The TL;DR:

• Let’s Chat D2C: Q1 2024 doesn’t look great - How consumers are packing their spending into BFCM and the Holidays even more than before.

• What I’m Thinking about this Week: Repurposing Content - How I take one piece of content and turn it into twenty.

• The D2Z Podcast: In this week’s episode, I sat down with Ryan Burrer, Principal Sales Engineer for New Products at Attentive, the world’s #1 conversational marketing platform.

• App Highlights: Cut down on the number of email tickets by leveraging other self-service and automated options with Gorgias.

• Upcoming Events: DRINKS was selected for a booth in NRF’s Innovation Lab in NYC, and I’ll be here until 1/17! Let me know if you’re around and want to connect.

Let’s Chat D2C - Q1 2024 Doesn’t Look Great

Disclaimer: None of what I’m about to say is backed by hard stats, just my observations from the first two weeks of the new year!

Consumer Behavior

Since 2018, I have seen two specific trends emerge:

• BFCM sales don’t have the same peak on the actual days of Black Friday and Cyber Monday because the sales are starting earlier and are spread out over multiple weeks in November and even December.

• Consumers are trained to expect the best deals of the year during the BFCM timeframe. As such, they are holding off on certain purchases during the year and frontloading shopping for the new year when there are limited-time deals they know only come once a year.

How this Impacts Sales

Q1 has always been tough for our ecommerce clients, but it’s only getting tougher. Customers are shopping like crazy during Q4 (we saw a significant increase YOY) but pulling back significantly during Q1.

In fact, in Q1 2024 compared to Q1 2023, we’re currently seeing a decrease YOY.

How Brands Should Adjust

DO NOT start freaking out and sending promotions out left and right. Instead, start factoring this change in consumer behavior into your forecasts and expectations for the year.

Focus on retaining the customers you brought in over BFCM in other ways than just excessive discounting: high-quality content, unique loyalty perks, etc.

Make your product indispensable to your customers and get them onto a subscription program. Recurring revenue will help you ride out the January/Q1 sales slump and allow you to invest more heavily in these customers.

What I’m Thinking About This Week - Repurposing Content

Repurposing content is the secret weapon B2B marketers employ to make one piece of content reach hundreds of thousands of eyeballs across different mediums and formats. Still, it’s not just limited to B2B, either! Ecommerce can get in on the fun as well.

Repurposing vs. Cross-posting vs. Reposting

Cross-posting is when you share a piece of content as-is on another social media platform. Reposting content is when you republish a piece of content on the same platform. Repurposing content is keeping the core of a piece of content’s idea and adapting it for other channels.

B2B Content Repurposing

When repurposing content, it’s almost always easiest to start with long-form content, repurpose it into different formats, and then break it up into smaller tidbits. Here are some of the types of content that you can repurpose:

• Static Long Form

  • Newsletter

  • Blog

  • Slide Deck

  • Ebook (i.e., Resource Guide)

• Static Short Form

  • Social Posts

  • Infographics

  • Email

• Video Long Form

  • Youtube

  • Podcast

  • Webinar

• Video Short Form

  • Short Clips cut up for social

  • Quotes

You can also take long-form video and transform it into written content. For example, creating text transcripts of your videos or turning your video transcripts into blog posts.

Beyond repurposing content, you can combine the above types of content to maximize value. For example, embed one of your podcast episodes into a relevant blog post.

How I Repurpose Content

Here are some standard structures I employ for getting more content out:

• Newsletter —> social posts. I create a long-form newsletter every Sunday that our social team can cut and craft into short-form pieces of content. One newsletter could equal anywhere from 3-10 social posts, depending on the depth of the newsletter.

• Podcast —> blog post and social posts of video snippets from the podcast.

Pro-tip: Include other contributors in your content! Some of my most engaged social posts are of my podcast since there is always a guest tagged in the post that will share it with their audience and amplify it.

Ecommerce Content Repurposing

Content repurposing isn’t just for B2B! If you’re an ecommerce brand, you could turn a blog post into multiple emails, record short-form video content with the blog post content, etc.

This Week’s The D2Z Podcast

#89 – The Art of AI-Driven Personalization in Marketing

🎧 Listen Now 🎧

In this week’s episode, I sat down with Ryan Burrer, Principal Sales Engineer for New Products at Attentive, the world’s #1 conversational marketing platform. This one was HEAVY on how AI is shaping the future of conversational marketing. Specifically, we explored the following:

💰 How AI can automate decision-making processes, generate personalized content, and predict customer behavior.

📲 How Attentive leverages AI to create 1:1 messaging.

😎 The challenges of a post-cookie world and the need to transition to device tracking and IP-based identification.

🚀 Channels beyond email and SMS that you need to pay attention to.

App Highlights - Gorgias Email Mitigation

Across all merchants using Gorgias, more than 75% of support tickets come through email. While email is the most familiar channel, it’s not the best customer experience, so let’s dig into how you can push more of your support tickets into other channels.

Replace Email Links with Contact Form

Most brands have mailto: links across their site in the Contact Us page, FAQ page, and website footer. Switch these over to a Contact Form and take advantage of:

• Less spam: Bots crawl websites and add your address to email spam lists. The contact form is much less vulnerable.

• Better ticket routing: The contact form asks customers to select a subject for the ticket, which you can then use to build Rules to tag, route, and prioritize tickets automatically.

• Automation opportunities: Display flows and order management, reminding shoppers of self-service options that will get them answers faster than the contact form.

Embed the Contact Form Directly on the Site

Embed it directly on your website and direct even more traffic to the contact form. You can embed it in just a few clicks on your Contact Us and FAQ pages. Some merchants will even link to the Contact Form in the header, footer, and email signature of all emails to make it as easily accessible as possible for customers.

Upcoming Events

DRINKS was selected for a booth in NRF’s Innovation Lab in NYC, and I’ll be here until 1/17! Let me know if you’re around and want to connect. I’ll also be heading out to the following:

• WSWA: Jan 29 - Feb 1 in Vegas

• Vinexpo Paris: Feb 12 - Feb 14 in Paris

• ShopTalk: Mar 17 - Mar 20 in Vegas

I’m also hosting a couple of workshops at the Gorgias booth tomorrow at the conference - stop by and say hey if you’re there!

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