Ryan W.

You're sabotaging conversions with one product listing page mistake. Our latest A/B test exposed this conversion killer: We removed the hero section from targeted PLPs. Hypothesis: Eliminating scrolling friction would increase ARPU. Reality: A 6.3% ARPU drop... Here's what we learned: 1️⃣ Shoppers want context They don't just want to be bombarded with products. Hero sections help guide their shopping experience. 2️⃣ Exploration beats tunnel vision PLPs should encourage browsing, not just finding one specific item as fast as possible. 3️⃣ Branding sparks desire Lifestyle images communicate value in a way that product grids just can't. The numbers don't lie: Context and branding make a big difference in how much people spend. Removing that instrumental element actively detracts from perceived value. To plug those revenue leaks, you need a PLP strategy that inspires: ➡️ Use hero sections to set the vibe and spark desire ➡️ Guide an engaging branded journey, not just a product list ➡️ Balance quick access with immersive storytelling But optimizing your PLPs is just one part of the equation... I've got 20 more revenue-driving tactics used to generate exactly €3,940,600.23 in revenue for our clients. Comment "Tests Please" and I'll send 20 test results to your DMs.

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Beware❗ — do NOT make this all too common goal-setting mistake... Brand founders of scaling DTC brands often feel tempted to pivot their goals when they don't seem to be working out. But here's the kicker: they're going about it all wrong. Let me clarify: well-crafted, clearly defined goals are sacred and should not be changed frequently. But do you know what SHOULD be changed frequently? The strategies you implement to achieve those goals! If you find yourself struggling to gain traction on some of your growing brand's goals, don't make any changes to them right away... Instead, get your team together for a brainstorming session on new and creative strategies you can implement to move your goals closer to the finish line. -- Did you find this post helpful? If so, consider resharing it and giving me Jon Blair a follow. #dtcbrands #scaleyourbusiness #founders

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🔥Hot take: Agency founders are scared to expand their sales teams beyond themselves. Building your sales team is mission critical‼️ It’s the only way to scale your business. Spoiler alert: We haven’t seen a founder-led sales business exceed $15M without a dedicated sales team. Without one, you risk being the best-kept secret in your industry. You can have the best work product and great company culture, but to grow, that leaves you with only one more lever to pull: SALES. While most founders want a robust sales team, many hesitate due to past setbacks or unsuccessful attempts at outsourcing sales functions. **My advice: keep sales in-house. Staying hands-on ensures the best results.** That’s where GForce comes in. We provide a framework to build your sales team and onboard the right people. Founders often struggle here. It’s like the restaurant business: high cost, high risk of failure. We eliminate that risk by:  1️⃣ Helping screen candidates 2️⃣ Identifying key traits to look for and questions to ask 3️⃣ Conducting interviews 4️⃣ Developing compensation structures 5️⃣ Establishing sales training programs As an agency owner, your path has 2 options: sell or maintain a healthy lifestyle business. Both paths need a predictable revenue stream. 💸 Word of mouth and referrals aren’t enough, especially in today’s market. That approach leaves you in a tight spot when you try to grow your delivery team. You can’t invest in your business unless you know sales are coming in. Bottom line: Hire a salesperson, collateralize and invest in growing a strong sales team. That’s how you’ll get results.

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Hiring an agency is a crapshoot, 100% of the time. It doesn't matter how many times ad age has written about them... ...or how many times they've won best places to work, or how many positive reviews they have. It could go great -- it could go ok, it could go terribly. I remind people of that all the time and they seem surprised. The best agencies in the world are not successful 100% of the time. So many factors go into an agency being successful. Some in their control. Many outside of their control. Hiring an agency could end up being the worst professional decision of your life, but I do know one thing. You should be over the moon excited on the front end and feel supremely confident. If you do NOT, you should do 1 of 2 things, or both. 1) Talk to more agencies, 2) Ask more questions of the one's you are talking to. All the social proof, past results, and testimonials STILL do not guarantee success. And, if you hire an agency, and results don't come, that doesn't mean that agency is bad, or not smart, or had bad intentions. The biggest (unintentional) mistake I think brands make when hiring agencies, is they don't talk to enough of the RIGHT agencies. Finding an agency is easy. Finding the right agency is hard. I feel so passionately about that statement I've considered getting it as a thigh tattoo. There are a BAJILLION (a real #) agencies out there. New one's enter the market ever 12 seconds. Brands don't need to speak to 10 different agencies. They need to speak to 3-4 of the RIGHT agencies.

