In case you’ve been living under a rock, Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp all went down Monday.
For a hot second, Twitter became our only hope. 🤣
According to Facebook, ads did NOT deliver during the outage although advertisers may see (or already have seen) accelerated delivery as the outages recover.
Make sure you review your bids and budgets!
If you’re new to DTC, welcome! You’re in good company with fellow newcomers from Hanes, Brooks Running, E.L.F. Beauty, Silk + Sonder, Muddy Bites, Counter Coffee Culture, and Revolve. 🎉
👥 Part 2 – How Olipop has crafted the best customer experience.
🤑 Killer email Q4 planning tips.
🚽 Wash, not wipe with Omigo’s Thomas Lotrecchiano.
🧘♀️ Keep Calm.
Read till the end to access exclusive DTC swag. 😎
👉 If a pal forwarded this to you, subscribe so you never miss out. And be sure to follow us on Twitter and Instagram.
We’re back with part two of our conversation with Eli Weiss, Director of CX at Olipop.
Let’s go!
In its most basic form, CX strategy is about meeting the expectations your brand has set across the customer journey. And, if you can, it’s about exceeding them.
But most customers didn't repurchase because they had an expectation that it would taste exactly like Coca-Cola.
Eli explained that the team’s ad copy was creating that expectation, so they switched it up and went with a more educational approach.
Figure out where those pain points are – especially during this process, when customers may be upset.
Here’s an SMS campaign that educated Olipop customers about its ingredients, without even including a CTA to purchase the product.
The approach was purely about providing value.
1) Appreciate and Apologize: Be generous with appreciation, and apologize/remedy if you mess up.
2) Context: Understand the full message. See if you can reference any context to show you’re actively acknowledging the person.
3) Engage: If customers are chatty, lean in and engage. As an example: What’s your favorite flavor? What flavor are you trying next?
These are great opportunities to LEARN about what customers like and don’t like.
4) Focus on Relationships: If a customer dislikes a product and leaves a negative review, offer to send a different product instead of refunding.
READ that again! ^ It’s a great idea.
5) Follow up: When necessary, follow up (snooze feature is a great way of reminding yourself to reach out).
6) Manage expectations: Always look to overdeliver instead of overpromising.
7) Personalize: Call customers by their name, add personalization to macros.
People love their own name, whether it’s hearing it in person, over text, or in an email. Use that to your advantage.
8) Listen: Listening to your customers is key to understanding if you’re doing it right, or if you’re just convincing yourself that you are.
You can start doing this by asking customers to give your feedback in a survey.
Many people think an extroverted personality is required to work in customer experience, but that’s far from the truth.
Eli, a self-proclaimed introvert, outlined the qualities he believes make someone a successful CX marketer:
The ability to read between the lines: "When somebody is pissed off about your product being two days delayed, it could be that they had a really bad day, but it could also be that they had the same issue with their last three orders. So it makes sense why this person is extremely frustrated."
Humility: You’re going to get thrown around in your inbox by all sorts of situations.
If you can acknowledge your mistakes and address each situation with humility it will prepare you to help customers better.
Empathy: Understand your customer’s pain points and have empathy for the frustrating experiences they’re going through –both with your brand and in their personal lives.
"I really, honestly feel terrible if a person bought something for $40 and didn't get it. Like, if somebody spent their hard earned money on a product and they felt like it was a waste of money, that hurts me."
Good listening skills: Talk to your customers, listen to their concerns, hear their feedback, and apply it to make their shopping experiences better.
The ability to think outside of the box: "You're not always just going to be able to refund someone. So you have to get creative with conflict resolution."
Here’s another very personal response the Olipop team received from a customer:
CX is about creating a comfortable space for consumers to engage with brands and coming up with unique ways to have conversations with them.
Eli suggests brands should have larger support and CX to make room for this level of creativity.
"If your job is support, and you’re running through 5,000 tickets in a day, you’ll never have that space.
I get told all the time, ‘we're over-resourced.’ And I'm like, I want people to have 10 tickets in an hour to think of creative ways to engage. But if you don't have the space because you have 5,000 tickets, you'll never be there.
When chatting with brands in the space that have been in the news for being massively overworked in CX, you hear them saying, ‘I didn't have the ability to think like that.’
If you found this helpful or want to learn more about CX, reply to this email. :)
US subscription brands will have to work harder to win customers in 2022, according to new data that shows the pandemic boom is starting to wear off.
