Marketing Pulse Live

DATA REPORT

Marketing Pulse: Live

Data-backed recommendations to regain lost revenue

The spread of coronavirus has had an unprecedented and unpredictable impact on digital commerce. That's why Wunderkind has been tracking how performance across areas like email and onsite revenue has ebbed and flowed since February. After hosting over 20 sessions over nearly 4 months, giving you the most up-to-date performance data & strategies, it seems we have a tentative answer. Shoppers seem to be permanently moving their purchasing behavior from omni-channel to pure eCommerce. This means we're in a great time to engage with prospects and customers as they shift their behavior online. Check out this page for more strategies to convert visitors well into the rest of 2020 and 2021. And be sure to sign up to our weekly newsletter on this page to get snapshots of the strategies you need to be paying attention to most right now.

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WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Key Performance Takeaways & Strategies

Performance has been very volatile week-over-week, with the hardest hit verticals seeing an average 30% decrease in conversions and 15% decrease in revenue.

Retailers who have pulled sales forward have outperformed their industry benchmarks and are seeing growth, while those around them declined.

Email open rates have increased by 17% as more consumers shift away from mobile to desktop.

This shift to desktop has helped email revenue remain steady despite overall business declines—indicating an opportunity for increased send frequency and cadence.

Performance has been incredibly volatile by vertical

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

E-commerce companies who are down week-over-week have seen on average a 30% decrease in conversions and 15% decrease in revenue over the past 7 days. Breaking this data out by vertical helps isolate the areas that have been hit the hardest.

These are massive week-over-week swings, and would be considered very unusual to see in a normal week. The leaders in performance include Food, Electronics, and Home Goods retailers—an unsurprising trend as many major cities throughout the country practicing social distancing. As is also expected, the areas seeing the biggest downturn include non-essentials and retailers that service other industries that have been significantly affected by the outbreak. These include Educational Supplies, Intimates, and Luxury. You may notice that while our data shows Luxury conversions have gone down, revenue has actually seen a significant spike. We’ll dive into that in a moment.

We dove into verticals that were down to understand which companies, if any, were outperforming their peers. Our goal was to try and identify commonalities among the industries that have been better able to weather the storm. It’s typical in e-commerce to limit site-wide sales in Q1 after such a promotion-heavy Q4. However, we noticed that many who’ve seen strong performance relative to their peers were pulling large sales forward in their promotional calendar. One fashion retailer specifically employed a strategy similar to an adhoc Cyberweek, and showed a 32% growth in conversions compared to 5% drop we saw across Fashion & Apparel as a whole. A jewelry retailer employing a similar approach saw 132% growth in revenue week over week while their industry fell over 7%.

Over-performers are pulling major sales forward

SALES TRENDS

In both cases, those retailers had prominent promotional messaging throughout their website, while adapting their paid media & email strategy and frequency as they would on Black Friday/Cyber Monday. While we saw several instances of this behavior throughout every category, none embraced it more widely than the Luxury space. An area that’s known among consumers to be notoriously selective with promotions, our data has seen over 60% of retailers push large sitewide sales. The gap between the impact on conversions compared to revenue likely suggests that, while many consumers were still hesitant to spend on luxury items, those with spending power took advantage of the rare promotions resulting in a dramatic boost in AOV even with the discounted products.

Since WHO official declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, email open rates have seen a 13% lift, with a slight disproportionate dip in email click rate.

Email Open Rates Rise With Increase in Desktop Browsing

EMAIL PEFORMANCE

Much of this can be contributed to company-level work from home mandates and widespread social distancing. This has lead to increased time spent on desktop devices and simultaneously less time being spent on mobile where email views have continued to trend towards in recent years. This trend continued over the past week, with a 17% increase in email open rates from March 12 to March 18 compared to the previous 7 days. This lift appeared present across all verticals we reviewed.

Eyeballs on emails have and should continue to rise alongside the spread of the virus. Use this opportunity to increase email frequency. But, while you do, also shift from a heavy transactional and promotional email strategy to content-driven messages. Share things like tips, guides, and videos that will provide your customers short-term value and build a healthier list. Scale back any messaging on scarcity and urgency that would add unneeded stress in a period where both brands and consumers are dealing with the impact of inventory shortages.

The recent economic downturn has forced massive cuts in e-commerce paid media spend. According to data provided by WITHIN, nearly each vertical has slashed budgets anywhere from 40-70% since February 18th. Scaling back these reliable channels is contributing to the conversion drops we’ve seen across e-commerce. Despite the week over week drop in overall e-commerce revenue, email revenue has remained mostly flat over the same time period, with our data showing 1.45% lift in conversion and 0.40% lift in revenue. Broken out by vertical, there does appear to be a relationship between email performance and overperforming /underperforming industries.

