Thursday, April 4

🗣 Running a B2B and want to reach 33,441 DTC Brands? Start here…

WHAT’S HOT ON SOCIAL MEDIA

When it comes to Email Marketing, we all know Klaviyo is the gold standard 🤌 But does that mean they can outrageously increase the costs and people would still stick with them? Only time will tell 🕰️ 

Currently, it isn’t clear if the increase in pricing would apply just to the new accounts, or eventually if it would be rolled out to the existing customers as well, but do make sure to keep an eye on it to avoid surprise billings! 🥸

GRAPHIC DESIGN
#2 - Does your business needs a facelift?

Does it need design that grabs attention, is memorable and leads to sales?

You have 4 options:

Option 1 – Do it yourself. Saves money but risk having average designs.

Option 2 – Find a freelancer. Also a cost effective option, but spend hours finding the right one, risk potential communication and quality issues.

Option 3 – Hire an in-house designer. Spend time vetting for the correct designer and receive high quality designs. However you’ll be adding a minimum of 5-6k/month to your overheads.

Option 4 – Delegate your designs to Delesign. A team of skilled graphic designers, already vetted for you. Have a designer work as part of your team for as long as you need at 1/5th the cost, with design turnaround times of 24 hours.

SOCIAL
#3 - Social Commerce: The DTC Game-Changer

The Scoop: Social commerce is the next big thing in e-commerce, projected to hit $8 billion by 2030. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook are becoming virtual shopping malls, with influencers as the salespeople driving massive growth.

Connecting with Customers: DTC brands can now reach customers directly on their favorite social media hangouts. By teaming up with the right influencers, brands can tap into the authentic, trusted relationships creators have built with their followers. This makes product discovery and purchasing a natural, seamless part of the social media experience.

Opportunities for Brands:

• Create exclusive, limited-edition products with top influencers

• Host interactive live shopping events showcasing your products

• Build a diverse network of micro-influencers aligned with your brand

• Encourage user-generated content with social contests and rewards

• Develop high-quality, platform-specific creative assets for influencers

Measuring Success:

• Track sales and conversions driven by each influencer's unique affiliate links

• Monitor engagement rates on influencer-promoted content

• Assess brand awareness and perception among influencer audiences

What's Next: Expect more seamless, native social shopping integrations and a rise in live, interactive, and immersive content. Brands will cultivate long-term influencer relationships and jump on emerging creator partnerships early. Data-driven influencer matching will be essential.

Our Perspective: Authenticity is key but can be tricky when scaling influencer programs. DTC brands should prioritize quality over quantity, fostering a tight-knit community of genuinely aligned creators. Focus on building lasting partnerships that grow with your brand, rather than chasing fleeting viral trends.

➡️ You can read the article here...

DTC Daily’s Monthly Spotlight:

Upcoming Events:

June 11-13: CommerceNext Growth Show in New York City.

Need a Graphic Designer? Cost effective solution, instead of full-time employee: Delesign 

🗣 Have an upcoming event or tools you’d like to recommend to 33,441 DTC Brands? Click Here

RESOURCES
#4 - Things Worth Checking Out

AI - How AI will provide offline shopping experience to online shoppers

MARKET - eCmmerce marketplaces crack down on counterfeits

NEWS - Levi’s D2C captures 48% of revenue amid improvements to ecommerce experience

AMAZON - Amazon accounted for 40% of ecommerce sales, 4% of retail sales in 2023

PAYMENTS - Card payments to make way for more 'seamless' payment formats, study finds

IBRAHIM’S NUGGETS

A Mistake That’s Costing You a Lot of Dollars in Email Marketing

One of my favorite things to talk about is email marketing and its intricacies.

”But Ibrahim, what’s so special about email marketing? A tool like Klaviyo has some templates, we’ll modify some essential flows to our brand, and boom, we’re done!” — (Not sponsored by Klaviyo. At least not yet :D).

Well, if you’re drop shipping, this could be enough for you. But if you’re running a brand, you’re leaving a lot of $$ behind, and not working hard enough to ensure customers have a seamless experience with your brand. If you use a template that every other Tom & Harry’s of the world are using, how is it going to set you apart? But that said, it’s good to at least set this up than not having anything at all in the first place.

