Sound familiar? 🥴
Well, you’re among friends here. You can talk CTR, CPM, CPA or your acronym of choice as much as you’d like. It’s a safe space.
If you’re new to DTC Newsletter, welcome! You’re in good company with other newcomers from The Sill, Milksta, illy, Art of Tea, Hip and Bone, Copper Cow Coffee, Pooch and Mutt, and Snapchat.
🎨 Facebook and Creative tips for your Father’s Day campaigns.
📱 How top DTC brands are leveraging SMS Marketing.
📦 Everything you need to know for Amazon Prime Day preparation.
🤳🏻 Inside Instagram’s newly-launched affiliate program.
🚀 A quick hit tip to boost your BOF campaigns.
👉 If a pal forwarded this to you, subscribe, so you never miss out. And be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram.
This week the Pilothouse Amazon team gave us the best Prime Day tips to make sure you cash in. 🤑
Prime Day sees 8-10x the usual traffic on Amazon, so you’ll want to make sure your page is in tip-top shape.
📦 Listings – If you’re running a sale, add a listing image that tells shoppers you’re having Prime Day sale. Place it as the second image in the carousel.
📦 External Traffic – Prime Day makes it worth sending external traffic to Amazon directly.
We've found Amazon's attribution tool quite inaccurate and would instead recommend building out a store page specifically as a Prime Day Lander.
You can then generate a UTM to that page via "Insights" on the backend of your Amazon Store.
The metrics it gives are relatively accurate (of course, conversions still don't feed back into FB/Google to help its algorithm optimize).
📦 Inventory – Luckily, over the past month, Amazon has relaxed some of its stringent storage limits. Ensuring any product you plan to discount is fully stocked up before Prime Day is critical.
You don't want to sell through all your inventory on the day and then lose all that traction by stocking out.
Sponsor
SMS marketing is helping DTC brands engage mobile consumers like never before.
Yotpo is here to breakdown exactly how top DTC brands are leveraging this high-performance platform:
👉 Click here to read more about the rise of SMS marketing and why it’s here to stay.
📦 Beware of window shoppers – Prime Day attracts many users, which is good, but it also attracts many low intent clickers, costing you money.
📦 Careful of rising CPCs – As your competition ramps up bidding, campaigns can quickly overspend unprofitably.
To counteract this, ensure your bids are in a good place, with a small bump to account for increased competition.
Ensure your budgets aren't capping your campaigns.
Budgets work as a great way to prevent overspending, but if they're too low on Prime Day, your campaigns will restrict spending and hamstring your sales. 🤮
Bids should be your restricting factor to ensure profitability, not budgets.
📦 Depending on the brand, there are two strategies to live by on Prime Day:
⒈ Take advantage of the increased traffic to drive rank:
Bid high, own search results, and drive a TON of sales, but at the cost of profitability.
Use the sales to skyrocket your rank, so it’s maintained after Prime Day is over.
⒉ Drive more revenue at a similar profitability rate:
Tight control over your bids across campaigns can ensure you remain profitable while still gaining from the increased traffic.
For most brands, the best strategy will be a combination of both.
Listen to the pod for more Prime Day insight and some seriously spicy takes from our Amazon team.
Father’s Day tips from the Pilothouse Facebook and Creative team
👩👧 Target parents – Our team has seen success on Father’s Day campaigns targeting women with young kids under three.
With children too young to buy Father’s Day gifts for their parents, it's often partners who purchase gifts for their significant other.
This could also work for empty nesters!
Most of the campaigns Pilothouse ran last year for Father’s Day saw the bulk of purchases coming from people in their 30s or 40s, likely buying for themselves or their partners.
✅ Be consistent – If you run a Father’s Day campaign at the ad level but not on the landing page level, you’ll lose the sense of urgency, and customers will bounce off your page.
Your ad should scream urgency, and that same messaging should continue onto the landing page.
