Banter

Monday, February 6, 2023

Monday motivation. Write your to-do list and start crossing ‘em off! ✅

In this newsletter, you’ll find: 👇

📦 99 problems but Adv+ campaigns ain’t one

📦 Stress-free consumer research with Attest

📦 Love is in the air – Valentine’s Day promo ideas

📦 Kick back and relax with on-demand fulfillment

📦 The rise of DTC resale programs

Read till the end to access exclusive DTC swag. 😎

👉 If a pal forwarded this to you, subscribe, so you never miss out.

Meta

If you're not taking advantage 😉 of Advantage+ Campaigns, and they’re available on your account, take this as your bat signal to try them out.

The Pilothouse Meta team, on average, has seen Adv+ campaigns consistently outperform traditional campaigns across a range of accounts.

In one client account, the combined return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) of the ADV+ campaigns is 84% higher than the combined ROAS of traditional campaigns over the past year.

And this isn’t an isolated event…

In other accounts, the combined ROAS of ADV+ campaigns is 35% higher than traditional campaigns over the last 5 months.

👀 Here’s what the team thinks is working today

Uncapped Adv+ campaigns with no limit to percentage of spend on pre-existing customers are performing best – especially with catalog ads. Make sure to review the ratio of delivery by audience type to see how Meta is delivering between new customers and existing customers to ensure alignment with your strategy.

👉 What’s the big deal about Adv+?

Traditionally, when creating campaigns on Meta, you separate your prospecting from your retargeting, and set up your own targeting for each.

With Advantage+, you can group them together and let Meta set up the targeting AND the split between prospecting and retargeting.

This means:

• Meta will target your customers far better than you can.
• Meta can choose how much of the budget is allocated to retargeting and dynamically change the percentages as results come in.
• Since prospecting and retargeting are now combined in 3–5 ads, campaigns can exit the learning stage quicker. The consolidation lets campaigns optimize to a higher degree than traditional campaigns.

Give Meta what it needs, and let the algorithm work its magic.

If Adv+ campaigns are available to you and you’re not testing them, the Pilothouse Meta team strongly suggests it. 🔥

Sponsor

Don’t bet your 2023 budget on a game of marketing roulette!

Marketers waste millions of dollars annually on irrelevant, misguided advertising. 🤯

How?

Instead of tracking and testing creatives (which is arguably boring and time-consuming), they rely on gut feelings to make campaign decisions.👎

In 2023, there’s no excuse for guesswork-based marketing – especially when you have access to consumer research tools like Attest.

You can have a direct line to millions of your ideal customers. And these customers provide accurate insights that help you adapt your strategy to match real consumer preferences. ✅

Attest gives you the tools to:

• Rely on data, not biases, to make decisions.
• Delete doubt from your marketing campaign strategy.
• Make data-driven decisions you can bet your career on.

👉 So, don't guess – Attest! (see what we did there) Try stress-free consumer research today with Attest.

Creative

😍 Spread the Love

With Valentine’s Day around the corner, love is in the air! We may as well lean into it and show some appreciation to our consumers. Sending out good vibes in your email messaging can generate awesome returns. However, just like writing a card for your Valentine, it’s all in the words that you use.

Be relatable and fearless in how you approach your consumers. Some icebreakers we love are:

• 🤫 Shhh… It was your idea
• Of course we thought ahead!
• You single? Same 🥰

These subject lines keep things light and tap into that more… Relatable side of Valentine’s.

🤗 Give yourself a hug

Not everyone has “that special someone” on Valentine’s Day, so remind them of their loved ones. These can be anyone – from themselves to a friend or a great aunt. If a consumer’s been feeling a bit lonely, we bet they’ll glaze over anything about a gift for someone special.

💪 Put it into practice

Don’t get too mushy with it. It’s just a little weird. Only really specific products like jewelry can get away with it. Your consumers know that you are trying to sell them something and it's coming from the voice of your brand. Anything too mushy is just going to fall flat. Check out this ad from LG where they lean a little too far into the mushiness for us:

“A gift as fresh as your love” works really well for a jewelry brand… But refrigerators? Not so much. Keep it light and connect with the consumer you’re actually speaking to. The Body Shop plays it safe with self-love messaging:

The Body Shop also touches on the potential for some valuable user-generated content (UGC) with their hashtags. An interactive post keeps your audience engaged and attracts potential customers, because who doesn’t love a fun and trendy challenge once in a while? Keep in mind that when viewers give you their time, offer a little incentive to show some love back! This could be a discount like free shipping or a full gift bag for a selected winner. 🎖️

Why not throw a little FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) in there? Valentine's Day lands right in the middle of February so you have plenty of time to build hype, host the event, and wrap things up right before your Springtime promos begin! 🌻

☀️ Warm it up

With all of this love going around, you’d be missing out on so many opportunities to raise brand awareness without some sort of Valentine’s promo. Make your customers feel appreciated this season to start warming up those chilly winter blues just before we hit the ground running in Spring.

Sponsor

Are overstock issues holding your cash hostage?

Over-estimating your sales and ending up with piles of unsold inventory is the worst! 🙃

But there’s a solution! (And it's easy!)