In most cases, industries saw a proportionally smaller decrease in email performance relative to their decreases in overall performance. This can be traced back to a couple causes. As more emails are viewed on desktop devices, email performance tends to rise. This is because users are (excuse the phrasing) mobile on mobile devices—leading to more transient, distracted browsing. The conversion rates for mobile traffic are also typically half that of desktop. More desktop opens leads to more desktop traffic from emails, which will increase overall conversion rates. For retailers where triggered emails make up a large percentage of their email revenue, the decrease in traffic that occurs as paid media efforts are scaled back will result in less than normal send volume. However it appears the increase in email conversion rates have kept that channel steady.

Email Performance Steady Despite Overall Revenue Drops

EMAIL PERFORMANCE

Industry-wide email frequency is likely to increase in light of this shift in behavior, which will necessitate individual brands increasing their email cadence to keep up. A diverse email program that balances transactional and content driven messaging will reduce list fatigue during this time. Adapt email capture strategies to leverage an incentive to encourage email sign ups from prospects. Without the visits you’re used to from PPC channels, email will be more important to keep traffic levels steady in the short term. Make sure your email incentives match the highest incentive available on the website in order to encourage higher submit rates.

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MARCH

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REAL-TIME PERFORMANCE DASHBOARD

+25%

-25%

-50%

-75%

-30%

+30%

+25%

-25%

% Change in Click Rate

% Change in Open Rate

% Change in Email Revenue

+15%

% Change in Revenue

-30%

-45%

% Change in Visits

-20%

-40%

-60%

All data represents performance across BounceX's global client base.

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MARCH

Key Performance Takeaways & Strategies

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Omnichannel continues to be dominated by Facebook Spend, which has increased an average of 16.4%, slightly down from the 24.8% increase we saw earlier this week. Google spend continues to trend down 41.5% from it’s benchmark, although that’s a slight improvement from earlier in the week when it was down over 43%.

Email open rate continues to trend anywhere from 10-25% above normal, while the click rate remains steady day-after-day at just below normal performance benchmarks.

Daily website visits have remained steady at just about 25% below their normal levels. While revenue has rebounded from a low of 75% below normal values to now being just over 25% below—signaling a potential change in the weather for eCommerce.

Hard-hit states like New York and California are seeing moderate increases in conversion rates over the past 7-20 days after a huge drop off. This suggests that they may have already seen their basement levels and are beginning to climb the stairs again.

Take advantage of high open rates and low unsubscribes by doubling the emails you’re sending out. Do this quickly, and without stress by pulling content from any high-performing, no-sell content you’ve featured in the past.

EMAIL REIGNS SUPREME

QUICK-HIT STRATEGIES FOR EMAIL

Email your top 10% of spending customers with personal outreach to show them how valuable they are to your company.

If you’re low on time, send simple text emails. They often perform just as well, if not better, than HTML emails and often get through firewalls easier.

Treat these next two weeks as Black Friday or Cyber Monday by pushing sales that help customers buy products without blowing through their bank accounts.

Rotate different offers every 3-5 days, to see which emails are resonating the most with your target audiences.

Understand your cost-per-email before starting campaigns by looking at how many emails you need to acquire before one converts onsite.

Pair email with SMS to make sure you’re reaching people wherever they go online.

This has been a difficult time for many retailers. As our graphs above show, many of us have seen drastic conversion drops that are only just now slowly beginning to normalize and creep up. But it’s also important to remember to not make this time period more difficult than it needs to be. Come to terms with where you are now and move on. What we mean by this is simple, where we are now should be considered our new normal. That means that if you were a 100MM business before but have dropped down to 45MM, you should be approaching everything that you do as a 45MM a year business. While this may be hard, your goal should be to not make things hard and difficult on yourself by spinning your wheels around how to get back to that pre-COVID-19 revenue number. Instead, make this harder reality easier to implement by moving forward with your marketing strategy using your post-COVID-19 revenue numbers.