When consumer research platform Attest surveyed US consumers, they found that 65% of respondents are open-minded to purchasing a new product subscription—and they wanted to dig into exactly what would interest them.
While practical product subscriptions that replenish the things people run out of are still the most popular type, there are still a number of gaps in the market.
What are they? Well, the answers might surprise you. 😮
Find out the freshest insights on what consumers want from D2C brands in 2022 in Attest’s latest D2C Digest.
We’re back with more Q4 tips from the Pilothouse team. This time we’re covering Email.
Tip 1. Turn off regular promotion messaging AT LEAST 2 weeks before BFCM.
Tip 2. Adjust welcome series and winback flows to align with your BFCM messaging.
Tip 3. Customer inboxes will be jammed up from now until the end of the year. Avoid inbox clutter by making a heavy push on SMS.
Tip 4. Modify abandonment flows to have a much shorter window in anticipation of high traffic.
Tip 5. Segment out buyers who purchase during BFCM and place them into a different flow (this is crucial, and most brands fail to do this!).
Tip 6: Clean your email list to improve your deliverability.
If you have subscribers who’ve been through all your flows and never clicked, engaged, or bought, create an "unengaged" list and stop sending to them. It’s only hurting you.
Tip 7: Set up welcome nurture sequences to continue engaging with your newly acquired customers AFTER BFCM is over.
Create flows for how to keep those customers. It’s all about retention!
CREATIVE
Timing is everything…
Meditation app Calm is the latest example. 🔥😎
Are coupon extensions like Honey and CapitalOne Shopping good for your eCommerce business?
Research shows that not only do they reduce AOV, they also reduce overall conversion rates and increase cart abandonment - all while claiming credit for sales they had no part in driving.
Leading eCommerce brands like Caraway, Made In, Super Coffee, and Vessi are increasing revenue, reducing affiliate fraud, and saving hours per week by blocking coupon extensions with cleanCART.
Isn't it time you did, too?
Stop letting coupon extensions scrape and share your discount codes with buyers they weren't intended for.
Reclaim control of your coupon strategy with cleanCART and see MASSIVE ROI, fast. 🔥
👋 This week on the pod, we were joined by Thomas Lotrecchiano, co-founder of Omigo.
"The most difficult thing about selling bidets to Americans is probably the fact that most of them haven’t used one before.
So, to educate them is the most difficult thing… To help them understand how much better it is than wiping with toilet paper."
Omigo did a few things to better educate their audience on bidets (and ultimately improve new customer conversion):
As TikTok surpasses 1B monthly users (❗), DTC brands are scrounging to get their products in the hands of top TikTok influencers.
But before getting too "salesy," marketers may want to consider a more organic, authentic approach with TikTok –which is, after all, the essence of the platform…
"You can’t go out there making ads on TikTok or ask creators and expect it to blow up… It’s all about giving creators free-range with your product and letting it organically show up on someone’s feed."
YouTube has been a big growth channel for Omigo.
But how do they keep up with the creative churn needed to feed the YouTube algorithm? 😫
"You don’t need to make a new video entirely every couple of months; you don’t have to put out a brand new video. But it is important to make small adjustments to your creative… it’s about keeping creatives fresh for the algorithm, not your audience."
Thomas recommends frequently making small tweaks to your existing videos, like:
👉 Listen to the full pod with Omigo here (and get a 20% off code for your very own toilet of the future).
📊 Spotify rolls out podcast polls and Q&As to creators and users worldwide.
🧐 Google pushes back FLoC testing to Q1 2022.
🎞 Facebook launches Reels on Facebook to US users.
🎥 TikTok’s new ad products invite users to interact with taps, swipes, likes and more.
📧 Watch for inflated email open rates now that iOS 15 is out.
💬 Facebook Messenger releases cross-app group chats, further integrating with Instagram.
😊 TikTok entices advertisers with brand safety, ad measurement and commerce push.
🚽 Why YouTube is the secret behind this DTC bidet brands success with Thomas Lotrecchiano from Omigo.
👨🎓 Retention for Consumables with Troy Petrunoff from Every Man Jack.
🌎 Omsom’s Emily Chan shares the secret behind 90% of their growth, and it’s NOT paid ads.
🛍 Building the future of online marketplaces with Matt Hayes, Co-Founder of The Fascination.
Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)
DTC Newsletter is written by Thomas Schreiber, Kelsey Hess, Tina Donati, and Rebecca Knight.
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