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Hey guys,

"The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future in life.“

— Plato

🚨 In today’s newsletter đźš¨

  • 4 Metrics That Decide You Go Broke Or Get Wealthy With Meta Ads

  • Ibrahim’s Nuggets: 3 ideas you probably never thought about

  • Top 3 Latest News: How shippers can navigate Pitney Bowes Global Ecommerce’s shutdown and More…

Let’s get into it👇

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Sai - DTC Paid Ads Specialist

4 Metrics That Decide You Go Broke Or Get Wealthy With Meta Ads

For a DTC Brand, there are only 4 metrics that decide whether you go bankrupt, break even, or scale.

The 4 metrics are:

  • CPM - Cost Per 1000 Impressions (Meta)

  • CTR - Click Through Rate (Meta)

  • CVR - Conversion Rate (Website)

  • AOV - Average Order Value (Website)

As you can see in the above screenshot, Column B has a considerate situation.

CPM - $20

CTR - 1.5%

CVR - 2%

AOV - $75

For every $1000 spent with the above metrics, you'd make a break-even ROAS of 1.13.

Even if 1 of them gets expensive, the table turns around. In Columns C, D, E & F are the respective scenarios and their effect on ROAS.

If you want to turn around the situation and get better ROAS, you will need to improve each metric. The respective scenarios are shown in columns H, I, J, K.

That's how you achieve a staggering 4x ROAS for your business.

Figured Out Bottleneck For Your Business? Want Us To Help You Scale Your DTC Brand?

IBRAHIM’S NUGGETS

3 ideas you probably never thought about

Heyy!

I hope you had an awesome week thus far!

Today, I wanted to talk a little about out of home (OOH). But I realized there is so much within OOH to talk about, so instead, I wanted to focus on a few things that I would consider to be out of the box, with OOH being one of them.

If you're reading this newsletter, there's a great chance that you're involved in eCommerce, but it doesn't mean we necessarily have to stay digital the entire time... there's nothing wrong with taking a little bite of traditional marketing here and there.

Okay so today, I want to cover a few quick things I think any brand can do, relatively cheap, and with efficient spending/performance in mind.

  • Performance-driven OOH

  • Partnerships with publishers (not really publishers though) and brands

  • Direct mail

Performance-Driven OOH

Chances are, when you think of OOH, you think it's the brand marketing team's playground to put something up that most people wouldn't care to look at. I mean, when was the last time that you remember seeing a billboard and then doing something about it? However!! Turns out, as digital ad space is getting more crowded, OOH advertising has been performing better and better.

Brian Rappaport of QUAN Media Group, sent out an email to his insiders, where he shared the impact of OOH. Here's what it said:

OOH generated activations of between 18 percent and 41 percent among consumers who had viewed OOH ads within the past six months. OOH ads prompted the consumers to take action at these rates:

  • 41% used a search engine

  • 33% searched social media

  • 33% visited a website

  • 30% searched for video

  • 21% posted on social media

  • 20% made an online purchase

  • 19% downloaded an app

  • 18% posted a video

This data is from OAAA (OOH Advertising Association of America) and Comscore research.

If you think about it, that's insane. What's not included here is exactly what levels of spending were correlated to making these actions happen. For example, was it a Times Square takeover, or a 15 billboard campaign? Not 100% sure, but those sound expensive. That said, we know OOH is great for a few reasons:

  • It can drive amazing awareness, especially with great creative

  • Perception-wise, it makes the brand feel a lot bigger and builds trust with consumers

  • When selling into or launching in wholesale accounts, OOH is something retail accounts LOVE to see

  • They seem to work, according to the data above!

So how should we activate this in a way where it's performance-driven, and it's trackable? A few brands that I consult with, have been working with a company called Adgile, where we can put billboards on the sides of trucks, capture mobile device IDs of people on the ground level who are in viewing range of the truck, and then retarget them on channels like Instagram, TikTok, or through programmatic banner ads.

