Time to Focus on Creative 👀

Let's start planning!

Author

Chris Meade
January 13, 2022

Happy Thursday! Almost through the work week and I'll tell you it's been a damn fun one. The bootstrapping never gets old and trying to figure out how we are going to enter into one of America's largest retail accounts, plus keeping up with current demand is a beautiful problem to try to solve.

Thanks so much for almost the one hundred responses I got from the first newsletter of the year. I hope you guys loved it. If this is your first time reading the newsletter, or got forwarded it take a second to subscribe here. Each month I'm going to start giving away some free CROSSNET's & some merch to whoever shares the newsletter the most. 

So what's been working & what's not? 

Industry-wide conversion rate post-holiday shopping is down. If you're seeing your sales drop and your conversion going down you're not alone. Gassing up the ads and throwing more fuel onto the fire probably is not the answer, especially when costs are just atrociously high. So here's what we're doing instead. 

Updating Our Amazon Listings & Website

Use this time to make 2022 the best possible. If things are slow, I promise you'll wish you had this time back so you can make improvements everywhere. We've completely redone our entire Amazon seller page & each and every product. We've also launched a brand new website, check it out here. It's 100% not done, but a great start and I'd love as much feedback as possible. Rip it apart and be as negative as possible. 

On that same note, stop waiting for the perfect time. I talk to so many people who "want to start a personal brand" or "have been planning to launch" something for a year now. Just get started. I could have waited to launch the website until it was 100% done, but that could be six months from now. As long as what you're putting out today is just even a fraction of a % better than what you put out in the world the day prior, then that's an improvement and a win. 

Building out our Referral Program & Community 

It's much easier to sell to a previous customer than trying to catch a new one each and every time. Everyone uses this damn buzzword "community" and everybody wants it, but only the best brands have it. So how are we doing it? 

- Incorporate our private Facebook group into every piece of communication possible. We have a group called the MVP Group that is centered around the concept of play and going outside. I know as an entrepreneur, the best time in my day is when my phone is not in my hand and I'm actually relaxing or breaking a sweat. 

- Setting realistic and attainable goals with our social team to improve our engagement. Each week our social team is responsible for reporting to the executive team our engagement growth week over week on each platform and also showing the company our top-performing organic video (typically on Tik Tok)

- Putting a massive focus on email capture & SMS. Every time you're spending money to get a paid customer to your site you best be providing them the best experience ever. Lets be real, how many times do you buy something the first time you see it? Your customer needs to be wined & dined over and over again. There is zero reason I'm drinking out of this damn $60 Yeti water bottle when a cup with ice works just fine. They got me with the branding, the sponsored ads, and made me want to feel like I had the best of the best.

Branding takes time, good things take time. We live in this world of instant gratification and it's so damn bad. Everyone wants to go from 2 sales a day to 20 and get burned out trying to rush to get there. How about going from 2 to 4? Then 4 to 6. Start setting realistic goals and watch how damn fast you actually build. 

A few months ago our head of community came to me asking if we could test out this Shopify app that he saw on Twitter called ReferralCandy. Rather than hunting new customers, why not have them be our biggest champions and pay them out for each sale? Well it's been working and we're going to be doubling down on our word of mouth efforts which is how CROSSNET actually got started in the first place. One sale at a time, build loyal customers who are willing to sell your product for you.

As we work on building our referral program I now have complete over giving certain types of customers different codes and tracking them throughout the platform. In my world, I may want to offer a mom a different offer than a college kid who's out there hustling and just looking to get the bills paid. I remember when I was working at the school cafeteria cleaning the grill for $11 an hour, coming home smelling like grease, I would have loved to had the option to go sell CROSSNET's around the school and make more.

You can learn more about ReferralCandy works here & get your first 30 days for free by joining here. 

Relentlessly Repurposing Old Ads & Gathering New Social Content 

As ad performance continues to be fun in the wake of iOS we need to start spending more time on creative! It's always is the website working, are the ads live, is the copywriting good. What about the damn video or photo you're running ads to?!

We're going back and looking at everything. What videos are starting too late? I can't tell you how many times I've found videos running where the first 5 seconds are just people walking into a park and the CROSSNET has not even been set up yet. Customers do not have the time! You legit have 2 seconds to get somebody's attention or you are done. Do everything in that first frame to hook the audience or you've lost the game before it even begins.

We've recently brought on a freelance video editor practically full time and he's been crushing it. He's not only ripping through our old shitty content and putting a new spin on it, but he's constantly snagging UGC from our dropbox or the Archive App and making new paid or organic content for Tik Tok & Instagram. 

If you haven't heard of Archive App, it's essentially your social media manager's new best friend. Every day you can jump into Shopify and see every single tag from customers who are either mentioning your brand or using your hashtag. The coolest part is that the app actually saves the videos and you can simply download them out in a click of a button rather than hounding the influencer down. Oh, your social person is out of the office for a few days, no worries Archive App will capture everything. 

Archive App just raised over $4 million from Stripe and is currently waitlist only, but you can skip the line by joining from this link. The app will open to the public on January 18th! 

Creating Clean ROAS Dashboards

As a bootstrapped business we are cracking down on our paid efforts more than ever. If online performance is down 30%, then our marketing spend better be down 30%. We will be tracking relentlessly our return on ad spend and making sure that we are not running digital ads unless they are profitable or at the bare minimum breaking even. 

Our head of performance has just made this nifty sheet that he'll be compiling weekly to show spend across all platforms versus return on Shopify, Amazon and retail. At a bare minimum, we're shooting for a 2 ROAS. A good majority of these metrics are also tracked within Triple Whale. 

Although ROAS numbers are vital to a business' profitability levels, I will challenge you to stop thinking about marketing as performance ONLY. We spent so much time in dashboards and worrying about CLV & AOV, but what about growing the brand, the product, exposure to new potential customers. Start thinking about if this was 1970, would your company be around? If so, how would they be thriving?

Two of My Favorite Threads of The Week:

Even at my stage, it is crazy how difficult it is to get funding for your business. Even with years of established credit or purchase orders, the financial system makes it as difficult as possible. According to the 50+ comments on LinkedIn and another 50 on Twitter, here are some of the best places:

  • Divvy - A credit card company that will give you a crazy amount of capital. We use them personally for CROSSNET after moving away from Brex. 

  • Wayflyer

  • Shopify Capital

  • Clearco

  • Settle

Stop discounting! We've made it our internal goal to cut discounting by 50% this year. Why? People have shown time and time again that they will buy our game at retail or Amazon at full price. So why give away free money that we can take to the bank. Regardless of your industry here were a few of my favorite opt-in strategy suggestions:

  • Win a vacation (The brand gives away one paid vacation a quarter or a year)

  • Provide a free low ticket item with each purchase that uses the code. For example we'd give away a CROSSNET hat with each order. The hat costs us $1.80, rather than the $10 discount.

  • Enter to win our monthly giveaway. You'll get one of everything we make!

  • Only way to gain access to an exclusive product like CROSSNET x Black Wolf Sunscreen

We all need help sometimes. If you're struggling with any of the areas below here are some of my favorite contacts in the industry. Half of these people have zero idea they are being included in this, but I can guarantee they'd love to work with you. 

I hope you have the best rest of the week. I'd love to hear from you. What else can I help you with? What areas would you like me to shed more light on?

Did you know every month I work 1vs1 with anywhere from seven to ten up-and-coming entrepreneurs? We cover anything from DTC strategy, bootstrapping, entering retail, and team building. I'd love to make room for three more consulting sessions this month.

If interested in working together simply hit reply or drop me a line back at [email protected] 

All the love in the world,

ChrisÂ