water report, or you can give a discount, which is what most brands do. 10% off when they give their email. In either case, the customer is getting something of value in exchange. 

2. Have a branded receipt with shipping notifications.

Anytime someone orders, they should receive an email that includes:

  • A Thank You Note! Start with a thank you message. Bonus points if you include the customer’s name. 
  • Order Details: i.e a summary of the purchased items, including product names, quantities, prices, and the total cost.
  • Order Number: i.e the unique identifier for the order, which is important for any future communication or customer service questions that might come up. 
  • Estimated Delivery Date: An approximate date when the customer can expect to receive their order.
  • Shipping Address: Confirmation of the address where the order will be shipped.

When their order ships, make sure they get an email with another personalized intro, followed by the shipping carrier information, and an easy link to track the package. Majority of your customer service complaints will come from people who say, “Hey, when does my package arrive?” If you can make that clear up front, you will save yourself a lot of tickets.

3. A story-forward welcome flow.

This is really an introduction to your brand and an opportunity to turn new subscribers into paying customers. They have just given you permission to pitch them on why they should buy from your store… think of it as Shark Tank but for the inbox.

I have a funny way of thinking about the welcome flow, but bear with me over these 5 emails… 

Introduce yourself to her:

  • This email is you casually saying hey — don’t get too formal but don’t be weird.
  • Timing: Send this ASAP after someone subscribes on your site. 
  • Content: Include a warm welcome message, an introduction to your brand story, and what subscribers can expect from your emails (i.e., deals, new arrivals, product guides or giveaways, etc.).

Introduce yourself to her parents:

  • Explain why you deserve a purchase… aka, speak to the benefits of what makes you better than the competition. For example, if you have a particular ingredient, tell me how that ingredient benefits my life or enhances my life.
  • Timing: 48 hours after the welcome email.
  • Content: Offer a light discount (can just be free shipping)
  • If you use a discount code, make it something easy to remember for later (i.e., FREESHIP or SAVE10)

Show off the product:

  • Timing: 72 hours after the second email.
  • Content: Highlight one or many best-selling products. Include customer testimonials, social proof, and reiterate reasons to buy.

Bring out the receipts:

  • Timing: 72 hours after the third email.
  • Content: Bring all the social proof — customer reviews, UGC, influencers who have posted, press coverage snippets, what your mom says about the product, etc.

Give them a last chance:

  • Timing: 1 week after the fourth email.
  • Content: Include a great offer to get them to purchase. Talk about what the brand is known for, show that product, and add social proof.

Give them the benefit of the doubt (if applicable)

  • There’s a chance they don’t want to buy because they don’t trust you.
  • Redirect them to buy in retailers or marketplaces you’re sold at (Target, Amazon, Nordstrom, etc.)

Having this setup properly means that you can drive sales in your sleep. It might take a few days to workshop these emails and perfect these flows. Still, this alone can dramatically increase your engagement and revenue without you having to spend another second convincing someone to buy.

3. The Value of TV. 

As you might recall, I spent quite a bit of time talking about how under-rated TV was as an advertising channel for fast growing brands in 2023. 

I wrote about TV multiple times but I wanted to pull some nuggets from my email “The 9 Page TV Advertising Bible” on WHY to run TV. Here are some of my thoughts below: 

Why TV Ads?

It’s cheaper than you think, to test. Remnant ads can be $1 to $3 CPM, to get on a prime network like ESPN or CNBC. Meanwhile on Connected TV (CTV), you’re more likely to pay $10-30 CPM, but you’re also targeting the user, not the content.

Increase in search traffic and awareness. If you’re creative does a phenomenal job explaining who you are and what the problem is that you solve for a customer, you’ll see a direct correlation to branded search traffic and inbound interest. When running a sale, by including the promo code on the creative, you’ll also see a direct impact on site traffic, sales, etc. Sales are great, but by getting someone to even type into google, “Hint Water TV” and then seeing the TV offer linked in the sponsored Google ad up top, you’re winning.

