Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this, I hope you’ve spent the better part of your Sunday studying the US Open bracket and making predictions on who’s winning. I don’t know anything about Fantasy Football, but when it comes to tennis, put me in coach! By this fourth sentence, I hope you’ve adjusted to the couch where you’re sinking in with a beverage in your hand, your feet up, and the AC on.
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been focused on tightening up the screws for our clients as we get closer to the holidays. For some, this means applying a Q4 site refresh, taking into account all the best learnings, and updating some UX/UI to create a frictionless shopping experience. For others, it’s focusing more on engaging our colder email subs or updating cancellation flows in subscription apps.
For today’s email, I want to reach into the vault of what doesn’t typically get shared and give you some nuggets from different areas we touch for clients. My newsletter covers about 90% of what we do for Sharma Brands clients; the other 10% is our competitive edge, and you need to be a client for that.
Before we get into today’s email, did you get a chance to listen to the DPA masterclass on Limited Supply? Everything from how to update your catalog without resetting learnings to what product categories actually make sense to run DPAs with, in the first place. Listen to the episode on Apple or Spotify and make sure you’re taking advantage of DPAs as best as possible.
Also, this week, I’ll be speaking at Google’s Think Retail event — an annual event Google puts on, sort of like their State of the Union on advertising/CPG as we get into the holidays. It will be held at Google’s new $3B office in Lower Manhattan, NY, and live-streamed to everyone on this link. I highly recommend signing up or sending someone from your team to take notes; as of now, they’re not planning to share the replay or slides afterward.
Vendor of the Week
AfterSell — Yes, they do slide-out carts and checkout extensions... but they also make you cold, hard cash with network offers.
If you’ve made a purchase recently on Jones Road Beauty (Miracle Balm, anyone?) or True Classic, you’ve seen that on their Order Thank You page, they have offers from other companies. Depending on your profile, it might be from Nike, Netflix, or GoPuff, and every time that shows up or gets clicked, Jones Road or True Classic generates revenue at a 100% margin.
I’ll admit I was skeptical about the Network Offers feature, given that you’re displaying other offers on the thank you page, so we ran a test. From my analysis, there was no difference in AOV or return rate of customers who were shown the Network Offers vs. those who weren’t. The only difference is that the brand made more money as a result of showing them.
Testing Network Offers is an easy way to drive incremental revenue without any hassle or negative impact on customer experience. If you want to learn more about how a supplement brand founder has leveraged AfterSell, join their upcoming webinar on September 18th!
We launch websites with AfterSell at Sharma Brands and I recommend you check it out! Click here to learn more about Network Offers and see how much more money you can make.
Let’s get to business!
For today’s newsletter, my goal is that you can read this email in less than 5 minutes, take a nugget or two back to your team, and make (at least) an extra $98,000. If you have any questions about the below, reply to this email, and I’ll get back to you! Let’s get started…
Update your cancellation flows in your subscription apps. If you’re running a site wide sale during the holidays or a discount on products people are already subscribed to, there’s a chance they will want to cancel. They know they pay $30/month for it, but it’s now on sale for $18, so why would they cancel and grab the deal, and then re-subscribe? Get around that by going into your subscription app’s cancellation flow and make it easy for people to apply the current promotion to their order, instead of cancelling. This makes it much cleaner from a cohort-reporting and analytics standpoint, and shows your customers that you’re not just leaving them behind as a subscriber.
Let your VIPs know they can apply the upcoming sale with 1 click. Your top 15% or 20% of customers should feel rewarded and close to you — they’re likely the customers that talk about you the most, post and tag you, tell heir friends, etc. Reward them! Send them an email that clicks into a script with your subscription portal, automatically applying the upcoming promotion to their subscription. So if you’re launching a 25% off BFCM sale, with one click from the email, that 25% will be applied to their next order.
Automatically apply this discount for your top 1% or 2% of customers. Tell them you value them so much that you’re going to automatically apply it to their next order, no actions are needed.
Let customers know you have an upcoming sale ahead of time. With the average holiday shopping purse size of $2,400, it’s not a bad idea to tell people you have a sale coming up. Jones Road plans to send an email to customers outlining the sale, the price, what’s going on sale, and what time it’ll be ready to shop. You can push this to your SMS subscribers who’ve purchased before, too.
With the influx of site traffic, double-check your SMS flows going out and ensure you’re not set up to overspend. Postscript doesn’t do this, but most SMS vendors will charge you for replies and for emoji usage (2-3x the credit of SMS). Don’t put yourself in a place where you’re scratching your head, wondering how your text bill tripled when sales attributed didn’t! Also, if you’re on Postscript, ensure you have onsite opt-in enabled — it’s a no-brainer.
