The TL;DR:

• Let’s Chat D2C: BFCM is Meaningless Without a Second Purchase

• What I’m Thinking about this Week: Job boards don’t match relevant candidates to relevant companies - why we built SCALIS.

• The D2Z Podcast: In this week’s episode, I sat down with Brennan Tobin, Founder of Odd Duck, a fractional growth marketing group and full-service performance marketing agency that JUST launched! This is a great episode for first-time founders or those thinking about taking the leap and starting their own business.

• App Updates & Highlights: Superfiliate Promotions, Expanded Rebuy A/B Testing, Gorgias <> TikTok Shop Integration, and Tiktok Shop <> PostPilot Integration.

• Upcoming Events: I’m in Austin from 11/27-11/28 and at WIN Expo in Sonoma from 11/29-11/30. Then, I’ll be back in Miami on 12/7 for the rest of the year. Let me know if you want to connect!

Also, you can now easily share this newsletter with a friend! As you refer, you earn:

• 3 Referrals: A Free Tech Stack Audit

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• 10 Referrals: A Free 30-minute Consulting Session

Let’s Chat D2C - BFCM is Meaningless Without a Second Purchase

BFCM is a low-margin race to the bottom for most brands eagerly trying to capture new customers and a topline revenue boost before year’s end. Discounts are front and center as they compete to acquire as many customers as possible.

Repeat purchases generate cash flow because there is zero or lower CAC, and typically discounts are lower. But, it will be a long Q1 if you’re not engineering how these customers will return and make a second purchase.

Implement my playbook below to ensure you’re maximizing the % of new customers from BFCM that reorder.

1) One-shot vs Subscription

If you have a subscription program, you must separate your one-time purchasers from your subscribers in all post-order communications and follow-ups. For example, when you get a new subscription customer, you’ll send them an email welcoming them to their new subscription and outlining all of the benefits of it (proactive retention and churn mitigation), but with a one-time purchaser, you’ll be more aggressive in the frequency of communications sent and highlight when they should reorder next.

You’ll also want to exclude active subscription customers from your standard replenishment and win-back email/SMS flows because they don’t need to take action to reorder!

2) Second Order Timing

Understand when your customers typically come back and place a second order. You can use a solution like Lifetimely to identify the typical time between 1st and 2nd orders. Then, set up your follow-up communications during and around that timeframe.

If you want to get more advanced, you can leverage predictive analytics, such as Klaviyo’s Expected Date of Next Order, that takes into account the specific customer’s order behavior and the order behavior of all of your customers to determine when to trigger a flow of email and SMS communications.

3) Transactional Experience

A strong transactional experience is CRITICAL to improve retention. These are always the most highly engaged touchpoints and also reach customers regardless of their marketing opt-in status. If you use standard Shopify transactional notifications and a standard order tracking page, you will get lost in the sea of brands.

Leverage a solution like Malomo to stand out from the crowd and create personalized transactional experiences.

4) Returns & Exchange Process

If you’re a business that takes returns and exchanges, nothing is worse than a manual process for customers. Customers should be able to log into their accounts and initiate a return or exchange process without needing customer service intervention, and you should also have tactics in place to turn return requests into exchange requests.

I like to use Loop to automate the returns process.

5) 2nd Order Perks

One of my favorite tactics for getting one-shot customers to reorder and for keeping subscription customers past their first order is to include a gift or special item in the 2nd order, BUT make sure to communicate that this gift will be included in their 2nd order in your transactional communications. We do not want to surprise and delight; we want to employ proactive retention tactics here!

What I’m Thinking About This Week - Why do Job Boards not Work?

We’ve been ideating and building for almost 18 months now, so I’m super excited that SCALIS launches in 3 weeks!

The Problem

Of all the products we could’ve built, why did we choose to build a fully integrated AI-based ATS & job board?

Put simply, job boards do not match relevant candidates to relevant companies.

I scaled my Shopify Plus ecommerce agency Electriq in just 3 years to a successful exit, but I experienced hands-on horrible inefficiencies in finding and hiring talent. I’d post a job on Linkedin for a Shopify developer and get 500+ applications, but at most, 5 of those candidates had even logged into Shopify!

While at Stanford, my brother Parker signed up for LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, Indeed, and all of your standard job boards. To date, he has yet to receive a single recommendation that he is even remotely qualified for. His inbox is littered with Fortune 500 CMO positions and other unqualified roles, such as air traffic controller and forklift operator!

So, we set out to try and find out why job boards don’t work. After our research, we realized just how large of a gap there is in the market, and SCALIS was born.

The Solution

You can learn more about SCALIS here and sign up for the waitlist to get onboarded!

This Week’s The D2Z Podcast

#83 – Taking the Entrepreneurial Leap with Brennan Tobin.

🎧 Listen Now 🎧

In this week’s episode, I sat down with Brennan Tobin, Founder of Odd Duck, a fractional growth marketing group and full-service performance marketing agency that JUST launched! Specifically, we explored the following:

💰 Intricate dynamics of agency pricing and client relationships.

📲 The synergies between different media channels.

😎 Starting your own business for the very first time.

🚀 Actionable takeaways and strategies to enhance your own entrepreneurial journey.

App Updates & Highlights - Superfiliate Promotions, Expanded Rebuy A/B Testing, Gorgias <> TikTok Shop Integration, and Tiktok Shop <> PostPilot Integration.

Superfiliate Promotions

Most holiday sales typically cannibalize referral, influencer, and affiliate programs, so Superfiliate has built three different types of promotions you can use to promote your programs during BFCM:

• Higher Discounts: Let’s say you’re running 30% off sitewide during the holidays, but your referral program only offers 20% off. You can now match that discount across all of your Superfiliate programs.

• Buy X Get Y: Incentivize buying certain items with a Buy X Get Y promotion.

• Spend X Get Y: Similar to Buy X Get Y, use this promotion to increase AOV by encouraging your customers to shop more by offering rewards for hitting a certain spending threshold.

Expanded Rebuy A/B Testing

To help with the sunsetting of Google Optimize, Rebuy is expanding the A/B testing product functionality to general A/B testing, including anything that JS and/or CSS can support.

Gorgias <> TikTok Shop Integration

You can now manage all customer support interactions from TikTok Shop in Gorgias.

PostPilot <> TikTok Shop Integration

One of the biggest drawbacks to selling on TikTok Shop is that you don’t get the customer’s email, so how do you market to them?

You have their postal address, so target them with direct mail! You can use PostPilot for win-back campaigns, second purchase campaigns, and more.

Upcoming Events

I’m in Austin from 11/27-11/28 and at WIN Expo in Sonoma from 11/29-11/30. Then, I’ll be back in Miami on 12/7 for the rest of the year. Let me know if you want to connect!

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