I spent the last 7 months of my career slowing growth during an industry supply crisis.
I peeled back every growth lever and learned secrets untold. My assumptions about what was driving growth were shattered.
With confidence, these are the 3 most impactful drivers of growth:
Big news to share with you guys.
I’ve accepted a role as ILIA’s new VP of Digital & Ecommerce.
@iliabeauty
ILIA’s a beloved clean beauty innovator that sits at the intersection of clean skincare and high-performance cosmetics.
99% of DTC loyalty programs don’t create loyalty. They just increase the discount rate on your existing loyalists.
Change my mind with examples. Don’t say Sephora
Ecom peeps: you’re creating browse abandons by asking customers to navigate away from your site and go to their inbox for that 10% coupon. Stop it. Auto apply coupon after form completion.
Ahhh tis the season to buy ads for 3X the cost and sell product for 3/4th the price only to acquire customers who will never purchase again…
Meanwhile Amazon sold your product to your customers 2 weeks ago
But sales next month will stop a catastrophic Q1, right?
Right?!?!?
I still see so many tweets about asc vs cbo, lowest cost vs cost cap. It’s WILD how little yall talk about creative and the effort and creative strategy that goes into making great ads. The creative drives 90% of paid media success, not your tinkering in the account.
Steps to turning around your ad account:
1. Open twitter
2. Spend 6-8 hours tweeting
3. Make a few threads 🧵
4. Hide the ROAS metric from your dash
5. Log off for eternity
6. Change careers
7. Emigrate to new country
8. Change your last name
9. Attribution
It’s not that Facebook ads are less effective…it’s that efficient scale on Facebook requires a higher upfront investment
You can get efficient scale fast if you invest heavily in testing volume of creative
But the cost of creative production and testing is high
If your video ads can’t beat your statics, it’s you🧵
I believed the fallacy that statics “do better” than videos. I was wrong. My video ads just sucked.
After months of trying to figure out video performance, we nailed it. Performance has never been better. Videos are winning.
@graceclarke
A hug from my kids is worth more than billions of dollars, my career, my free time, my independence.
It’s hard and terrifying AF.
Your needs become secondary. At times you are the shell of your former self, as you barely survive to make others thrive.
But your perspective…
Dtc Twitter: how we feeling? Are we pumped? Are we psyched? Are we living our Chad media buyer best lives??? Are we even alive rn??? Who else is barely alive?! Hit that MF like!!!!
I want to host the FIRST EVER dtc dinner that’s put on by dtc operators FOR SaaS brands.
SaaS sales reps esp are the unsung heroes of this community. They engage with our content, they invite us to podcasts, they send us stuff in exchange for demos.
WE ARE NOTHING WITHOUT THEM
I won’t stop saying it: SaaS people are the backbone of the dtc community. If I ever put out a trash take (hasn’t happened), I know my SaaS squad will still smash like that
Do you or someone you love have too many tabs open?
Close them. All. At once.
If you love something you let it go and if it’s meant to be it’ll come back to you
Bobbie crossed $100M in 2 years.
Listen to the Andrew Faris Podcast where we dig into the supply crisis, cohort forecasting, and how we're going to enlist Elon Musk and Nick Cannon to grow the US population.
The worst use case for a/b testing is minor aesthetic tweaks that stem from internal debates.
Don’t optimize for who’s right or wrong. Maximize for incremental growth with bigger, high-impact swings.
Today, Bobbie announces its acquisition of Nature's One.
This time last year, the nation was experiencing an infant formula supply crisis.
The industry was too reliant on 2 brands.
And when one of those brands had a recall, there wasn't enough supply to feed our babies.
Have you or someone you love been personally injured by someone saying "PDP page"? You may qualify for monetary damages. Please join this class action by replying below
Mothers deserve more than discounts. We send them back to work 6 weeks after delivery, when their baby is helpless & they’re getting no sleep. They give most of their income to a stranger to raise their kids. They’ll hardly make ends meet & likely not retire. We’re a sick society
Since joining ILIA 9 months ago, I’ve taken on the side quest of building our company-wide data architecture, strategy, governance, and insights practice.
We’ve just hit a major milestone. We’re opening a role for our first data & analytics lead.
Please share or refer!
One of the best pieces of media buying advice was drilled into my head by
@TaylorHoliday
:
never turn off an ad.
One of my ads that I had high hopes for was getting no spend and poor performance for a few weeks.
In the last 2 weeks, that ad took off & is the best performer.
18 months after launching DTC, we are now on shelf and online in Target…while our country continues to face a national formula shortage. Bonkers!!! Send me a shelfie if you see us 👀
when life hits you with challenges, when ROAS is shit, when your fb rep stops calling you, when no one else is there for you…dtc Twitter will be there for you
The basic principles of UX and CRO haven’t changed over the last 10 years:
1. Design for mobile
2. Reduce friction
3. Build trust
4. Show, not tell
I continue to be shocked at how many brands (big and small) struggle with these.
