Tuesday, 23 April

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

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

WHAT’S HOT ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Since there’s a $5K incentive to the winner, a few really good P&L templates are being shared, and we didn’t want you to miss out on that, so you can check out the tweet here and find those templates in the comments

SARAL

🤔 The next (profitable) marketing channel after Meta Ads is…

Good news. Your brand is growing. You're feeling good. It's time to scale. It's time to reach more people. But wait. You want to maintain your authenticity and personal touch. You can't just throw money around; you have to be smart about it. What can you do?

3-second answer

Influencer marketing.

27-second answer

Influencers bring with them - awareness, trust, creativity.

🏠 Choose the right influencer to partner with → You get a ready-made community of potential customers.

💰 Work with nano or micro-influencers and make them your long-term brand advocates. There's something for every budget.

📈 Play your cards right, and influencer marketing can be one of the most cost-effective ways to scale your marketing efforts.

With SARAL, 200+ brands are building their full-stack influencer marketing campaigns because it automates the mind-numbing tasks and lets them focus on what's important. SARAL is your one platform to discover influencers, automate reachouts, ship products, track sales and more.

You can try it out for free →

Have questions? Their team has the answers→

RISING CPM
One of our clients said, "I have been running my ad account for 1 year, & I'm seeing a surge in my CPM now; I think it's due to my competition."

Let's break 2 myths here before we address the Elephant in the room - CPM.

1. Your competition always exists, but it has little to no influence on your ad account performance.

2. Your CPMs depend on your creatives rather than the platform.

”Can I manipulate my CPM?" A short answer is "YES!"

Here are 3 Ways to reduce your CPM:

🕐 Inverse Theory: CPM is inversely proportional to CTR. Meaning, Higher your CTRs, Lower your CPM.

To 2x your CTRs, you can use the suggested frameworks in our previous email.

Note: There's always a limit to how much you can lower your CPM. You can never beat Zuckerberg at his best game ;)

🕑 Audience: In an audit call last week,

An account was using single demographic for 6+ months for all the testing and scaling campaigns.

By betting on only one demographic, you're signalling Meta that it's your performing audience.

Demand & Supply theory. Hence, the rise in CPM.

Always test and rotate your audience interests, demographics, and ages to avoid overlap, and DO NOT BET ONLY ON ONE AUDIENCE.

🕒 Creative Format Rotation: Did you know CPMs vary for each ad formats?

Static < Carousel < Videos.

• To lower your CPMs, you must use a mix of ad formats.

• You have to test every format for each hook line. What works in video might not work in carousels or static and vice versa.

DTC Daily’s Monthly Spotlight:

Tools and Services:

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

IBRAHIM’S NUGGETS

All things Shopify tech stack and how they can help you..

Hi, everyone!

I’ve been getting questions from people asking me to share my Shopify tech stack, so we’ll specifically talk about Shopify apps today (available in the app store), and we can discuss about other third party tech in one of the future newsletters.

Alright, let’s get into it..

Shopify

If you’re at a stage where you’re considering which platform to start building your DTC brand on, 100% recommend Shopify. It’s still the best in the industry!

My rating: 9.5/10

Klaviyo

• Klaviyo has been the DTC brand’s gold standard for years now, and while their pricing has been increasing, I believe it is still the best in the industry

• There are other good options for SMS and pop-ups such as Attentive, but since I like to keep things simple, I use Klaviyo for emails, SMS, and pop-ups and its been working totally fine

My rating: 9/10

Replo

• If you’re looking to build a landing page and are searching for a landing page, Replo is one of my best finds of 2023!

• I’ve tried landing page builder such as Shogun as well, and while it does help you build LPs, they had a lot of limitations on their entry plans and that was, quite frankly, extremely annoying! I remember ditching Shogun within 3 days.

• On the contrary, Replo lets you access pretty much all their features, and if you’re someone that uses Figma to design, you’d love this

• Exceptional customer support!! 10/10

My rating: 9/10

Rebuy

• Looking to increase your AOV? Highly recommend Rebuy!

• It’s primary offering is the smart slider cart, letting you cross-sell, up-sell subscriptions, milestone features such as “$50 left for free delivery”, AI product recommendations based on the user, etc.

• It also has other interesting features such as thank you page cross-sells, etc.

• One good alternative to Rebuy is AfterSell—which offers a lot of the features what Rebuy offers, and is extremely good at bundling products, so if this is important for you, you should look into AfterSell

• Good customer support

My rating: 9/10 (Rebuy), 9/10 (AfterSell)

Wonderment

• This is something I spoke about recently in the post-purchase email flow series. If you haven’t read it, you can read it here

• This will make your life so much easier, especially if you’re a solo-Founder. Why? Because it’s going to cut down your customer support tickets drastically with the help of its features such as order tracking page, automated order tracking emails at every step of the way, keeping the customers notified at all times and not keeping them in the blind, and let the track their orders seamlessly.

