October 2023 eCommerce Fuel NYC Session Videos
A few weeks ago, Brij had the pleasure of sponsoring the local New York City eCommerce Fuel meetup. Thank you to Hasan Hasmani, the CEO of Underdog games for organizing. Enjoy the session videos below!
How Nori hit a $15M run rate via paid media with a 5:1 LTV to CAC ratio
Below is Courtney Toll's recipe for growing virally with paid ads.
1️⃣ Easy to demo product
Videos of the Nori press swiping garments and making wrinkles disappear had a huge appeal to Nori’s target audience.
2️⃣ Test all different types of creative
Courtney tested reels, static ads, UGC mashups, press placements, and product shots.
Put creatives in a broad prospecting campaign.
Every 3 days scale anything with > 2x ROAS an additional 20% to see what creative can maintain ROAS at scale
3️⃣ Short mashups worked best
This was a combo a product demo video followed by press placement and “as seen in Nordstrom.” worked
Remember that Nori is a > $100 purchase, so you need to test what is right for your brand.
4️⃣ Trust in Facebook Advantage Plus Shopping Campaigns
With ASC Facebook’s AI does optimization for you.
And Courtney puts any campaign that delivers 2x ROAS into it’s own advantage plus shopping campaign.
This allowed Nori to scale to >$120K in ad spend per month.
5️⃣ Stay lean
Nori is doing ~$15M this year and up until recently was only a 2 person team.
They only recently brought on a social media person to manage Nori’s organic presence.
The rest is outsourced by agencies.
6️⃣ In this environment keep CAC as low as possible
To balance out paid advertising CAC, Nori is on Amazon but doesn’t spend there.
It only invests in paid there during big sale periods, i.e. Prime Day, BFCM.
Nori’s retail presence also helps lower the cost of acquisition as well.
7️⃣ Get the upsell
Nori’s flagship product is a one-time purchase.
So it developed a subscription product - special ironing water and attachments like a travel case.
Nori then puts QR codes on its packaging.
Those QR codes link to upsells.
8️⃣ Prepare for Black Friday
Last year, Nori spent big, but realized that it left money on the table.
This year, they are allocating even more budget. And also preparing more creative for the sale.
Is your marketing creating conversation amongst your target audience?
Arjan Singh, the co-founder of Jolie, the shower head for skin care recently shared how Jolie is creating conversations with its audience.
The #1 goal for Jolie marketing is getting people talking about Jolie at the dinner table.
To level set what creating conversations can do, Jolie has achieved
💪 $28M run rate in 2 years,
💪 $10M ARR in subscription revenue
💪 120k customers
💪 10K pieces of UGC
🤯 PROFITABLY
The core beliefs that drive Jolie’s marketing engine are that “People influence people,” and the goal of a brand is to “Create conversation.”
Here’s how they did it.
1️⃣ Out of the gate they seeded influencers with products and not necessarily “capital I” influencers.
Seeding = COGS + Shipping. They give hundreds of shower heads out per month.
Now every single day 20-50 pieces of content are posted every day.
At this point, it’s not influencers anymore, it’s customers.
They want to share the unboxing online.
2️⃣ It’s not just about shower heads
Jolie is creating conversation about water, which touches life, art, food, drink, music, and culture.
Some of those activations include:
🎯 Giant sidewalk stickers with statements like “Your water is as dirty as a martini”
🎯 Visually arresting truck wraps that say, “Shower water is dirtier than this truck.”
🎯 Guerilla marketing posters that say, “She doesn’t want …, she wants great hair.”
🎯 Succession shower head campaign around April Fool’s
🎯 Shower thoughts content series
🎯 Tres Jolie brand collaborations
🎯 Erewhon end cap display touting, “Erewhon worthy shower water.”
🎯 High-end food and beverage events, i..e oysters and wine, boat cruise
🎯 Pool-side yoga event
🎯 “Water &” video series connecting water to everything from painting to surfing and oysters
3️⃣ Do activations with momentum and density
Rather than peanut butter and jelly marketing across geography and times of the year.
Jolie concentrates resources in single geographies like New York.
And they run multiple activations over that short period of time.
“Match sticks need to be close together to light a fire,” says Arjan.
4️⃣ Content doesn’t scale linearly
It’s actually cheaper than advertising, but takes time to incubate and conceive.
For instance:
💰 Stickers = $60
💰 Truck wraps = $1600
💰 Succession creative = $200
💰 Posters = $25
💰 Content and collabrs are free (written internally)
💰 Erewhon display = $6k + $2k/month
💰 Events - ~$2k/event
5️⃣ What’s next?
