#87 The Least Boring Weekly Newsletter

May 11, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

Good Morning Readers! 🌅

Hoping for a bright and successful day ahead. 😎

Elon Musk is expected to become Twitter's temporary CEO after settling his $44 billion deal with Twitter, as the billionaire inches closer to securing funds for the deal 🤝 .

The other investors include crypto firm Binance, New York-based real estate tycoon Steven Witkoff's firm, and DFJ Growth IV Partners which have investments in the Boring Company, SpaceX, SolarCity, and Tesla.

Their goals: "we hope to be able to play a role in bringing social media and web3 together and broadening the use and adoption of crypto and blockchain technology," Binance CEO, Changpeng Zhao said.

Almund’s newsletter will let you in 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:

💹 Finance and women entrepreneurs in the Entertainment market

👩‍🏫 Lessons on Loyalty

🕴️ Best business practices

📖 Top reads of the week

👨‍💼 Plenty of jobs awaiting you

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WHAT’S COOKING, HUH? 

The entertainment industry is BIG. It generates a total of $29 billion in revenue and employs 252,000 people to work in the sector. However, their sources of funds are often limited. Entertainment entrepreneurship often leads people to opt for a single source of funding—loans. With the sheer number of loans being sanctioned, there is a clear need for financial solutions in the marketplace. Enter industry veterans Melanie Krinsky and Charlene Paling. 

They have joined forces to create a Los Angeles-based Entertainment 🧩 & Media Group at the Western Alliance Bank. The division has already begun its work by putting in $300M in debt with $100M in upcoming potential deals. This fantastic duo first met each other in 2017 when Paling started work as a lawyer in the entertainment sector and Krinsky was finishing her tenure at the LA entertainment bank. 

Their ultimate goal: make this better for women 👩 in business. Female writers and producers have struggled to raise financial support for projects while getting paid less than their white male counterparts. 

“There’s something about being women in entertainment finance, especially as we’ve both evolved in our careers and traveled to international events, it’s definitely helped us bond,” Krinsky said.

They wished to uplift women by sharing ideas and stories of those around them, thus, creating a tight-knit community. Krinsky commented on the undiscovered greatness of the relationship-driven bank by stating, “I love having the opportunity to tell them who this bank is. The first thing to know is that this is a national business bank with over $50 billion in assets – and everyone here, including the CEO and CEO, are excited to join Entertainment & Media Lending.”

The bank’s executive Vice President, Robert McAslan stated the enthralling progress made by the female founders in just six months has gotten them a spot on the list of the top entertainment companies.

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Lessons on Loyalty– DTC Edition

Selling as a direct-to-consumer brand brings a lot of benefits to the table. You get complete access to your customers all around the world, bypassing wholesalers, distributors, and third-party platforms completely. So you must create a great content plan, integrate it into your marketing campaign, and deploy engagement strategies on social media channels to garner attention.

But all of your efforts would be in vain if you don’t retain your customers. 

✔️ American brands lose up to $83M due to bad retention strategies.  

✔️ Acquiring a new customer is 5 times costlier than retaining an existing one. 

✔️ Loyal customers buy 67% more than new ones. 

✔️ This leads to them being the sole reason for 80% of a brand’s profits.

✔️ Converting an existing customer to a loyal one has a 70% success rate.

✔️ Products and customer experience together inspire brand loyalty amongst almost all millennials. 

Customer retention strategies contain a variety of tactics that help you have your customers coming back for more. But loyalty programs take the cake. 

Loyalty programs are the major source of retaining your customers by providing them a personalized, enhanced user experience every time they visit your eCommerce store. After all, it is known that 50% of millennials (the biggest buying power in the DTC community) shop from their favorite brands and prefer to remain loyal. 

So, how can ensure your loyalty programs do provide the gratification that your customers need to keep coming back to you? Enticing them is the key, especially if you’re a new brand launching in a market with a heavy influx of competitor traffic.

Here are some easy ways you can begin!

🏅 Reward Programs

Running regular reward programs for customers will make them feel happier, more satisfied, and loyal to your DTC businesses. Reach out to them via the app, on their inbox, or send push notifications through texts to let them know that you wish to reward them for shopping at your store. 

Rewards can include exclusive discounts, premium services, free trials, free samples of new products, and more. 

📦 Subscription Discounts

Subscription services are ideal if you’re running a DTC business. Even though all subscription services nowadays follow the ‘no strings attached’ rule as their customer policy, your subscribers are less likely to drop off before their subscription period gets over. 

To entice your revisiting customers, offer them discounts on repeated subscriptions. This will definitely have them coming back for more.

🗣️ Referral Campaigns

Ask your loyal customers to refer your brand to their friends, family, and other connections. You could make it a happy deal for them by offering them reward points or free products for each referral they make.

🎁 Redeemable Benefits

You can also hook your customers by allowing them to harvest redeemable points in-app or on the website. Based on an order they make, you could add to their profile some variable redeemable points which can be used to shop online for ‘free’ whenever they want! 

📸 Featuring Loyal Customers

UGC content is truly the best tool to retain AND attract new customers. By featuring your loyal customers, their user journey, customer story, and feedback (after seeking their permission of course), you can have them coming back for more as you let them know just how much they mean to your business. 

Retaining customers and converting them into loyal business relationships is a gargantuan task that causes all of us to break a sweat. But if you build your foundations strong, keep your customers’ user experience simple and engaging, and provide quality services, your business is not far from becoming a successful one!

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BEST BUSINESS PRACTICES

If you’ve been following us for a while, you’d know we’re in love with brands introducing special products 🎁 on particular days that make their business stand out in the best way possible.

Now summer may not be everyone’s favorite season but it is for the beauty 😍 and skincare enthusiasts, especially this year. As things got warmer in April, we saw brand new launches in the beauty and cosmetics industry; we were introduced to brands like Tower 28, Bubble, ColourPop, and more. They haven’t let the excitement ‼️ die down even during May.

ColourPop’s new product is an ENTIRE Star Wars Makeup Collection that includes the franchise-themed lipsticks💄, powder palette, glosses, liner, and much more. 

The collection is called ColourPop’s 1977 Star Wars™ collection and is a great example of developing new products for real-time marketing. 

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TOP READS FOR THIS WEEK

American version:

👙 Summersalt is gaining attention for all the right reasons! They launched an annual campaign targeting inclusivity by featuring a range of women of diverse ethnicities.

🚐 Musk aims to up Twitter's existing audience by 200% in the next three years.

📷 Facebook removes a bunch of location tracking tools as data policies continue to evolve.

🤳 Whatsapp is set to double the size of group chats in the app.

🎶 TikTok expands the test of their new 'Friends' Tab, replacing the existing 'Discover' section.

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In Need of a job? We've got plenty awaiting you!

American Version:

Senior Copywriter - No Meat Athlete

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