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Forget Influencers! Learn how to set up a creator funnel & produce insane amounts of UGC ads for cheap 💰 Featured guest: Bostjan Belingar, CEO of Hustler Marketing 🚀 Topics: ✨ Importance of UGC amid privacy policies & algorithm changes 🎥 Finding & working with creators for UGC 📄 Creating detailed creative briefs ✂️ Editing UGC for platforms like FB, TikTok 👥 Tailoring UGC to customer avatars & age groups 🔗: https://lnkd.in/gx9cKDyJ #ViralMarketing #UGC #SocialMedia #Creators #DigitalMarketing

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Meta is like the government — it will take as much of your money for free as you let it. Here's what I mean: Meta defaults to incentivize you to spend more money. How? Through the same mistake I see the majority of DTC brands make: "We have to spend more money to produce better results." Yet Meta promises no clear insights or direct correlation between budget spend and performance. Meta is like the government, asking you for tax money but not telling you how it's being spent. That is... without cost controls. In highest volume campaigns, Meta uses your spend (money) as a constant. Performance is then "dependent" on spend, though nothing is guaranteed. But cost controls flip the script, using performance as a constant and spend as the variation. It's like being able to tell the government, "I'll give you my money, if you promise you can fix the potholes on my route to work." I don't know how we're operating in 2024 and still trying to throw cash at every single problem. Dollars spent ≠ dollars made. Cost controls let you establish a target CPA (which you can set at a profitable cap). Then, Meta confines spend to the campaigns that perform. Creative volume is the way to unlock more of this spend — more creatives, more testing, more potential performers, more profitable spend. I'd much rather let Meta leverage my creatives than my wallet to find performance.

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If there's one message I want to repeat over and over – it's this one: Understand the difference between Discovery Platforms and Relationship Platforms, and then design your strategy accordingly. Discovery Platforms have a mechanism for connecting NEW consumers to your content (social media, YouTube, etc). Relationship platforms are distribution you own (email, podcasting, SMS, private communities). First, decide: Do you want to focus on video or writing? If writing: • LinkedIn • Threads • X If video: • Instagram • TikTok • YouTube Shorts • YouTube long-form Choose ONE platform to start (e.g. LinkedIn) and experiment with cross-posting to the other platforms in that same medium (e.g. Threads). Trying to do BOTH writing and video is like trying to become world-class at playing two unrelated sports. The point of Discovery Platforms is to build up distribution via your Relationship Platforms. If you're not already effectively directing LinkedIn attention to email, solve that before you start publishing on another discovery platform like Threads or X. – If you want to go deeper on content and platform strategy, read this: https://lnkd.in/gVnkS3_j

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Here's an example of why follower count should not matter... As a micro-influencer (30,000 followers) in the motherhood space, I recently partnered with a pediatrics company. I posted ✨ONE✨ Instagram story frame for them and generated - 158 clicks 23 signups (~15% conversion rate - from a singular static image) This is not a brag. This is a plead for brands to focus on influencer ALIGNMENT over vanity metrics. #influencermarketing #influencers #influencerROI

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After you’re done with that, do this: 1. Note video styles that work 2. Go to JoinBrands  3. Hire a UGC creator or a few 4. Tell them to create in that style 5. Get videos featuring your product 6. Post them everywhere organically 7. Turn them into paid ads too Get the data. Make an informed guess. Test. Adjust. Start getting more sales. It won’t be easy, but it’s a lot more doable when you have the right tools. P.S. My UGC marketplace helps you find proven creators and get persuasive content made for affordable prices.  Hit the “visit my website” button to check it out.

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I’ve used UGC to build multiple 7-figure brands. But… 1. There’s no one formula that works for every brand. It depends on the product, the niche, and more. 2. The only way to figure out what works for your brand is to try a ton of stuff, cut out the 95% that doesn’t work, and iterate on the 5% that does. Keep your quality high, but get your volume up. Then keep going until the results start pouring in. That’s the only way to win. P.S. My UGC marketplace helps you find proven creators and get persuasive content made for affordable prices. Hit the “visit my website” button to check it out.

