Hey! I know, it's not Sunday, but today I spoke at an event hosted by eCommerce Fuel, and I talked about: issues related to acquisition right now that I think are most important.

Right now as I'm writing this, it's Tuesday (yesterday) and since my best thinking comes from writing, I'm going to write out what I'm talking about (well, I already spoke this morning) and share those thoughts with you! 

Issues with acquisition:

• Loss of data has led to a variety of issues.
  • Ad platforms can't score every consumer and match that score with the exact version of ad copy and creative to get that person to convert (the benefit of the "walled garden").
  • It's hard to know which versions of copy or creative drove the most impact or highest return — we just don't see a lot of the data on this.
• Tons of brands haven't built BRAND (the external face of CULTURE) and they're struggling when it comes to continuing at the current scale.
  • Even some of the brands who've gotten huge, as a result of great performance marketing, have struggled on how they should continue to build their brand.
• Lots of brands don't know much about who their customer is, why they buy from them, the problems that are being solved by the product, how the purchase of the products affected their lives positively or negatively, and what else they want to see from the brand, in the future.
• There's not a lot of testing going on: most brands are driving directly to their website. Where are the landing pages? The point of eCommerce is to test and learn constantly, and we're not doing that with websites and landing pages anymore.
  • There is too much friction to make a simple purchase as a new customer — be confident in telling a consumer the best way to be welcomed to your brand.
  • You can't be mad about where consumers want to shop — meet them at the channels they want to shop (see below for more).
• Consumer confidence and inflation are working against DTC brands that are selling overpriced commodities. Walmart, Dollar General, and Dollar Tree's CEOs have all recently stated they are seeing an increase in mid-and higher-income consumers looking for deals, value, and savings.
• Cash isn't coming in as easy as it used to — there's less money to go grab and feed the beast. Settle, Wayflyer, etc exist, but they are much tighter with lending or have increased rates.

Solutions to a lot of these problems:

Acquisition isn't a game of just the traffic source, whether that's ads or earned media. That's just one part of the larger consumer journey to making a purchase. So what are some of the solutions to these problems:

• Better site optimization
  • Conversion rate
  • Site speed
  • Merchandising of the best products
  • App optimization
    • Using all the right apps on your website for reviews, subscriptions, upsells, analytics, surveys, etc.
    • Using the wrong apps will not only work against you with regards to site speed and functionality but also each month in the bill.
• Better email optimization
  • Email capture
  • Email flows
  • Email campaigns
  • Are they written in a way you'd handwrite messages to your customers?
  • Are the emails focused on taking customers on the journey of why the brand exists, and introducing them to new products/product lines?
  • Are you creating content for email/SMS that people can open, consume, and talk about at the dinner table? Or is it just self-serving promos?
• Testing new channels and testing in a way that's native to the channel. You can't just run your FB offer on new channels, you have to study the consumer behavior behind how a channel works well, and then replicate that for your own brand.
  • Some channels that have worked well for us recently:
  • TV (connected TV, OTT, cable — election season TV!)
  • Direct mail
  • Out of home, with the ability to retarget
  • Wild postings with upper-funnel CTAs (ex. Jolie Water Report)
  • Advertorials / Sponsored editorial content (We see ~25-40% lower CPAs with paid social)
  • Use landing pages
  • Your website speaks to one audience — your landing pages speak to many audiences.
  • Landing pages can cater offers and messaging directly to the source of your traffic — earned media, paid social, a non-brand Google ad, an influencer posting
• Be better about what people buy when they come to your brand.
  • Does it fit their needs as a consumer?
  • Do they get enough sampling of variants?
  • Is the price point on par with what they can expect in the future?
• Be more aggressive with moving OTPs to subscribers if you have a subscription business.
  • The LTV of a subscriber most likely outweighs your OTP, if they become a subscriber through the right path. For example, I've seen with a beverage that the best subscriber LTV was when someone bought the variety pack, then another individual flavor, and then subscribed.
    • We were aggressive in pushing OTPs to subscribers, but we didn't compromise the most optimized funnel, laid out above.
• Everything on your own website has to be done especially well.
  • Traffic is too expensive to not be fully optimized on your site.
  • Your homepage, collections page, product pages, slide-out cart, navigation menus, and landing pages need to be fully optimized.
    • Use tools to understand heat maps, scroll-depth of the pages, user session recordings, and optimize.
  • Your email capture should be A/B tested like crazy — don't settle for 5% or 7%. Keep pushing to beat the record.
  • Site speed has to work in your favor, not against it (another reason to use landing pages) 
• Use software to make up for the lack/lag of data that feeds the decisions around media buying.
  • Northbeam for attribution
  • Black Crow for audience scoring & segmentation
• Storytelling needs to be woven into every piece of creative, every landing page, and every email.
  • What is the brand?
  • Why does it exist?
  • How is buying from the brand going to benefit my life?
  • Why is this the best solution on the market?
  • How can I get it?

I'll let you know how this goes tomorrow. If there's anything here I missed, reply with it! I'll mention it on Sunday!

Ok time for a quick highlight on some tech I've been a fan of since I first met the Ownit team about a year ago and loved what they were building.

They allow you to run microsites using their product, Ownit (see a store example by clicking here), and this is a great hack for optimizing every dollar of paid traffic. This landing page increased conversion for Quikflip (the example linked above) by 3x.

They offered me (and now, you) 30 days to try it free with any brand. Just use NIK30 as the referral code on this page.

The best part — you can let people use Shopify, Amazon, or Walmart to checkout. The whole thing is seamless, and even though you are using Amazon or Walmart's checkout, you're able to pixel that Amazon sale to track it.

Hope this random Wednesday email was helpful. It was certainly helpful for me to write out some thoughts on what I talked about earlier today. I'm confusing myself with the present, past, and future tense now.

I'll see you on Sunday!

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