3 Unique Things Working in Our D2C Brand

Hey all,

Happy Thursday. For this Yellow Notes, I wanted to share 3 unique things we are doing in our D2C biz this year that are working quite well.

Hopefully the tactics are a bit out of the norm from what you see in D2C nowadays and can spark some new ideas for you to test out. Let’s get into it..

1. Double email send in our new subscriber welcome flow

When a customer subscribes to our email or SMS list on our site, we actually send them 2 emails in the first 10 minutes. The first immediate email is a plain text email from me, the founder, saying hello and asking if they have any burning questions we can answer. In this one, I am actually trying to encourage interaction - I want customers to respond and engage with us.

Not only have we found customers who interact with our CX to have higher LTVs and generally become better customers, but it’s a nice branding moment too. If you’re looking to buy our products and have a question, it’s pretty cool to have the founder personally respond to you within an hour or so.

The 2nd email is our more “flashy” welcome email with the new customer offer. It’s branded and fully designed — your classic welcome email from a D2C brand. We send it exactly 10 minutes after the personal welcome email.

It works for us. Originally, our “place order rate” on just the branded welcome email was around ~4.3%, but with the double email, we’ve bumped it up closer to 6%. For every 1,000 subscribers, that’s an extra 25 orders!

I originally got the idea from Ryze, who executes this type of “encouraged customer interactions” so well. If you get any of their ads, they have thousands and thousands of comments. Plus, a ton of their emails and SMS customer comms purposefully encourage customers to reply and engage.

2. Splitting out our Facebook ASC’s by creative type

This is something that Meta actually advises against, but I’ve found it to be very efficacious for our acquisition efficiency on Meta. We don’t spend a ton on Meta yet - $2-3K/day on average - so I originally followed Meta’s best practice of running consolidated ASC campaigns and ran all of our creative in just 1 or 2 campaigns.

This didn’t work that well. I don’t have hard data on this, but it felt as if Meta was having a hard time distinguishing between our top of funnel media (usually our videos) and our bottom of funnel media (usually statics). Statics always dominated spend in our consolidated ASCs and that worked for a few weeks, but dried up pretty quickly. Even when put against the best video ads our biz has ever run, statics would generally get all of the spend.

So a few months ago, I decided to re-build our account and segment out all of our ASC campaigns by creative type and sometimes angle. For us, it’s lowered our CPAs by ~20% and has helped us drive up spend a significant amount. I’ll now separate out UGC videos, designed static images, UGC static images, whitelisted ads, etc into their own campaigns.

I can’t tell you exactly why this works, I honestly don’t know for sure and it goes against Meta’s “best ASC practices” but it does. My theory is that all of our media speaks to different audiences, and segmentation allows it to maximize and silo signal for each unique audience.

3. Changing our offer and using the word “free” more frequently

It seems obvious, but adding “free” into any offer can really unlock performance, even if the offer doesn’t fundamentally change. Athletic Greens built their entire business against an offer with a lot of “free” add-ons.

This is what I think has really unlocked our growth over the last 3-6 months. We completely changed our acquisition offer and the products we were looking to acquire customers on via FB. Originally, we had just run a classic 15% off your first order to a 3-pack of our top SKU.

It worked OK and we got pretty close to being first purchase profitable on a $50 AOV. Our products are consumable and last 1 month. So being first purchase profitable is awesome given our repeat/consumption rates. But when we acquire customers on a 3-pack of our top SKU, we were essentially kissing goodbye to any chance at 30-90 day LTV. Any LTV within 90 days was 100% captured within the first purchase. Not great for our cash flow and our ability to profitably scale our media - a 5-10% performance dip would drive us into the red.

So, we decided to change our offer completely. Instead of acquiring customers our 3-pack, we acquire them on a single SKU and offer them our other SKU for free. Buy our top product and only SKU we advertise on FB, and we’ll give you our other product for free.

This lowered our AOV by ~20% but the CPA reduction significantly offset that. The new offer helped us do two things at once: lower CPA and acquire customers on a better “LTV offer”. If we can acquire customers profitably AND have more LTV available to capture in 60 days, win win.

The lesson for us? Use the word “free” more and craft more offers that include free things, even if it’s just about changing the perception of the offer.

That’s all. Hope hearing about those 3 areas we focused on can inspire some ideas for you & your brand! Now let’s get into our tool and brand of the week..

Tool of The Week: Numeral

Numeral is an awesome new tool in the D2C world that helps to solve the sales tax burden for brands. It’s not a secret that managing sales taxes can be a huge pain for eCommerce brands.

Numeral’s platform offers a white glove sales tax service that handles everything related to sales taxes, compliance and more. The tool claims to let you spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax compliance and according to D2C brands who use the tool (Immi, Obvi, Rejuvia, etc) — it’s true.

Check Out Numeral Here ⚡

Brand of The Week: Noonbrew

Noonbrew crafts the best drink to beat the afternoon slump — their ice tea mix is made with 19+ superfoods designed to increase natural energy, boost digestion, and enhance focus.

It’s a great product, awesome brand and run by a killer operator, Andrew.

Check Out Noonbrew & Their Stack 🍵

That’s all for today. Next week, I plan to highlight 3 new tools to the 1-800-D2C community and the unique features they’re offering to the D2C world.

If you have a minute, what did you like the most in this newsletter? Would love to get your feedback.

-RC

Helpful Links & More Content:

• Latest Under The Hood with Carolyn from Unbloat

• Hire 1-800-D2C For Tech Support

• Submit Your D2C Brand

• Submit Your Tech Tool

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