Happy Sunday!
If you’re reading this newsletter, I hope you’ve got your feet up on the ottoman, your pinky supporting this iPhone and a beverage in your other hand. Today we’re going to dive into what innovations I am excited to dive deeper into in the new year.
By now, you probably feel caught up from the madness of BFCM. When I spoke at Google’s Think Retail event, their data scientists shared that even these in-between-holiday days are expected to be higher volume days for merchants, compared to last year. Across 50+ Shopify stores, I’m seeing that be valid. So while the promotion may not be active, it’s important to take every opportunity to maximize conversion, improve site speed, leverage better UX, and stay getting 1% better everyday.
How was Black Friday for you this year? I want to put together a report with your anonymized insights, and in exchange for filling out this BFCM Survey, I’ll send you a copy of the report. I won’t share it publicly in the newsletter when it’s finished. Fill it out here — I’ll send you a copy!
Limited Supply
This past week’s Limited Supply episode was a Listener Mailbag Q&A from the listeners. Listen to it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify!
PS, my friend Kevin’s company DreamStudio just built a new studio in my office (see here). These episodes are about to get 10x better.
Going into a new year is a time to let the tense shoulders relax, to put your desk back into standing mode, and to get excited about how you plan to innovate on your business. For today’s email, I want to focus on innovations or things to test within the marketing function. But before we get into that...
Vendor of the Week
impact.com — The affiliate platform trusted by TikTok, Uber, and 4,000 others.
Did you know that total spend on influencer marketing has grown by more than 3x since 2019? Brands are now spending close to $24B per year on influencer marketing. If you include traditional affiliates (blogs, email lists, publishers, etc), it’s even more than that.
Today, influencer marketing accounts for about the same revenue as email — 16% of total eCommerce sales. All of this data and a lot more came from this new 30 page report I just read by my friends at impact.com
impact.com is the leading partnership management platform, empowering brands to manage all of their partnerships — from affiliates and influencers to customer referrals. It’s all in one place.
More than 4,000 brands including Uber, TikTok, Microsoft and more trust impact.com to run their influencer and affiliate programs. Their software helps you track and optimize every step of the customer journey from first click to closed revenue, driving growth through one integrated tool.
If you plan to run influencer and affiliate programs in 2025 (which you should be!) you need to skim through this report.
Approaching Innovation in 2025
New Channels
As you experienced just now, running advertising toward the end of the year gets to be the most expensive time. CPMs go up astronomically doubling, even tripling, as brands compete for eyeballs on Meta, TikTok, YouTube, etc. However, on January 1st, all the big players’ ad dollars go to zero, and you have the lowest CPMs of the year. This is the best time to start testing new channels.
If you’re just focused on Meta and Google, but looking to scale further or crack the code on building more top of funnel, you should think about view-through channels.
When tracking conversions, there are two main types: click-through conversions and view-through conversions. Click-through conversions happen after you click an ad, like on Instagram or Pinterest. View-through conversions happen from knowing a user saw an ad impression, and then eventually converted within a period of time, usually 1, 7 or 30 day windows.
Because view-through channels are hard to track, most companies stick to Meta, Google, YouTube, newsletters, etc. Here are some view-through channels to test out:
-
TV — you can likely use existing assets to create a great first TV commercial (or even with a tool like Butter). CPMs on TV are low, they bring validity to your brand (not anyone is on TV), and once you find a winning creative, you can run it for months.
-
Mobile ad networks — AppLovin is all the rage for brands right now. If you’re a brand with significant scale on Meta, it’s worth a test. Check out the Haus test results for the channel on this link. It’s not as efficient for new customer orders, but that can quickly change if they add exclusion capability.
-
Advertorials — whether you do them with publishers directly (which can be overpriced), or you do it with an agency like Character, running advertorials is a great way to drive new awareness. Your favorite performance marketing brands are all leveraging sponsored editorial content, leading with entertainment and then educating customers on their product. On Meta it’s now accounting for ~22% of ad spend and helps to balance out the nCPA.
