All The Best Brands Spend Their Time Doing This

Hey there,

I hope you had a great Mother’s Day Weekend! I took a long overdue trip up to Connecticut to surprise my mother-in-law this weekend. It was so nice getting out of the Miami heat and back home to the slower pace of life. I’m taking my own momma to the Dead & Co show in North Carolina in a few weeks to make up for ignoring her this weekend.

Returning back to my hometown always feels nostalgic and its also funny how I long for a few places (mostly restaurants) that have been home to so many good memories with friends and family.

Like how I have to rush to Dunkin Donuts to get a large ice tea, with lemon and two sugars on the side because it tastes better in Connecticut, or how I need to drive 30 minutes to Deary’s to get a milkshake and buffalo chicken tenders.

Just like restaurants, the best brands can build that undying loyalty. For me it’s some of my favorites like Birddogs, Rodd & Gunn, Siegelman Stable, Tenzo, and Rheal. All brands that I have spent thousands on and will continue to do so over the next few years of my life.

When I start to think about what separates the good brands from the greats, it comes down to a few things:

• An incredible product

• Trust & customer loyalty

• A way to keep their top customers happy and buying more

You see all these “marketers” using fancy words like retention strategy and AOV, but it simply comes down to make good shit, keep innovating and designing things your customers want while making them feel special. Do this for 5-10 years and you’re on to something great.

I’ve said this many times in interviews but my goal with Good Sport is to make a legacy sporting goods company that will stand the test of time like Wilson, Spalding, and Franklin. All brands that I’ve grown up with that have made incredible products and have been just consistent. It seems like nobody has tried to challenge them since I’ve been alive and our goal is to create incredibly fun backyard games that are innovative, new, and different than whats been on the market for the past hundred years.

So how do we build trust & customer loyalty?

Well this week’s newsletter is sponsored by Tapcart and you can’t focus on 100% of your customer base because you can’t make everybody happy. Think about your personal life. It’s hard enough to keep like your eight friends and family happy. How are you possibly going to keep the thousands of customers happy?

Instead, focus on building loyalty and dedication with the top 30% of your customers.

Retention is the name of the game and making the customer come back for free that you’ve already spent $50 to acquire is much better for your business than hunting new leads each and every day, burning money, and hoping that you’ll be profitable on first purchase.

So how do you do this? Build a system that rewards the top contributors and your biggest fans.

• Always make your customers feel like they are your #1 priority

• Build private communities that allow first access to new products

• Have your most loyal customers actually test and give feedback on products before they are available to the market

• Dedicated sales only for your community

Pro Tip: Don’t give up after four months. This takes time. Years and years to build. But once you build it, it will be your secret weapon. Kinda like this newsletter. If I started this back in 2017 when I got started in ecommerce, I’d have five readers and been discouraged and given up. Anything good takes time. Period. Stop living for instant gratification.

What do things look like behind the scenes?

• We have one retention marketer who is focused on email, sms, and mobile app

• We have a social media assistant who runs our Facebook group

• We use AI to respond to comments immediately and have one CX representative answer more important tickets that require more love

• We have one graphic designer who works with the Tapcart team

After seeing the success of many of my friends using a mobile app (Frost Buddy, Barstool, Obvi) I decided to have our team invest in a custom app for just a few thousand dollars. An investment that we made back in weeks, just by using our free month trial.

We noticed that one of the biggest customer complaints was them misplacing the rulebook or instructions, so we decided to create a home via our Tapcart-powered mobile app for all that information to live. Eliminating the rule book also allows us to save upwards of 40 cents on each unit manufactured.

As the email and sms inboxes continue to get more cluttered with noise we have noticed that push notifications have started to become a very important part to a successful retention stack. Imagine the power you have when you can send out a notification with 100% deliverability to your most loyal customers that you just dropped a new product and its only available for them in app.

We’ve seen acquisition costs go down (so much easier selling to old happy customers than convincing new ones to spend) and even better, we’ve found that revenue is almost 2x higher in the mobile app compared to web based purchases on desktop & mobile.

Unlock a new revenue channel today and try Tapcart for one month free using this link here.

I promise you won’t regret it.