Happy Sunday! This past week in Austin was a whirlwind. I hope you’re sitting on a plushy couch, your feet up, and a beverage in your hand. Today’s a long one.
I attended The Whalies (and won best new pod) caught up with a ton of friends and fellow founders, and had some epic late-night convos on the state of DTC.
Buckle up, because we’re about to get tactical!
For those of you that don’t know, The Whalies was a 2 day conference hosted by Triple Whale in Austin, Texas. They gathered ~175 smart DTC founders and marketers to discuss the state of commerce in 2023.
Speakers hosted panels and presentations on paid media, conversion rate optimization, subscription, stretching every dollar on a bootstrapped budget, and more. I had a blast and will definitely be back next year.
Now... Let’s get into it.
This email is definitely for you if you’re an early stage brand currently doing or trying to achieve $1-$5M in TTM (Trailing Twelve Month Revenue)
I hope this email inspires you to try something new or helps you finally crack the code on your customer acquisition funnel going forward.
The takeaway is simple: Do less, better.
I believe that more brands need to eliminate unnecessary distractions and double down on what’s already
working to succeed. You need to focus when you’re under $5M in annual revenue.
There’s no way that you can do everything at once. Pick a product, a channel, an avatar (or ideal customer profile) and get to work. You need to test and iterate rapidly and try to master this sales sequence before you attempt to expand.
During my time at The Whalies, it became obvious to me that way too many people are focused on way too many marketing activities and it’s the #1 thing holding them back.
Instead of trying to be world class at SEO and influencer marketing, and paid ads, and physical retail, and selling B2B, and partnerships and collaborations, and doing pop-up shops and events, all at the same time, they just need to focus on creating a funnel that actually works.
Now that’s easier said than done, but here are a few tactics to try.
For context, we recently did this with a client at Sharma Brands in many verticals, and it works. One specific brand I advise was a team of 1 FT person, the founder, who did all of this on their own.
They went from $0 in revenue to $30K/day and $300K on Black Friday in just 24 months.
They didn’t have a celebrity founder, they didn’t have any press, and they didn’t raise a massive round. They just had a great product, and a simple and clear funnel, that worked.
My team and I had weekly meetings with the founder and they weren’t asking me how to do pop-up experiences or buy billboards in LA or NY. They were asking me how to improve the core offer, messaging, creative, landing page strategy, targeting, and more.
You know, the tried and true stuff that actually performs
Together, we tested like crazy and iterated as fast as possible until we had a winning funnel and formula to scale.
And once their funnel was working, we didn’t immediately try to launch a new product or immediately test 10 other channels or immediately try to unnecessarily expand. We just squeezed the juice out of what was already working and scaled them to becoming a profitable 8 figure DTC brand.
Here’s the “simple playbook” that everyone should focus on:
Paid Media
In my opinion, when you are just starting out and trying to find profitable product-market fit, you should focus on running FB + IG ads exclusively until you crack the code.
Don't even think about turning another channel on until you can profitably spend $5K/day on Meta.
Why FB + IG you ask?
- They have the fastest feedback loops
- They are the fastest channels to learn and optimize
- They are the easiest to setup and get started
- You can start with ~$2500/day and get insights quickly across 2-3 audiences.
To do this, you should be utilizing a manual ads manager setup.
When you are just getting started, your pixel is not well trained, so you can’t expect it to optimize perfectly vs the more automatic campaign setups that Meta offers.
Paid Social Creative:
Again, you have to stay simple here. Please don’t get too fancy, and don’t think your creative needs to be perfect for posting! This isn’t going on a billboard or national TV. You need to move fast and test new ads and angles to see what sticks.
IMO, you should be making Tik Tok style videos showcasing the use of the product, how it works, what problem it solves, and how soon someone can get it.
These videos should be so good, that they’d perform well even if you posted them organically. If you don’t think they would (i.e. they don’t have a strong hook, they don’t explain the product well, or they don’t tell athink they would (i.e. they don’t have a strong hook, they don’t explain the product well, or they don’t tell a compelling story), then don’t run it. There is simply no time to spend money on driving traffic to lackluster creative at this stage.
Use Data To Your Advantage:
The CPMs for pushing static ads are about ~50% lower than video right now, so you can test more messaging using text overlays on your creative to see what works.
