Trends from BFCM to Pay Attention to

The TL;DR:

• Let’s Chat D2C: Recharge Bundles - the merchandising hack to increase conversion rate and AOV.

• What I’m Thinking about this Week: Important Trends from Klaviyo’s 2022 BFCM Report.

• The D2Z Podcast: The Benefits of Ecommerce and POS integration.

• App Highlight & Updates: ByondXR powering Lindt’s Virtual Shopping Experience, Shopify Plus B2B Updates, Pause Subscription on Recharge, and Klaviyo’s November Product Releases.

• Upcoming Events: I’m hosting a masterclass webinar on 12/13 with my friends at Fairing. RSVP HERE!

Random tip: It’s good to look up to individuals you view as successful, but don’t get overwhelmed trying to “catch up” with others. Focus on being your best self. 

Let's Chat D2C: Recharge Bundles

This week I want to chat about bundles, one of my favorite merchandising hacks to increase conversion rate and AOV. Specifically, I will dive into all the different bundles you can configure for subscription programs.

Preset Bundles

A preset bundle is a bundle of products that the brand presets. Customers can subscribe to it but cannot change the bundle's contents; however, the brand can update the contents from the merchant portal.

Variable Customizable Bundles

This is also known as build-your-own-box! The brand defines what products are available, and the customer selects which products they want in their box when signing up. On recurring orders, customers need to choose their product for the next order within a merchant-defined order window; however, there are fallback products if a selection isn’t made in time.

Merchants can also create one-off product add-ons to cross-sell and increase AOV before upcoming orders are shipped.

Customizable Bundles

This is the same as above, but the customer’s selection will stay the same for all recurring orders unless they make an update.

Preset + Customizable Bundles

A combination of preset and customizable. The subscription starts as preset, where all customers get the same defined products on their first order. Then, the merchant defines what products are available after the first order, and the customer will select which products they want for order #2 and on.

How to use Bundles for Your Store

I recommend testing out a bundle offer on your store. My favorite is sending repeat purchasers to a build-your-own subscription box page, allowing them to subscribe to their typical one-shot order.

What I’m Thinking About This Week: BFCM Trends from Klaviyo’s Report

A 46% Increase in Revenue YOY

Between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday 2022, brands attributed $2.2B in revenue to Klaviyo messages–a record high and a 46% increase from $1.5B in 2021.

More importantly, brands attributed 37% of their online store BFCM revenue to Klaviyo, showcasing how essential email and SMS are as marketing channels for the future of brands, especially with the changing paid acquisition landscape and struggles related to data privacy.

SMS Marketing is Here to Stay, and Consumers Don’t Mind It - They Want It

A recent Klaviyo survey showed that 96% of consumers in the US and Canada are willing to receive a text from a brand at least once per week, over triple the percentage (31%) that agreed in a similar survey conducted a year prior.

SMS is Conversational

I continue to strongly advocate for brands staffing their SMS line with customer service agents versus forcing customers to email in to get help, and the numbers support this stance. Over BFCM, Klaviyo processed 1.92M incoming text messages.

This is a massive opportunity for brands to engage with their customers in a 1:1 manner, improve their experience, and help nurture them to conversion. With Klaviyo’s Gorgias and Zendesk integrations, adding it to your customer service channel mix is pretty simple.

This Week's The D2Z Podcast

#38 - Benefits of Ecommerce and POS Integration: Bridging the Gap to Optimize User Experience from a Marketing and Operations Perspective

🎧 Listen Now 🎧

In this week’s episode, I sat down with Christine Russo, the Founder of Retail Creative & Consulting Agency, to chat about ecommerce and POS. Specifically, we explored the following:

💰 The challenges and opportunities of creating a tightly integrated shopping experience

📲 Improving inventory management, product knowledge, shipping, and more

😎 Improving inventory management, product knowledge, shipping, and more

🚀 The Metaverse?

