I'm Mad About a 5.5 ROAS 🤬

Happy Almost Friday!

Does anyone have any good suggestions for helping me launch a Kickstarter for my wedding? Heading to Italy on Monday to check out the wedding venue and seriously may need to sell a few more nets :)

I've done two incredibly productive things this week that I wanted to share.

First my biggest fuck up this year has been not accelerating spend when your return is good. As a founder & more importantly a marketer, your job should be to raise spend as much as possible until it stops giving you the return you need to run your business. Obviously, there are other factors that come into play such as "do we have inventory?" or "do we have enough credit card limit on our Divvy cards?", but outside of that I'd assume everyone reading this weekly is trying to grow their business as fast as possible.

In March of this year, I failed as CMO. CROSSNET hit a 5.5 ROAS (return on ad spend) for the month, when our annual target is 2.2. Sick in theory. But absolutely terrible if we are not hitting the velocity that we need to be driving new customers. In March we missed hitting our performance marketing spend goal by 67% and this is completely on me for not being on top of the numbers more and working with our media buying team better. How we're changing it?

Each and every morning I receive the following two reports by 9AM:

1) Triple Whale Breakdown By Country

• I quickly need to see how much money we spent versus made on Shopify in USA, Australia and Canada

• We use Triple Whale that has this beautiful Slack integration

• I fucked up and wish I invested in this company, but they are giving all my readers 15% off with code MEADE if you want to try it for a month or two here.

2) Amazon Breakdown By Country

• My Amazon virtual assistant will then send me an email that showcases the following stats: PPC Spend, Revenue Generated, Units Sold for each country

3) Blend The Money & Adjust

• The virtual assistant will then blend the money in versus out and create the following email that will go to the exec team and our media buyer.

• If we are above our 2.2 ROAS target that means we need to accelerate spend to increase velocity. The beautiful thing about it is at 2.2 not only are we profitable, but we still have yet to see the offline effects in our 3500+ retailers.

GROWING LTV & PUSHING RETAIL

If you're selling at retail or looking for ways to re-engage old customers this next part is going to interest you. I have two top priorities this summer: Grow LTV & connect digital marketing with our growing assortment at retail. How can we support our retailers better & also get customers pumped about new products. Here's what we are doing!

We will be giving away a new "Mystery Product" to any customer who submits a receipt from a retail store over the next few months. This "Mystery Product" is actually an inflatable volleyball net, co-branded with our good friends over at USA Volleyball. The product costs roughly $7 to make and is much better than giving a customer a $10 off discount for no reason.

Customers will submit their receipt via text from this page built on Aisle. It is not fully completed yet, so don't judge me. The customer will then receive a confirmation text that their receipt was successfully submitted and prompted to enter their shipping address for their new product.

Behind the scenes, we are working with Post Pilot to send direct mail to customers over the past 12 months who have purchased a product of ours and live within a 15 mile radius of any of our top-performing retail stores. The goal is to make customers aware of our retail presence, on the postcard, we'll display other products that they may not have purchased yet, and get them stoked to go out to the store and purchase in order to get their free item. This test will go live in just a few weeks and will cost less than a couple thousand dollars to execute. Very, very excited about the potential.

As always I hope you've found this helpful! It's crazy to see that this newsletter has just surpassed over 5,000 weekly readers. It's an amazing feeling and it's humbling to look back and see how far this e-commerce journey has taken me. Thank you sincerely for reading & if you haven't subscribed of course hit this link here, it's completely free.

Talk soon,

Chris