Newsletter

Travel’s limited, but being able to work from anywhere has us dreaming. If you could book a 1 month working trip anywhere in the world right now, where would it be?

👋🏽 Welcome to the newest DTC members: Voxy, Cabinet, Boreal Brewing, Sparq, Vita Drop, and many more who’ve joined in the last week.

(Did a good friend send this to you? Be sure to subscribe here)

This week’s newsletter is all about simple ‘force multipliers’ that you can apply in your advertising to tip those scales to get outsized performance gains ⚖️

Here’s whatchya gonna get:

📦 Write a lot of copy? Or emails? Or anything that involves typing? We give you a simple typing hack that saves tons of time

📦 A checklist that will help you write more persuasive copy (every time)

📦 3 best practices to get your Snapchat Ads game on point for Q4

📦 The simple calculation for more accurate day-of ad performance reporting 

📦 3 Facebook Ads rules to setup now so that you save money on bad days, and make more profits on good days

LET’S GO

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🤯 Has This Typing “Tip” Been Under Your Nose All Along?

We couldn’t believe we hadn’t heard about this sooner. 

Did you know you can ‘Backspace’ more efficiently with these two shortcuts?

• Mac: Option + Del // PC: Alt + Backspace 👉 This will delete the previous word
• Mac: Cmnd + Del // PC: Ctrl + Backspace 👉 This will delete the current line of text

Having written almost 25,000 words of DTC Newsletters, we’re excited about this one.

The 16 Word Sales Letter Checklist

We’re always on the lookout for simpler approaches to writing high-converting copy.

Evaldo Albuqurque’s The 16 Word Sales Letter is a framework you can run your landing pages through to find quick opportunities for improvement.

Since we know you’re DYING to know what those 16 words are, here you go:

“The secret to converting copy is to define the one belief, then answer these ten questions.”

Let’s break it down:

The One Belief

The One Belief is made up of three parts: 

1. The New Opportunity → Humans are hard-wired to look for novelty. New things signal to our lizard brain that something is either dangerous or could be highly rewarding.

2. The Key Desire → What is the ONE thing they really want from your product?

3. The New Mechanism → Once your prospect believes that the new opportunity is key to their desire, it’s time to show them that your New Mechanism (the product) is the ONLY way to go.

Here’s one of many examples of the One Belief provided by Evaldo for Febreeze:

“Adding a pleasant smell at the end of your cleaning routine (new opportunity) is the key to keeping your home looking fresh and clean (desire) and it’s attainable only through Febreze’s OdorClear

technology (new mechanism.)”

The 10 Questions

With the One Belief established, use Evaldo’s 10 Questions as a checklist:

• How is this different from anything else I’ve seen?
• What’s in it for me? (Big promise)
• How do I know this is real?
• What’s holding me back? (Reveal the REAL problem)
• Who / what is to blame? (Enemy = an existing belief)
• Why now?
• Why should I trust you?
• How does it work?
• How can I get started? (Superior, irresistible, and no-brainer offer)
• What do I have to lose?

The better you answer these questions, the more persuasive your copy will be.

And if you’d like to get inside the mind of an Agora Financial copywriter,  dive into Evaldo’s process in The 16 Word Sales Letter here.

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3 Best Practices For Q4 Snapchat Ads

Usually in the shadow of Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat can be a powerful addition to your advertising efforts. We asked Pilothouse’s resident Snapchat Ads expert, Grayson Rudzki, for 3 best practices that you can use to add fuel to your Q4 fire 🔥

Focus On Story Ad Placements

Be sure to test all ad placements, but you’ll likely end up dedicating most resources to the ‘Only User Stories’ ad placement.

While it has a higher cost per swipe up (CPSU), it also has way higher intent. “Most of my daily budgets are story placements,” says Grayson.

They are tragic if done wrong (they're more pricey) so iterate and test lots. To avoid Snapchat Story Ad tragedy, Grayson recommends the following:

• Give your Stories a narrative arc (pun intended)...
• Have one story lead into the next...
• Summarize the key benefit of the video in the caption (so they’re not waiting for the punchline)...
• UGC selfie videos tend to work best...
• Split test tons of tile card copy and images...

Get momentum on these before Q4 and nail down winners.

Spend More Now To Unlock Conversion Events

Unlike Facebook and Instagram, where you can use conversion events right away, Snapchat requires you to ‘warm up’ the pixel, first.

In order to get access to certain bid types (e.g. sign ups, add to carts, purchases), you must be driving at least 50+ attributed conversions over a rolling 7-day period. 

So Grayson recommends allocating more budget to your Snapchat ads now so that you can unlock all your pixel events before Q4. 

(Afterall, the last thing you want is to start a Snapchat campaign one week before Black Friday, and you can’t optimize for purchases 😬)

“You’re not running Snap ads for performance until you have the purchase goal unlocked imo,” Grayson says.

Find out more about Snapchat’s pixel events here.

Use Snapchat To Get Leads. Use Facebook To Close ‘Em.

