You = G.O.A.T (greatest of all time), and don’t you forget it!
If you’re new to DTC, welcome! You’re in good company with fellow newcomers from Serena & Lily, CIBC, Crumpet Cashmere, and The Moon Deck. 🌛
In this newsletter, you’ll find: 👇
📦 Samantha Kozuch on community-building, influencer marketing, and the journey of Maniscripting
📦 Turning creators into revenue for your brand
📦 Controlling your Amazon campaigns by bids, not budgets
Read till the end to access exclusive DTC swag. 😎
👉 If a pal forwarded this to you, subscribe, so you never miss out.
🎧 On today’s episode of the DTC pod, we delve into an inspiring journey of transformation, tenacity, and trend-setting. Join us as we sit down with Samantha Kozuch, the visionary founder of Maniscripting, the journal company revolutionizing self-expression.
Born amongst the noise of the COVID-19 pandemic, Maniscripting is the culmination of Samantha's eclectic entrepreneurial path that began in fitness and influence, navigated through online business coaching, and eventually found its purpose in the written word.
Samantha opened up about the challenges she faced in carving a unique space in a saturated market and the role community-building played in her strategy. She also drops some wisdom on setting and manifesting goals, shedding light on the drive and determination powering Maniscripting's ambitious plans for 2023.
Whether you're a budding entrepreneur searching for inspiration or a seasoned business owner looking for fresh insights, this episode is an indispensable guide for your entrepreneurial voyage.
The takeaways 👇
🤝 Community-first
One of the main pillars of Maniscripting's remarkable growth story lies in its community-building strategy.
Samantha emphasizes that the brand's success is rooted deeply in its devoted community of thousands of women, which they've nurtured with genuine care, support, and authenticity.
Instead of relying on costly ads, Maniscripting leveraged strategic promotion and community engagement, proving the power of organic growth.
Samantha believes fostering a supportive community is vital, especially for businesses that cater to self-development, and having communal support during hard times can make a significant difference.
The secret?
Supporting the community as much as possible, offering them a safe and nurturing space, and making them feel part of the journey, creating a ripple effect of word-of-mouth promotion.
✨ Mastering manifesting
On the pod, Samantha sheds light on the vital steps for manifesting your goals. She believes that clarity is the starting line in this journey.
Segment your goals into various life facets like health, mindset, relationships, career, and finances, and jot them down, transforming intangible thoughts into tangible targets.
She also emphasizes the power of incremental progress, nudging us to take even small action steps toward our goals. Chunking them into bite-sized pieces makes the task less daunting and more manageable. And remember, every little win deserves a celebration! 🎉
Above all, she advises keeping the sunshine of positivity alive. Faith in your ability to achieve and maintaining focus on your end goal is essential. Manifesting your dreams might require time and effort, but the rewards are worth it.
Her parting wisdom? Your thoughts and actions shape your reality, so stay determined, spring into action, and never let your dreams fade.
💰 What Samantha would do with an extra $50K:
Her plan was clear: invest in people and product.
For example, a new warehouse manager could streamline packing and shipping, while a more proactive inventory management approach prevents stock-outs.
Most importantly, however, Samantha would double down on a success-oriented mindset, essentially acting as if her business goals have already been achieved. This strategy, according to her, is key to attracting positive outcomes.
👉 Listen to the full episode with Samantha Kozuch here!
From ecommerce to software, more and more brands are now leveraging creators to increase their sales. 🤑
Why? Because pay-per-click ad costs are running high, and people trust people more than ads.
DTC brands see 10x ROI when hiring creators with an established audience. Look at Asics, HelloFresh, and FarFetch, which all use affiliates as key revenue channels.
With Upfluence, you can seamlessly search and communicate with creators (even draft messages with ChatGPT compose), send and approve briefs, ship, and track products, create custom codes, manage payments, and track sales and ROI.
The best part? You can do it all without leaving the software.
👉 Turn creators into revenue today – take Upfluence for a spin here!
🚗 Bids, take the wheel
If you’ve been sleeping on your Amazon strategy, it’s time to wake up and leverage your bids, not your budget!
Crafting effective bid strategies isn’t unique to Amazon, but they are key to success on the platform. Making the most of each bid comes down to combining three core processes:
While these processes seem simple enough to implement on their own, it’s merging them that takes a true Amazon aficionado.
If you’re new to this whole bidding thing, there are a few key terms that we’ll need to discuss before taking your bids to the next level. 👇
💲Pay-per-click campaigns (PPC):
Brands pay a certain amount per click on an ad from potential consumers. This value is known as a cost-per-click (CPC).