This is where it’s extremely important to have a proper funnel built out that is battle-tested. We’ve built a few TV-focused landing page funnels at HOOX, and for this to work well, we’ve found that we need to:

  • Ensure the creative on the landing page is similar to that of the TV commercial.
  • Ensure that the landing page does a good job of collecting first-party data (1P data), as quickly as possible. This might even mean running a giveaway to increase the opt-in rate of the 1P data, but remember, it’s still a pre-qualified audience if they’re on this LP from the TV commercial (they’re showing high intent here). 
  • Have a bullet-proof offer here — if you’re a consumable brand, have a higher discount to get the first purchase. If you’re a one-time purchase, play less with discounts, and more with gifts that you can add onto the order itself.
  • Ensure you communicate the credibility of the brand, the safety of customer information (those credit card secured logos and icons), what the brand is and who’s beind it, the problem you’re solving for them, and how soon they can get it if they order right away. It also doesn’t hurt to add BNPL providers listed on the page.

Overall, you have to treat TV traffic like it’s very upper TOF traffic that can leave at any time, so there’s no time to BS on the landing page. Be fully in service to the person coming to your brand’s landing page, and make sure you deliver value right away.

Increased performance on other existing ad channels. A lot of brands eventually hit a point of diminishing returns on platforms like Facebook or Google. Meaning, there’s a ceiling for when they spend their budgets, and the CPA just balloons to a point where it doesn’t make real sense to continue scaling the account budgets. Running TV expands your brand's awareness so much, allowing for you to increase the ceiling on that point of diminishing returns for your digital ads. With some brands, we’ve seen Facebook budgets increase by more than 3-4x within 18 months of turning on TV ads. 

Additionally, for the months and quarters after you run TV, it’s very common for brands to see their CPA decrease on their other existing ad channels. This is often called the “halo effect” that brings second order efficiencies to your existing digital ad spend on Meta/Google/TikTok etc. 

The infamous “as seen on TV” badge. It’s the stamp of approval that only a select few, the top 1% of retail brands, will ever have. Being a product that’s sold on TV automatically establishes a sense of trust with the viewer, as its ingrained in our mindset that “Being on TV” is a huge deal. 

4. The Power of Whitelisting

As many people know, I was super early to the concept of whitelisting and started doing it in 2017 at Hint Water. I’ve seen this exact strategy work for hundreds of brands and I’ve personally helped dozens of companies do this through Sharma Brands and Character. 

These insights come from my email “WTF is Whitelisting? Here Are 3 Easy Ways to Try It.” In the email, I talk about founder whitelisting but here are some nuggets for how to do it with influencers and creators for your brand below: 

Influencers & Creators

You’ve undoubtedly seen ads when you open Instagram, Facebook, TikTok or Pinterest where instead of an ad coming from a brand’s account, it comes from an influencer’s personal Instagram or Facebook page.

My two tricks before you start whitelisting influencers or creators are:

  1. Find someone who’s really good at speaking to you through the screen. It should feel like they’re talking to you, not just to a camera. This is one reason I really prefer working with YouTube vloggers, or good TikTok storytellers. They make you feel like they’re just talking directly to you.
  2. If you can, work with creators who have a blue checkmark; the CTR is higher. But don’t not work with creators who don’t have a blue check. 

When I did this in 2017, I had a few theories as to why it worked so well (which I still think are all true):

  • To work with verified influencers, to the average consumer, means you must be a legit brand. Though us industry people know that that may not be the case, it absolutely helps the trust/perception when someone’s never seen your brand name before.
  • If someone sees your ad, goes to your site, then a few days later sees an influencer or celebrity posting about it in their feed (as a whitelisted ad), it gives the thought of, “Huh, that’s funny, I just saw this the other day. I should look into this more.”
  • If someone is obviously a content creator, people can sense there might be good content behind the play button, and people will watch for a longer average watch time, than your brand-account videos.
  • Content creators and influencers ARE the media. They know HOW to create content that is actually thumb-stopping, entertaining, and understands the contextual setup of the platform. Their ads will get much higher engagement and CTR as a result.

