DTC readers walking into the weekend like:
Congrats to the Milwaukee Bucks on their first NBA Championship in 50 years!
👩💻 Avoiding mistakes on your product pages.
📧 The value of email personalization.
🧑🎨 Why your creative team needs to wear the performance marketer hat.
🖱 Using one-click checkout to turn your cart abandonment rate into sales.
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🚨 Job opportunity: DTC is growing, and we’re looking for content writers who are passionate about the DTC space.
If that’s you, send a note to Thomas (thomas@directtoconsumer.co) with your resume and why you’d be a good fit!
Three product page mistakes to avoid!
You’ve spent time perfecting your ads, making sure your copy is perfect.
You're confident in your landing pages, and yet you're still not seeing the sales that you want.
If you see a big drop-off just before consumers should be adding to their cart, you might be committing one of these mistakes.
1. No Review or Negative Reviews
No review is just as bad as negative reviews.
No one wants to be the first person to try a brand new product, especially in this Beklina example where the shoe comes with a hefty $343.00 price tag.
The other big mistake we see is brands auto-populating their reviews using an app without any type of screening in place.
This means that if someone leaves a negative review, it will show up on your website.
Before you set your review tool live, ensure that you have some type of screening in place.
If you don’t have reviews on your product yet, leave the review bar out and add in once you do.
You can also entice your customers to leave reviews using a post-purchase email flow and potentially offering a small discount for an honest review.
2. Confusing Funnels & Prices
When your products/services are on sale, include the original price but cross it out with the new discounted price.
This is also a great area to promote a subscription offer just below.
These are simple ways to increase your revenue.
Even as an educated consumer, this product page from UGMONK had us confused.
There’s one price for the main product, plus a separate price for an add-on that you must buy with a subscription option. 🥴
The solution: group the main product + the addition you must purchase into one product with one price.
You can then offer a subscription below.
Messy product pages lead to confused consumers, and confused consumers don't make purchases.
3. Non-descriptive, misplaced or non-existent product descriptions
Not having a strong description or no description at all can lead to a major drop-off in sales. Your description should tell users about the product while also highlighting your key features and benefits.
Remind consumers what makes you stand out from your competitors to ensure you close the sale. In this example from Hint, there’s no description beside the product. Instead, it’s at the very bottom of the page.
If we had to hunt for it, consumers are definitely missing it.
Ensure your strong product description falls right around your CTA.
🤳 Influencer whitelisting at scale has unlocked a new high-performing media and acquisition channel for high-growth DTC brands.
But when brands want to whitelist ten or more creators, obtaining advertising access becomes a major pain point.
Setting up advertising access differs from creator to creator based on their account setup. The process to gain advertising permissions from creators is far from straightforward.
✨ Enter Lumanu.
Lumanu’s software automates the process of gaining influencer advertising permissions from creators, allowing you to focus on amplifying impactful creator content, reaching new audiences, improving paid social ROAS and simplifying collaborations with creators.
In their latest e-book, Lumanu shares their five best tips for improving Influencer Whitelisting results used by top DTC brands like Brooklinen, Savage x Fenty, and Fabletics.
👉 Unlock growth and reduce friction with creator-brand partnerships – read Lumanu’s Influencer Whitelisting E-Book here.
Email segmentation tip: Personalize content for each segment
Your segment is only as valuable as the actions you take.
Establish different offers, copy and layouts for each segment.
Purchase history is a great place to start.
Purchase history segments will differ based on each brand’s product or service, but here’s a good place to start. 👇
Segmentation is a great opportunity to see what it takes to move someone from one segment to the next.
It could be free shipping, further discounts, or first-dibs to new products.
Test, test, test!
👉 Everyone should be treated differently based on their purchase history.
This week's AKNF features Cam, Jordan, Angela and co-founder Kyle from the Pilothouse team.
They dive deep into what it takes to build a high-performance creative strategy to scale your DTC brand on paid social.