Try running a cash-back-based promotion — it works just as well. With cash back, you’re not discounting off the gross margin; you’re giving gross dollars back, of which you may have a 40-80% margin. Similarly, running promotions where you donate a % of profit to a charity does well too. In the latter, you don’t have to discount your product, and your customers feel great about what they bought.
Ensure you have a bundle builder page or BYOB (Build Your Own Bundle) page. If you sell many SKUs (beauty, skincare, supplements, seasonings, beverages, etc.), have this page ready. This Salud BYOB page is one of my favorites. Sharma Brands did a custom design and build; there is no app with a monthly subscription behind this page.
Update your cart to be gamified and focused on selling to a net new customer. This means when it’s empty, have social proof, ideally a customer review that highlights the benefits of the product which has the highest sell-through for new customers. When something gets added, create a gamified experience to boost AOV by adding gifts or additional discounts as the UPT (units per transaction) goes up. Make sure you’re also smartly upselling complimentary products. You can do all this easily within AfterSell.
Test into any new channels you can before peak holiday time. One of the most overlooked but well-performing channels is Taboola. Taboola lets you reach millions of users across the open web in a highly engaging format. You can run ads on legitimate publishers like VOGUE; everything is performance-based. Learn more about leveraging Tabools in your media mix on this link.
Make sure you have brightly lit, beautiful, and delicious product photos. Even if you don’t sell food, your photos can still be delicious — just look at any photography on Cadence’s site. If you need last-minute shots, I recommend using Soona Studios—they’re fast, high-quality, and legit.
Scope out competitor ad libraries to ensure you’re not missing anything; also to make sure they’re not making stupid claims against your brand. So many “loser brands” run ads like this, taking shots at the category leader (in this case, Jolie). Keep an eye on them, and send a C&D while they continue to lie.
When building landing pages, build them out in Shopify 2.0. Everything becomes modular, so when you’re using Heatmap.com and realize that a specific module of the LP is helping drive conversion… with Shopify 2.0, you can immediately add that to your PDP or any other page on your site.
If you aren’t using Shopify for landing pages, I recommend using Replo to stay within the single Shopify domain. If you’re not using Shopify, then I recommend building pages on Unbounce. Both these tools are heavily drag and drop based, which is great because I can’t code!
Every FAQ section, landing page, pre-purchase welcome flow, and ad creative must answer the following 6 questions: 1. What is the product? 2. How does it benefit me as the buyer? 3. Why should I trust the brand? 4. How does it compare to other options in the market? 5. If I order today, when does it arrive? 6. What happens if I don’t like the product?
Be smart with your copywriting, don’t be fancy. Yes, there are places to be heavily “on-brand” with your copy, and don’t get me wrong, there is a way to be frictionless and on-brand. However, focus on speaking to a 5th grader with your copy. People are on their phones, they have notifications popping in, they have things to do... don’t make someone have to think about what they’re reading. There’s some good research on this topic on this link.
Double-check your ADA compliance. Make sure all your emails, landing pages, and website pages are compliant from an ADA standpoint. We all know how these ambulance-chasing attorneys who have nothing going for them in life just slap brands with lawsuits for ADA. They have a “Patient” who gets an eyesight test, pretends they can’t read the third line, becomes “Legally blind,” and then send 75 lawsuits out on the same day. Don’t be a victim of that — do everything you can to make sure you’re compliant and have documentation that you are compliant.
Make sure your affiliate programs are setup and have updated links, banners and rules around how affiliates can earn commission. For example, you want to make sure your affiliates can’t run search ads against you! Similarly, on Amazon, make sure you’re setup properly and enroll all your creators. Levanta put together a great report on Prime Day Affiliate marketing — take 15 minutes to comb through it and find some nuggets.
Triple-check your product review flows. Make sure you’re set up to collect as many reviews as possible with the rush of orders about to come in.
When you upload your product feed for a sale, don’t make a new DPA source feed! Using Commerce Manager (see here), add your sale feed as a supplementary feed. This ensures your learnings don’t reset.
Beware of sneaky ASC+ creative enhancements. There’s nothing worse than cut-off ads for a high-quality brand during peak shopping time. Make sure you check each ad’s automatic enhancements. Meta is trying to create as much weird ad inventory in order to keep us spending, but don’t get suckered into a bad spot when you can avoid it.
Ok, if I missed something good you thought of, reply to this email with it. In a couple of weeks, the new Sharma Brands website will have my entire archive of newsletters, and I’ll include all the replies!
That's all for this week
I hope today’s newsletter was fun to read. It certainly was fun to write and may have excited me to get to the office tomorrow.
Tonight is a Sunday, a school night, so make sure you get those 9 hours of sleep and go to bed hydrated. There’s nothing better than waking up from a hydrated sleep — the brain is just ready to fire on Monday morning!
I’ll see you next Sunday, the last Sunday of the summer (for us in the United States, at least), so I’ll prepare something great. Have a fantastic upcoming week!