Wednesday, March 8, 2023
We’ve all been Janet at some point, right??
If you’re new to DTC, welcome! You’re in good company with fellow newcomers, including the NHL, La Leur, Goodfair, Versed, and Moth Drinks.
In this newsletter, you’ll find: 👇
📦 Five styles of quadrant ads to test in your accounts
📦 Are you missing out on the biggest opportunity in eCommerce?
📦 Bushbalm's David Gaylord goes B2B, enters US retail, and the product winning at top-of-funnel
📦 How to grow your business with made-to-order production
Read till the end to access exclusive DTC swag. 😎
👉 If a pal forwarded this to you, subscribe, so you never miss out.
Move Over Foursquare, There’s A New Type of Quadrant On Top
Here’s the tea… 🫖
Quadrant/Grid ads are among the most profitable styles produced by Pilothouse for their clients.
Don’t believe us? Pilothouse produced and tested this ad for Hillberg & Berk, a jewelry brand centered around connecting and empowering women.
The video was live for two days before being scaled into their main campaigns. Now? This ad is seeing a return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) increase of 191% compared to the account average.
Seems like a no-brainer that quadrants should be next on your testing docket. 🧠
🟪 Why quadrants?
Quadrant ads are a timeless ad style and one of the easiest to insert into your ads library.
If you want to shake things up and add some to your ad account, peek at these five simple quadrant ad angles you can create!
1️⃣ Product features
The product features angle makes important product information simple for scrollers to take in and relays the benefits of your product in an easy-to-digest format.
🎨 How to replicate:
2️⃣ Discount / pricing
Everyone knows that shoppers love a discount. Anchoring price as your quadrant angle helps seamlessly encourage sales by building excitement around your product and the money the shopper could save!
🎨 How to replicate:
Keep scrolling for three more quadrant style creatives to test for your brand! 👇
40X Your ROAS and Go From Zero to Hero
If you don’t have a mobile app, 📣📣📣 you’re missing out on the biggest opportunity in eCommerce.
📲 Push notifications are proven to convert 92% of users that engage with them!
But building an app is complicated. You need coding skills or a Dev Team, right?...
Not with Tapcart. They’ll turn your Shopify store into an on-brand, customizable app within 2 weeks! Their team will even help you create a launch marketing strategy to maximize downloads.
Take it from VRG GIRL, who just launched their app with ~app-mazing~ results:
Building your mobile app with Tapcart = Minimal effort + major impact.
This is what Marketing Heroes are made of. 🦸
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3️⃣ Product variants
If your product is like an onion (has layers), the product variant is perfect for you!
Have t-shirts in different colors or different flavors of a mid-afternoon snack? Use this angle to simplify the decision-making process for customers and show off what you’re working with!
🎨 How to replicate:
4️⃣ Lifestyle
The lifestyle angle is exactly as it sounds. Scrollers should be able to easily see how your product fits into their lifestyle. Bonus points if you can demonstrate your brand’s aspirational qualities!
🎨 How to replicate:
5️⃣ Testimonial
Shoppers enjoy knowing that a product is well-loved by its current users before spending their hard-earned money.
This is your moment to dust off those reviews and testimonials and put them to work to build social proof and credibility for your brand. 🤝
Check out how functional mushroom supplement brand hekate does it. 👇
🎨 How to replicate:
The proof is in the data. Each of these quadrant styles is high-performing in their individual ad accounts. The Pilothouse creative teams are big advocates of this style and think you should be too.
P.S. If you test them in your brand account, email us and let us know how it goes! 🚀
From Idea to Product to Sold. Faster Than You Can Fold Laundry 👕
Looking for an efficient way to grow your business with made-to-order production? Meet Printful Enterprise.
Printful Enterprise helps you:
💤 Rest easy instead of having a dark inventory cloud hanging over your head. Managing inventory is a thing of the past when you partner with Printful.
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🎧 Today on the DTC pod, we're excited to have Bushbalm founder and CEO David Gaylord joining us!
You might know Bushbalm for their range of intimate care products, from oils to scrubs to trimmers, but today we're focusing on the Hydrogel Vajacial Mask, the product that's taken the top-of-funnel offer crown from their signature balm. 👑
We’ll get the inside scoop on David's retail planogram and find out how targeting small stores worked wonders in Canada and why he's now set his sights on big 1,000+ door partners in the US.
We'll also dive into Bushbalm's expansion into the wholesale market and explore how it impacts their DTC growth strategy.
David will also share his valuable insights (and much more!) at our upcoming C-Suite Mastermind conference in Las Vegas. He'll join 100 other DTC founders and executives for two days of focused learning, deep workshopping, and relationship-building with our industry's top players.
Trust us. You won't want to miss this exciting episode!
The takeaways 👇
🛍️ Retail-mania
David had a unique retail planogram for Bushbalm. He used the retail landscape in Canada as a testing ground to understand big retail and EDI, launching with Indigo, a large Canadian retailer, to learn more about the industry.
However, in the US, he took a different approach and targeted three exclusive retailers for a bigger impact (leading to a relaunch with a huge retailer with close to a thousand stores at the end of March 👀).
David explained that it's all about finding the right fit and that density plays a significant role. He noted that Canada has a smaller population and fewer stores, while the US has a higher population and higher density of stores. His overall approach was highly focused on understanding the market.
🌅 New horizons
On the pod, David touches on Bushbalm’s diversified wholesale strategy and how it’s significantly impacted the company’s DTC growth.
When the company first started, they were mainly focused on DTC, with around 97-98% of sales coming from their website.
However, they’ve expanded their channels to include wholesale and Amazon, and as a result, DTC now accounts for about 60% of their sales. David’s success in this area is partly attributed to their ability to diversify sales channels and adapt to changing market conditions.
This shift in strategy has also allowed Bushbalm to expand its reach and penetrate new markets while providing the company with more stable revenue streams.
👉 Listen to the full episode with David Gaylord here!
🤑 And you have 2 DAYS to save $500 on your tickets! Get them before this Friday, March 10th!
Quick Hits
🚀 Scaling on Tiktok? Start seeing success with insights no other brand can find + get $5000 in ad credit when you try KnoCommerce! *
🪟 Microsoft’s “next step in the automation journey” comes to its business app suite. The product updates introduce further low-code, CRM, and ERP tools to its platform.
🔗 LinkedIn introduces collaborative articles. The new initiative will utilize AI-generated writing prompts and invite contributors to expand your content.
🐥 Twitter says it will release full direct-message encryption later this month. This update would put Twitter’s direct messaging tools on par with other social media platforms and substantially increase user privacy.
📱 Meta updates Facebook Reels to max out at 90 seconds. Additional updates include support for “Grooves” and “Memories” within the extended Reels.
🤖 Satya Nadella’s surprising opinion of Siri, Alexa, and Cortana. With Microsoft's large investments in OpenAI, Nadella emphasizes AI’s monumental leap forward over earlier technologies.
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👀 Ronak Shah - Obvi Collagen - Obvi's biggest blunders (and how you can avoid them) - C-Suite Mentor Preview.
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👟 Kuru Footwear’s Turnaround Playbook: Sean McGinnis On The CRO Tactics That Doubled Revenue (C-Suite Mentor Preview).
🧑🦲 iRestore Hair Growth System: Kevin Chen - The True Impact of Costco.
⚔️ Mini Katana: Karly McFarland on $100M in Email Sales and Why She Sold Her Agency and Turned to the Brand Side (C-Suite Mentor Preview).
💡 Listen to the Biggest Marketing News Stories Today.
Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight, Kate Gullett, and Michael Venditti. Edited by Claire Beveridge and Eric Dyck.
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