The TL;DR:
- Let’s Chat D2C: Taking Advantage of Valentine’s Day Without Discounting Your Brand.
- What I’m Thinking about this Week: Reaching Gen-Z Where They’re Browsing.
- The D2Z Podcast: In this week’s episode, I sat down with Michael Charleston, Sr. Ecommerce Product Manager at Nordic Naturals, an award-winning Omega-3 fish oil and other foundational nutrients company.
- App Highlights - Shopify & Recharge Pricing Updates + Malomo’s new Loop Returns integration.
- Upcoming Events: I’m speaking at EEE Miami on February 23rd at the East Hotel! Ecommerce Experience Evolution is an annual event in Miami gathering leaders in the Ecommerce space to connect, share knowledge, and learn! Use the code SP-ELECTRIC-20 at checkout for 20% off your pass!
Random tip: Do not drive your paid traffic to your standard storefront. Invest in landing pages!!!
Let's Chat D2C: Taking Advantage of Valentine’s Day Without Discounting Your Brand
Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and it’s one of the best holidays in Q1 to take advantage of as a brand! In 2022, consumers spent nearly $24B on Valentine’s Day. And this year, they’re expected to spend just under $26B, according to NRF! So, let’s dive into some ideas around how you can maximize the effectiveness of this day.
What types of Items are People Buying?
The top gifts include candy (57%), greeting cards (40%), flowers (37%), an evening out (32%), jewelry (21%), gift cards (20%), and clothing (19%),
Example Content Calendar
It’s not too early to start sending out campaigns for Valentine’s day. Consider executing something similar to this example campaign calendar:
- Send out a buying guide early this coming week to your customers, i.e., “Gifts for the loved ones in your life, family, galentines, etc.”
- Send a campaign specifically to last year’s shoppers
- Last chance for your gift to arrive on Valentine’s day (based on whenever your shipping speed is)
You could even think about implementing a fun little quiz gift guide on your site:
- Who are you buying for?
- What is your budget?
- What do they like?
Then serve them a relevant product recommendation.
Post-Purchase Survey
Start to aggregate more zero-party data on your customers. Implement a post-purchase survey on your website with a tool like Fairing and ask purchasers two questions:
- Was this order a gift?
- If it’s a gift, who did you purchase it for?
You can then use this data to inform your post-purchase email and SMS communications. For example, did you buy for someone else? Treat yourself to a purchase as well. Or, save the cohort of gifters for the next holiday to send a campaign around gifting.
Update your Signup Forms
Add a popup or modify your existing one to capture email and phone number in exchange for access to your Valentine’s Day promotion.
Live Chat and SMS
Offer real-time shopping assistance with live chat on your site with Gorgias and via two-way text support with Klaviyo.
Discount Strategically
Brands can try and maximize Valentine’s day sales with discounts. Still, it’s important not to damage your brand reputation or get your customers into a habit of “just waiting for the next deal” versus buying a full-priced item.
You can experiment with discounted product bundles as personalized recommendations that can help move certain hard-to-move SKUs but also protect the pricing power of your SKUs while offering existing customers a unique way to shop from you.
You don’t have to just discount either. Test pay-now-buy-later promotions leveraging store credit or coupons in the following ways:
- Get a $25 gift card for $20
- Get a $25 gift card with every purchase over $150
- Get a $25 store credit redeemable within 30 days for every purchase over $100.
What I’m Thinking About This Week: Reaching Gen-Z Where They’re Browsing
TikTok is now the World’s #1 Search Engine
Google’s roughly 5.7 million searches per minute are now only good enough for 2nd place. TikTok, primarily powered by the search habits of the under-30-year-old crowd across the world, is now the world’s #1 search engine. In fact, more than 40% of Gen Z users prefer using TikTok over Google for searches.
TikTok Continues to Invest in This
TikTok is moving from being “just a social media platform” to a robust search engine. They’re uniquely positioned to consolidate social media user behaviors and search behavior to recommend more relevant content and serve better search results. They’ve improved their search engine with predictive text and an AI recommendation engine that considers CTR, watch times, and reports.
What this means for Brands
Historically, every company had a Facebook Page. In 2020, every company had an Instagram page. 2023 is the year absolutely every company needs to have a TikTok page or risk being left behind.
But the type of content that worked on Facebook and Instagram doesn’t work on TikTok. The best-performing content on TikTok is sub-30-second videos that are authentic and provide a personality to the brand.
It’s not enough to just post once a week, either. Followers expect continual engagement and for companies to stay up to date on the latest trends down to the minute.
Tap into your existing SEO team to funnel insights to your TikTok social strategy. Brands that can master authentic content with an SEO-backed approach on TikTok will reap the benefits. There isn’t another platform that can provide such a giant organic reach to anyone, so long as you create the right content.
TikTok’s Future
TikTok isn’t just dancing videos. It’s a place where consumers search, discover, and learn. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve been repurposing all of my long-form Youtube tutorial content to TikTok.
This Week’s The D2Z Podcast
#45 – Retention Marketing and Team Empowerment
🎧Listen Now 🎧
In this week’s episode, I sat down with Michael Charleston, Sr. Ecommerce Product Manager at Nordic Naturals, an award-winning Omega-3 fish oil, and other foundational nutrients company. Specifically, we explored the following:
💰 Launching products and customer acquisition
📲 The technological side of building a robust omnichannel brand
😎 The value of investing in customer service to increase the customer's lifetime value
🚀 Creating a collaborative team environment based on delegating to create long-term successApp Highlight - Shopify & Recharge Pricing Updates + Malomo & Loop IntegrationS
Shopify
On January 24th, Shopify raised prices for their standard plans. Basic, Shopify, and Advanced monthly subscription plans for new merchants have increased to $39, $105, and $399 USD per month. Existing monthly merchants who opt-in to their yearly plans will pay the current prices of $29, $79, and $299 USD per month billed yearly and will have until April 24, 2023, to do so.
Recharge
Recharge made updates to their Standard Plan pricing on February 1. This update impacts new merchants only and includes a monthly fee, an increase in the transaction fee, and a 30-day free trial. The new pricing is $99/mo + 1.25% & 19¢ per transaction.
Malomo & Loop Returns Integration
The Loop Returns & Malomo integration is now live! With this integration, customers can initiate and track their returns and exchanges from their Malomo tracking page.
According to Malomo, brands will now be able to:
- Give every consumer a fully branded, seamless experience to track, return, or exchange an order from a single consumer tracking experience
- Give consumers complete transparency about where their order, return, or exchange is and significantly reduce WISMO/WISMR/WISME tickets while increasing CSAT
- Personalize and segment experiences with recommended products and incentivize exchanges to retain revenue
Merchants using Malomo + Loop typically see 27% higher retention rates when compared to industry alternatives.
Upcoming Events
I’m speaking at EEE Miami on February 23rd at the East Hotel! Ecommerce Experience Evolution is an annual event in Miami gathering leaders in the Ecommerce space to connect, share knowledge, and learn!
Use the code SP-ELECTRIC-20 at checkout for 20% off your pass!
If you're a brand and want to attend for free, reach out to me directly, and I'll send you the special VIP code!
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