I’d personally recommend:
- Testing different styles of photography — including lifestyle, studio shot, UGC, etc
- Testing different styles of overlay copy — including reviews, one-liners, comparisons, and various value props
And then, go work with some actual creators!
We all know that organic, non-commercial style content performs the best — but don’t fake it.
Go on TikTok, search for the product that you’re selling (i.e. “leather purses” or “iPhone cases”) and reach out to the people that are already creating compelling content in the style that you're searching for. This shouldn’t cost more than $500/creator for good content (videos + imagery) to test. If it starts working, go back, and create more.
As an early stage founder you need to get scrappy to succeed. I would also personally email customers to ask for reviews and what they liked about your product.
Take those insights and use it to inform the copy in your next set of ads and overlays. If you literally can’t think of what benefits to write, then go to Chat GPT and say “Go through online reviews of natural deodorant, and find out what benefits people love the most” and take the best nuggets from there.
Website Optimization
It’s obvious that website optimization is one of the most important attributes for increasing sales and conversions for your brand at any stage. This is exactly why we started HOOX because we’ve seen the mind- blowing results that simply changing or optimizing your LP experience can bring. The goal is to make a landing page that’s educational, entertaining, and easy to use. You need to explain what you sell, why it matters, how it can improve the lives of your prospective customers, and how long it takes to get the product you sell. Bonus points if you have some compelling testimonials, press mentions, videos, and other social proof.
Beyond that, here are some of the basics that I think everyone should follow.
1. Nav Bar: You have to have a clear navigation bar. It needs to be unbelievably easy for new customers to shop your site or find the latest offer, or your best selling products, etc. I often think that if your grandparents would struggle to understand or buy from your store, it’s probably not simple or optimized enough.
2. In-Cart Upsell: I also strongly recommend testing various in cart up-sells. I personally recommend the Rebuy app for this, but there are a few other tools. If you want to increase AOV, you should experiment with making it as easy as possible to add a last minute upsell directly to your cart. For example, if you buy an iPhone case, you might have an upsell for an Airpods case or an iPad case too. Simple one- touch upsells or cross-sells are one of the most effective ways to boost AOV + add material margin to your brand.
3. Post-purchase upsell: Similar to in-cart upsells, you should also try pushing for another item to be added post-purchase. Shopify holds the payment token for a few minutes post-purchase, so customers can just click “add” to an offer and it will add the item to their order, and there is no need to check-out again.
A few popular upsell ideas include:
- Buy another unit for 20% off
- Buy 3 more for 50% off
- Add XYZ adjacent product with one click, etc.
There are a number of things that can work.
Update the UX/UI and copy of your site:
It’s pretty amazing, but just updating the copy, offer, and story on your site can make a big difference to CVR. I’d recommend using a tool like Microsoft Clarity to look at 3 things:
- Heatmaps: These will tell you where people spend the most time on your site reading and clicking, and where they hover their mouse to read or dig into the copy or offer that you wrote.
- Scroll-depth maps: This tells you where people start to leave or bounce. Once you understand which sections make visitors bounce, you can rewrite and/or re-optimize the UX/UI to reduce the bounce rate overall.
- User recordings: Watch these and look for patterns in the sessions. You’ll find that people tend to hover on certain sections, or have similar behaviors that drive conversions or drop-off. Focus on fixing these sections first in order to plug any existing holes in the customer journey on your page.
If you’re not sure how to do this yourself or would rather work with a team who’s done this 100+ times for hypergrowth brands, consider working with us at HOOX to get it done.
Our LPs have added 10s of millions in profitable DTC revenue for high-growth businesses and we’d love to help you as well. Depending on your engagement and revisions, it takes roughly ~4-5 weeks to go from an initial concept to a live landing page that you can begin driving traffic to.
Here are a few more tactical ideas on landing pages that can help your brand.
Our LPs have added 10s of millions in profitable DTC revenue for high-growth businesses and we’d love to help you as well. Depending on your engagement and revisions, it takes roughly ~4-5 weeks to go from an initial concept to a live landing page that you can begin driving traffic to.
Here are a few more tactical ideas on landing pages that can help your brand.