Listen Now  

App Highlight - ByondXR, Shopify Plus Updates, Pause Subscriptions on Recharge, and Klaviyo’s November Product Releases

ByondXR lets your customers experience your products in a virtual store. It essentially allows you to take your shopping experience into the metaverse and is the software powering experiences such as Lindt’s virtual store.

❓What is It: Metaverse commerce platform for brands to create virtual shopping experiences.

🏅Differentiator: They are one of the only technology solutions in this space and are used by Fortune 500 companies such as Target and P&G.

💰Starting Price: I haven’t heard back yet, but I am guessing it’s expensive :)

🚀How we use it: We don’t use it at Electriq yet, but I’m exploring it later this month and hope to test it out with one of our merchants in Q2 next year!

Shopify Plus Updates

Shopify just dropped six new B2B features for Plus Merchants!

Draft Order Checkout

You can now send buyers a pre-populated checkout.

“Due on Fulfillment” Payment Terms

Give your customers the terms they want. Just go to a company location profile and add or edit payment terms.

Branding Customizations

Update your brand settings in the checkout editor to have consistent branding across checkout, order history, and account information pages.

Shopify Functions for B2B

Create payment and delivery logic and apps tailored to B2B customers.

Flexible Shipping Address

Allow customers to modify their shipping address at checkout.

Payment Reminders

Automatically remind your customers of payments as they become due or overdue.

Pause Subscriptions with Recharge

There’s not too much to note here, other than you can now add the ability to “pause a subscription” in your cancellation flow. Early data from Recharge shows this functionality helps increase customer retention by up to 10%!

Klaviyo’s November Product Updates

Per usual, Klaviyo released a few product updates in November that extend the functionality of their platform! Let’s dive into what they are and why they matter.

SMS Assistant

With Klaviyo’s new SMS assistant, you can briefly describe your campaign to generate examples of SMS copy in seconds.

SMS in New Zealand

Not much to note here other than Klaviyo now supports SMS in New Zealand, furthering its international messaging reach.

Scheduled Signup Forms

Instead of manually turning forms on and off, you can now schedule them to automatically display on a day and time and automatically shut off at a specific time. This is a valuable feature, especially around the holiday season when you should change your lead capture pre-BFCM to have BFCM language, etc.

Redesigned Consent Pages

Finally!! Historically, you needed to involve a developer to customize preference, subscribe/consent, and unsubscribe pages. And as an email marketer, this was very frustrating as preference pages are one of the best ways to collect zero-party data from your list and tailor your communication strategy to them based on what they actually want.

Klaviyo has now released a new drag-and-drop builder to create these pages, adding the ability to collect SMS consent, amongst other features.

Book of the Week - The Monk who Sold his Ferrari

I saw Ben from Disco and Dan from the Snow Agency recommend this one on IG, so I had to pick one up! It was a great read that’s given me a kick in the ass to take a different approach to some things. I’m a big proponent of looking at everything as an opportunity, no matter the circumstances, but it’s challenging to do so, and this book was a strong reminder of how important it is.

Key Takeaways:

• Thoughts matter, and it’s important to cultivate your mind to see opportunity rather than looking towards negativity. Nurture your mind, teach it to think positively, see opportunity, and make it a habit.

• Have a passion for something. It’s cliche, but finding something to live for is crucial.

• Positive affirmations can help you break through barriers and overcome challenges.

• Do the things you fear the most.

• Never sacrifice happiness for achievement.

• Being outcome obsessed can be a negative. You need the discipline to put in the practice and time required to reach your end outcome.

• Time is extremely precious. Hold yours in high regard and protect it.

• Helping others will help you.

• Be present in your current moment.

Get The Book Here! 

Upcoming Events

I’ll be hosting a masterclass webinar on 12/13 with my friends at Fairing about how I use their platform to help with purchase attribution and as a zero-party data aggregator that directly impacts Electriq’s segmentation and personalization strategy. More details to come on this! You can RSVP here!

RSVP HERE!

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