🚀 Match your promo code to the campaign – If you’re just running one promo code, match your promotion to increase sense of urgency.
If you’re running a promotion for Father’s Day, your code can’t be "WELCOME10" – consumers are smarter than that and know they can use it any time.
"FATHERSDAY10" is far stronger and indicates a brief window of availability for that code.
📓Take note, Ordergroove – the leader in subscription performance – is here to make sure you're getting the most out of your subscription program with their brand new (and free) optimization guide.
With consumer demand for subscriptions at record highs, it's no surprise brands are flooding the market with subscription offerings.
In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2023, 75% of direct-to-consumer brands will have a subscription offering.
It's an exciting time for any brand with a subscription program, but merchants with unique program incentives, frictionless experiences, and churn-fighting capabilities will win the day.
👉 To help brands turn their subscription program into a market-leading model, Ordergroove created The Ultimate Guide to Optimizing Your Subscription Program, a comprehensive guide that’s stuffed with best practices and use cases.
In the guide, you'll learn how to:
🤔 Don’t have a subscription program yet? Not happy with your existing subscription provider?
☎️ Schedule a consultative call with one of Ordergroove's subscription experts today.
👩🏻🎨 Get smart with your creatives – CPMs are higher for gifting holidays, and people will be bombarded with TOF Father’s Day ads.
Test campaigns that don’t look like Father's Day ads!
🎉 A promotion is a promotion – Don’t look past the opportunity to appeal to folks buying for themselves.
If someone is interested in your brand, they’ll be interested in your Father's Day promotional code.
🤝 Align your testimonials – Make sure your testimonials match your copy!
If you’re using testimonials for a Father’s Day promotion, make sure the testimonial says, "I bought this for my Dad."
If the ad copy is for a Father’s Day promo, and the testimonial doesn’t mention that angle, the ad will be disjointed and ineffective.
🎁 Can’t afford to advertise on Father’s Day? – If you’ve got a tight budget and can’t afford 20/30$ CPMs that come with mainstream holidays, look at unique events that tie into your brand and come up with a niche promo.
CPMs will be way cheaper and have less competition.
Bottom of the funnel not popping off the way you hoped?
Have you segmented your audience messaging?
What a consumer needs to hear one day after adding to cart is much different than what they need to hear thirty days after adding to cart.
Build a 0–10 (as long as your audience size allows) ATC + I/C + website visitors, and use time-sensitive messaging like:
This adds a sense of urgency while your brand is still top-of-mind for the consumer.
🔬 Why direct-to-consumer brands are going big on scientific research.
💻 472 of the best eCommerce landing page designs.
🤳🏻 TikTok charges up to $2M a day for top advertising spots.
📱 75% of people watch mobile videos on mute: what that means for advertisers.
Forecast: global, US ad spending to hit records on COVID rebound.
👩🏻💻 WooCommerce merchants can now list their products across Google.
👍 Facebook: brand loyalty is no longer stable but an ongoing conversation.
🗄 Harvard Business Review: nine trends that will shape work in 2021 and beyond.
🎮 Twitch expands brand sponsorships on non-eSports content.
📈 Introducing Facebook Graph API v11.0 and Marketing API v11.0.
🍏 Apple doubles down on privacy, further complicating tracking and targeting.
🍽 Trifecta Nutrition’s VP of Marketing chats TikTok and eSports.
🤩 Three Ships' Lillie Sun on Clean Beauty, Agile Bundling, and Aging Up Your Brand.
🛒 Olipop's Eli Weiss Goes Deep on Customer Experience.
DTC Newsletter is written by Thomas Schreiber, Eric Dyck, and SadieEvans.
Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.
🔊 Podcast.
✍️ Blog and past newsletters.
📥 Work for The DTC Newsletter (Writer + Editor).
🚀 Advertise in DTC Newsletter.
DTC 2023. All Rights Reserved.
DTC is fueled by Pilothouse company registered in Victoria, BC, Canada.