All these still remain true. This does require building real relationships with content creators and influencers. You won’t find these people on an influencer marketplace… you might, but you want genuine and authentic creators to your brand and target audience, not just a content creator for hire by anyone. I usually find influencers and creators in a couple ways:

  • Just search on TikTok for the topic you’re looking to chase, and find the top voices in that category. The category might be organization, travel, cooking, etc.
  • On Instagram, look for an influencer you know is a perfect fit, and then start browsing around the comment section to see who their friends are. Usually on Instagram, like-minded influencers comment on each other’s stuff to juice the engagement and algorithm of their peers.
  • Ask the influencers you work with already who in their network or friend circle could be a good fit for content creation. The creator circles are tight and friendly. Everyone helps each other out, so if you’re basically asking who they can help get work, they will have someone for you.

5. How to make better ad creative!

IMO, great ad creative has always been and continues to be the main variable for paid social success. These nuggets come from my email “18 Underrated Tactics to Make Better Paid Media Creative” 

I shared 18 tactics in total, but here’s 6 nuggets that stood out. 

  1. Create ads that YOU would personally screenshot or share. If it won’t perform well organically, don’t make it into an ad. You might remember my email about the Broke Man’s Content Playbook… create content, test it organically, and then push it into paid. Content that won’t get shared into the group chat, isn’t content worth putting out.

  2. Let the data help you decide. If it drives sales, it’s “on brand.” There is nothing worse than a CMO saying, “That’s not on brand,” and then having their “On brand” creative perform 10 times worse. Until you are doing $50M in topline revenue, your “brand” is built by getting your products into the hands of consumers who can use and enjoy what you create.

    We use Motion to track and understand analytics behind all our clients’ ad creative. For TV, we leverage Tatari’s internal app analytics.

  3. Hire actual creators to make your content. Want amazing video creative? Go search for creators who do this for a living and contract them. If they’ve built their own audience online, making content like the ads that you want to see, they can make strong creative for your brand. If you work with content creators, don’t try to tell them exactly what to do either — you hired them, let them do their job.

    In this same bucket, I would highly recommend using Refunnel — it’s free to use and automatically saves, downloads, and categorizes any content that customers tag you in on social media. It’s perfect to repurpose in email, ads, on your site, landing pages, and more. This company just launched, and their product is great (I used it in beta). It’s also… free. If you want the paid plan, use code NIKSHARMA to save $60/month!

  4. Experiment with all mediums and formats. Until you’ve tried all the mediums and formats listed above, you haven’t tested enough creative concepts for your ads. You absolutely should be doing a “media mix” of statics, videos, studio shot, UGC, comparisons, unboxings, reviews and testimonials, story based creative, ads that are comedic, ads that are serious, founder stories, fully animated ads, advertorials, listicles, articles, holiday themed creative, influencer creative and more to see what works best for your brand. I promise that the learnings from testing all of these formats will be worth their weight in gold. 

  5. Build a “creative reference bank.” Everytime you see an eye-catching ad from another brand or creator online, take a screenshot or save the link. Obviously you don’t want to copy these ads directly, but you should be building creative references that can help inspire elements of your future campaigns. Maybe you like a color, font, hook, or something else. Save it in your creative reference bank to spark ideas for future ads.

    Within your team, I would also recommend creating an Instagram DM group for ads inspo. Whenever someone sees something good, send it in there with 1 sentence on why / what you like about it.

6. How to Increase your conversion rate: 

As everyone knows, every 1% increase in conversion rate can equate to an enormous gain in top line revenue for your brand. Earlier this year, I wrote a 10 page email titled “40 Underrated, Easy-To-Implement Tips to get a 7% Conversion Rate” where I went in depth on tons of ways to increase your CVR. 

