Ashvin Melwani’s Post

If your UX is shit, your ads will only take you so far Ads get them in the door, but they need to be able to browse easily, understand who you are, and checkout. Last post I went into 2 factors outside of ads to drive growth. Here’s some more ⤵️ 1️⃣ Retention – maybe a misnomer Email & SMS can warm up users, encourage them to purchase, & shorten longer consideration cycles, getting those customers to “yes” faster Optimizing common flows like a new visitor welcome series, abandoned cart, or winback, are table stakes BUT! Retention campaigns that supplement basic flows can be a gamechanger if done well. Campaigns give you the opportunity to warm up users (at a fraction of the cost of paid ads) through certain content pillars Some examples we have seen work: Founder or founding story  Brand halos  Product education 🤳Founder content that communicates a compelling, mission, vision, or founding story can humanize your company and Make your users feel like they're buying from another person, not some faceless company. 😇Brand halos Supporting charities or being environmentally friendly - give your customers another reason to trust and support you. 📚Product education campaigns Another opportunity to relate your key features and benefits + answer common questions or troubleshoot challenges your customers might encounter. Most brands lean heavily on discounts and special offers in their retention efforts. But campaigns can improve the perception of your offers, your vision/mission, & your brand. Trust + authenticity = invaluable levers for sales. Almost done - 2️⃣ Customer Service No matter how coherent your post-click experience, or slick your CRO/merchandising, and optimized your retention efforts… At some point, your customers are going to have problems, challenges, or complaints. That’s why customer service is a must-have. It may be seen as a cost center in ecom... But it’s vital to the long-term health of your brand. It can be a HUGE source of sales & profit (if managed well) all in a 5 minute convo For example, a friendly, well-trained, and motivated phone or chat agent can not only answer questions and concerns, but also make sales, build bundles, and lower user anxieties, All in a 5 min chat/conversation. Meet with your head of CS and lead agents to better understand your customers Ask yourself about your CS department: ❓Are your agents quick, qualified, efficient, and friendly?  ❓Can your CS turn doubters and detractors into customers and advocates?  ❓Do your return, refund, and complaint processes add lots of friction and frustration? Or do they help convince people to give you another chance?  ❓Are you set up to mine your CS for common issues that will help you improve your ads, UX, or products? Don’t get me wrong. Ads are very important. I talk about them constantly for a reason... But all of the above affects sales and growth too so just remember -- ads are a player. Not the whole team.

One of the biggest mistakes we've made while growing Obvi for the last 5 years: When hiring people, we’ve taken way too long to figure out if we’ve hired the right person or not It’s just a waste of time for both sides so I asked Ben Sharf during our podcast how do you set KPIs for every role and optimize that whole process Something he said stuck with me: Let them fail. A lot of the time we drop everything, run to the problem at hand, and solve every issue. But what you have to remind yourself is that, as a founder, you can’t be everywhere at all times And sometimes you have to let them fail on their own to force them to figure it out. Ben said that what he did was hired a manager and laid out guardrails of this is what you need, these are the things that matter, and this is what needs to be done. He made sure to put the proper time in hiring the RIGHT person, gave them a playbook, and let them struggle a bit. They’ll sink or swim. 💡So make sure to have a playbook in place and after the first couple hires, you’ll be able to refine it enough where it notes, within reason, each role’s responsibilities and KPIs.