Approach your marketing strategy with your new revenue stream in mind

KEY STRATEGIES

If you look at many of the performance metrics that are being pulled by MarTech and Agency vendors in the space, including WITHIN’s COVID-19 metrics and our updates above, you’ll notice that it seems like conversions have drastically increased. That seems do defy logic, so why might that be? The big reason is simple. Most of us have seen a drastic decrease in new customer or prospect traffic. Most of the traffic that is coming to our site consists of long-time and loyal customers. Simultaneously, both of these audiences convert at a much different rate. Prospective customers can be seen to convert at a rate of around 0.5% while loyal customers convert at a much higher level. Because your audience makeup is now likely made up primarily of loyal customers, your overall conversion rate will look like it’s jumped exponentially. Don’t fall into this trap. When looking at your conversion rate, you should be assessing it across multiple different channels and across every traffic source you have. Or at the very least, you should be assessing conversion rate separately between current customers and brand new ones. This will help you understand how to market to each customer base. But, more importantly, it will help you understand how your conversion rate is actually trending so you can effectively assess where to direct your marketing efforts.

Assess conversion rate on a traffic-by-traffic basis

KEY STRATEGIES

As we mentioned last week, you should be treating this current timeframe in the same way that you treat Black Friday or Cyber Monday. When we say this we mean that your customer base is still interested in purchasing products but they’re likely a bit more strapped on cash then they’d normally be. Instead of worrying about how featuring huge sales might hurt your brand (as it can do outside of typical holiday periods) now is the time to prominently feature sales so that you can provide value to customers who may not have typical resources to purchase your products. Additionally, these promos should be incredibly easy for all site visitors to find. This means things like an ever-present banners at the top of the page, big home page callouts across mobile and desktop, promotional reminders in the buy box and more. One really good example of how this is done is from our own client, rag & bone, which you can see features a clear to see banner and massive call out right when you land on their homepage.

Keep promotions, front, center, and easy to find

KEY STRATEGIES

On our recent COVID-19 Retail Pulse, we were lucky enough to feature Mike Lackman, the CEO of Trade Coffee. One incredibly important point that he made was that it’s important for all brands to keep their messaging sensitivity in mind when it comes to communicating with prospecs, as well as their current customer base. Let’s dive through an example straight from him. One thing that was top of mind for Trade Coffee, was the fact that many baristas are being furloughed or even laid off. Similarly, many office buildings are currently closed, making it hard for roasters to maintain their regular cadence of sales. In order to provide value, they launched changed their campaigns from “Discover Local Roasters” to “Support the Coffee Community.” The move was a great example in empathy and understanding by a brand for their target consumers. Above is an example of how they rolled out the campaign across their social channels in order to support their local community. As Mike said, “We aimed to support barista’s by putting a certain amount of our dollars to their individual GoFundMe accounts. We also used this campaign to help roasters who have 7-8 months of green coffee at their disposal by connecting them to people in need of our services.” The result is a campaign that engages with their community without needing to focus exclusively on driving sales.

Keep messaging sensitivity in mind

KEY STRATEGIES

One of the most common questions that we get is around how to best stay engaged with your target audience as a retailer during this time. It’s a great question. Before engaging with your target audience, it’s important to first remember what we talked about above concerning empathetic messaginging. Much of your audience will be turned off by hard sales at this time, so be sure that when you communicate to provide value and entertainment for your community that isn’t just pushing hard sales. Beyond that, we really recommend employing any push channel when it comes to engaging with your target audience. This includes things like e-mail, SMS, social media, and more. You’ll essentially just want to be looking at any channel where you can push messaging out to customers who can then engage with your brand. One of the best examples we’ve seen from this is from Nike. Recently, they employed their #AirMaxDay campaign that, instead of selling directly to customers, encouraged them to get involved by sending videos and pictures with their designated hashtag. It was a great way to have people push content back to them in a fun way that reminded people why they liked the Nike brand in the first place. In addition to leveraging push channels, this is also a great time to interact with your customers on the platforms they’re using most during their WFH time. Consider increasing your email efforts as people continue to work from home. To get personal and show your audience how much you care, try having actual members of your team send text-based emails to your most valuable customers. Better yet, pair this with SMS to make sure you’re really reaching people wherever they may be. It’s also a great idea to look into using platforms like Zoom to directly engage with audiences. Consider hosting an event, or a virtual townhall, using these video conferencing platforms so people feel connected even while they’re working from home.

Stay engaged with your community

KEY STRATEGIES

While this may not be top of mind for you currently, if you have the resources, consider using this time to negotiate deals to make the most of different marketing opportunities. Know you’ll likely have a push in December or January? Try negotiating out-of-home buys, subways, taxis, TV, and more now to make the most of your money. When you do, make sure to include an opt-out clause. This will mitigate the risk that you’re taking on just in case your strategies or objectives change over the coming months. Most importantly, we know this is likely a time when many people will look to take previously outsourced efforts in house. We highly suggest against this. Now is a very important time for you to make sure experts are helping guide your business to the best performance possible. Instead of getting rid of any vendor or agency help. Look into negotiating ways to restructure payment plans, push off certain services, or contractually guarantee performances to make sure you’re seeing the most value.