• Best part? It pings you when there’s an order delay, so you could sort out the issue before the customer reaches out to you

My rating: 9/10

Gorgias

• Need an app where you can streamline every customer support messages, notifications, etc. all in one place? Gorgias is incredibly good at it!

• Wonderment can reduce a lot of CS tickets, and Gorgias can automate a lot of it, or at least cut down your time and make you more efficient

• It also offers you features such as calling/SMS and gives you a phone number as well that customers could use to reach out, apart from the chat bot

My rating: 9.5/10

Invoice Falcon

• Invoicing on Shopify can be hassle. From all the order printer apps, Invoice Falcon is by far the best in terms of customisation and how simple it is to use.

• Customer Support is super efficient and responsive

• Lot of options like bulk printing, creating proformas, drafts and returns.

My Rating: 9.5/10

Recharge

• This is actually something we personally use for subscriptions and works okay, but I wouldn’t recommend it. In fact, we’re looking to switch ourselves to Skio or Smartrr

• Pros: has integrations pretty much with all the apps you could think of

• Cons: Not great CS support, and they’ve barely been developing new features at all

My Rating: 6/10

Okendo

• It lets you add Review widget to your website, and you could customize it according to your brand colors, etc.

• Lets you send automated emails (via integration with Klaviyo) that can be highly customized and personalized

• Okendo’s team has one of the best customer support

My Rating: 10/10

Wholesale - All in One

• If you have been doing your wholesale purchase orders manually, this is going to save you a lot of time, energy, and automate most of these things

• When a wholesale distributor submits an application on a page such as this, we get notified via email, and we could either accept or reject that application. You can ask whatever questions you’d like on the form.

• Once you approve someone’s application, you can tag them as a “B2B seller”, etc., and let’s assume you’ve set 40% discount, so here’s what happens next:

  • Distributor gets notified about the application being accepted, and instructions on how to move forward

  • Comes to the website, logs in to the normal account, and when they go to the product page, instead of the normal price, they’ll see the products with 40% off

• These are just a few features. You can do a lot more things such as set custom shipping exclusively for wholesale customers, etc.

• Good customer support

My Rating: 8.5/10

Snowball

• This app is perfect for referral programs, and it integrates with apps like Klaviyo as well,

• It has some really good other features as well, such as having a unique discount code displayed on the thank you page for every customer post-purchase, which can be shared with their friends/family and get be rewarded for it, which is tracked via Snowball

• Payments to influencers can be made within Snowball

• In my opinion, Snowball when combined with an app such as SARAL, can be a deadly combination to crush your influencer marketing efforts

• I won’t be mentioning SARAL in this lineup since it’s not listed on Shopify yet, but I use it personally, and it will pretty much automate all of your influencer marketing efforts, especially discovering your influencers, reaching out them via drip email campaigns, tracking, keeping them organised, etc. (I’ll talk about this further in tomorrow’s deep dive, and give you the glimpses of all the possibilities)

My Rating: 9.5 (Snowball), 9.5 (SARAL)

Presidio: Quiz Kit

• I use this to help customers find the right size, to reduce returns, and does its job very well

• It’s basically an economically cheaper alternative to Octane AI, but if I had complex requirements, I’d definitely be using Octane AI

My Rating: 8 (Presidio), Octane AI (9.5)

Loyalty Lion

• I use this for all things loyalty and rewards and it does its job well

• It inegrates with Okendo as well, so I like incentivising customers with loyalty points after they’ve uploaded reviews, and a lot more points if they upload photos/videos with them

• These points can be translated into coupon codes later on, and you can set the rules according to your requirements

My Rating: 8.5

Alloy

• For all things eCommerce automation

• This can save you a lot of time, and is definitely worth looking into!

My Rating: 9.5

Loop

• Since we have extremely low return rate, we don’t currently use an app for exchanges, but if I did have to use one, it would definitely be Loop

• They’ll make the process for customers to exchange/return items so much easier. It feels almost as easy as Amazon to return something!

My Rating: 9

Triple Whale

• Helps you with attribution, tracking sales, etc. with server side tracking

• They have a free plan as well, so definitely recommend checking them out!

My rating: 9

All in One Accessibility

• Just download any Accessibility app, doesn’t have to be specifically this one

• If you don’t have this set up on the website, before you know it, you could be hit with legal notices and penalties since it’s mandatory to have one

My rating: 9.5

Alright folks, that’s all the Shopify apps I currently use. See y’all tomorrow inside the Wednesday deep dives!

Thank you.

Have any questions that you need help with?

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

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