Snapchat is relatively cheap to build your audience, but it can be costly to convert. Focus on using it to generate leads that you can later convert with email, SMS, and Facebook retargeting. 

Build these lists now. 

The ROAS Multiplier: A Better Way To Measure Advertising Performance

Anyone who’s run ad campaigns at scale knows that factoring in delayed sales can be tricky.

“Since FB attributes the sale when the ad was interacted with, it means customers that click our ad but take a while to decide, don’t see another ad but come back and buy days later, that is actually attributed to the day or counted in Facebook when they saw the ad, not when purchase was made,” says senior media buyer, Taylor Cain.

The more expensive your product is, the longer your attribution window will be. And the longer the attribution window is, the more challenging it is to have an accurate picture of performance on any given day (because there are still sales that will come in the following days).

To help solve this problem, Taylor developed a concept called the ROAS Multiplier. 

It’s a simple calculation that factors in the ‘lift’ that delayed sales have had over a 4 week rolling period, giving you a more accurate picture of day-of ROAS.

The ROAS Multiplier Calculation

(Revenue Difference) / (Monthly Ad Spend) = ROAS Multiplier

Revenue Difference = Totally Monthly Revenue - Day-Of Revenue

Provide example with real numbers

Then all you need to do is apply the ROAS multiplier to your most recent day’s ad spend to get a projected delayed revenue.

Add that to your day-of revenue and now you can gather your projected ROAS lift based on your actual spend that day.

Track it on a regular basis using excel formulas, etc. and you’ll have key lift insights and projections that can help guide budgeting and testing decisions to come.

He also says, “It comes in huge with client communication on months where day-of may be lower than our target and our actual is on target or even higher.”

Check out the ROAS Multiplier in action in this Reporting Dashboard template.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bamebG3SW_kgfRFv8J8N2WjvNbsEry7hgQx-WD7mAe8/edit#gid=1003340203

Here’s the foundation:

• We track day-of sales in Facebook - i.e. happen on a given day, like Sept 4
• Since FB attributes the sale when the ad was interacted with, it means customers that click our ad but take a while to decide, don’t see another ad but come back and buy days later, that is actually attributed to the day or counted in Facebook when they saw the ad, not when purchase was made
• So we also track what we call longer purchase decision sales - 2 days and beyond in the attribution window
• We track this on a daily basis to understand lift as days progress - baked into our daily tracking
• We also track this at the revenue level to see how much of a revenue lift we get as time goes on

How the multiplier works:

• We have a Projected Longer Purchase Decision Revenue Multiplier that takes Revenue Difference (Total - Day Of - Aka our longer purchase decision sale revenue) / Ad Spend - we do this on a rolling 4 week basis (summing 4 weeks of data for each formula element)
• We multiply our actual ad spend by this multiplier to give us a sense of the historic ratios of longer purchase decision sales, but based on spend we’re doing - projected revenue
• We do this on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis
• We create a delayed ROAS projection by summing actual same-day revenue with our projected longer purchase decision revenue and dividing by actual ad spend

Ultimately:

• our projected revenue and ROAS for the month updates on a daily basis based on historic data
• What’s cool is it lets us see exactly how our spend translated out to revenue and the accuracy we had
• July is a good example because it’s had 28 attribution days since the end of the month to mature…
• In July in the report I shared, you can see we spent $309K and had day-of revenue of $682K or a same day ROAS of 2.21
• But with longer purchase decision factored in…we actually went on to have revenue of $915K and total ROAS of 2.96
• The formula projected out 2.97 total ROAS….
• So 99.7% accuracy that month

Comes in huge on months where day-of may be lower than our target and our actual is on target or even higher…

Really useful for client communication too

We’re now factoring this into Q4 planning

i.e. what day-of ROAS can we afford based on historic projections to really scale up spend

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3 Simple Rules To Apply To Your Campaigns Right Now

Charley T gives 3 simple rules that will help your save money on bad days, and push spend on good days:

Rule #1: Increase start of day budget by 20%

If your campaign budget is $100, set a rule to increase it by $20.00 at the beginning of the day.

Rule #2: Stop delivery at 75% of spend if not at target performance

For example, if your target CPA is $20, and at 75% of spend ($75) you have a $25 CPA, delivery will be turned off.

Rule #3: Increase spend by “Target CPA x Sales” if over current budget

This ensures that if you’ve exhausted your budget while performance is going well, the rule will increase budgets to accommodate more profits.

Charley also recommends putting a rule in place to reset auto-scaled budgets at midnight.

Is Shopify Partnering with CartHook or Swallowing Them Whole?

Last week, Carthook sent out a notice with good and bad news. The bad news: As of September 1st, Carthook will accept no new customers. 

The good news is a little more ambiguous, but Carthook reports that they’re hard at work to build a new version of the app which supports post purchase checkouts and is compatible with Shopify’s checkout. 

Carthook promises to keep all current accounts alive and serviced, so don’t worry if your campaigns rely on the tool (for now).

We weren’t able to dig up more info on exactly what’s happening here, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.

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DrinkHydrant.com How to Build and Operate a High Growth Team

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be in the mind of a Head of Growth at a top DTC brand?