Here’s 7 of my favorite tips from that list:

  1. Leverage more social proof from real-world humans, not just models and paid creators.
  2. Don't be so chunky with your copy — get punchy, get savvy, and focus on benefits, not just the value props.
  3. Design for mobile first. 80% of your traffic will be from mobile devices. 
  4. Write copy for mobile first, as well. At Sharma Brands and HOOX, we write all of our landing page and website copy for mobile first, then fit it for desktop after. 
  5. Make your pricing, discounts, and offers more noticeable! Do anything that you can to make the pricing and discounts pop. Use a different color font, or make it bold, use highlights, a sticker, etc. Another tip: use colored CTAs as they outperform black and white CTAs.
  6. If you sell a consumable, include your price per use. i.e. $1/bottle when you buy a 24 pack of drinks, or “Less than $1/day for a greens powder,” for example.
  7. A picture is worth a thousand words. Use a lot more of them. Also include illustrations, icons, graphs, charts, etc. Explain visually. 

7. Optimizing your above the fold experience: 

When a consumer lands on your home page and landing page, you have roughly 1-2 seconds to get them interested in your product, brand and offer. In my opinion, it’s all about your above the fold experience which is really the hook that gets a potential customer interested in learning more. Here’s how to make a great above the fold experience on your LPs in 2024. 

P.S. These insights come from my email: “The 3 EASIEST levers to increase conversion rate on your website” which you can search for in your inbox and re-read anytime. 

Your above-the-fold, homepage experience

If you think about the most valuable retail shelf space, it’s being in the aisle of what you sell, at eye-level on the shelf. With eye-level placement, someone doesn’t need to turn their head; your product is in their face. The homepage, or wherever you send your traffic to, above the fold, IS that same valuable real estate. Instead of not having to turn heads, we have one block of real estate that no one needs to scroll down. Here’s what to make sure you have:

Clear hero module. A good hero section (think the focal point of the page, above the fold) contains:

  • Clear imagery shows the product in action and the feeling you’re trying to sell. This company has a perfect example of a hero image that shows the product, what it comes in, how it looks, what you can expect as a consumer, etc. It closes the gap between what you think is showing up and what will actually show up, increasing your trust as a consumer without even realizing it.
  • A headline that sells you on the punchline and earns your interest to continue scrolling. Just having something that you would recognize in your internal marketing meetings isn’t going to sell someone who just came off the street into your store. Eight Sleep does a good job of this — from the headline, you can understand you will be cooled, and your sleep health will improve.
  • Supporting evidence. This might be a sub-heading underneath the headline, it might be 2-3 bullet points, social proof, badges or certifications, etc. This HOOX page is a good example of everything discussed so far.

You really just have to be in the mindset of, “How would I get someone from the street who saw my storefront (aka the ad or email they clicked on) to come inside and scroll?” Once you’re in that mindset versus trying just to make pretty pages, you will start winning.

8. Crushing it during Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 

As all brands knows, winning during Cyber Week (soon to be renamed Cyber Month) can be the difference between your brand being in the red or black for the year. 

I went heavy on insights about BFCM this year but here’s a really tactical section about email and SMS from my newsletter titled “9 pages of Tactical Last-Minute BFCM Strategies & Hacks” from this past year: 

EMAIL + SMS For Black Friday

According to Klaviyo, the average brand sent 11 emails during BFCM weekend with an average open rate of 49% and an average CTR of 1%. That’s only 2-3 emails per day. In my opinion, you should send more. 

A more aggressive email strategy on Black Friday might look something like this:

  1. 12:01am, you send your first email blast announcing your sale. 
  2. Between 7-9am, you send your second email blast reminding them of the sale. 
  3. At 11am, for anyone who didn’t open your first two emails, send another segmented blast. 
  4. At 12:30pm, for anyone who opened but didn’t click or convert, you should send your first text with a “Text only offer” around lunch.
  5. At 3pm, send another email telling subscribers that “Inventory is moving fast and they better act now.” 
  6. At 6pm, send a plain-text email from the founder thanking the subscriber for one of your best Black Friday’s yet and adding another offer like a free limited edition gift with purchase available on all orders now thru EOD to drive more sales.
  7. At 8pm, send one more text to anyone who has clicked but not converted and increase the discount with a new custom code. Offer an additional 5-10% off here. 
  8. At 9:30pm send one more “Last Chance” email to push for the final purchases of the night. 