Jolie plans to create its own infomercial for streaming TV.
The commercial will be focused on water quality around the country.
And how it affects your skin and hair.
Arjan and the Jolie team are a testament that being a successful brand is not just running ads.
It’s about creativity and getting your audience talking.
If there is one takeaway here, it’s to start flexing your right brain and think more about the messaging and ad creative then the channels and budget!
Pro performance marketing tips from the Obvi founders
Obvi founders, Ronak Shah, Ashvin Melwani, and Ankit Patel, share their learnings from bootstrapping to launching in Walmart and surpassing $60M in revenue.
And they are doing in one of the most challenging times to run a brand with recession fears, inflation, and post-iOS 14 update.
1️⃣ On Black Friday
Run BFCM for a month, to beat the rush, capitalize on the buying frenzy, and learn and iterate during the time period.
It starts with teasers 14 days ahead, getting some hype going around a big offer reveal.
Make the offers access-bases, as in the customers need to earn the deal, i.e. join the community, and download the app.
And it’s not just offer, offer, and offer. Obvi continues to educate buyers on their why in email and SMS campaigns.
2️⃣ Email pro tips.
Don’t send emails at peak open times.
Don’t send too many emails.
Don’t set it and forget it. Review early days in your flows, so you can optimize emails later in the flow.
Don’t do a single email send - break up by time zone.
Segment based on trackable behavior. I.e. welcome series, and even cart abandonment flows should be customized based on previous purchase behavior and where they started in the funnel.
3️⃣ On performance marketing
Make sure to look at contribution margin along with CPA and ROAS on your ads.
Because when you over-obsess on CTR, AOV, you might be promoting offers that are contribution margin negative.
Make sure to calculate your breakeven ROAS before calculating your offer.
For example, heavily discounted offers and free gifts can kill the ability to profit when paired with advertising costs.
Some creative ways to keep the contribution margin up are BOGO and cash back on future purchase offers.
4️⃣ Why Obvi rebranded
Obvi brought the same packaging that crushed in DTC to retail, which failed badly.
With DTC, the PDP page does a lot of the selling for you.
But in retail, the packaging does the selling.
To that end, the redesigned the packaging to focus on what the product is and make sure the value proposition is crystal clear.
They took the same design system and pushed it across all of their digital properties.
The new packaging is not only crushing it in Walmart but it’s reinvigorated the online community.
Creating Amazing Products
Unlike many brands that start with a product first and then build a brand…
Lalo started with a customer, parents, and a problem, parents felt no attachment to their baby products because incumbent brands didn’t listen to what they needed.
Lalo is all about making parents' lives easier and helping them create positive memories.
And its working - Lalo after only a few years is doing 8-figures in revenue.
1️⃣ Where new ideas come from
Lalo sends out customer surveys every 6 months.
But it’s not a simple survey - they send invitations to an exclusive customer council for 15 customers that has a one-week expiration.
But they get thousands of responses filling out the application, ahem, a survey in disguise.
One of the questions is, “what do you want from us next?” and that fuels the product roadmap.
And for 3 straight surveys, they saw requests for wooden sustainable toys and a toy subscription.
3️⃣ Customers want options.
Specifically, customers were asking for an alternative to another popular toy subscription Love Every.
What customers didn’t like about that was it was a straight subscription.
So, in addition to making its product in the Lalo way, it also allowed for one-off purchases.
2️⃣ Enlist the help of experts
The Lalo team knew nothing about toys, so they researched extensively and partnered with the leading sustainable toy manufacturer.
They also brought in toy marketing experts to help create educational content to support the launch.
4️⃣ Designed for marketing
Michael is the CMO, and he also runs product development.
So, during product design, he thinks deeply about how the product will look in ads and unboxing.
Will it photograph well? Will it sell? Will it arrive looking like it does online?
5️⃣ Competition is a good thing
Lalo is going head-to-head with a $100M brand.
But as an entrepreneur, he’s not afraid of competition, and he wants to win.
But he doesn’t think too much about Love Every.
He is focused on providing value to Lalo customers.
For Lalo thats the design and sustainability angle.
7️⃣ On launching.
This was the biggest launch for Lalo to date.
It had its own creative identity.
The launch was branding, logistics, technology, website, merchandising, advertising, and partnerships.
A director of special projects ran the launch, but it it still was the largest team effort in company history.
8️⃣ Write your own playbook
There is a ton of advice passed around between brands.
Don’t take that advice as gospel.
What works for one brand, doesn’t always work for another.
Determine how that advice applies to your brand and make it your own.
Take risks, make mistakes, and the learnings are where new playbooks happen.