Learn how to not only think like a growth marketer, but also how to put together a small ‘n’ mighty growth team for your DTC brand in today’s cast with Hydrant’s Head of Growth Margaret Fortner.

Tune-in to Margaret’s data-focused thinking and learn…

📈 What does the Head of Growth do, anyway?

📈 How can you make data clear so that it tells a story?

📈 Why simple testing goals will keep you out of the weeds

📈 How Margaret has grown an efficient growth team

📈 And lots more

Get your sneak peek of this week’s DTC Podcast 24 hours early, right here!

Preparing for BFCM: Customer Support

How do you scale customer support in a post-COVID era when traffic is overwhelming your support team & operations? 

If you’re unprepared with how Ecommerce is evolving, here’s some tips you can use:

👉 Respond quickly to incoming tickets. Even if you can’t handle it right away, let the customer know you’ve gotten their request and are looking after it.

👉 Automation. Find a Helpdesk that can resolve repetitive questions so that support agents can focus on complex issues.

👉 Personalized responses. Let your customers know there’s a human touch at the other end. They want to feel that they’re being looked after by a real person.

If you’re afraid of what’s to come, our partners at Gorgias may be able to help you with Customer Support issues. 

Get 2 months free by booking some time here: 

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Help Your DTC Network

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Things We Loved This Week

🐵 Mailchimp making moves: @normandj88 and head of Pilothouse’s Email team reports that Mailchimp is making moves to provide a similar level of data testing to Klaviyo. “Exciting for Mailchimpers because deep data analysis has typically been super hard on Mailchimp for automations and multivariate testing of flows was basically non-existent.”

👩🏻‍💻 UX/UI Design: This quick guide on Medium by Uyen Vicky Vo on how to modernize UI for DTC websites. She gives multiple examples of exactly how brands who get it design their sites to be simple, straightforward and just the perfect amount of “hipstery.” Worth making a free account, or subscribing to Medium if you don’t.

🐦 Thread: @Taylorlegacy just whispers sweet influencer tips in our ears weekly. In this thread he compares traditional influencer posts with influencer sponsored ads (white listed influencer ads). Taylor elaborates on dynamic content funnels that filter people based on view time, using influencer posts and other UGC to walk the customer towards the purchase. If you have ANY questions on the step-by-step process of reaching out to influencers and pitching a sponsored partnership, make sure to check out Taylor’s newest thread on exactly that, here. 

🎙 Podcast: Another quick dip into the DTC Podcast vault had us listening to Dave Huffman from Microbe Labs dive deep on advanced performance tactics like free plus shipping (controversial but effective), as well as the nearly forgotten strategy of using reg path traffic to drive initial purchases. 

💻Dashboard Flex: This @taylorholiday thread invites DTC twitter to share their company master dashboards. It’s very cool to see how everyone actions around their company data, which tools they use, which and which metrics are most important. Take a peek to see if there’s something you’re missing. 

🧠 Brain Hack: We revisited @wizofecom’s advice to wash the dishes if you need to solve a big problem. “Doing AN AUTOMATED, second nature act will take pressure off you & aid you to work through complex problems.”

🍎Apple Feud: As marketers we hold our breath as Apple threatens to divorce it’s data from your Facebook pixel, it’s nice to read this ZDnet article which calls for a more conciliatory tone, reminding Apple that it’s the apps like Facebook and Instagram that make their devices worth having. The article examines Apple’s holier than thou stance regarding data, and compares this stance to some of the charges leveled by EPIC and others, that Apple’s “uneven” treatment of some apps. We just hope they can all realize they need each other and work it out quietly.

🤖Open Source AI: One area where Big Tech doesn’t seem to have a problem working together is on A.I. where Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and others have all embraced working in Open Source protocol “to foster innovation and reach maturity faster.” I’ve often said that the next big revolution will be personal A.I. butlers who know us better than we know ourselves, to whom we licence our data, and give them permission to be as honest as we’re ready for.

🇺🇸 Political Spending Break: Political spending on Facebook Ads is off the charts in the run up to the US elections, raising our cpms across the board and hair triggering false account suspensions when they tune the algo too tightly. That’s why we were relieved to see that Zuckerberg plans on pulling the plug on political spending on his platform one week before the election, giving all of us DTC folks a little more elbow room at the table leading up to BFCM. 

📺  YouTube Top Ads: Not enough advertisers are using YouTube to its fullest capacity. The content that works there is not exactly like FB creative, but it’s not that different either. Did you know that Google posts the top ads across YouTube every month? Check these out for examples on how to tap into this endless traffic source for your brand.  

👩🏼‍🏫 Back to School (Ads): Not all DTC readers are parents, but those who are, are probably a little conflicted this week. Back to school has always been a fun time, filled with familiar smells, sounds, and faces, but this year’s a bit more complicated for many. After spending the whole spring and summer at home with kids, I’m ready for some good old fashioned peer pressure to chime back into their socialization process. This blog on Khoros.com highlights several excellent back to school ad campaigns and dives into why they’re so effective. 

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