Remember: Brands work the entire year to build awareness and anticipation for the Q4 sales season. When your shoppers feel ready to spend (i.e during BFCM and the holidays) you need to go all out to clear your funnel (“flush the toilet” concept from this deck) and get lurkers, visitors, and on-the-fence buyers to convert.

I feel very confident that no one will remember, in a bad light, that you sent 8, 10, or 15 emails to them 2 weeks after BFCM. But as a brand owner, those extra emails or “chances” to convert could equal a meaningful increase in revenue (and hopefully profit) for your company and team. In short, don’t be afraid to send more emails. 11 is the average. I think 15-20 throughout the weekend is more than okay, especially as long as you keep removing those clickers/buyers as you go.

Email your entire list to start: 


Most brands exclude inactive subscribers on regular sends to increase their open rates and click through rates. Don’t do this on BFCM. You should ping your entire list. As a brand, your biggest goal with email (or SMS for that matter) is to make subscribers aware of your offer in 2 seconds or less.

Put your offer in the subject line: 

This brings me to my next point. If your offer is 30% off site wide, put it in the subject line and put a massive image in the email stating your offer. Consumers want to know what offers are available so they can decide how they might want to allocate their limited budgets on BFCM between brands. Although they might not open your email, they will scan their inbox and read subject lines. Put the offer upfront and make it loud and clear. 

Use exclusions after the first 3 emails:

If you plan to send 15-20 emails during BFCM, the best way to go about it is to use exclusions and segments after the first few major blasts. If people open and click, exclude them from  various future emails that you plan to send. If they’ve converted already, exclude them. Exclusions and segments exist in ESPs for a reason. Use them wisely as you clear more and more of your funnel over the week. 

9. Nailing the holiday sales playbook: 

Each year, you get 14+ free opportunities to create meaningful marketing campaigns around US holidays that can drive lift for your brand. 

I wrote about that this past year in my email “Online Promotions 101 — the full playbook to execute.” 

Here’s are a bunch of helpful nuggets to keep top of mind as we head into 2024: 

The typical holiday calendar in the US to pay attention to is:  

  • New Year's Day: January 1, 2023 (observed on January 2 if it falls on a Sunday)
  • St. Patrick's Day: March 17, 2023
  • Easter: April 9, 2023 (Sunday)
  • Mother's Day: May 14, 2023 (always falls on the second Sunday of May)
  • Memorial Day: May 29, 2023 (observed on the last Monday of May)
  • Father's Day: June 18, 2023 (always falls on the third Sunday of June)
  • Fourth of July: July 4, 2023
  • Amazon Prime Day: Date varies each year, usually in July (official date for 2023 is not available at the moment)
  • Labor Day: September 4, 2023 (observed on the first Monday of September)
  • Halloween: October 31, 2023
  • Black Friday: November 24, 2023 (always falls on the day after Thanksgiving)
  • Cyber Monday: November 27, 2023 (always falls on the Monday after Thanksgiving)
  • Christmas: December 25, 2023
  • New Year's Eve: December 31, 2023

There are a few other holidays in the US that you could also consider but this is the primary list. If you are not in the US, you should use your own national holidays as a guide, but also remember the US takes every opportunity to make money, and theres a good chance some of these are celebrated internationally.

When thinking about promotions and sales, I like to think about all the puzzle pieces involved in planning and executing the promotion:

  • What’s the budget to drive awareness of the promotion?
  • What’s the goal (new customers, hitting monthly revenue goals, sell-through a SKU)?
  • How much inventory do I need if my sales projections are correct?
  • Where are we pushing the sale, and to whom?
  • What does my LP look like?
  • What’s my offer, copy, and ad creative?
  • And what’s my email and SMS strategy/sequence pre and post purchase?
  • How are we segmenting or tagging these customers after the sale?