🪧 Bidding:
Brands offer to pay a certain amount for their ads to be shown through keywords or when consumers click on their ads.
📢 Advertising Cost of Sales (ACOS):
A percentage value that reflects the amount spent on PPC campaigns compared to your revenue.
$50 spent on an ad campaign / $100 earned from sales = ACOS of 50%
Now that the essentials are out of the way, let’s put this knowledge to work. 👇
♻️ The process
A bid on Amazon is what your brand is willing to pay for a click. If you know a keyword’s conversion rate (CVR) and your ideal ACOS, you can calculate the best bid for your budget.
Let's say your:
That means:
1️⃣ Your brand spends $20 per sale (20% of $100)
2️⃣ Your target bid should be $2 (10% of ACOS)
If your target ACOS is 20% and your conversion rate is 10%, there’s no reason to budget cap your campaigns provided you have the correct bid set. That would only limit your potential revenue.
At $2 per click and 10 clicks per sale, you’ll always want to keep spending, as you’ll eventually achieve your target efficiency. Controlling campaigns by bids allows your spending to fluctuate based on demand rather than leaving money on the table. 💡
🚂 No brakes on the train
If your campaign hits its budget cap (whoops), you don't necessarily stop spending on keywords. This is especially true if you haven't given extra consideration to negative keywords across your other campaigns to cancel them out.
Let’s say you have an exact match campaign that hits its budget cap while also running an auto campaign. When your exact campaign stops spending, it's likely that your auto campaign will begin matching on the keywords from the exact match campaign and continue to spend. 😱
This same scenario can happen with broad or phrase match campaigns depending on your keyword setup.
This is a perfect example of how data gets messy when you’ve been spending on the same keyword across multiple match types. This throws your campaign efficiency out the window.
Coordinate negative keywords across your campaigns to ensure spending stops when you want it to.
😱 Loss prevention
In a worst-case scenario, budgets can (and should!) be used as a tripwire to prevent campaigns from overspending. If things go wrong, like having the wrong bid chosen, uncapped campaigns can quickly burn your budget and tank your overall efficiency.
🤑 Manage your bidding
Effective and consistent bid management is key for revenue growth. Your target ACOS won’t be the same across all keywords, so you need to determine the target for each keyword and segment.
Assigning ACOS to each keyword will become more intuitive with each iteration. It’s simply a matter of digging in and getting busy sooner rather than later when designating ACOS will be a much more daunting task.
👑 Consistency isn’t king
Campaign spend, CVR, or AOV will never be consistent from one day to the next. These values fluctuate as demand from consumers naturally increases and decreases. A carefully calculated starting bid and understanding how bids control your spending will keep you confidently on track to achieve your goals. 💪
🚀 Success doesn’t stop with your bids
Pilothouse’s Amazon team is always on the cutting edge of the tactics that move the needle for your brand. Whether you are just starting out or need a refresher, every brand’s Amazon strategy can benefit from a checkup.
That’s why we’ve got more Amazon essentials coming your way in the next few weeks. Be there, don’t be square.
📊 See how your results stack up against 1,000s of brands in the SMS Benchmarks Report. Get data breakdowns and actionable insights to make SMS your top revenue channel in 2023. *
🚨 [ONLINE EVENT] Last Call for Google Analytics 4! GA4 is replacing Universal Analytics on July 1st. Is your store ready? GA4 overview and all you need to know with Charles Farina in partnership with Aidaptive. Register now. *
🦺 Surgeon General advises the public to better understand how social media affects their personal information.
📷 Snap is working on the “Dreams” feature using generative AI to create realms from text prompts. This unique concept could open the door to future developments in generative AI for the platform.
📺 YouTube’s Growth and Discovery Lead discloses the algorithm's new focus to support up-and-coming creators and long-term relationships with audiences.
📔 A new study confirms that TikTok is still leading in popularity with short-form content among its competitors, while Instagram Reels follows in second place.
*Sponsored
💚 "Enlightened Hospitality" and the Secret to Killer CX with Eli Weiss from Jones Road Beauty.
💄 8-Figure Beauty Empire Trinny London's Epic Organic Content.
🚗 The Road to 9-Figures with Cody Plofker from Jones Road Beauty (Plus Cody’s YouTube and Meta Ads Funnel Breakdown).
🤑 How Not to Grow an 8-Figure Business (Obvi Panel - C-Suite Preview).
🍫 Jess Cervellon from Feastables: What CPG Can Learn from SaaS about CX.
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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