On-demand fulfillment. By outsourcing fulfillment to Printful, you can kick back and relax! 🧘

Some of the things Printful can help with are:

• Holding stock. No heaps of extra inventory hanging around your warehouse.
• Product sourcing. Choose from 320+ carefully tested, premium-quality items to sell.
• Production. Save thousands of dollars by letting Printful fulfill your orders.
• Shipping. Printful’s 17 fulfillment centers worldwide ensure fast shipping to all your customers.

👉 Sleep tight and focus on your business goals – let someone else take care of the dirty work!

Resale Programs

The Rise of Recommerce: Why Your Favorite DTC Brands are Launching Resale Programs

Once reserved for trendy hipsters and bargain buyers, secondhand shopping is having its moment.

As consumers become more environmentally conscious and price sensitive, shoppers are trading in their have-to-haves for hand-me-downs.

Apps like Depop and Poshmark are surging in popularity, while modern resale-as-a-service (RaaS) leaders like ThredUp and The RealReal are teaming up with retailers across the globe to give new life to the thriving recommerce industry.

Here’s a quick lay of the land:

• The recommerce industry is growing 11x faster than traditional retail and is expected to double within the next five years.
• By 2030, the industry is expected to be worth $84B, almost double that of fast fashion.  
• Over 100 billion garments are produced each year, with 73% of all apparel sent to landfills or incinerated.
• 77% of Americans are concerned about the environmental impact of the products they buy.

Clearly, there’s a massive opportunity at hand. And both DTC brands and traditional retailers seem to agree.

Much of the excitement surrounds brand-led resale programs, which allow customers to return used products in exchange for money or store credit. From there, retailers clean and resell the returned products at a reduced price.

🤔 Resale as a Marketing Tool

While these programs may appear to be solely circular sustainability initiatives on the surface, they’re actually far more strategic marketing levers.

Retention is the name of the game as we head into a recession. Allowing existing customers to trade in clothes for store credit increases the likelihood of future purchases down the line and keeps shoppers brand-loyal. Once shoppers are back on-site or in-store, they’re also more likely to buy something at full price, knowing that their products have future resale value.

Recommerce also opens up avenues for customer acquisition, creating affordable opportunities for more price-sensitive shoppers who once may not have been able to afford the brand.

“65% of the people buying resold are new to the brand, having been unable to afford it before,” says Trove CEO Andy Ruben in an interview with Vogue Business. “It’s an opportunity to increase the value of the brand, not decrease it.”

📦 But the logistics?

The value of these programs is undeniable, but setting up the infrastructure and logistics is no easy feat. While some brands choose to build their programs entirely in-house, others offload some of the heavy lifting to RaaS partners and peer-to-peer options like Recurate.

Non-apparel companies like The Body Shop and The Beauty Kitchen have launched their own refill programs, while countless major conglomerates and DTC brands have teamed up with TerraCycle on reuse and recycling initiatives.

💸 Who’s Doing It Well?

• In February 2022, Allbirds launched its ReRun program in partnership with Trove. The beloved sustainable footwear offers customers $20 in-store credit in exchange for turning in their preloved Allbirds shoes. The used shoes are then resold online on the ReRun platform, starting at $59.

• Tradlands launched its "Worn Well Exchange" an in-house peer-to-peer resale platform that lives directly on-site.
• With the help of Treet, Cuts Clothing rolled out The CUTS Marketplace in June 2022. Instead of shipping items back to Cuts, sellers list items on the marketplace using their mobile device. After they’re sold, the seller receives a prepaid shipping label and is rewarded with up to a 110% payout for choosing Cuts Clothing credit.
• In July 2021, Fabletics announced its partnership with ThredUp, offering online customers free ‘Clean Out Kits’ to be filled and shipped back with apparel, shoes, and accessories. If the items meet Fabletic’s quality standards, Fabletics credits will be added directly to the customers’ accounts.

This is only the beginning. Hundreds of top brands have already experimented with recommerce offerings and the trend will only continue.

So, tell us… Have you already purchased from a DTC recommerce program? What was your experience? Do you plan to launch one for your own brand?

Quick Hits

‍

🎲 Growth in 2023 is no game of chance. Lock in your learnings at C-Suite Mastermind Las Vegas! Join the DTC team and 100 DTC owners and operators in Vegas from March 23-24th.

🤑 OpenAI launches paid model called ChatGPT Plus

📸 Snap celebrates Black History Month

🐥 Twitter cancels free access to its API, starting Feb 9

∞  Meta’s users increase to 2.96B

🔎 OpenAI’s detection tool

🔊 Have you heard our latest podcasts?

‍

⚔️ Mini Katana: Karly McFarland on $100M in Email Sales and Why She Sold Her Agency and Turned to the Brand Side (C-Suite Mentor Preview).

🤑 The Oodie - Davie Fogarty: Lessons From a Fast $400M.

💸 Andrew Wilkinson at C-Suite in Victoria: Bootstrapping vs. VC vs. PE vs. Angel.

😎 Pretty Boy - Ben Feys and Kevin Niehoff: Nailing your Brand Identity and Balling on a Budget.

🥤 Sansorium - Fiona Hepher: Sipping Sober with a 30% Return Customer Rate.

💡 Listen to the Biggest Marketing News Stories Today.

Don’t forget to rate the DTC Podcast on Apple (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️)

DTC Newsletter is written by Rebecca Knight, Randy Ginsburg, and Michael Venditti. Edited by Claire Beveridge and Eric Dyck.

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