#95 The Least Boring Weekly Newsletter

June 08, 2022 • Estimated Reading Time: 10 minutes

Good Morning Readers!

Here’s to hoping for a successful day ahead!

Are private labels the way to go?

Last week, we saw a new trend emerge in the DTC market. Fast commerce brands are now producing their own lines and ranges of direct-to-consumer products that are to bring immediate and direct competition to some well-known brands. The front-runner here is the rapid-delivery company Gorilla. 

They’ve launched a line of goods under their private label with the sole intention of “driving app downloads and reaching profitability.” They’re putting out four brands under their label: Gorilla Daily for essentials; Gorilla Premium for gourmet, high-end products; Hot Damn, a coffee brand; and <start-up beer>. These brands together make up to 50 products in 11 of the most in-demand categories in European markets.

Jumping on the bandwagon, GoPuff has also launched its own product line to give Trader Joe’s some direct competition. 

So, what will happen when companies like GoPuffs and Gorillas can create DTC products better than some of the thriving industry giants?👀

Almund's newsletter will give you tips for DTC brands and much more.

Alright, so let’s get right to it!

This newsletter is going to dive into:

🤥 LinkedIn brings new updates on app spam, scams, and fake profiles.

♻️ Lifecycle Marketing—A Strategy That Can Save Your DTC Business

🕴️ Best Business Practices

📕 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?

LinkedIn brings new updates on app spam, scams, and fake profiles.

LinkedIn's automated systems have now been upgraded to detect and remove more fake accounts, according to its latest transparency update, which has increased the number of detected fraudulent accounts over the last six months of 2021. The publicly available Transparency Report provides detailed information on spam, fake authentication, takedown policies, and more. 

Although LinkedIn isn't as targeted as Facebook or YouTube, scams still abound as frauds gain access to information and trick LinkedIn members with fake offers. LinkedIn activity, including connection requests, increased 34% year over year, making the channel more popular and attractive for spreading disinformation. According to LinkedIn, AutoProtect prevented 96% of all fake accounts and over 11.9 million login attempts during that period. 

Of course, there is no guarantee that all fake accounts have been processed. The numbers are verified only using what the platform’s system can verify. While some of this information is public, to the best of LinkedIn's knowledge, this tracking method is inefficient and has been improved to track real-world and in-app interactions. 

Compared to previous reports, LinkedIn's spam and fraud detection are quite reliable. On the other hand, LinkedIn puts more emphasis on "enhanced self-protection that helps us better detect potentially harmful content". The number of false positives on LinkedIn is steadily increasing, from 110,742 in the 2nd half of 2020 to 147,490 in the 1st half of 2021 and 207,000 in the 1st half of 2022.

Lifecycle Marketing—A Strategy That Can Save Your DTC Business

Marketing is now a lot more than simply putting out the word about your business. Reaching your customers where they spend their time the most, catering to their needs on multiple channels, and creating a cohesive omnichannel experience keeping in mind consumer needs and convenience—altogether creates a lifecycle marketing strategy. It is designed to keep your customers engaged and in-loop, leveraging the fact that returning/loyal customers are the ones that help a DTC business generate the majority of its revenue. 

What Makes Lifecycle Marketing Different?

We all know that winning a customer over takes a lot of time and effort. To ‘wow’ them not just with your products or service, but also with the overall experience when engaging with your brand, is what seals the deal. Thoughtful touchpoints, accessibility, and active engagement are what builds customer loyalty and trust. Thankfully, with a great strategy termed Lifestyle Marketing, you can do it all and much more!

What sets it apart from the strategies we’ve spoken about before? 

It is only understandable that lifecycles would be unique to every business—no two can be alike as it depends solely on your consumers. From first contact to engagement to awareness to finally, conversion, your marketing funnel can be short or long, depending on your goals, industry type, and services/products.

With so much to think about when developing the lifecycle marketing strategy for your business, it’s best to start small. Consider the foundations of lifecycle marketing and plug them into your business plan. 

Don’t know how? Here’s an easy guide to what constitutes a successful lifecycle marketing plan. 

Layer #1: On-Site

When putting together the first layer of the strategy, it’s essential to take into account your on-site marketing operations. And that begins with data acquisition. 

The most common zero-or-first-party data that businesses collect are:

➡️ Purchase History

➡️Search History

➡️ Browsing History

➡️ On-Site Heatmaps

➡️ Cart History

➡️ Location & Personal Details

➡️ Engagement Rates (to campaigns)

➡️ Survey Responses

➡️ Quiz Responses

➡️ Product/Service Reviews

Consider collecting them actively to ensure your lifecycle marketing strategy can feed itself. The second part of the on-site marketing strategy is the conversion drivers. These funnels are designed to engage customers and provide a seamless first-contact experience to acquire more information about them.

Layer #2: Mobile

With the information, you acquire about the customers’ preferences, based on the interaction with the products that you’ve mapped, create a targeting strategy that’s highly contextualized to cater to their needs and preferences. Short-form messaging can be urgent, immediate, and trigger-driven to keep the customer engaged for long. 

Layer #3: Email

Once you see your customers interacting with the kind of targeted & personalized ads you’re throwing at them, relay the information to their inboxes. Of course, you wouldn't use the same messaging as you do on-site or short-form messaging. Instead, you can nitpick the content you wish to display in their inboxes based on their engagement with your targeted ads, giving them an even more personalized experience.

Loop them back onto your website, prompting them to interact with you more. This creates a constant cycle of engagement which is a great opportunity to convert them into loyal customers. 

While it may look a bit too easy on paper, it sure takes a team of experts and a ton of work to ensure you’ve developed a fool-proof strategy. Even though it may seem tedious at first glance, in the longer run, a lifecycle marketing strategy is what’ll help your DTC business grow exponentially.

Stay tuned for our next edition to know more about the first steps you can take to get started with your lifestyle marketing plan!

Best Business Practice

Most, if not all, eCommerce businesses offer coupons, discount codes, and other similar incentives to their customers. Quill takes this a step further by allowing users to collect coupons online and save them to their accounts!

The Quill Coupon Clipboard allows customers to ‘clip’ all their coupon codes in one place on the website. At the time of checkout, the customers can then choose which coupons they want to use (limit being up to 5 coupons per transaction). 

Coupons include offers and discounts, QuillCASH, and free gifts from affiliates. You can even check the eligibility information, expiry date, and other details right at the time of checkout to make the most of the coupons you’ve saved up. This creates a sense of urgency, ensuring that the customers would most likely redeem a coupon.

The team's decision to implement each of the above features was based primarily on market research. Sergio Pereira mentioned, “this innovation is directly related to our desire to make Quill as easy to use as possible. Our customers are too busy. So it doesn't take long to search and track coupons.” 

Quill is taking user-centric marketing to the NEXT LEVEL! And we’re loving it.

Top Reads Of The Week

6 things you can track to measure your Social Media performance

New story update announcement Meta including interactive stickers, audio sync, and longer clips

Xbox and Sorenson are launching a new channel with ASL interpretation

The power of Curly Human™ digital experiences is more in retail

IN NEED OF A JOB? WE’VE GOT PLENTY AWAITING YOU!

CHOOSE SUCCESS below and have a great weekend! Get that D2C business Runnin’.