This is what should be top of mind for every important sale campaign, regardless if it’s a holiday or not. All this information makes the execution of the promotion 10x easier when you get copywriters, designers, website merchandisers, and the ops team involved to help go live. 

Depending on the month and the state of your business, you could want to: 

  • Acquire new customers 
  • Re-engage lapsed customers 
  • Reward repeat customers 
  • Drive more subscriptions 
  • Sell more bundles 
  • Sell inventory that’s not moving
  • Cross-sell existing customers to a new product/category

There are a bunch of potential goals, you just have to pick the one that’s most relevant for your business at the time, and design everything around it (the offer, the merchandising, the distribution channels, etc.). I think most operators know this, but email still drives 20-30% of all revenue for e-commerce brands.

Once you’ve picked the sale day, and identified the goal of the sale, you need to decide on the product merchandising (what products are you going to push) and define the offer.

When it comes to making the offer, don’t make this too complex. Sure, you might sit at your desk and think, “We should do something really cool and innovative!” Most of the time, that’s a horrible idea. Think about how many promotional emails, texts and ads someone sees already; keep it simple (KISS), stupid. Instead of requiring someone to use their brain power to figure out your promotion, respect that you only have so much attention from someone, and use that attention to get them excited about what you have to offer. Don’t make someone spend 10 seconds trying to understand what your promotion is, or when the discount kicks in. 

Here are some KISS offer structures:

  • A percentage off one product, one collection, or the full site
  • A gift with purchase
  • Buy one get one free (BOGO)
  • Buy one get one X% off
  • Free expedited shipping, or free shipping if you don’t normally offer that
  • A new colorway or variant
  • A discounted or limited availability bundle
  • Mystery box or mystery bundle ($40 box, with $100 of value)

There are many ways to go. Pick one that makes the most sense, execute, and learn. 

10. Going Deep on Customer Experience 

This year, I collaborated with a few incredible domain experts on topics like TV, customer experience and organic social to do deep dives in my newsletter that I thought would be valuable. The last one I wanted to end with are these nuggets on customer experience from my interview with Jess Cervellon earlier this year. 


CX and retention are going to be a huge focus for many brands next year so why not end with some nuggets from my email with a great leader in the space. 

Here are some insights from my email “5 full pages/notes of Customer Experience Golden Nuggets”

When to Hire a CX Leader + The Ideal CX Org Chart 

Another big question that I get from a ton of the brands that I’ve worked with at Sharma Brands is “When should I hire a CX leader in my org?” 

For most brands, you should have done this a long time ago. In my opinion, and also Jess’s, CX should really be part of the core founding team. The right CX leader in your org is going to help you optimize every touchpoint in your customer experience/customer journey from day 1. 

Where you manufacture, what ingredients you use, what your packaging looks like, what your ads look like, what your emails look like, what your support program looks like, how you handle issues, complaints, and negative comments on social media etc are all part of customer experience! 

CX, in my opinion, is like the modern day “brand director”, overseeing everything that not only goes out from the brand, but everything that even becomes a part of the brand in the first place, too.

The best CX leaders know this and are willing to go deep into the details to make all of these elements shine for your brand. 

The CX Team Org Chart

As far as an org chart, In Jess’s view, there are a few critical roles all brands should consider when it comes to CX:

  • Head of CX
  • CX Tech Lead
  • Customer Support Lead
  • Community Team
  • CS Agents

First is your Head of CX or Director of CX. This person will set the vision and strategy for what an exceptional CX program looks like at your brand. They will also directly manage all of the other departments/CX related roles in your org. 

Next is your CX Tech Lead who is responsible for researching, testing, and implementing all of the relevant technology and tools that will empower your CX and CS workflows from end to end. These are the folks who get to decide which softwares, chat bots, and automation tools, etc that your brand should be using to make CX as seamless as possible for your company. 