If you’ve found a winning asset, you should be doing iterative testing Swap out the hooks & CTAs – find different variants of that winning piece But DON’T dedicate all your time to iteration I follow the 80/20 approach: Spend 20% of your time iterating And 80% of your time working with new angles & new concepts

Are free trials into a subscription just not it anymore? Here's a better way to look at the trade off on free trials thanks to Gina Perrelli and Pierson Krass 👀

Your creatives on Meta, TikTok or Youtube are only really contributing to one part of the buyer journey. It’s grabbing attention. Click. Prompt people to search your brand on Google It’s up to your UX to close the deal. 2 other factors outside of ads to drive growth ⤵️ 1️⃣ Destination matching The destination i.e. home page, LP, or a product description page (PDP) needs to make sense to the user If the post-click doesn’t match a customer’s level of awareness or if UX isn’t easy to understand or navigate ➡️ high risk of that person bouncing Ex: Don’t push someone who has just entered the awareness phase in your funnel straight to a PDP. Even if you have KILLER merchandising and product pages, you need to warm them up (esp if you are a higher AOV product or have a longer consideration cycle) That’s why some marketing is not aimed at “making the sale”, at least not right away. LP formats like listicles, advertorials, and “us vs them” comparisons can be effective at educating potential buyers And moving them into the interest or consideration phase of their journey. Ok on to 2️⃣: Merchandising Yes it’s what physical retail stores do, but you shouldn’t underestimate merchandising when it comes to your digital store either. Think about it: why do big-box retail & grocery stores spend so much time on merchandising? The easier customers find your product, the better. Bundle products into something enticing, you'll make more sales. Catch their eye, show key features and benefits, & find similar or relevant products. But beyond these basics of CRO, merchandising can expand to… Product line plans  Product/category expansion  Product variant and pricing strategies  Sales channel / line planning And more. Many DTC brands launch with a hero product, or a small, modestly sized catalog. But as you grow, though, and add more ✅ Product variants  ✅ Product lines or even  ✅ Product categories As well as... ✅ New marketing channels,  ✅ New Sales channels, ✅ New Sales Regions, And new market customer personas… Then you’ll have to dedicate more time & attention to how your brand and offerings are launched, presented, accessed, priced, and organized That is, merchandised. ------- That’s it for today – there’s a few more factors so I can talk about that in another post if you want to know more! There are many factors that contribute to sales and growth. Ads is one of them, but it doesn’t do all the work.

As brand owners, we sell products that are MEANT to be consumed every day so naturally we set subscription renewals for every 30 days. But that’s often not the reality. People are still getting into a routine and will often maybe finish their products a little later than 30 days. Then when it comes to the next months order being processed, there’s a high chance of churn because people may have “too much product” So how do you account for this and decrease churn? 🙏🏽One way: your thank you message Your thank you message to your subscribers should be different When somebody checks out, have different flows for if they’re a subscriber vs if they're not So based on your product + how much they should consume it – change your messaging to help build your product into their routine A/B test on how many emails are too much to make sure you’re not annoying people into canceling… And just give gentle nudges through email or SMS reminding them of “have you tried the product”, “here’s the product benefits” etc.

This was the biggest tip I saw in email marketing that changed my whole perspective on how to handle retention marketing Ok so customer opens an email → click on something → doesn’t buy What does this mean? They’re telling you what they’re interested in just by that one click. Most of us see this as a signal of engagement. So we tend to group people who simply engage with our emails and we continue to send communication to these people. You should be really paying attention to what they’re clicking and not the fact that they’re just clicking If someone is clicking on a single link out of 5, that should tell you that there’s high intent behind that click. So we should be grouping THESE individuals together and sending them messaging accordingly. For example, we decided to first test this during BFCM Usually what we did, during pre launch, we’d send them a form where they’d input their email & SMS and we’d segment them that way We decided to test a new approach, where during pre launch we sent an email out along the lines of “BFCM is coming, click here to be notified” With this new way – all we needed them to do was click one thing and that indicated to us they were ready to shop the black friday sale All we did was simply create a segment of users who clicked on that specific CTA. That segment alone brought in more revenue than ANY other segment… That’s when I realized we were approaching retention all wrong and no one was talking about it (except for Jimmy Kim, s/o jimmy for tweeting about this a while ago)

Going from 0 to 1000 customers, CAC is the most expensive thing in terms of line items on a PNL... So I asked Pierson Krass where should CAC be in relation to the fact that pushing subscription on the first order may not have the best conversion rate🧐