Happy Wednesday!

Today’s newsletter is going to be one for my e-commerce nerds as we are getting back to my roots.

If this is your first time reading one of my newsletters, thank you! If you’re a familiar face, please do me a favor and forward this to one or two people you think will enjoy it. They can hit subscribe right here.

If you’re a reader in Miami, I am throwing two events this week for The Founders Club. Tonight at one of my favorite restaurants on the beach and tomorrow night we’re throwing a mansion party & dinner. Send me a message to get added to the VIP list.

So let’s get into it. This year we’re making big changes in how we approach Black Friday and Q4.

Last year was fantastic but we still committed some major mistakes. We only realized them once it was too late and it cost us tens of thousands.

Here are the 3 biggest shifts we’re making this year:

1. We’re doubling down on Australia – 95% of our revenue last year in AU came during Q4

2. PROFITABLE growth over everything – topline doesn’t matter if you’re selling at a loss

3. I’m tapping the smartest minds in DTC to help us smash last year’s numbers…

Earlier this year, my friend Joel taught me a hack that changed my life. I wrote about it here.

Joel’s a close friend who ran CROSSNET’S Global DTC Marketing several years ago. He took us from $1M to $9M in 18 months, so I trust him with my life.

He recently left Homestead, one the top eComm agencies in DTC, and has been implementing the insights he gained after seeing $100m+ in managed Meta spend.

Since Joel took over our Paid Ads, we’re beating our main KPIs by 20% YoY:

→ Shopify Revenue

→ Contribution Margin

→ CAC

The best part, we’ve spent 40% LESS on Meta YoY so far in Australia:

We’re scaling fast now, and it’s reassuring there’s NO wasted spend.

There’s nothing I hate more than wasting money. My Frenchie and wife surely have better places to spend that hard-earned money.

Joel’s Biggest Recommendations

All that to say, I asked Joel to share the 3 biggest changes he made so brands like yours can replicate them and make tons of money this Q4.

Here’s what he recommends and the impact it had on my business:

1) Lean into historical data & double down on winners

Here’s what our data told us and how we shifted our focus as a result.

A) 95% of Q4 2023 Shopify revenue came from Australia  -> Prioritize Australia

B) Nearly ⅔ of our sales came from SmashNet -> Prioritize SmashNet

C) Re-use or refresh last year’s top-performing ads -> Prioritize creative iterations.

Following this approach, we’re capitalizing on our largest opportunities rather than trying to reinvent the wheel.

It’s paying off in each area too:

• We’re outpacing our forecast by focusing on AU, rather than spreading ourselves too thin across regions.

• Our SmashNet campaigns have been our most profitable when compared to our other SKU P&Ls.

• Relaunching and refreshing past winning ads has seen up to 2-3x better CPCs vs net new creative ideas.
  

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2) Adjust Meta account structure & strategy to fit your goals

Although it’s important to double down on wins, you also need to learn from past mistakes. That requires change and testing a new approach.

Last year we lost $10,000+ by undercharging for shipping to certain regions. You won’t believe this but shipping to Western Australia cost us $100+ USD. Not good when you were charging $15. We didn’t realize we were losing this badly until we got the shipping bill at the end of the month. Now we are fully prepared.

Taking our profitability requirements in mind, here’s what he did differently:

Joel launched ads using Cost Cap campaigns.

We’ve been driving PROFITABLE revenue weeks in advance of our historical peak periods. Although sales volume may be lower, it’s a hell of a lot better than the forced spend campaign we tried and got us a 0.6 ROAS. We could’ve lost $1000s by testing too aggressively early in the season with cost controls in place.

It feels damn good heading into BFCM knowing we’re outpacing last year’s performance vs stressed and banking on BFCM to make or break our year.

Next up, we targeted specific regions.

After correcting our shipping rates, there’s not much we can do for cities in AUS that cost us $100 to get our product to their door. However, we can limit ad spend in these regions.

Being forced to charge customers an extra $100 just in shipping would tank our CVR %. What we decided to do is pull an export of Customer per region, then specifically target the areas with shipping costs under $39.99 AUD. This is a no brainer strategy to ensure we allocate our ad dollars as wisely as possible.

It sucks not being able to serve some of our Australian customers, but business is a math equation and we can’t run a profitable business in some parts of the world when it costs $100 to ship a $80 product.

With our strategy and structure in place, we focused on ad creative.

We’re fortunate to have a lot of winning video ads from last year, but are drastically lacking with static ads.

Historically, BFCM is the best time to run static ads and tends to become our top-spending ad format.

By creating a variety of these, it should convert a lot of audiences we’ve been warming up throughout the year. This week we’re launching a few static batches and can’t wait to see the results!

Typically statics generate the lowest CAC in our Meta ad account, but aren’t as strong at prospecting new audiences compared to our video ads. Creating this 1-2 punch helps Meta efficiently allocate budgets across different stages of the funnel.

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2.5) Start selling on Walmart.com

I’ve been talking about them for months but if you’re not selling on Walmart.com you’re making a big mistake. Tons of incremental dollars are pouring into our business.

The best thing about Walmart.com is with their Multichannel Solutions (MCS) program, you can leverage Walmart’s supply chain to fulfill orders quickly and reliably —meeting customers’ expectations no matter where they shop.

Major Benefits: 

• Competitive storage & fulfillment costs

• Fast, reliable shipping options

• Plain, unbranded packaging

• Simple inventory management

• Returns managed by Walmart 

The Walmart Marketplace helps your business scale by optimizing inventory consolidation and enabling growth across Walmart.com and other sales channels simultaneously. There’s still time to leverage the world’s largest supply chain and use Walmart’s Fulfillment Service to crush your holidays.

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3) Optimize other parts of the funnel

What if your Meta problems don’t entirely live within your ad account?

Joel did an insane job catching countless areas for improvement outside of our ad account. Immediately after fixing each, Meta performance consistently improved.

Here are a few areas we made adjustments:

• Website / PDPs → For starters, our language needed strengthening. So we did a better job at highlighting our 2-3 day shipping within Australia & other messaging improvements across our website banners.

• Pop-ups → Not only were our pop-ups not firing, they weren’t converting well when they were. We incorporated a basic offer into the pop-up to boost the sign-up rate (+8%). We’re also converting a larger % into purchasers.

  

• Email Cadence → We were neglecting one of our key marketing channels, so we bumped up our campaign cadence to send at least 1x per week to explicitly convert new subscribers.

• Welcome Flow Rebuild → Our email welcome flow wasn’t the best, so we put time into simplifying our strategy and promoting our bestseller to new subscribers. Previously we weren’t even showcasing our new top seller - SmashNet.

All of these optimizations had nothing to do with Meta ads, but our results IMMEDIATELY got better as we fixed or improved each section.

Now we’re scaling at a faster pace and doing so far more profitably!

Want Joel to help with your brand?

He’s taking on a few brands ahead of BFCM if you need a killer to run your ads profitably or just need an audit to make sure you have your most profitable month yet! Click the link below or shoot him an email at: [email protected]