The biggest lesson: 👇
🚨 Your creative team needs to think like performance marketers
At Pilothouse, the creative team isn’t an endpoint or a starting point in the performance marketing process; they’re an embedded part of the data analysis and decision making.
They’re constantly creating content based on the needs of an account and data rather than gut!
👉 Listen to the entire podcast!
Why One-Click Checkout is Winning
Last month, big news broke of Shopify’s one-click checkout service, Shop Pay, becoming available to all merchants selling on Google, Facebook, and Instagram Shops.
This is game-changing news for our space. Here’s why:
1. Cart abandonment is a huge challenge. Baymard Institute reports a 70% average cart abandonment rate, a figure calculated using 44 different cart abandonment studies.
2. Although Amazon’s "Buy Now with 1-Click" patent expired four years ago, it gave them an 18-year head start. Now that the field is more level, competitors can finally catch up.
3. Shopify reports a 1.72x higher conversion rate with Shop Pay versus regular checkout. For some merchants, this could take their sales from good to great overnight. 🙌
If your website isn’t already using a fast checkout solution, there’s no time like the present.
Here’s a guide to getting up and running fast.
Step 1: One-Click VS. Fast Checkout
Countless tools offer a faster customer checkout experience, making the distinctions a bit murky and the terminology confusing.
One-Click: Typically refers to a minimal checkout flow that usually requires a single click to buy. Also known as buy now, instant pay, or 1-click.
Fast Checkout: Often refers to a checkout flow with fewer required fields and pages than a standard checkout but requires multiple clicks. Also known as fast pay, quick pay, or express pay.
Step 2: Identify your platform and select a provider
A few things to consider before installing a one-click payment solution are your platform, tech compatibility, and level of effort for your development team.
Common Platforms
Most tools let you scale as you grow larger, so it’s essential to choose the best option that matches your current needs.
Since most of our readers are on Shopify, the screens below walk you through how to find a good one-click checkout provider in the Shopify App Store.
1. Navigate to the Shopify App Store and, using the spyglass at the top right, search for "one-click checkout."
2. Filter your results using the left sidebar and select how you prefer to sort the results.
3. Identify the app that fits best with your business needs, and add the app.
Step 3: Installing One-Click Checkout
Assuming you’ve found the perfect app to install and matched it with your business requirements, you’ll simply follow the documentation for installation or hand this part off to an experienced Shopify developer.
Thanks to Shop Pay, merchants can now sell products with a single click across major advertising and social media platforms. 🤑
Meet Cann, the DTC social beverage microdosed with cannabis for a light, uplifting buzz without the hangover, calories, and regrets.
Their flavors include lemon and lavender, blood orange cardamom, and grapefruit rosemary.
Check out how their cannabis in a can works:
Their website is a must-visit for gorgeous design, copy and branding inspiration!
🥄 Little Spoon scoops up $44M to grow its children’s nutrition delivery service.
🦓 Zebra raises $1.1M in a pre-seed round for messaging that pairs photos with voice chat.
📧 Sendlane raises $20M to convert shoppers into loyal customers.
➡️ Loop Returns locks in $65 million Series B led by CRV.
🛒 Powered by local stores, JOKR joins the 15 min grocery race with a $170M Series A.
👻 Snapchat partners with Verishop to launch a new eCommerce portal.
🚚 Colombian on-demand delivery startup Rappi raises ‘over’ $500M at a $5.25B valuation.
📖 Byju’s acquires reading platform Epic for $500 million in US expansion.
👩💻 Zoom to Acquire Five9.
✅ How Kellogg’s thinks about DTC and eRetail with Joe Harper and Jordan Narducci.
🥤Slashing Facebook ads in half with Olipop’s Steven Vigilante.
💇♂️ Beardbrand’s Eric Bandholz and the DTC long game.
🌴 Product/market fit with Canopy Humidifiers' Eric Neher and Michael De Santis.
💥 Building a bold brand with Ugly's CEO Hugh Thomas.
Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
DTC Newsletter is written by Thomas Schreiber, Eric Dyck, and Sadie Evans, RebeccaKnight and Collin Tate.
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