Wednesday, May 19th, 2021
Introducing the first DTC Macbook Pro Giveaway!
When you share the DTC Newsletter today using your unique referral link at the bottom of this email, you’ll be entered to win a brand new Macbook Pro.
1 referral = 1 entry (more referrals = more entries)
More details below 😎
In this edition of the DTC Newsletter, you’ll find:
📦 Olipop’s Eli Weiss on creating customer experiences for real humans.
📦 Survey results from Attest breaking down how different industries have fared during the pandemic.
📦 Actionable tips for Google, Pinterest, and Amazon.
📦 Your invitation to the biggest expert-lead DTC marketing event of the year.
Read until the end for the Creative of the Day, and literal email gold.
Podcast
This week on the pod we have Eli Weiss, DTC Twitter darling and Director of Customer experience at Olipop.
🧐 What’s the most underutilized moment in the brand experience?
It’s the time between a customer placing their order and actually receiving it.
Retail: "You make the impulse decision. You purchase the product. You test it outside and you love it."
DTC: "By the time you get it, the hype and the magic is so often over. So how do you keep people tied in?"
"It’s about that perfect amount of not being really annoying, while keeping people in the loop and keeping people excited and engaged."
📝 Beyond the customer survey
Eli encourages brands to prioritize non-formal one-on-one chats with customers.
Instead of forming an expensive focus group, or relying on customer surveys that are unlikely to reveal customers’ true feelings and frustrations, just talk to people.
"It’s when they’re having a good time on Saturday, tagging you in a post on Instagram, you reach out and say "Wow, where did you buy this?"
"It's finding people where they’re at. They’re willing to chat, willing to talk, willing to have these conversations. It’s been the best qualitative data."
👋🏻 Customer success = reaching out before shit hits the fan
Eli challenges the misconception that CX is exclusively a way to put out fires.
"When you think about it as a way to put out fires, it’s obviously nothing you want to invest in. Versus, if you think about leveraging it as a marketing channel, that to me is a very simple way to invest in it."
CX is the best way to keep people happy and make sure they repurchase.
🤝 Act like a human!
"You can say you love customer experience. You can say you’re a customer-centric brand. But do you put your money where your mouth is?"
For Olipop, this comes down to acting as a human would act.
This can look like surprise and delight initiatives such as sending plants to sixty-five customers.
Or discovering a couple was purchasing Olipop for their wedding and gifting them something off their registry.
"If you got a gorgeous plant from a brand you spent $50 at, you gotta be crazy not to tell 10 people. That's our vision."
Do things that don’t scale and go above and beyond to create branded moments that cause people to say "wow this brand really cares."
🔊 You can listen to the full pod here, and catch up on our coverage of Olipop in our DTC Soda Diagnostic series on our blog.
Sponsor
Attest surveyed 2,000 U.S. consumers to understand which U.S. DTC categories will continue to stand strong post-pandemic, and which will lose out as shoppers return to stores.
Curious to know more? Check out Attest's D2C Digest (U.S. edition), full of the latest consumer insights, case studies, interviews and expert advice.
Amazon
Don't set-and-forget your listings!
It’s crucial to regularly change up your titles, bullets, and listing images.
This is especially true for products that can be marketed during holidays (i.e Mother’s Day).
Find keywords that are specific to your product. For example "Father’s Day gifts for movie lovers" or "Father’s Day gifts for runners’"
Don’t just make this a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign around a specific holiday. The Pilothouse team recommends adding those keywords to your title and bullets to help increase their index.
If you’re running a sale, place a listing image into the second spot and point out the price cut you’ve created for that specific holiday. 🚀
Pinterest
Dial in your keywords and interest audiences:
Use the targeting tool on ad group and ads level to understand which keywords and interest audiences are driving your sales.
Eliminating the losing ones can make a HUGE difference in campaign performance since they’re usually wasting spend.
Always testing a variety of related keywords and interests at the start of a campaign – but quickly optimizing them – can turn an okay campaign into a great one.
Creative of the Day
Why this works:
Tool Spotlight
It’s time to shake things up.
As a performance marketer you can’t get stuck on autopilot, repeating the same things you always do expecting different results.
You need fresh ideas, perspectives, and input from your peers. 🤝
This is why you should attend DTC DAY Live, the world’s largest DTC marketing event.
This virtual conference will feature over 3,000 attendees and a star-studded lineup of 100 expert speakers, including the best and brightest DTC brands like Purple, Bonobos, and Tuft & Needle.
Sometimes taking a few days to gather new ideas, talk to peers, recharge and recommit is the ticket to supercharging your marketing performance.
Attend DTC DAY, and come back to work with new ideas that will work better and take less time to execute.
👉 As a DTC reader you’ll receive $50 off your ticket purchase!
(While DTC Newsletter isn’t affiliated with DTC Day, we are BIG fans of the conference. 😎)
Email Gold
A Sephora customer returned perfume and a couple days later received the email below. Notice the subject line "Not loving your last purchase, Alex?"
This is next level segmentation that we LOVE. TO. SEE. ❤️
Shoutout to Alex McPeak for sharing!
DTC Brand Spotlight
PLUS is a new DTC brand that launched in April.
The Rundown:
Product: Zero-waste body wash with 100% dissolvable packaging
Price: 16 washes = $16.50
Sustainability: 0 plastic, 80% CO2 shipping emissions, 38% less water used in manufacturing.
How it works: 👇
Giveaway
…drumroll please 🥁
Introducing the DTC MacBook Pro Giveaway!
Share DTC Newsletter with your referral link, and you AND the friend you refer are automatically entered to win a brand new Macbook Pro.
One referral = one entry to win. More referrals = more entries!
Here’s how it works:
Step 1: Grab your referral link below.
Step 2: Share DTC newsletter with your friends/colleagues and anyone you think might enjoy DTC! 🌍
Step 3: WIN A MACBOOK PRO. 💻
Your Unique Link: http://directtoconsumer.co?utm_source=sparkloop&utm_medium=newsletterplacement&rh_ref=1ed4b700
Quick Hits
💧Dropps (earth-friendly cleaning products) is offering DTC readers 25% off their first purchase with the code "Pilothouse25"
😎 New report looks at the best times to post on social media platforms.
🔊 Spotify to add automatic transcripts for its own exclusive and original podcasts.
🐦 Twitter may be working on Twitter Blue, a subscription service that would cost $2.99 per month.
👊 Inside Gucci and Roblox’s new virtual world.
💻 Bloomberg: Apple and Microsoft’s rivalry had cooled. Now it’s back and getting testier.
👀 Grove Collaborative launches deodorant, body care refill system.
☕️ Why Bulletproof Coffee is ramping up product expansion.
📺 Shift toward streaming deals challenges Nielsen’s ratings dominance.
📦 DTC is hiring a full time editor and writer. Apply now!
🔊Have you heard our podcast?
DTC Newsletter is written by Thomas Schreiber, Eric Dyck, and Sadie Evans.
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