Every Weekend Should be a 3 Day Weekend...

The TL;DR:

• Let’s Chat D2C: Your retention strategy starts before the first order.

• What I’m Thinking about this Week: Testing & analyzing results by customer segment.

• The D2Z Podcast: I chatted with the SVP of Ecommerce at TRUFF about using content to create differentiation, building brand loyalty, and some tips to show authenticity.

• App Highlight - Recharge: The #1 Subscription app for Shopify stores, and it has SMS subscription management!

Random tip: "Accidentally" send a promotion to contacts on your list that have never purchased before. Every time we've done this, it works exceptionally well!

Let's Chat D2C - Your Retention Strategy Starts Before the First Order

I’m guilty of this as well, but many brands think of a retention strategy and focus on what happens after the first purchase. Your customer’s journey and whether or not they remain a customer of yours is a bit more complicated.

To use the simplest of examples, let’s say John makes his first purchase, but the website experience wasn’t the best, and the shipping timeline for their order wasn’t clear either. Well, you just set yourself up for a potentially harmful customer experience.

John waits three days, but he still doesn’t have an update on the expected delivery date, and now he’s frustrated and messaging your customer service team asking when his order is expected to arrive! Not only is John’s experience not seamless, but now you have additional customer service costs.

It’s crucial to audit your customer journey from the moment they land on your site through the reordering experience.

Testing & Analyzing Results by Segment

I’ve been preaching for a while that you need to be A/B and multivariate testing (who hasn’t) and to analyze these tests by SEGMENT, not across your entire list. Not every customer group will respond to your campaign the same way, so it’s important to ensure you’re taking into account the type of customer receiving it.

For example, we recently tested a text-message campaign “from the founder” with a selfie versus a text without a picture. The version with a selfie had a significantly higher CTR for non-purchasers, but the version without a selfie won for purchasers.

How can you do this?

Klaviyo just released the ability to get campaign performance reporting at the audience level! Now, instead of cloning campaigns just to send to different audiences, you can send one campaign and still get segment performance.

What does this allow you to do?

You’ll get a clear view of how a campaign and its messaging resonate with different audiences, which in turn will allow you to develop more targeted audience-specific campaigns that will improve performance.

Example Customer Segments

Here are a few customer segments you can think about analyzing your results against:

• Purchasers vs. non-purchasers

• Active Subscription Customers

• Churned Subscription Customers

• VIP Customers (i.e. $500+ in LTV)

This Week's The D2Z Podcast

#26 - Using Content for Differentiation in CPG, Focusing on Loyalty & Authenticity with Calvin Lammers

🎧 Listen Now 🎧

On this week’s episode, I sat down with Calvin Lammers, SVP of Ecommerce at premium hot sauce brand TRUFF. Specifically, we explored:

💰 Shifting from acquisition to customer loyalty

📲 The pros and cons of CPG ecommerce

😎 How to differentiate food products by using content to identify taste profiles and educate

🚀Best practices for building a consumer brand!

App Highlight - Recharge

❓ What is It: Subscription Commerce Platform

🏅 Differentiator: There are some new entrants to watch in this category, but Recharge is THE subscription platform for Shopify merchants (They have around 80% of them). Recharge is not only a robust subscription, but it has numerous integrations with other best-in-class apps in the Shopify ecosystem. One of their biggest differentiators is RechargeSMS, something we’ve been leveraging for our clients since before they acquired the platform over a year ago. On average, customers who interact with their subscription via SMS have a 30% higher LTV.

💰 Starting Price: 1% +

🚀 How we use it: All things subscription!

• Subscribe & save

• Gifting

• Prepaids

• Build-a-box

• A quiz that leads to a custom recommendation

• Intro offer into an auto-renew

• SMS Subscription Management

Video Tutorial: I put together a walkthrough of RechargeSMS here!

Upcoming Events

I've got 3 conferences I'll be attending and speaking at in October. One in Miami and two in LA. Once I have the solidified details, I'll drop them here!

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