- Optimized PDPs — this example is one of my favorites for an optimized PDP. For the purpose of driving paid traffic, it’s worth duplicating the PDP multiple times and trying to be as aggressive as possible around testing variants for copy, imagery, product education, offers and benefits, etc on your LP.
- Listicles — Good listicles can have a 35%+ CTR and they’re a great way to get cheaper traffic when you are just starting out. You know you have a good listicle when you feel like someone can read it, and use it to justify why they bought something to their annoyed husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend etc :)
- TikTok instant pages — These are TikTok’s in-app landing pages that you can build in the TikTok ad library. Again, If you don’t have FB figured out, I don’t recommend doing this, but I wanted to mention it because if you have a TikTok account that’s doing well for your brand, you should build an LP on TikTok Instant Pages to amplify some of your existing top performing content to see how it performs.
LP Essentials:
- Include a comparison chart for how your product or service outperforms competitors
- Social proof — include reviews, press quotes, user-generated content, etc
- Include how the product works, key value props, and benefits
- Include the ingredients or what comes in the box
- Include an FAQ section (and make sure to include info about shipping and returns)
- Include videos or UGC that shows the product in action
Messaging Optimization:
The hardest part about starting from zero isn’t making assets, it’s messaging.
Most people get stuck testing very basic value props. For example, if you sell natural deodorant you might feel compelled to push messaging around the natural ingredients, using less harsh chemicals on your body, etc.
But really, you should be looking for unique angles to build a story in the customer’s mind first, before you hammer home the additional benefits and value props. For example, a better lead would be: “The only natural deodorant that still smells great after a 5-mile run.”
This is a clear and specific angle that speaks to a broad range of athletic individuals. Any athlete knows that running 5 miles leads to a significant amount of sweat. If this deodorant still works after 5 miles, that’s a fantastic mental image to paint in someone’s head for why they might want to buy.
You also have to make sure that you cover objections that people might have and you must make the shipping/return policies very clear to your consumers.
They need to know when the order ships, where it ships from, where the product is being made/manufactured, and how long it takes to arrive. Generally, operators/founders are drinking their own Kool-Aid here and they forget some of these essential details.
If you ignore the critical exercise of messaging iteration, it’ll be really expensive to acquire customers from day one.
Email and SMS
Beyond getting someone to buy, the next best thing is to get them to stay engaged. Beyond optimizing for sales, you should be optimizing for first-party data and relationships through email and SMS. If they don’t purchase today, that doesn’t mean that they’ll never purchase in the future. You just might need to nurture them for a while with a few emails, offers, and texts, to close the deal.
On every site that you build, you should have a way to capture a visitor's contact information, even if they don’t complete a sale. This typically means an email and SMS pop-up that triggers immediately when you arrive on the site or, upon some action, like once you have scrolled 30% down the page.
Generally if you have less than 10% of visitors entering their email to stay up to date, you have some work to do.
If you are able to capture someone’s email and phone number, make sure that your marketing messages work in tandem. Don’t just copy and paste the same email and send it as a text. Do something unique and leverage the channels properly to deliver relevant content to each.
For SMS and Email, here are a few flows that every brand should have:
- Abandoned cart reminders
- Post-purchase education and intro to the brand
- Time based offers, that you can send one month post purchase, 3 months, 6 months, etc
- A custom birthday offer (if you are able to capture this info)
- And there are plenty more
By not turning these on, you’re doing your paid traffic a disservice. If you don’t know how to set these up, just use the templates available in Postscript, Klaviyo, etc to get it done.
Campaigns:
As you build your email + SMS list, you’re going to need to think about campaigns. Obviously this includes things like holiday offers and BFCM, but it should also include interesting content along the way. Remember, not every piece of creative needs to have a sales objective.
Share articles, lifestyle tips and tricks, listicles, news of a new partnership or something else. You should aim to create content that can be brought up at the dinner table. If you’re always trying to sell, you’ll lose your open rate quickly and readers will lose interest in opening further emails from your brand.
Merchandising, pricing, and offer testing
Ok, now you’re driving traffic, capturing emails and nurturing leads.
At this point, you need to test a ton of things within the actual “shop section” to boost CVR.
The shop section is the section of your PDP where you choose what color/size/scent/flavor you’re buying, and hit the infamous “add to cart” button.
Here you need to:
- Test offers of % off or $ off — go with the one that sounds like a better deal.