Next is your Customer Support Lead who oversees ticket resolution and manages your team of CS agents who spend all day interacting with and problem solving for prospective customers, existing customers, and returning customers for your brand. 

Next is your Community Team. They are the folks responding to comments on social media, doing fun surprise and delight missions for new and returning customers, plus sending out countless DMs, likes, and emails, to make your community feel heard!

Last but certainly not least are your CS agents. These are the folks managing customer support tickets, exchanges and returns, compliments and complaints, and so much more. Depending on the scale of your business, you can have dozens, if not hundreds of full time or part time CS agents depending on the total volume of your brand. 

Someone reading this should take this framework and build an agency doing just customer experience, in this way.

What Metrics Matter When It Comes To CX?  

If you currently have a CX program in place, here’s how to know whether it’s working or not for your brand. 

For customer support specifically, the basic metrics to pay attention to are total number of tickets, average response time, CSAT, and overall NPS. 

Both qualitatively and quantitatively, if you are getting a ton of negative comments, DMs, and emails about your customer experience, then you know there’s a huge problem! 

Conversely, if customers are sharing your posts, commenting about how much they love your brand, and giving you positive reviews on their unboxing experiences, then you know your customer experience is great.

The Best CX Teams Build Strong Feedback Loops Which Rapidly Improve Your Brand 

Out of any employee or department in your org, your CX team likely has access to some of the most critical and relevant data that can help you rapidly improve your brand. 

As is probably obvious, your CX and CS leaders are in the trenches every day listening to real customer feedback, compliments, and complaints. They know (often before many others in the org) when something is working and when it’s not!

As Jess puts it, the best CX teams act as a flywheel for innovation and improvement because they have so many core insights and data points about where to streamline or double down. They can gather this feedback in real-time from their day-to-day ops, then communicate it to other departments, and help your company troubleshoot issues as soon as they arise. 

And that’s it for this year. 

*Cue the TikTok sound* “And with that, the 2023 season comes to an end!”

On to some fun stuff…

Vendor of the Week:

OpenStore — The largest owner and operator of Shopify businesses wants to send you a check.

As 2023 comes to an end, there’s no doubt many entrepreneurs are asking themselves: should I continue scaling? Should I explore a sale? Should I get myself out of the day-to-day of running my business? Well, I have good news for you: if your store nets $500k or more annually, then here’s what OpenStore can do for your Shopify business:

Buy your business: If you’re feeling ready to move on and hand the keys to someone else, OpenStore will give you an acquisition price within 24 hours, and pay you out within 2 weeks. Requesting a valuation is completely free and easy to do — try it here!

Scale your brand for you: OpenStore is the largest operator of Shopify brands in the world, and while you take some time off, OpenStore Drive will guarantee monthly payments for the next 12 months to you. You collect the check, they handle everything including marketing, customer support, inventory management, and more. 

If your Shopify store does over $500k annually, click here to see what OpenStore can do for you to make 2024 an incredible year!

LP of the Week:

If I’m being honest with you, I didn’t get time to source one and share it with you as I’ve been trying to spend as much time with family as possible. But next week, I’ll hit you with two great examples! 

That's all for this week

Well, that’s it. 18 pages later, this year’s entire library of newsletters comes to a close. What an incredible year. Thank you to the tens of thousands of readers who joined me this year on this weekly email — I appreciate you!

I’m actively working on a new website that will be hosted on WordPress. Why WordPress? Well, it’ll be incredibly easy for me to upload all these newsletters as blog posts and make it easy to link back to past newsletters or give a full library of content to people who join the list as a new subscriber. 

I hope that this year you made incredible progress as an entrepreneur, as a human, a family member, and for yourself. 2024 is right around the corner, and it’s a reset from 100% back to 1%. Pick out the 3 results you want to achieve in 2024, personally or professionally, and build a plan to hit all of it by this day, next year. 

I’m sure you’re going to be up late, but I’ll tell you a secret — there is no better way to start the year than by getting 9 hours of sleep! 

Have an incredible, safe, happy, and healthy New Year. I’ll talk to you next year!