🎧 On this episode of the DTC pod, we chatted with Will Critcher, eCommerce Director at Death Wish Coffee, who spilled the beans on the brand’s success.
Death Wish is on a mission to save the world from blah beans and caffeinate the universe with The World’s Strongest Coffee. ☕ A premium product, bold personality, and marketing prowess has helped this brand build an iconic 8-figure coffee empire in less than 10 years.
Grab a cuppa Joe and tune in to learn how a Superbowl ad launched the brand, why the death of the Facebook feed is eminent, how adding Quick Shop boosted their ATC by 400%, and much more.
The takeaways 👇
✂️ Separation of church & state content and sales:
Death Wish has always been big on email marketing. “We have two commodities: coffee and email addresses.”
In the past, they would combine promotions and content in one email, thinking the content would be supportive of the sale. Pretty common approach, right?
However, they noticed that sometimes the content would outperform the promo and hypothesized that having both in one email was cannibalizing potential sales.
So they decided to separate the two:
- They made their sales emails simpler, with just one CTA focused on the product or promo.
- They moved their content to a weekly standalone newsletter called “The Scoop.”
✔️ Not only did their sales-focused emails improve, but their newsletter quickly amassed 100K followers and is now beloved by customers.
Sometimes it pays off to simplify and focus!
☕ A whole latte leadership wisdom:
As someone who’s been mentored by great leaders, Will shared some of his favorite nuggets (or beans?) of leadership wisdom:
The speed at which truth is shared within an organization is directly correlated with the success of that business.
Context over control. (No micro-managing.)
[A successful company is] not a family. It’s a Superbowl-winning football team.
We would also like to add: The success of your business is linearly correlated to how caffeinated your employees are. 🤪
💰 What Will would do with an extra $50K:
“Pre-roll and display ads on Pornhub.”
(No, really. That was his answer.)
We’ve got the hook: Hot coffee near you. 🔥🔥🔥
👉 Get the full drip with Will Critcher here!
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