#81 The Least Boring Weekly Newsletter

April 20, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 12 minutes

Good Morning readers!🌞

Hope your week is going well!♥️

We’re here with another amazing podcast! 🎉

Beardbrand, an American men's grooming, and facial hair wellness firm, was co-founded in 2012 by Eric Bandholz, a financial advisor turned DTC business owner.

We had the opportunity to speak with him about his enthusiasm for the DTC business, as he discussed what it takes to be a great entrepreneur, the importance of getting started early, and more.  Stay tuned! 🎉

Almund's newsletter will let you in on all kinds of tips for D2C brands and much much more. 

Alright, so let's get right to it! 

This newsletter is going to dive into :

🌏  Why The Digitization Of Malls Is Vital To Their Survival

👌 Monetizing Your Way To Success

🙎 BRAND of the week - Kendra Scott

📜 Top reads for this week

👩🏻‍💼 Plenty of jobs awaiting you!

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

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WHAT’S COOKING, HUH?

Consumer data 🗂️collecting has become a requirement in e-commerce( True), both for financial success and to give individualized experiences to customers. 

Furthermore, younger generations, including 68 percent of Gen Z and 58 percent of Millennials, prefer to buy things directly ↕️from brands because they have a better buying experience

As a result, the capacity of businesses to use customer data to improve the shopping experience is critical to direct-to-consumer success.

Data is important for the future of e-commerce, but it's also important for the future of physical retail. Tenants and landlords have traditionally had little data beyond traffic counts for physical places. The possibility, though, is enormous, as malls are now developing apps and giving wifi.📶

Mall foot traffic in the United States has failed to rebound to pre-pandemic levels, according to Placer.ai's newest research.

"Shopping malls need to become part of the e-commerce economy to the benefit of their tenants; if they don't, their relevance will further decline over time as the share of consumer spending online keeps growing at the expense of the spending in physical stores," shared Peter Tonstad, CEO of Placewise, a cloud-based platform that connects data points for shopping centers.

The first step in implementing a digital strategy is to relate all digital activities to consumer profiles in a data layer. These consumer profiles then become the mall's first-party digital reach, bringing digital footfall🌠 back to the tenants." In essence, the data enables malls and landlords to gather insights on shoppers and translate that information into earned revenue for tenants and a better customer experience.

The multichannel real estate experience begins with the digitization of malls🏪. It may sound contradictory, but if retail brands are visible online and in person, so should real estate. That could mean the metaverse in the future, but for now, improving mall technology and data collection is critical to their survival.☄️

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Monetizing Your Way To Success

Newsletters are one of the oldest tricks in the books, a key to an engaged and active community for your DTC business. They are the best long-form means of communication with your customers that reach them directly in their inbox—that’s as close as you can get!

While monetizing strategies take into consideration social media channels and eCommerce sales, many often overlook the humble newsletter. If you’ve got a successful newsletter with a great subscriber count, impressive open rate, and an engaging audience, why not convert that channel into a source of revenue too? 

To be able to generate a constant stream of revenue through your newsletter, you must ensure you get a constant amount of traction for your strategy to work. If you’ve been running your newsletter for a while, you might be all set. However, if you’re still establishing your foundations, let us help you.

#1 Always Be Content-First

The people receiving your newsletters are highly interested in how you offer to enhance their lives. Your newsletters are a part of their brand experience, and if you can provide them with valuable data and information—that may or may not be directly related to your product—they would love to stick around. 

#2 Provide Value

A great way to entice your readers to keep them from unsubscribing is by providing them with valuable information. If your content with every edition only brings them great value, influences their choices and actions, and allows them to learn something every time, they’d be more than willing to continue reading.

#3 Do Not Try To Over-Do It

When employing a strategy to monetize your newsletter, it is important to find a balance. Seeing your revenue-building strategy taking effect might cloud your judgment. However, you mustn’t overwhelm your audience by hitting the unsubscribe button.

#4 Achieve A Stable Open & Engagement Rate

Above all, it is important to hit all your targets even before beginning with a strategy. When you successfully build an engaged community through high-value newsletters, you can then try to monetize the channel, as they've already invested in your content. Work on lead generation and organic content creation before anything else.

Great! Now that you’ve got your audience interested enough in your newsletter, it’s time you introduce them to the first step of the strategy. But, in what way do you want to start earning revenue? You can employ just one method of revenue generation or a combination of many—all depending on the kind of audience you have and the content you create.

If you’re confused, we’ve got some options for you.

💵 Sell Directly

If you’re working from platforms such as Substack, you can consider selling subscriptions directly. You can start with a low subscription value and consider increasing it over time. If selling your subscriptions right now seems too soon a strategy, you can also charge them for a special edition alone. This way, you wouldn’t lose many subscribers and generate revenue from your already existing content creation strategy. 

📀 Sell Digital Assets

If you offer a DTC service, you could sell your digital content as assets. For instance, as a data-analysis tool and platform, Almund could create templates for reports to help companies analyze and display their information in an easy-to-understand manner. 

Create digital assets that you can monetize for a lifetime and sell them via your newsletters.  

🔗 Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing has taken OFF, and we couldn’t be happier. Customers and affiliate marketers love affiliate links; they provide customers with an easy navigation experience to the product they want, and they even bring revenue to the marketer. Consider becoming an affiliate marketer for a brand or service that your business can connect to and partner with them for mutual benefits. 

💳 Sponsored Ads

Sponsored ads include a mix of textual content and videos or images to catch the readers’ attention. You could completely control the ads displayed in your newsletter, ensuring the quality of ads your readers are receiving.

⛑️ Donations

If you’ve built a community that continues to find great value in your brand, they’d likely be willing to donate to keep your newsletter running. Be empathetic and clear about your intentions and use platforms such as Patreon to gather the sum. 

With so many tools available (and many are free!), it’s only fair that you begin working on creating a community that receives your newsletters every week. As every audience is different, no strategy works the same for two different businesses. Ensure you find the right pick for you to monetize your content.

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BRAND OF THE WEEK is…

Kendra Scott is an American fashion designer. She is the executive chairman, designer, and former CEO of Kendra Scott LLC. “ 

The watch is one of the world’s most iconic accessories,” Scott stated on social media about the collection. “ designed to be the signature of your every outfit👚, each detail of this timepiece is ageless, polished, and distinctly Kendra Scott.”

The DTC jewelry brand last year introduced its first men’s jewelry collection, which Scott designed in collaboration with her sons. 👦That collection included bracelets in a variety of styles made of stones, leather cord, paracord, and vinyl beads. ( wow) 

Other DTC jewelry 📿 brands are likewise seeking expansion through category extensions and store openings:

 Brilliant Earth went public in September last year with plans to expand its network of showrooms 🏨s, and Aurate recently reopened the store it had to shutter during the pandemic as part of a larger brick-and-mortar strategy.

While Kendra Scott has large DTC footprints that include over 100 stores🏬, the brand also sells through 600 specialty boutiques, as well as upscale department stores Nordstrom⛈️, Neiman Marcus, and Bloomingdale’s. 

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TOP READS FOR THIS WEEK

🔖Instagram rolls out product tagging to everyone in the US

🏚️LinkedIn adds ‘Stay-at-Home Parent’ to the list of job titles

👁️WhatsApp is rolling out a new privacy option for the ‘Last Seen’ feature

🎲Facebook to roll out short-form Soundbites and podcasts soon

☘️Nowadays puts its spin on plant-based nuggets

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In need of a  job? We’ve got plenty awaiting you!

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CHOOSE SUCCESS below and have a great week! ‘Get that D2C business runnin’.