It sounds illegal, I know. Collecting mobile device IDs and then uploading that audience into Facebook? I know. But it works. With a high-ish AOV brand of ours ($85), where they normally have a $60-$70 CPA, we saw a $14 retargeting CPA, in addition to the spend of the trucks.

Depending on which city you're in, you need a good amount of trucks to go live. In NY, that's about 5 trucks. In LA, it's about 7. These trucks are already running their normal truck routes... Adgile just found a way to monetize the blank truck and it works wonders.

Take this one step further and direct your billboard traffic to a custom landing page—I’ve seen the best conversion that way!

Partnerships with Publishers and Brands

The reason it's "kinda" publishers, is because the one I had in mind was SoulCycle. It's kinda a publisher because they have a huge cult audience of repeat riders who trust them with their recommendations.

Getting a partnership with SoulCycle, or other gyms, stores, boutiques, restaurants, or honestly anywhere there's an audience that comes for a recommendation is tough, but it's so worth it.

I learnt that after a ride, when you come out, they have Hydrant stick packets available to replenish with electrolytes, for free, and in the bathroom, they have Curie spray deodorant. Now, both are available to use for free, but the alignment and perception from being in the SoulCycle world is huge!

You can attribute sales back to the discovery/awareness by either having a specific coupon code available at the point of discovery, a specific URL, or by using a post-purchase survey.

Outside of reaching more people, right in your demo, here are a few things you get:

  • Your products are put in a place where their use case is highlighted and necessary (deodorant and electrolytes are exactly what you need!)

  • You get the stamp of approval. If SoulCycle carries your product, they are saying that your product fits their ethos, mission, values, etc. It's like having a Whole30-Approved sticker on your product packaging.

  • You are put in front of a very expensive-to-target group of people. Think about trying to find everyone who is paying $38 for a workout class... those would be some insanely high CPMs.

  • It's a social-proof moment for you in other places. When a wholesale buyer is on the fence, you're building a Wholesale page on Faire, or you are even pitching for other partnerships, you have something as social proof.

Similarly, partnering with brands is just as useful and can be executed in a few fun ways:

  • Put post-cards in each other's shipper boxes that go to customers (Hello Fresh has made an entire business out of this)

  • Lookalike audience swaps through Disco Network (digital-only, and doesn't require any hard costs)

  • Co-branded product launch

  • Co-branded giveaway on Instagram to each others' followers

  • A co-branded acquisition page (a landing page where you sell SkinPharm and SolaWave together, and split the CPA 2 ways and if it’s between 3 brands, then split it 3 ways)

All these ways work, and they're fun to execute. If you haven't done any, I highly recommend doing them. While you might think a "bigger brand" isn't open to it, you'll realize that most brand managers are open to collaborations and creating excitement for their customers.

Direct Mail

For the longest time, I never cared for direct mail. Even when brands like Harry's, Ritual, AWAY, and others would run direct mail campaigns, I would think, "Damn, why? I would just throw it away!"

However, it feels like now, people are a lot more careful with going through the mail they get—something changed with the type of mail we started getting when COVID happened and we don't want to miss important documents, checks, etc. So, I started looking into a few direct mail partners and found one that basically acts as Klaviyo, but for the offline world.

I found a vendor called PostPilot which basically is the Klaviyo for direct mail. You can set up flows (post-purchase, re-engagement, subscriber "thank you", abandon cart, etc.) and turn them on. One other great use case is being able to just send a piece of direct mail to your past customers who haven't bought in a while, maybe 60 days.

The ROI that comes back from direct mail has been astonishing, and because you have the addresses already, the cost of sending postcards is cheap. If you have a database of addresses, I highly recommend running a test campaign to see what happens.

Alright folks, that’s it for today. If you’re trying any of these things, I hope you have some fun executing them!

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IN THE NEWS

Have any questions that you need help with?

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

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