While Klaviyo could get expensive, I still think it’s unmatched when it comes to overall features and functionalities it provides. So anytime I talk about email marketing, it’d by default be Klaviyo, but the tactics and fundamentals would generally apply to any email marketing tool you’d use. I’ve also seen a few brands switch to SendLane lately, and if that’s you, let me know how your experience has been by replying to this email.

In today’s email, I’ll talk about:

1. Email flows vs Campaigns
   

2. A common mistake that I see most Founders/Marketers make that’s costing them $$
   

3. Email flows vs Campaigns

   If you know what the difference is, you can skip this section. But if you’re unsure of what the difference is, continue reading…
   

   Emails flows

   So emails flows are basically segmented cohorts of customers or email subscribers, and they enter specific email flows such welcome series flow, abandoned cart flow, etc. depending on the action the customer has taken.
   

   Example: If you go to any website, enter your email on a pop-up for a discount, you’d enter their welcome flow, and what’d typically happen is:
   

   • Receive an email with the discount code
     

   • Receive more emails over the next few days where the brand shares about the Founder’s story, educating about the product, what makes them special, asking to purchase the product, etc.

   

   Similarly, depending on what action a customer takes, they could possibly enter others flows at the same time too, such as post-purchase flow, abandoned cart flow, checkout abandonment flow, browse abandonment flow, etc.
   

   Campaigns
   

   Campaigns are totally different than flows. In the case of campaigns, you basically send one-off emails to your customers and you can also choose which set of customers to send it to with the help of the customer segments.
   

   Example: You had Easter holidays most recently, and if you wanted to send multiple promo emails to your customers—that’s campaigns. It could be a design focused campaign, or a simple text email from the Founder—that depends on your overall campaign strategy.
   

4. A common mistake that I see most Founders/Marketers make that’s costing them $$
   

   By default, as I’ve mentioned earlier, Klaviyo provides you with some pre-made templates, which are fine to at least begin with, but not enough. However, the number one mistake I see a lot of folks make is, they assume the Abandoned Cart Flow and Checkout Abandonment Flow are the same—but they’re not. To make it a bit more confusing, Klaviyo names the Checkout Abandonment Flow as Abandoned Cart Flow inside the templates, due to which, a lot of folks just end up setting Checkout Abandonment Flow, and leave out Abandoned Cart Flow.
   

   “But wait, what’s the difference?” — Knew you’d ask!

   

   Abandoned Cart Flow

   • When a customer adds a product to the cart and bounces without going to checkout and entering his/her details, this customer should ideally enter Abandoned Cart Flow.
     

   • If it’s a new customer, this customer may not have given his/her email to the brand yet, so how you send such customers emails remind them about their cart? By capturing browser cookies, which is done by Klaviyo.
     

   • The reason why Klaviyo doesn’t provide an easy built-in template for this use case is because setting this up gets quite complex, but totally worth it!
     

   • Here’s a guide by Klaviyo on how you could set this up. It requires you to manually add some codes to your website as well, and configuring them.
     

   • Not all the Add To Carts visitors’ emails can be captured since we capture with the help of browser cookies, and after the iOS 14.5 updates, it’s not possible to capture emails of every Add To Cart visitor. Typically, you could capture ~15-50% of the visitors’ emails.
     

   Checkout Abandoned Flow

   • By default, Klaviyo calls this flow as Abandoned Cart Flow since people find it quite challenging to set up the actual Abandoned Cart Flow anyway.
     

   • If a customer adds a product to the cart, goes to the checkout page, enters the shipping details, AND clicks “proceed to pay”, only then would this customer enter the Checkout Abandoned Flow.
     

   • Klaviyo can receive the details entered by the customer only after the customers hits “proceed to pay”, which is when the Checkout Abandoned Flow should be triggered, just in case the customer does not complete the payment process.

   

   So if you understand the difference, you’d now realise that if you don’t set up the Abandoned Cart Flow, you’re leaving dollars on the table. These are the things you’d need to work on and set up once, and it’d be running on auto-pilot, 24x7.
   

   That’s it for today. Appreciate you reading thus far! On my next Wednesday Deep Dive, I’ll dive deeper into what other flows to set up, their breakdowns, and some fundamentals to be mindful about.
   

Have any questions that you need help with?

Ask here - and look out for Fridays Issue where Ibrahim will answer them.