Take advantage of ways to negotiate deals

KEY STRATEGIES

In addition to leveraging push channels, this is also a great time to interact with your customers on the platforms they’re using most during their WFH time. Consider increasing your email efforts as people continue to work from home. To get personal and show your audience how much you care, try having actual members of your team send text-based emails to your most valuable customers. Better yet, pair this with SMS to make sure you’re really reaching people wherever they may be. It’s also a great idea to look into using platforms like Zoom to directly engage with audiences. Consider hosting an event, or a virtual townhall, using these video conferencing platforms so people feel connected even while they’re working from home.

Approach your marketing strategy with your new revenue stream in mind

KEY STRATEGIES

Assess conversion rate on a traffic-by-traffic basis

KEY STRATEGIES

Assess conversion rate on a traffic-by-traffic basis

KEY STRATEGIES

On our recent COVID-19 Retail Pulse, we were lucky enough to feature Mike Lackman, the CEO of Trade Coffee. One incredibly important point that he made was that it’s important for all brands to keep their messaging sensitivity in mind when it comes to communicating with prospecs, as well as their current customer base. Let’s dive through an example straight from him. One thing that was top of mind for Trade Coffee, was the fact that many barista’s are furloughed or even laid off. Similarly, many office buildings are currently closed, making it hard for roasters to maintain their regular cadence of sales. In order to provide value, they launched changed their campaigns from “Discover Local Roasters” to “Support the Coffee Community.” The move was a great example in empathy and understanding by a brand for their target consumers. Above is an example of how they rolled out the campaign across their social channels in order to support their local community. As Mike said, “We aimed to support barista’s by putting a certain amount of our dollars to their individual GoFundMe accounts. We also used this campaign to help roasters who have 7-8 months of green coffee at their disposal by connecting them to people in need of our services.” The result is a campaign that engages with their community without needing to focus exclusively on driving sales.

Keep messaging sensitivity in mind

KEY STRATEGIES

Stay engaged with your community

KEY STRATEGIES

MARCH

Email Conversions and Revenue

Visits by State

Email Interactions

Website Visits and Revenue

Revenue by State

-15%

-80%

+15%

% Change in Revenue

-45%

% Change in Visits

-20%

-40%

-60%

Key Performance Takeaways & Strategies

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

As we mentioned last week, you should be treating this time in the same way that you treat your Black Friday and Cyber Monday promotional deals. One of the reasons why conversion rates are so high right now is because many eCommerce brands are offering promos. Similarly, the reason why we’ve started to see a dip in performance when it comes to total onsite revenue is likely because many sites were running promotions through the end of this month but have since turned them off. To ensure that your performance remains high, and you’re driving as many conversions as possible, we highly suggest that you continue to run sitewide promotions. Below, we’ll dive into a couple of ways you can do that on your site and through the high performance of email.

Extend your marketing promotions or start running new ones

KEY STRATEGIES

Below is a poll we took during our most recent town hall. Besides the 50% of respondents that reported that they’re unsure about how many site visitors they’re capturing for email, the next biggest group of respondents reported only capturing 1-5%. While this is a good starting point, we recommend that for optimal performance, you should really be capturing at least 10% of your traffic through email. Below we’ll dive into a few ways that you can do this, but the importance of it remains the same. Email is seeing a spike in open rates and an even bigger increase in overall revenue. Take advantage of this time by getting in front of customers while they’re opening their emails and converting through that channel.

Increase the amount of emails you're sending

KEY STRATEGIES

Don’t bury the lead! One of the best things for you to do in your onsite promos is to feature full screen offerings on your homepage. A good example of this can be seen from Alice & Olivia, who make essentially everything above the fold one big promotion. They also did a great job featuring a tier of different promotions. Tiering your promotions often works better than just one flat rate. Additionally, their promotions feature percentages instead of dollar amounts. We’ve found this to be much more effective at convincing your site audience to convert over flat dollar amounts.

Create full-screen, tiered offerings

KEY STRATEGIES

Here’s another great example from our client Tarte. What’s great about their promotion is that they’ve formatted it as if it’s a branded event. They do this by offering the countdown clock to show that this will change within the next 12 hours. Additionally, they didn’t restrict their banner event to just the homepage. As you can see below, they also did a great job ensuring that it shows up on all product pages.

