Happy Sunday.
I hope you are having a great weekend. This may be my last newsletter for at least a few weeks, my wife and I are expecting this week!
Anyways, today I want to talk about our favorite subject, ad creative (and a few other things). It's always a focus, but about now it's all I am thinking about. Specifically volume of creatives. But before we to, I want to thank today's sponsor Loop Returns. The post-purchase experience can be a source of frustration for both consumers and eCommerce operators. With customer acquisition costs rising and challenges to logistics cropping up this year, merchants need every opportunity to keep shoppers happy while safeguarding margins. Loop flips post-purchase on its head, giving Shopify merchants an opportunity to turn every customer touchpoint - from returns to tracking and more - into an opportunity to drive revenue.
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One thing I am learning very painfully is just how much creative is needed at scale. We’ve historically had very good performance even with less than other brands produce for creative. But I am realizing that to get to that next level of scale, we're really going to need to ramp up our creative volume. We've been under-resourced for creative and design support until now. I’ve built a really strong team of marketers, but they've been hamstrung and haven’t received the necessary design creative support to do everything we need to do. While we’ve managed and done pretty well, I’ve realized that many roadblocks in our organization and on our testing roadmap stem from creative bandwidth constraints.
This goes for ads, as well as retention and ecom. On each of those, our focus is both on ramping up volume of testing, as well as taking bigger swings. I'll touch on how we're thinking about volume and big swings for each below.
Sean mentioned on Operators that DTC is really a game of making more ads and more products, and I've been thinking about that a lot lately. We also need better products and better ads. need more products and better ads. So right now we are solely focused on making more ads, sending more emails, and testing more things on our site while also taking bigger swings in all of those areas as well. Here are some of what we're up to:
Retention
Volume - We've learned that when we send more emails, we make more money. Easy enough to do right? There are a few issues. First, while we do see more revenue as email volume goes up, so does unsubscribe rate and revenue per message decreases. What we need to do is segment more so we can send more total emails, but keep them highly relevant. To do this, it just requires more bandwidth. We recently brought on a remote retention manager under of Director of Retention, and as of tomorrow we have 2 new designers starting. This will enable us to send more, more segmented emails to maximize total volume while keeping the emails highly relevant.
Bigger Swings - We also have a lot of strategic retention things to do. To be honest, our lifecylce program is underdeveloped for our size of business. Our current Director is great, but prior to her joining we did not have anyone with great strategy insights so our lifecyle flows leave a lot to be desired, and are leaving a lot of money on the table. They're underdeveloped, and too educational. The first thing we did when our newish Director joined was have our data analyst to a thorough lifecyle audit to help us identify the best plan of attack. We found a few thing that most consumable brands will; the biggest opportunity is to turn 1 time buyers to repeat buyers, people are most likely to re-purchase within 7-10 days, and people are most likely to buy the same item. A lot of those are counterintuitive and if you were building a lifecycle program without data, you may set it up incorrectly which is what we initially did. I am excited about revamping these, but they will take a lot of design bandwidth to design and test multiple flows and branches.
Ecom
Volume - More tests. To me, there's almost no excuse to not have multiple tests running on your site at all times. The key here is balancing smaller, easy-to-implement tests with larger, big swings tests (you could say this is true anywhere.). We follow the ICE framework; which is to rank and prioritize tests in a roadmap by Impact, Confidence, and Effort. Ideally you want to start with any tests that are low effort, high confidence, and high impact but those are few and far between. What we try to do is have some bigger swing tests that are high effort but high potential impact in the works (more on them below), and some low effort and moderate impact tests. The bigger swing tests often require design and dev, and can take weeks to months. We don't want to be sitting idle while these are in progress, so we want to have a round or two of lower lift tests running to pick up some small wins while we wait. To help with volume, we recently started with a great new dev agency. They have dev, design, and CRO all in one which has really improved efficiency. They're also about half the price of our old shop, so we're able to get double the hours for the same price which helps us hit some of our volume goals. If you want an intro to them, let me know!
