#101 The Least boring Weekly Newsletter

June 29, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes

Good Morning Readers!

Here’s to wishing for a successful day ahead!

The world is witnessing women struggle to retain their rights in the USA. At times like this, we can’t help but think back to the privilege we’ve had to enjoy meaningful and enlightening conversations with some boss ladies in the DTC industry. 

Not only did we attain some fantastic insights they had to offer, but also got a sneak peek into what it takes to succeed in this highly competitive industry.

We stand in complete support of women across the nation & hope to provide a helping hand whenever possible. 

Tune into the conversations here ⬇️

Almund’s newsletter will give you all kinds of tips for DTC brands and much more.

Alright, so let’s get right to it!

This newsletter is going to dive into:

⬆️ THE Shopify Update Designed To Give Brands A Boost Much Needed 

🎧 Podcast Ads Work Better Than You Imagine

🎥 Video Bites: All Things DTC!

📕 Top Reads Of The Week

⚙️ Plenty Of Jobs Await You!

So, scroll down to THE VERY END & read up on what’s yet to come your way!

WHAT’S COOKING, HUH?

Shopify rolled out another update last week, empowering brands #PoweredByShopify to perform better. The idea—customers are now driving brands and shaping their experiences with businesses. With these updates, brands associated with Shopify can better align their strategies to what their customers WANT and NEED. So, let’s walk you through some updates that deserve all your attention. 

This feature allows merchants to create a shared network of audiences or customers. This will enable them to enjoy decreased conversion costs, access to active audiences, enhanced performance on their paid ad campaigns, and more. 

This gives you, as a brand, access to an audience that reacts positively to certain kinds of campaigns, helping you test out new strategies on customers with a higher chance of acquisition, ultimately leading to retention.

The next feature is a savior of all large to medium-sized eCommerce companies. Often, these businesses struggle to gather and organize data, ultimately relying on data analysts or synthesizers to do their magic. But with ShopifyQL Notebooks, things are going to be different.

They are a way for merchants to explore, analyze, visualize, and organize store data and metrics to make informed business decisions. In addition, it makes gaining insights simpler for the entire team.

Shop Cash is essentially a fantastic loyalty program that is creating an enriched Shopify ecosystem to retain its customers and keep them engaged. 

Basically, every time you use your card at Shopify checkout, it receives 2.4-2.9% of the total amount from the merchant. But with its latest update, customers can get back 1% Shop Cash—a strategy doing wonderful things for the platform. Firstly, it encourages more people to use Shop Pay, a Shopify-exclusive tool. Secondly, it gets more merchants to create Shopify-first marketplaces. 

A majority of B2B sales are expected to move online by 2025. Shopify is only taking the first step with this new update. This new set of features provides merchants with a powerful, customizable, and convenient platform that caters to all their needs in one place. 

Embedded with valuable features such as company profiles, B2B checkout, payment terms and conditions, and pricing lists, Shopify is making it easier for businesses to sell more without any external solutions.

The rising need for a headless strategy in every eCommerce business has pushed Shopify to work on this latest update that allows businesses to create headless stores with a React-based framework using built-in components and pre-defined templated. Using Hydrogen, merchants can use the tool to accelerate the development of these storefronts that tie back directly to the Shopify API. With Oxygen, you can globally deploy your eCommerce business with just one click.

But that’s not even the end of it. Shopify’s latest update has pushed:

Checkout updates;

Point Of Sale updates;

App upgrades;

Express extensions, and much more.

With so much to work with, Shopify is genuinely working on uplifting brands to have a better shot at this competitive market. 

Podcast Ads Work Better Than You Imagine

Podcasts are the new way brands are reaching out to a wider audience. And why not? People listen to podcasts on their daily commute to work, while getting ready, cleaning their living space, relaxing, cooking, or doing other chores around the house. It fits every activity as it allows people to actively or passively listen to what the speaker is saying and retain things on their own accord. 

