Thursday, 20 June

🗣 Running a B2B and want to reach 40,154 DTC Brands? Start here

Ask Ibrahim: If you need advice for your business, ask our DTC expert here

WHAT’S HOT ON SOCIAL MEDIA

There’s nothing like breaking down a static ad!

You can access the Tweet here.

PIXII

Creative is always a bottleneck

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• $15K per month saved on photoshoots

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• 11 hours per week saved

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Here's how you never run out of winning campaigns

Randomly testing 10 creatives a week doesn't yield the desired results in your Meta Ads Account.

Instead, you need to have a structured process to launch 5-7 creatives a week.

A great tweet by Ash on his testing framework

IBRAHIM’S NUGGETS

Bad Email vs Ads take by Agencies

Email is better than ads?

Many email marketers like to make blanket statements like:

• "Emails convert 5 to 10x better than ads do"

• "Customer retention is more important than acquisition"

• "The average ROI for email marketing is $44 for every $1 spent"

This is completely misguided. It’s not an either/or game.

You need both—ads and email:

1. Ads to acquire new customers and build an email list

2. Emails to retain customers / convert subscribers into customers

Statements like the above from agencies are extremely misleading. Of course, emails convert better because they’re being sent to a warm audience. The purpose of running ads to cold traffic is to acquire new customers primarily, who have never heard of your business before.

Naturally, your ROI will be lower because of the cost of your ad spend, but without ads, there is no email list to send to. You need both. Separately, this brings up another related point—there are two ways to approach email marketing:

1. Emails as ad impressions: Every email is another impression in your customers' journey. The more emails you send, the more revenue you generate because there are more impressions.

2. Emails as a channel for value and engagement: **Every email is sent only when you have something to say. Engaging, high quality, and entertaining content is prioritized over volume.

If your brand can consistently come up with engaging, high quality content subscribers look forward to, then the second option becomes more viable and perhaps preferable. However, in most cases, a higher volume of emails is the better option. There’s no one right way; it just depends on your strategy and brand positioning.

Media buying is dead?

A common idea promoted by many marketers these days is that great media buying cannot make terrible ad creatives work. This is true in the majority of cases; however, they also often imply that media buying is dead or doesn’t matter anymore.

While I completely agree that ad creatives are the priority, a large volume of ad creatives is not the answer to all your problems. A skilled media buyer will be able to squeeze out more juice from your creatives and maximize your ad account’s performance with the right structure and account optimizations.

So while media buying skills aren’t as important of a factor as they used they be five to eight years ago, they still matter.

Aim for the highest ROAS possible?

When you’re speaking with an inexperienced marketing team, the initial questions they’ll always ask are around ROAS.

• “What’s the ROAS of that ad? “

• “What ROAS can you guarantee us? “

• “How can we increase the ROAS?”

This is misguided. What matters is whether an ad is scalable.

I’d rather be able to spend $1 million on an ad at a 2x ROAS instead of being limited to $10k at a 5x ROAS. The ROAS is important, but it’s only one part of the story. Typically, as you scale, your ROAS drops. So getting a 5x ROAS is much more feasible at $500 a day than at $10,000 a day or more in ad spend.

What matters most is maximizing your contribution margin, and this requires stability at scale. Other factors at play include your gross margins and AOV. If you’re bundling high margin products together and you have positioned them with a high perceived value, then you can also tolerate a higher break even ROAS, leading to more stability at higher ad spend. These factors that are external to your media buying contribute significantly to your ability to scale your ads.

Overall, I would say, a holistic approach is always superior to getting bogged down with individual metrics.

Any other bad takes you’ve come across recently? Feel free to share your thoughts by replying back.

SARAL

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Have any questions that you need help with?

Ask here - and look out for Friday’s Issue where Ibrahim will answer them.