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“Brand bidding: the kindergarten of Google Ads”. Here's how we spent $7M on Google Ads and turned cold traffic into new customers @scale for DTC Brands [Not a penny spent on Brand Bidding] Many marketers stick to brand bidding as their safe bet in the realm of DTC and eCommerce. Brand bidding is an amateur's game. We chose to defy the norm—and it paid off big time. For DTC & Ecommerce brands, the true challenge lies in acquiring new customers at scale, not just targeting those already familiar with the brand. This has been our focus for years—converting cold traffic into loyal customers, bypassing the allure of brand bidding for a more ambitious goal of sustainable growth. Over the last 6 months, we’ve profitably spent over $7 million on Google Ads without a single dollar going towards brand bidding, for DTC Brands in the health and wellness industry. Instead, we focused on what truly drives growth: customer acquisition at scale. Our unique funnel transforms cold traffic into loyal customers, turning skeptics into believers. How do we do it? Through relentless optimisation and a deep understanding of consumer behavior. Our proprietary funnel guides potential customers from initial interest to purchase with unparalleled efficiency. The results speak for themselves. We generated staggering revenues for this client, as evidenced by our real Google Ads Manager screenshots. Here’s what makes our funnel unique: 🚀 Huge Conversion Rates: Achieving over 15% conversion rates, significantly higher than industry averages, (On cold traffic!) 💰 Extremely High Average Order Value (AOV): Maximizing revenue from every customer. 🎯 Precision Targeting: Only targeting cold traffic to ensure we’re bringing in new customers, not just re-engaging existing ones. 📈 Scalable Growth: Designed to scale seamlessly, allowing for consistent and sustainable growth. 🔄 Continuous Optimization: Using data-driven insights to refine and improve the funnel constantly. While others pour money into targeting those who are already familiar with their brand, we excel at converting complete strangers into customers. Our approach is bold, innovative, and, most importantly, profitable. And here’s the best part: I am offering our unique funnel for FREE! Yes, you read that right, for FREE. We want to help you move beyond brand bidding and tap into a scalable growth strategy that works. Let’s connect and explore how we can replicate this success for your brand. If you want to have access to our unique DTC customer acquisition funnel for FREE: 1) Like the Post 2) Comment “FUNNEL” 3) Be sure we are connected so that I can send you the Funnel directly by DM Let’s grow together. 🚀 #DTC #ecommerce #GoogleAds #CustomerAcquisition #digitalmarketing

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This brand drove $632,525 in sales from podcasts this year. Quick hit lessons from a deep dive into their strategy: 1) Their ads are catchy and make you remember them. The ad I listened to called out "Doesn't this sound like an ad for a really good drug rather than [brand name]". People passively listen to the ad section of a podcast, so you must stick out. 2) They go wide vs deep. They advertise on 94 different podcasts. Let that sink in. 94!! They even went the length to hire an Audio Marketing Manager to manage relationships with all of these podcasts. Start small, but if you see success scale up and hire around what works. 3) They use post-purchase surveys to measure the effectiveness of this channel. Podcasts are inherently hard to track. People forget to use their discount code it's impossible to attribute podcast traffic. Most importantly call this out in the ad! At the end of the ad they read "After placing your order select podcast in the survey to follow and then select Barry in the dropdown.” A trend I think we'll start to see more of. Who else seeing success on podcasts?

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Liquid Death had 100k Facebook fans before the product existed Here are three creative tactics you can steal from them to grow your audience: 1) Let the bad ideas through For something to be truly unique, it has to seem like a bad idea at first. It can't be obvious. The team at LD live (and die) by this. So if something seems dumb, crazy, impossible, unreasonable, you're probably onto something. 2) Let the creatives cook LD's CEO is a former creative director They hire comedians, writers, TV people, etc "Professional funny people" And the result? There is actual entertainment value in what they create. You might not have the budget to hire a comedian, but why not see if the "company clown" has any ideas on marketing your brand. 3) Embrace side projects LD spends a lot of time not making water, or talking about water, or even thinking about water. Instead they're out creating metal albums, makeup palettes, and enemas. These dumb ideas (see tactic 1) seem like a waste of time, but they are exactly what people think about as the grab a case of water off the grocery store shelf. Speaking of side projects, we recently did an episode of Why Brands Work on Liquid Death. We broke down their entire funnel: - Ads - Traffic - Landing Pages - Creative - Emails - SMS - Flows - Campaigns - Surveys - Options And much, much more... Swiping this strategy will help you reverse engineer some of their success for your own brand. If you want the full breakdown... 1) Make sure we're connected 2) React to this post 3) And comment below (anything) I'll then personally DM it to you asap! You can also download it directly here: https://lnkd.in/eW5tBV4B