Feature Branded Content

KEY STRATEGIES

When featuring your messaging across product pages, don’t just leave it to a banner at the top. Some customers can miss this, especially if it’s in the same coloring as other aspects of your product pages. One way to hedge your bets against this is to feature information on individual product pages. Here’s an example from Aeropostale who does it well. Instead of just adding in a new line of text to their pages they went the extra mile and created a popup that users have to physically click out of in order to highlight their promotional deals.

Feature messaging across product pages

KEY STRATEGIES

Clarks does a great job with their onsite promotion. Avoid any confusion with your message. Clarks avoids this by keeping their messaging incredibly simple, making it big on their page and not overthinking the copy. Additionally, the include a code with their offer. We recommend including some sort of code as it makes potential customers aware that what they’re being offered is different than what the brand usually does. Beyond that, the design of it is also great because it features a color that stands out and makes it much easier to find.

Make your messaging clear & feature a promo code

KEY STRATEGIES

It appears that after a low point on March 16th, both revenue and conversion rate are up for omnichannel customers. With revenue seeing near pre-COVID-19 performance levels but with conversion rate seeing over 50% better performance. This is partly due to the increase in Facebook spend and partly also to high email perfromance.

The open rate for email continues to trend positively at this time. With click rates also remaining relatively flat, this is a good time to look to email as a way to recoup any lost revenue you’re seeing. Similarly email revenue has trended up to the point where it has remained flat at 25% higher than we were seeing before March 1st.

Website revenue and visits are both down, although staying essentially flat as you can see above. This implies that revenue may be staying at these post COVID-19 levels for the foreseeable future.

Pure-play eCommerce hasn’t fully bounced back in the same way it has for omnichannel retailers. Both revenue and conversion rates are down from their pre-COVID-19 levels but they appear to have remind essentially flat or even improved since mid-March. This hopefully shows that performance may soon tick up even farther towards the positive changes like we’re seeing in omnichannel.

When polling our audience, we saw that the majority of respondents had worse or flat performance week-over-week. This suggests that email may be the right channel in order to reverse those trends and see more revenue come in.

ASK THE AUDIENCE

INDUSTRY EXPERTS WEIGH IN

MARCH

KEY STRATEGIES

Re-inforce category pages

Finally make sure to reinforce your category pages. If you can’t already tell, there’s a theme we’re starting to develop here around putting the promotional messaging throughout all stages of your site. With that, we’re also recommending you put the messaging in your category pages. Loft does a great job of doing this as you can see on each product they sell; they feature free shipping information, their discount, and a code for all users to take advantage of.

Create full-screen, tiered offerings

KEY STRATEGIES

Feature a branded event

KEY STRATEGIES

Feature messaging across product pages

KEY STRATEGIES

Clarks does a great job with their onsite promotion. Avoid any confusion with your message. Clarks avoids this by keeping their messaging incredibly simple, making it big on their page and not overthinking the copy. Additionally, they include a code with their offer. We recommend including some sort of code as it makes potential customers aware that what they’re being offered is different than what the brand usually does. Beyond that, the design of it is also great because it features a color that stands out and makes it much easier to find.

Make your messaging clear & feature a promo code

KEY STRATEGIES

Feature messaging across product pages

KEY STRATEGIES

+25%

-25%

-50%

-75%

% Change in Email Revenue

United Kingdom Visits and Revenue

Key Performance Takeaways & Strategies

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

To begin, we’ll briefly continue our conversation from last week by highlight best-in-business promotional tactics from key brands. The first is Tom’s, a social active shoe company that has made it a mission to use their platform to improve lives from inception. What’s great about Tom’s is that they’re crafting messaging and branding in a socially thoughtful way. Many retailers are currently concerned about how to market their products without seeming tone deaf. What’s important to keep in mind is that every company is currently trying to sell products as a way to keep their brand afloat and save their employees job. That is genuine messaging, and it is ok to do that. What comes off as disingenuous is to change your brand identity in order to fit in with our new environmental landscape. Tom’s does not do that. Instead, they further their brand’s established identity by highlighting a support service for any customer who needs it.

MESSAGING: TOMS

KEY STRATEGIES

Our second example of great messaging from this week comes from online soap brand, Dr. Squatch. This is a great, real-life example of a brand that is currently getting ahead of Amazon by highlighting their ability to meet the needs of their target audience more quickly than the online retail giant can. They do this so well because they call this out their high stock levels and shipping ability and straightforward way. Follow their lead. If you have in-stock products and the ability to ship, call that fact out in a visible manner with no minced wording used.

