The TL;DR:

• Let’s Chat D2C: Tips & tricks to get customers to place a second order!

• What I’m Thinking about this Week: Monetizing your audience - my story with APEX Early Careers.

• The D2Z Podcast: In this week’s episode, I sat down with Dan Moshkovich, VP of Marketing at Chargeflow, to chat about the increasingly critical issue of chargebacks in ecommerce and how merchants are losing revenue.

• App Updates & Highlights: I cover how to set up Lifetimely as well as each report, what they mean, and how you can think about utilizing these insights to better inform your marketing strategy and customer experience. Watch the full tutorial here!

• Upcoming Events: I’m headed to Dallas for SubSummit 6/15-6/18, and then I’m off to LA for Gorgias’ Customer Advisory Day until 6/24!

Let’s Chat D2C - Tips & Tricks to Get Customers to Place a Second Order

Everyone knows how important customer retention and increasing lifetime value are, so let’s dive into some tactics you can use to get a higher percentage of your customers to return and place that second order!

Email/SMS

At a bare minimum, you need to have your automated email and SMS communications set up:

• Post-purchase thank you flow: Thank your customers for placing their first order from you! You can even

• Replenishment flow: Depending on your product, trigger automated communications to your customers every 30-60 days, reminding them to restock their previous purchase from you. You can use a tool like Lifetimely to see the usual number of days between order #1 and order #2.

• Customer win-back flow: If customers haven’t returned and reordered in around 90 days, send them an exclusive offer to come back and shop with you.

Direct Mail

Layer direct mail into your email/SMS flows to reach customers with another touchpoint, especially those who haven’t returned and reordered within a short time frame.

Ads

Create a segment of one-time purchasers in your ESP and push that audience to advertising platforms like Facebook and Google to retarget them with ads incentivizing a second order.

Subscription

Experiment with incentivizing subscribe and save for first-time purchasers, so you don’t have to worry about getting them to come back and make another order. Instead, your focus should be on retaining those customers and making sure they don’t cancel before their second order ships out.

Loyalty/Store Credit

I am not a huge fan of loyalty programs… but I am a big fan of store credit programs. For example, you can give customers $5 of store credit for every $50 they spend with you and then send them reminders that they have X amount of store credit to redeem. Even better, to increase urgency, these store credits should expire after a certain time frame.

I find store credit works far better from a customer psychology standpoint than a discount code. Even if it’s the same discount, it frames it as if the customer is losing something if they don’t utilize and redeem their store credit versus getting a $10 off discount code.

What I’m Thinking About This Week - Monetizing your Audience

Many of you have or are building your own personal brand or a company and maybe aren’t aware of some of the monetization opportunities available to you.

My company, SCALIS, acquired APEX, a 200K subscriber newsletter of college students sending daily internship opportunities, earlier this year, and I’ve been in the process of monetizing this channel for us.

Get on the Right Platform

When we acquired APEX, it was on Substack, a free online platform that allows writers and content creators to publish and monetize newsletters directly for their audience. However, the only monetization opportunity with Substack is for your subscribers to pay a monthly fee for access to your content, which college students aren’t dying to do on a limited budget.

We kicked off a migration to Beehiiv last month, a paid newsletter platform that comes with a host of additional monetization capabilities that we have been tapping into, including sponsored ads that pay us on a CPC basis anywhere between $0.80-$2 and newsletter boosts where we promote other newsletters that pay us anywhere between $1-$5 for verified subscriber that we generate for them.

We are weeks away from finishing the migration but are already generating $1K+/week from these 2 monetization features.

LiveIntent

When most people think of programmatic ads, they think of the banner ads you see on websites. Still, most people (myself included) aren’t aware that programmatic advertising is also possible within an email.

We onboarded with LiveIntent last week and are placing 3 banners in our newsletter that are automatically filled and rendered by their technology, netting us over $100 per email.

Direct Sponsorships

Cut out the middleman and work directly with the brand. In April, Warby Parker sponsored the entire newsletter at a flat rate.

You can also negotiate a CPM, CPC, or CPA that the advertiser is willing to pay and set maximum caps that they will pay.

Expansion into New Channels

Last month, we launched the CareerHack Podcast, which not only engages our subscriber base in a new way but opens up the opportunity for podcast sponsorships that we can sell to advertisers or use as a sweetener that we throw into newsletter sponsorships.

The podcast also allows us to invite guests from universities and companies to whom we eventually want to sell our core product. Unlike direct selling, this makes them aware of us and leads to a more natural conversation.

This Week’s The D2Z Podcast

#108 – How to Beat Chargebacks on Autopilot and Save Your Ecommerce Business Revenue

🎧 Listen Now 🎧

In this week’s episode, I sat down with Dan Moshkovich, VP of Marketing at Chargeflow, to chat about the increasingly critical issue of chargebacks in ecommerce and how merchants are losing revenue. Specifically, we explored the following:

💰 The financial consequences of chargebacks and the potential legal ramifications for merchants, including increased processing fees.

📲 Why chargeback management is critical to have in place from day one.

😎 How AI dramatically improves chargeback win rates and saves merchants the revenue they deserve.

🚀 Leveraging a massive dataset from a significant network of merchants to analyze patterns and outcomes to inform dispute resolution better.

App Updates & Highlights - Customer Lifetime Value Analysis with Lifetimely

I cover how to set up Lifetimely as well as each report, what they mean, and how you can think about utilizing these insights to better inform your marketing strategy and customer experience.

Upcoming Events

I’m headed to Dallas for SubSummit 6/15-6/18, and then I’m off to LA for Gorgias’ Customer Advisory Day until 6/24!

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