Bigger Swings - I wouldn't say we want to do a whole site overhaul, but at the end of the year I want our current and new site to be unrecognizable. We will do this by testing one page at a time. It would take forever if we just changed one element at a time, so we're going to overhaul each page, but we will test it against the current one, and then we will iterate on them assuming they beat our control. We're starting with Heatmap data, user research and surveys, and lots of auditing and feedback. We are starting on PDP, then we will re-do some landing pages, then get to homepage and collections pages. We have two main heuristics which are guiding our PDP redesign; which is to make it easier to help people find their shade and that if something is nested and is getting clicks, we want to try building it into it's own section and making it not nested. I am very excited about some of these; we just finalized design on the new PDP and are pushing it to dev now. We also just finished a pretty big Nav rebuild, which we will also move to dev while we get started on some homepage and landing page redesigns.
Ads
Volume - More ads, and better ads. For more ads, it's pretty simple. We just hired a great new Senior Director of Creative Strategy. My job now is to get out of her way, but first to give her the resources she needs. Right now we have a lot of footage that a great strategist can work with to create a bunch of ads to test, so my first move was to bring on a few video editors. We just had two start, and we are likely bringing on 2 more. We are also going to be bringing on several new agencies to help us ramp up volume, because we just need that much as we scale up budgets. Right now we have 2-3 static/design partners and 2 video creative agencies. We will likely bring on 3-4 other video agencies and hopefully we'll get a batch from each of them weekly or bi-weekly at the least.
Bigger Swings - Creative volume is one half of the battle; creative diversity is the second part. At the end of the year, I want to look at our ad library and have it look like several brands. Not what the brand team wants to hear, but it's what is required for success. We want to have a well-distributed creative portfolio that has a mix of studio videos, funny videos, short influencer videos, creator or influencer testimonials, micro creators, macro influencers, publisher whitelisting, statics, and more all across multiple categories and messaging angles. This is perhaps the most important thing that we are focused on right now. This does go hand in hand with the above; one reason for bringing on so many agencies is to help with diversity. Some that we will bring on specialize in direct response ugc, some help with influencer ads, some funny studio videos, and a few statics ones. We are going to be putting our money where our mouth is. We'll test over a hundred ads a week across 40+ weekly concepts with varying styles and formats when it's all said and done. Just need a few months to ramp it up.
If you have a great creative agency recommendation, please reply or hit me up on X (hopefully my account is back by then)
Partner Of The Week - Ok, you might be thinking how is Cody affording all of these new hires? Well first, some of them are backfills from roles we previously had filled but no longer do. But, that and we've been working with a new recruiter who exclusively sources LATAM remote roles. We're a bootstrapped, profitable brand so we don't have endless budgets to spend on building a team so we need to be really smart about it. Our leadership team of Directors is in office in New Jersey, but we are building our creative and support roles oversees, mainly in LATAM. This allows us to get great talent at significantly reduced fees which A) saves money but B) allows us to hire a lot more team members to help us with all of our volume goals. A bit about the recruiter Proppel; the founder Leandro is a great guy who was born in Argentina and had his own marketing agency and DTC brand. He's been hiring in LATAM for a decade and has built up a strong network and learned he really loves this function.
We just started working with Proppel (Leandros' firm) this year and we've already filled 4 roles; 1 editor, 2 designers, and 1 retention manager. To say I'm impressed with the quality of talent he has sent over is an understatement. Their English is great, they are working our time zones, and many of them his team has sent over have worked for some of the top DTC brands and agencies previously. Remote/oversees work is not just VAs, we've hired some mid level talent with years of experience at very reasonable rates. The candidates are throuroughly vetted by Proppel, so we've only had to sift through a few resumes for each role which has saved a ton of time. They specialize in marketing, creative, and operations roles. They also have a 3 month satisfaction guarantee, so there is no risk. I highly recommend working with Proppel to help staff some of your remote needs like we have done. They usually fill roles in 2 weeks, and they normally charge a one off fee of 20% of the applicant's salary. But, they are good people so they offered to take 10% off for any of my newsletter readers when you ue this link. But you must inquire before Friday, February 14th to take advantage of the offer. Check them out here; you will love working with them.
That's all for this week. Lmk if you have any creative agency recs, or know how to get an X account back haha .
-Cody