Acquisition Tips & Tricks

The TL;DR:

• Let’s Chat D2C: Alternative Ways to Acquire Customers

• What I’m Thinking about this Week: Autonomy needs to come with accountability.

• The D2Z Podcast: The Entrepreneurial Journey, Risk and Reward, and Subscription Commerce with the CEO of Stately.

• App Highlight - Govalo: Gift Cards.

• Book of the Week: N/A - too busy! Time to get back at my one book-a-week habit.

• Upcoming Event - DTCX RETAIN: I am thrilled to be speaking 🤩 at DTCX RETAIN on October 20th in Hollywood, LA! I’m presenting my 10-part retention marketing program at 3 PM PST on the Indoor Stage.

Random tip: One step backward can lead to two steps forward.

Let's Chat D2C: Alternative Ways to Acquire Customers

iOS updates, increased competition, ecommerce slowing, and rising inflation. These 4, in combination, have drastically changed what a successful customer acquisition program looks like.

If Not Paid Ads, then what?

I don’t pretend to be a paid acquisition specialist. Still, through our Retention-as-a-Service offering at Electriq, I’ve picked up a few tips and tricks around alternative customer acquisition efforts. Let’s dive in!

Pop-up Shops

Consumers love in-person experiences, and I’ve found that brands can make more meaningful connections in person. Not only will you be able to make money with a pop-up shop, but you’ll capture a ton of UGC, and your customers will get to meet one another and start building a real community.

Suppose you’re worried about generating enough attendees. Log in to your Shopify backend and find the top 3 locations for your customers. Then, create a segment in your Klaviyo account of all email/SMS contacts within a 30-mile radius of a central zip code in that city. Send out a teaser communication to see if you can generate enough RSVPs and go from there!

Brand Collabs

Brand collaborations can be a waste of time, but if done with the right partner and executed well, they can significantly impact new customer acquisition.

Social media giveaways serve their purpose but won’t be a significant ROI generator. Email and text campaigns, on the other hand, can be, especially if, for example, you pay for placement in a brand's automated flows, such as a thank you email.

Carro

Carro allows you to sell your products on other brands’ websites. For example, our client Soylent sells its products on Blendjet’s Marketplace as a supplier on Carro. Suppliers can get their products listed on Carro’s directory for free and only charge a 5% transaction fee for sales generated through their platform. Brands, like Blendjet, will select which items they want to sell on their Shopify store through Carro.

When a customer orders Soylent through BlendJet’s marketplace, that line item from the order gets sent to Soylent’s Shopify store to fulfill. Why does that matter? We now get that customer data and can remarket to them, essentially acquiring a new customer for zero CAC!

Superfiliate

Superfiliate is a referral platform on steroids, allowing customers to create their own unique headless storefronts to refer their friends with. Through its deep integrations with Klaviyo, Attentive, and Postscript, Superfiliate automates email/SMS communication while integrating with Shopify and Recharge to handle payments.

Superfiliate is such a stellar platform (and their co-founders always go above and beyond) that it drove over $64,000 in sales alone in September for one of our clients.

Gift Cards & Gift Wrapping/Notes

Let your customers give the gift of your brand to their friends and family with gift cards. There are a ton of promotions you can structure around BFCM to incentivize gift cards, such as “buy a $50 gift card for a friend and get $10” back.

Another simple, easy feature to implement on your site is gift notes (and wrapping, if you can).

What I’m Thinking About This Week: Autonomy, but with Accountability

This week I’m thinking about the disconnect that remote work is causing between stakeholders and their ownership of items within a company. Remote work has fostered an environment where there is an extremely high level of autonomy. While I think is a good thing, if managers and teams don’t hold one another accountable, this autonomy can quickly turn into certain team members not picking up their fair share.

I’ve found that building a strong team culture while setting clear and specific expectations helps with this substantially!

This Week's The D2Z Podcast

#32 - The Entrepreneurial Journey, Risk and Reward, and Subscription Commerce with Hiral Zalavadia

🎧 Listen Now 🎧

In this week’s episode, I sat down with Hiral Zalavadia, Founder & CEO of Stately, a men’s fashion subscription service and innovator in the space. Specifically, we explored:

💰 The ins and outs of the DTC subscription model

📲 Growing a business and getting past bottlenecks

😎 How to assess and mitigate risk

🚀 Entrepreneurship and Hiral’s own journey!

App Highlight - Govalo

❓ What is It: Gift card and store credit app for Shopify.

🏅 Differentiator: Effortlessly integrated into the Shopify admin with the ability to schedule gift card delivery, customize the design look and feel, look up your balance, integrate with Klaviyo, and more. They recently enabled purchasing bulk gift cards directly from a storefront, a huge feature going into the holiday season to attract corporate customers.

💰 Starting Price: Free + 2.9% of total gift card value.

🚀 How we use it: On all of our client’s websites to power gift cards.

Book of the Week - N/A

After reading a book about the power of creating habits last week, I broke my habit and didn’t read a book while in Toronto for Shopify Unite. Life got in the way, and my streak ends at 4! I’ll make up for it with two books this week :)

Upcoming Events

I am thrilled to be speaking 🤩 at DTCX RETAIN on October 20th in Hollywood, LA! I’m presenting my 10-part retention marketing program at 3 PM PST on the Indoor Stage.

After numerous successful events 📈, the DTCX team is taking their smash-hit virtual conferences in person in Los Angeles, bringing the leaders in DTC together to prepare for the most challenging 🌟 holiday yet and for the year to come.

This isn’t another eCommerce conference. This TWO-DAY 📆 event will be held at Academy LA, one of LA’s most luxurious nightclubs, with a JUNGLE WELCOME Party on 10/19.

Join me with brands such as Princess Polly, Liquid Death, BrüMate, Love Wellness, and True Classic Tees for two days of sessions, workshops, networking, giveaways, and more!

Lastly, If you are a merchant, you can use my promo code - ELECTRIQ - to book your DTCX experience! 🚀 See you there! 👋

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