Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this, I hope you’re sitting back, feet up, beverage in one hand, and phone in the other. Today we’re going back into the Broke Man Mindset (“BMM” as I’m calling it) because whether you’re a $10k a month or a $10M a month business, this will make sense.
Before we get into that, did anyone catch the New York City campaign with Snif and Long Wknd? Remember that personal care brand I bought last year, we launched our first product (before rebranding and relaunching this summer) with Snif, and we’re almost sold out. We launched a Butter Bar — a lotion bar, smooth as butter and smells out of this world. If you know how good Snif scents are, then you know this bar will smell amazing. It’s only $18. Check out the collab product on this landing page.
This past week’s Limited Supply episode was also a great one - did you catch it? We talked all about Honest Company’s marketing, PRIME (Logan Paul’s drink), Cost Caps vs Bid Caps, and more. Check out Limited Supply on Apple or Spotify. PLEASE leave us a review if you have two spare minutes!
Ok, let’s get into today’s newsletter…
Over the last few weeks, the Sharma Brands team has been cranking out homepages for some of our clients. Lowering the paid media CPA means taking the entire customer journey needs to be fully optimized. When people want to lower their CPA, it means everything needs to be rethought, not just what’s happening on the traffic side of things. Everything from the website to the email capture and the subject lines of the flow to how the education is laid out on the page you send traffic to.
Side note: if you want to get your page completely roasted, you can set up a HOOX demo call, and we can talk through it live or drop it in the #landingpage-feedback channel, and 161 active members from the Limited Supply Slack community will drop feedback. We have over 2K+ people in the Slack now!
This past week I tweeted the Broke Man’s Content Playbook, which has me in the “Broke Man” mindset. So this got me thinking about the Broke Man’s Acquisition Funnel. That’s what I’m going to write about today. This is pretty universally applicable whether you’re a small/new business or you’re doing $500M a year.
Here are the key components:
- A killer offer
- Social proof
- Shop sections
- FAQ
- 1P data capture
- F-Shaped UX
- Accent elements
Personally, I am a fan of just using the homepage for this entire exercise. The homepage should be the most optimized landing page you use and constantly evolve based on learnings from landing pages. Especially as a bigger brand, when you’re on channels that don’t always have a direct click to the site, your homepage should be the net that catches and ensures everyone knows where they can go.
The Offer
The offer you put out for new customers needs to make sense to your customers, not make sense to you. Even numbers, clear discounts, easy-to-understand offers, and coupon/discounting/gift-redeeming that doesn’t take more than 5 seconds to read and process. Anything longer, and you are at high risk for abandonment.
In merchandising what’s in your offer, you also need to be scientific about what you’re trying to curate to sell to a new customer, why you’re pushing that offer, and how that offer plays a role in the customer. With landing pages, we keep the offers very custom to the audience you’re going after. An Outdoor Enthusiast merchandised offer would be very different than the Young Professional’s persona and offer. But with homepages, you want to think one level above the individual personas and more broadly. What offer can you push that you know has the highest chance of converting a new customer?
My favorite example of this is Hint’s 36 bottles for $36 offer. It hasn’t changed since launching it five years ago. Why? Because the offer makes sense immediately: 36 bottles, $36. Just $1 per bottle. You want two types of people to be able to understand the offer: a drunk person and an old grandparent. If they can, everyone else will too.
Social Proof
This is where you help remove the barrier to convert in people’s mind. The entire job of social proof is to tell people, “Hey, it’s okay to buy because look at all the other really smart and sophisticated people and media publishers that loved it, and here’s why.”
In that mindset, you can choose the exact quotes, logos, snippets, etc to publish as your social proof. You want social proof every few sections of the page. It’s like a constant reminder over the shoulder of safety.
Customer reviews are another amazing form of social proof for your site. The best reviews are ones that you can’t fake. Things like real tweets showing love for your product, IG posts from happy customers showing you off, or embedded TikTok videos from random customers.
Side note: Customer content is also great at highlighting what people are surprised about most, which signals what you should focus more on in your marketing as a brand.
Shop Sections
The shoppable sections should occur at least twice on the homepage. The first one should focus on your offer or your best seller — what you think most people have come for on their own. The second section can be more of a carousel, highlighting other featured products or categories someone can shop.
If you have multiple products to display, make sure to show them in an organized grid. Include product titles, review counts, the review stars, pricing, and “best seller” or “award winner” labels, and make all of it clickable to the PDP. Many “dead clicks” happen in this section because not all of the elements automatically lead to the PDP.
In the shoppable sections, you also want to constantly reiterate the benefits of the product. I recommend using iconography to help explain visually quicker.
FAQ
The next must-have is an FAQ section.
Every single FAQ should answer these simple questions.
-
If I buy, when will I receive my product?
- How do you handle returns/exchanges?
- Where is the product sourced from/made?
- What’s inside the package/box?
- What’s the size, weight, and expiration date?
- What are the ingredients in the product?
- What allergens are in your product?
Not having an FAQ is an easy way not to achieve a sale. Just answer these questions, and your customers will feel like they have everything they need to make an informed purchase from your brand.
1P Data Capture
If you’re getting traffic to your site and not doing all that you can capture email addresses, then you’re leaving money on the table, and you only have yourself to blame for that.
Obviously, the vast majority of people who visit your home page aren’t going to buy your product on the first visit (or ever) and many won’t subscribe to your emails but if you are sending paid traffic, you are doing yourself a disservice if you don’t add an email popup to your homepage.
The best email pop-ups aren’t just a one-step collection, they also get one level of zero-party data. If you go to the Love Wellness website, when you submit your email into the pop-up, you select why you’re there in the first place. This data routes customers into more specialized email flows, increasing your chance of a conversion.
Pro tip: Any time you run a discount with your site, match that offer text in your email pop-up.
F-Shaped UX
In 2017, Nielsen released an article about the web's F-shaped reading pattern. The study basically shows that readers look horizontally first, then up and down vertically, then horizontally again, forming an F-shaped pattern with their eyes on the page. You have strong buy-in at the top but very quickly lose the attention. Your most eye-catching information needs to fall into the F.
With the F shape in mind, I would place the text on the top left, an image on the top right, and key icons/headers on the left side as your visitors scan down the page. In every section, you should re-apply the thinking of the F-shaped scanning.
Accent Elements
Beyond the sections I mentioned above, I think the finishing touches are all about adding accent elements like slick icons, videos, animations, etc.
Just think about it. Sharing your homepage is like giving a keynote about your brand to a stadium of 1,000 or 10,000, or 100,000+ people as you scale.
As soon as you start running paid traffic, you will have attention to your site.
Wouldn’t you want to ensure all the accents and details are as good as possible?
Ask yourself:
- Where can I use icons instead of words?
- Where can I use illustrations, photos, videos, or UGC content instead of text?
- Where can I add some design flare that really makes the page pop?
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Where can I swap out value propositions to become benefits?
- Am I leaving any room for uncertainty?
- Am I creating the picture of the brand someone is excited to become a part of?
These can all be fun ways to spice up your page before you launch. At the end of the day, you should focus on CVR over almost everything else, but these are some of the final additions that I would consider.
I hope that today’s email was written with clarity and is helpful. Now, onto some fun stuff…