Live Shopping is another one that I am really intrigued by lately, especially seeing how so many brands were leveraging TikTok Live during BFCM. Just last night I saw Comfrt (extremely cozy hoodies) live on TikTok with ~700 people concurrently watching and commenting, all buying hoodies. What we are seeing with TikTok Live shopping is QVC, tailored to you, based on what TikTok knows about you.
If you’re not testing live shopping, you are going to kick yourself every month, wishing you started today. You don’t need to launch and have it be perfect on the first go; once you get started, you’ll find your footing quickly.
New Tactics
In addition to new channels, there are some more tactics I want to play around with in 2025. Here’s what I’m thinking about:
Video DPAs. Meta, Snap and TikTok are all going to leverage video DPAs much heavier in 2025. You might be thinking... how does one create videos for all the SKUs? Well, that’s where you use Marpipe. With DPAs, the more innovative you are on creative (either just by designing them better or using video), the more you are rewarded with better results.
Incrementality testing. Has incrementality become the new buzz word for the eCommerce world? In 2017, I ran my first incrementality test to understand how Facebook ads affected in-store sell-through. Today, while MTA and MMM attribution platforms are quite popular, more brands are coming around to incrementality as another measurement option. Incrementality testing is perfect when you have multiple points of advertising (Meta, Google, YouTube, TV, podcast, Snap, billboards, etc.), and multiple points of sale (Target, DTC site, Amazon, Walmart(.)com, Goop, etc.).
Giveaways. When we launched Feastables, I remember how wild the demand we saw was from the launch sweepstakes. Even today, the brand continues to run giveaways and sweepstakes, which generate so many organic impressions for the brand. It works well, given their distribution is so wide — you can get Feastables almost anywhere today. Ridge is another example of a brand that successfully runs giveaways. In fact, the first time I saw the Ridge-style giveaway was when I was buying FB ads (optimizing for entries) for Speed Society. The model works!
High-volume social content. Platforms like TikTok are goldmines for brands who are posting hundreds or thousands of creator videos PER day. Coupled with live shopping, the brands implementing this strategy are scaling with 7 and 8-figure-per-month TikTok Shop sales. If you want to learn more about this, reply to this email. Maybe I’ll go deep on how I’m seeing brands do this, before the rest of the world finds out.
Product collaborations and product drops. Launching a new product always works in your favor to drive new customers to the brand and find new audiences. But, leveraging the brand equity of a similar-minded brand, adds so much legitimacy, social proof, content-ability, and excitement to both brands. Whether it’s Good Time Hotel and Snif, On Running and LOEWE, or Prince and Vacation, collabs are fun for everyone, and another reason to talk about the brand everywhere.
Leveraging More AI
Going into the new year, I want to see where I can begin to leverage AI more. Here are some thought-starters and ideas of where I would want to play with it:
-
Within ads manager. Can AI understand patterns of ads that find success/scale and be quicker to identify winners/losers earlier? Can I have a daily creative brief written based on what ads are performing well across the account or multiple business managers?
-
Within creative. I don’t think AI will replace the brains of a creative strategist and talented performance ad video editors... but I do believe tools like Sora and Butter will speed up the ability to generate ads and generate high volumes of them.
- Within site optimization. How can I use a trained AI agent to tell me exactly what to update on my site to maximize conversion rate, based on traffic patterns and conversion data? How can I have an agent who replicates the top 1,000 ways a user interacts with our site and go through it daily to test for bugs or glitches before customers see it?
-
Within email and SMS. How can we send proactive text or email messages, all personalized 1:1, based on everything we know about a customer? This is also why collecting customer zero-party data (more info/traits to attach to their customer profile) is so important.
-
From tools like BlackCrow. This is not an ad, although Black Crow has been a newsletter partner of mine before. But leveraging Black Crow’s email AI product and Alia’s pop-up tool, we see a 12-15% email opt-in rate. BC uses AI pattern recognition to understand, based on how a user interacts with your website, when the best time to show them the pop-up is; then Alia’s pop-up is entirely optimized to maximize opt-in conversion rate.
How else are you think of leveraging AI or any new innovation in the new year? Reply here and I’ll share an updated article with any additional ideas I receive.