- Test GWP’s (gifts with purchase) and see if that drives a higher conversion rate
- Test different pricing with different landing pages
This is often something that people don’t try or know how to do. Instead of overcomplicating it, just make it easy. Use landing pages to separate the traffic and test different price points. See what people buy with, and move forward with that. Don’t get stuck trying to figure out the most scientific and accurate way to do it. Just test and learn and go from there!
- Test bundles with multiple products at a higher discount
There is a bunch of things that you can do. Give these 4 a try and respond to this email telling me which one worked best for you.
Social Proof:
Social proof is another key element to add to your LP once you have it.
The best examples include:
Adding reviews:
Focus on building a good reviews funnel from customers who order and receive your product. Be ruthless about emailing them asking for a review — tell them you’re a new business and that their review (good or bad) can dramatically help you improve.
Creators + UGC
Similar to what I mentioned above — send creators your product and get them to unbox it, make videos, talk about it, share what it feels like, how it helps them, why they like the product, who they would recommend gifting it to, etc. Adding this content to your site can boost conversions dramatically overnight.
Okay, that’s all for today.
I tried to put on a master class with actual specific tactics and tricks that can help you get your first $1-5M in sales. Some of these tactics and tricks aren’t as “sexy” as cool brand partnerships or events, but they work. Stick to the basics, and do them incredibly well, and I think that you will be surprised at the performance your brand receives.
On to some fun stuff...
Vendor of the Week:
Tapcart — The secret weapon behind some of the most iconic brands and celebrities, powering a seamless, mobile, shopping experience.
Ok, have you ever been to Tapcart’s site and seen their pricing? Unlike some of the software vendors that we won’t directly name, Tapcart is really well priced. Not only that, but Tapcart’s team also takes care of most of the lift when it comes to building an app (design, development, submitting into the app store, etc) and they’ll help you build an app in 2 weeks.
If you’re in the categories of fashion, health + wellness, or food & beverage, you should absolutely have an app — there is an ROI of at least 15x on average for brands in these categories. Jewelry and beauty are two other categories that crush with a mobile app. But... why does Tapcart work so well from an ROI standpoint?
- Push notifications
- Exclusive product launches
- Real estate on someone’s phone
- One-click checkout (with Apple Pay)
- Instant page load speed
If your brand is doing more than $5M in revenue and you want to maximize the LTV of the customer cohort that is your best 5-10% of customers, I highly recommend looking into building a mobile app. You can sign up for a demo on this special link, and if you build an app with Tapcart, they’ll give you 2 months of free usage. I promise you’ll realize that it only adds to your bottom-line (and you don’t have to pay for push notifications).
Click here to book a demo with Tapcart, today!
LP of the Week:
This week’s LP of the Week is a really special one for me, personally. I grew up eating the rice cakes from Lundberg Farms with almond butter and jelly as a pre-workout or post-school snack after coming home.
This page is exciting not only for that reason, but also because the HOOX team did such a great job displaying a number of products on a page, in an efficient manner. You can add products to the cart, and see the gamified cart in action, too.
If you’re ready to start optimizing your funnels, click this link and book a demo with HOOX today. Or, if you’re ready to just get started, make a purchase on this page, and we’ll get you kicked off ASAP.
Job of the Week:
Ghostwriter, Executive Branding @ Workweek
Has anyone ever told you that you’ll never land a job by spending so much time on Twitter? Here’s your chance to prove them wrong.
Workweek is hiring a Ghostwriter to join its Executive Branding team. You’ll have the opportunity to collaborate with a roster of highly-accomplished ghostwriting clients, including industry experts, entrepreneurs, and content creators. You’ll create Tweets, memes, and long-form content; taking clients’ best ideas and sharing them with the world.
That's all for this week
Thanks for sticking with me today — it was a long one, I know. For those who have a bigger business size and want to hire a team like Sharma Brands to do everything mentioned in this email, drop a note on this page.
Today’s email was really inspired by the late-night conversations I had with other people who attended The Whalies and spent late nights with me in the hotel lobby just jamming on their business.
I’m excited to be back in NYC this week, onboarding some new HOOX team members as well!! I hope you get 9 hours of sleep tonight, feel rested & refreshed, and have an amazing upcoming week.