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How long does It take to make money through Klaviyo? (…most ecomm brands get this VERY wrong) Most new ecommerce brands think email marketing is an overnight success channel They invest in building a huge list, write a few emails, hit send...and expect money to start pouring in immediately. But the truth is — making real money through email marketing takes patience and strategy. There are several key factors that determine your timeline: 🔻 How established is your business? - If you're just starting out with no customer data, it will take longer to get traction. - Established brands with rich customer insights can monetize email faster. 🔻 How strong is your acquisition? - If you have zero traffic or no new people coming to your store, it will be hard to do much with email marketing 🔻 What's your product lifecycle? - If you sell trendy seasonal products, your email money-making window may be shorter. - Evergreen products allow you to continuously nurture and monetize your list year-round. 🔻 How optimized are your campaigns? - Poorly constructed emails and sloppy segmentation will kill your open rates and sales. - Top-performing brands continually test and refine their email strategy. For most newer ecomm brands selling their own products; It realistically takes 6-12 months of consistent emailing to build momentum and start earning serious revenue. The first few months are all about: - securing opens/clicks - gathering data on what resonates, - segmenting your list appropriately. Once you've optimized your campaigns based on real data insights from your audience, email can become a huge revenue driver! But trying to force a 6-figure email income your first few months will result in disappointment.  Take the time to build a solid email foundation first. Nurture your customers, optimize for the long run.  Then the cash register really starts ringing! So stay patient, keep emailing prolifically! Let the winning results of strategic email marketing work their magic over time! ---- P.S — Want to grow your ecommerce business with email marketing? DM me “Klaviyo” to learn more about how I can help you to organically scale your ecommerce business! #emailmarketing #ecommerce #dtc #fashion #wellness #retail

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We meet with 20 DTC and enterprise brands a month that are working with other agencies to build an influencer-affiliate channel. Here's how 90% of the convo's go: "Our agency is reaching out to 150 influencers a week..." OUCH "They're sending one email through an influencer platform using their primary domain... AND NO FOLLOW UPS!" 😅 "They aren't recruiting influencers on instagram DM's." 😑 "They are only focused on nano and micro creators because the brand doesn't have budget for paid relationships." "They only send one product to influencers and expect them to continue creating content that converts." 😲 "Their is no community management strategy." 😒 "No automations or trigger based email flows to nurture influencers." 😤 "No monthly challenges or campaigns running." 🤐 "They're not putting whitelisting/ spark ad spend behind top performing content." 😶 These are what we call the cardinal sins of building a successful influencer-affiliate channel and will 100% guarantee that your program will never generate results Influencer-affiliate can be a profitable growth channel driving direct revenue, millions of free impressions, and create a library of high converting ad creative But you have to get the fundamentals right Start with a richer offer Use your CPA on Meta and start their... paying $50? Cool why not be willing to pay that for a creator to drive sales for you. 20x your outreach volume! YES 20x Get a new influencer software that supports email at scale, we use SARAL - The Influencer OS Set up a secondary domain and 10-20 new inboxes Now you can send 35 emails a day per inbox or 10,500-21,000 emails a month to recruit influencers Stand up 4 brand owned instagram accounts Start sending 100 dm's a day to recruit influencers Have a dedicated person that builds relationships with influencers in the community and finds ways to get them creating more content These programs are often the biggest marketing opportunity for brands But their agency doesn't have the right strategy or isn't willing to do the work required to make it work If you're working with an agency, at a minimum push them to scale TOF outreach and you'll start to see better results. What other constraints have you experienced building your influencer-affiliate channel?

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Athletic Greens (AG1) bootstrapped their ecom brand to $150+ million 💪 Here's a breakdown of the funnel they're using to grow... 👉 https://lnkd.in/eQiFmV8u AG1 has the most streamlined subscription funnel I've ever seen for a DTC brand 👀. No wonder they were able to bootstrap to $150+ million in revenue, before raising at a $1.2 billion valuation. This funnel by AG1 uses three strategies to achieve their desired AOV and improve profit on ad spend: • Discounted bundle offer to boost sales & AOV • Multiple subscription options to increase LTV • A subscription frequency upsell to accelerate LTV collected, and reduce payback period on CAC I've broken down each step from ad click to checkout. You can get the free Figma file, with editable templates, here: 👉 https://lnkd.in/eQiFmV8u Or just comment "AG1", and I'll DM it to you. Some key strategies in their funnel that you won't wanna miss: • How their ad creative hooks customers and sells the benefits of their product • The compelling intro offer they use to acquire new customers • The price-comparison approach the landing page uses to make their product look like a no-brainer • How their landing page answers buying decision questions (BDQs) • The streamlined subscription builder they use to personalize the shopping experience and upsell customers to maximize AOV • And more

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