Career advice from a seasoned professional (me):
1. End every work day by closing all tabs
2. Type “ecom” instead of “ecomm” to save time & look cool
3. Mark all emails as read 1x a month to start fresh
4. Reply to someone sending you their calendly by sending them your calendly
My preferred methodology for creative testing in meta: put creatives belonging to related concepts in one evergreen campaign.
Miss me with that testing campaign mess.
What happens will shock you. As winning creatives fatigue, sleeper creatives take off. Bad ads won’t spend.
Here’s what I got to say to the cost cap bros:
A “50% off everything” ad will win and scale in a cost cap ad account… but will that ad grow your business?
Don’t let the cost cap bros shrink your funnel.
Ads that drive awareness drive high CPA and are NECESSARY for growth.
Tell ‘em
@ChereneAubert
“And wrong. That is so wrong. Everyone’s doing it wrong.”
What’s she torching?
Planning, marketing, and measuring channels separately.
“Businesses view themselves as different sales channels, but that’s not how consumers view businesses.
“We have our
ILIA reached 1 million Instagram followers this month.
All of us pay to show people our social content and hope they convert.
But it's VERY rare for a brand today to get 1 million people to OPT IN to seeing their Instagram content.
I dare you to make consumers care about you.
YOU GUYS!!! I made it as a finalist for The Consumer Packaged Awards growth marketer of the year!!! Help me win so I can finally help my parents understand what I do for a living! Vote for Cherene Aubert as Growth Marketer of the Year:
Having been on the inside, I can say that not everyone in the category has naturally occurring demand. Bobbie is a beast of a business that has unlocked product-market-fit and has built a brand that touches hearts. Done it so well that they had to acquire manufacturing to scale.
why spend millions of dollars per year generating demand when you can simply select a category that have naturally occurring demand generation?!
well done, bobbie.
This man
@TaylorHoliday
gave me a street MBA & turned me into a beast
Ad account tear downs, statlas jams, ad philosophy classes, growth guide training. He’s an expert educator who poured learnings into his team & can give a masterclass on decentralizing organizational knowledge
I knew she was a legend from the day that I met her…
During our interview process we used to ask these really open ended brain teasers to see how people think.
Most of the time people would get incredibly nervous and start to panic or get really quiet while trying to think
Got my toddler a twin mattress and the sms welcome flow is all discounts for another mattress. Classic case of running the dtc playbook and not even considering the customer. Sell me some mattress protectors, some seasonal sheets, something anything other than another mattress!
Email test idea:
Send an out of stock notification to past purchasers of the product complimenting their good taste and celebrating how ahead of the curve they are. then suggest other products that are ahead of trend that they might like
Every growth marketers dream is to work at Temu make ads that have big giant “$0” in red with a countdown timer and spinner wheel and a “LAST CHANCE” ticker scrolling across the top.
Learnings from the last couple of days on Twitter:
-lot of ppl don’t when to stop tweeting
-lot of ppl who don’t know when to stop tweeting don’t realize how bad it makes their company look
-lot of ppl who like those tweets don’t realize the same is happening to them
If you use cost caps, mark zuckerberg himself unlocks a secret special audience vault (it’s not retargeting) that finds you conversions at the cost cap you set. I heard this from a meta algorithm scientist
Wow great news everyone. I’ve (obviously) been nominated for
@get_repeat
CPAs for Growth Marketer of the Year and I didn’t even nominate myself! I’d like to thank my friends, family, fans, colleagues, Twitter followers. Have a nice night
1. Your Offer
The single most impactful growth lever in your tool belt.
When polled, growth marketers may name channels like “paid” or “email” as their biggest growth drivers. But those are just vehicles to the offer.
The right offer can 2X CR and reduce CAC by 4X. (Validated)
@mattlady
That’s my take after seeing brands invest only into paid and expect to see the results that we were seeing 10 years ago.
AND ad creative is the hardest thing to crack for paid success. If you can nail a steady stream of organic content, way easier to put paid behind it
🚨Hot take alert🚨
IMO the widespread issue is that the majority of people responsible for advertising don’t know how to advertise to consumers in a way that drives attention, interest, desire, and action.
See: 99% of statics all look the same. eventually shrinks awareness
@ChereneAubert
Would you pin the blame on ads just being bad across the board or what do you think is the reason for widespread downturn in performance ?
joining a startup is fun. you get to build teams, structure systems, and drive growth for the first time.
this is my first time coming into a company post-acquisition.
a lot more rebuilding, restructuring, and reaching new growth plateaus. way more challenging, & way more fun.