🎧 On this 🚨 emergency update edition 🚨 of the DTC pod, Ryan McKenzie, cofounder and CMO of Tru Earth, is back to talk about what he’s bringing to the table as a mentor at the upcoming DTC C-Suite Mastermind event, how to approach acquisition and growth in these more tumultuous times, and how to focus on elements of your business that can be controlled and invested in for long-term success.
The Takeaways 👇
♻️ Out In with the old
Similarly to how curtain bangs and Y2K style are trendy in 2022 (yes, low-rise jeans are back 😐), the whole market proves that when it comes to selling your product what’s old is new again.
For example, a DTC brand that wants to build out a retail strategy can benefit from shifting its focus from broad awareness campaigns to a density mindset, AKA targeting people in a specific region where your product generates revenue. The more people know your brand and your product in one area, the larger your referral system gets, the more bang you get for your buck, and so on.
“If you only have one person in a town or state that knows about your product or has purchased your product… You don’t get that compounding effect because they may tell one or two people and then it dies.”
All in all, allocating a special budget to saturate specific regions where you want your product to sell is a good first step in acquiring a community of customers before branching out to those larger retailers.
🧪 Testing 1, 2, 3…
As we like to say in the DTC world, when the going gets tough, your CRO strategy gets going. 💪
Optimization is key in bringing costs down, but with optimization comes testing. Here are a few items Ryan talked about on the pod which you can test on your PDP for optimization:
- Making the ‘Add to Cart’ button big and bright
- Hiding your navigation bar to keep consumers on the page
- Having a sticky ‘Add to Cart’ button as you scroll down
Ryan even suggests a test – sending consumers to a landing page rather than a PDP to increase the consumer’s emotional investment in the product before hitting them with the price.
“You’re going to have the most bang for your buck on the first page that you send a person to, so address that first and slowly go down the funnel and make it better and better.”
📉 Going down, but looking up
During times of recession, consumers tend to spend less, trade down, and cut back on many CPG purchases. So, what strategies can you implement to increase your chances of success in future economic downturns? To start, Ryan thinks it’s about shifting your mindset.
“Your thoughts basically contribute to your reality. It’s really easy to get sucked into having a negative outlook and being very binary on whether things are good or bad, but realistically things are somewhere in between… You just gotta look at it with an abundance mindset.”
👉 Listen to the full episode with Ryan McKenzie here!
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