Moreover, podcasting platforms are super convenient! You can replay a section as many times as you want, pre-save your podcasts for offline study, download them to save them for later, and more. Podcasts are: 

✔ Informative

✔ Convenient

✔ Entertaining

which checks all the boxes when working on a strategy to retain your customers! So it only makes sense for you to invest in podcast advertising.

What Are Podcast Ads?

Podcast ads are audio ad clips that are ideally 15-30 seconds long but can sometimes stretch up to 60 seconds. They are inserted at the beginning (pre-roll), middle (mid-roll), or end (post-roll) of the uploaded podcast to reach audiences with the intent of:

➡️ Increase in returns

➡️ Brand awareness

➡️ Promotion of products

Why Advertise On Podcasts?

Podcasts are truly the most influential media channel in the current market scenario. With an increasing number of people turning to them as a source of entertainment, you’ll not only get a platform to showcase your brand in the best way possible but have fun with it!

But there are many other reasons for you to turn to podcast advertising when trying to market your brand. Let us walk you through some of them.

🔁 Evergreen Media

As stated above, people can always go back to digging up their favorite podcasts or replaying a particularly interesting section. Additionally, new listeners would always go back to the older episodes that they have missed out on as they stumble across a podcast today. Hence, your podcast ads are a piece of an evergreen marketing campaign that would continue converting customers indefinitely. 

🌱 Tap Into The Youth-Dominant Market

 It is statistically proven that 66% of podcast listeners today lie between the ages of 18 to 30—Gen Z and Millennials—which make up the majority of the buying force in the DTC industry. Therefore, with a well-defined and effective podcast marketing strategy, you can have a higher chance of increasing your revenue.

🔖 Multiple Options

With a variety of podcasts spanning industries and genres, you get to take your pick from the sea of options available. You can choose the podcast to plug your ad in, based on their audience, industry, and genre, ensuring that it aligns with your brand’s tone of voice. 

How Much Should It Cost You?

While podcast ads are relatively new, they allow you to make the most of the campaign you’re running. With an effective ad created by you and your team, you can find great ROIs, and for that, the average industry rates are really worth it. 

The podcast ads are based on CPM, which is cost-per-mile or cost-per-1000 listeners. Hence, if you pay for a 10-second slot in a podcast with 10,000 listeners, you’d have to pay $150. So, depending on how many listeners the podcast has, you’d have to pay accordingly. 

For 10-second ads, most podcasts charge $15; 

For 30-second ads, $18; and

For 60-second ads, $25.

Of course, there is more to creating a successful podcast ad campaign than just metrics and money (although important). So in the next edition, we’d walk you through some steps to build an excellent podcast marketing campaign that works!

Video Bites: All Things DTC!

In today’s edition, we will review this amazing video by NaturallyCurly!

We’re always fans of product demonstration videos that don’t feel like they’re trying to sell a product to the viewer—it’s a complex art to master! NaturallyCurly released this video a while back that hit all the right spots and made us fall in love with this brand.

They showed their product in the most natural setting, mentioning its USPs while allowing us to visualize it in use. They also tackled one of the most critical problems that curly-haired people face and consider when choosing hair products in the most natural way.

To top it all off, they created this campaign video to match an ongoing hashtag, #HaveYouTriedThis which further increased their engagement online. How cool was that?!

Top Reads Of The Week

Paypal’s switch in its pricing effective from 28th July.

Bed, Bath & Beyond’s flexible payment solution allows customers to “buy now, pay later.”

Twitter hands out a tutorial on making carousels more engaging and effective.

Starbucks is launching a new “Heritage Marketing Campaign” in 3 stores, allowing customers to dive deep into history while sipping some coffee.

In Need Of A Job? We’ve Got Plenty Awaiting You!

General Manager - Buffalo Wild Wings

Product Development Assistant - Levi Strauss & Co.

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CHOOSE SUCCESS, and have a great day ahead! Get that DTC business runnin’.