MESSAGING: DR. SQUATCH

KEY STRATEGIES

Before we jump in, the main strategy that we want to convey for all companies here is that now is the time to use your homepages to emphasize products people will be most likely to purchase right now. The vast majority of states are currently in shelter-in-place scenarios. Because of this, there are many fast acting brands who have reworked their homepage merchandising to focus on products that people will want to use around the house. Our first example of this comes from Diesel, who uses their homepage to highlight a stream of products like t-shirts, hoodies, and soft denim to showcase the indoor-ready aspects of their clothing line.

MERCHANDISING: DIESEL

KEY STRATEGIES

Hugo Boss is a men’s apparel company that, to many, can evoke ideas of smart business attire. However, they also have a healthy casual-wear business. The brand made a great decision with their merchandising after the outbreak by deemphasizing their business line and focusing on their casual line on the homepage. Like Diesel, this is a smart example of calling out product suites that will be most pertinent to customers’ current lifestyles.

MERCHANDISING: HUGO BOSS

KEY STRATEGIES

Homage is an apparel brand focused on vintage-themed clothing that’s tuned into the current cultural landscape. They’re also a brand that focuses their efforts primarily in one geographic area, Ohio. Through their homepage merchandising, they were able to hit on both of these key identifiers. As you can see, at the top they feature a shirt highlighting many communities’ recent efforts to support the great work healthcare professionals are doing. Below it, they feature a newly minted apparel collection that harkens to their close ties to the state of Ohio. Both are great instances of putting brand identity at the forefront through strategic merchandising decisions.

Remember, we’ll be hosting new sessions every Tuesday at Noon EST to dive into latest performance trends and up-to-date strategies that will help you recover any lost revenue from the start of the outbreak. If you’re interested in signing up for the sessions, please head to our event page.

MERCHANDISING: HOMAGE

SUMMARY

KEY STRATEGIES

Here’s an example from women’s retailer Fashion Nova. Unlike the previous examples, Fashion Nova focuses on making apparel designed for social outings like dating or attending parties. If you’re a brand like them, you still have an opportunity to resonate with people’s current lifestyles. As you can see below, they highlighted this point with the tagline “Digital Date Nights Aren’t Cancelled” while making merchandise related to this theme readily apparent on their homepage. For many retailers, creative merchandising and messaging paired together as Fashion Nova is doing will be one of the quickest ways to engage customers and incentivize new purchases.

MERCHANDISING: FASHION NOVA

KEY STRATEGIES

After weeks of below benchmark performance, eCommerce revenue for omnichannel companies is back to normal. It’s important to note that, while eCommerce revenue is up, many of these companies are still experiencing losses as their brick-and-mortar stores close down.

California and Washington are seeing site visits above pre-March 1st levels, while hard-hit New York is rebounding more slowly. Meanwhile, the UK has seen site revenue and conversion rates slowly inch back up over 10 days to nearly flat performance from 30 days ago.

The Essentials vertical marketing spend rate has drastically decreased as many companies look to stem sales with inventories running low or completely going out of stock.

Website visits and revenue is finally starting to tick back up for eCommerce retailers. This is partially due to email, which is seeing its own channel revenue effectively matching it’s pre-March 1st performance.

In our latest edition of COVID-19 Retail Pulse LIVE we were joined by Ryan Babenzien, CEO & founder of luxury shoe company Greats, as he shared the following reasons why you should be enacting SMS strategies today to begin reversing revenue losses.

DON'T FALL BEHIND

WHY SMS IS AN INDUSTRY GAME CHANGER

APRIL

Guaranteed open rates and 100% share of voice

In our session, Ryan Babenzien specifically mentioned that he believes text to be the highest growth and most effective commerce device ever invented. And he isn’t alone. The reasoning behind this is simple, we’re trained to respond to texts in a different way than we are messages on other channels. Unlike display, social channels, and occasionally email, we’re trained to open every text we receive and respond. Because of this, SMS marketing messages see a near 100% open rate and garner a 100% share of voice when viewed. Because we’re also in the habit of responding to emails we receive, they’re a great way to drive engagement with prospects and customers. Just make sure to avoid over sending messages as it will have adverse effects on brand affinity. We recommend no more than once a week.

Endless segmentation opportunities

We’ve noticed that many brands who do employ SMS tactics are treating the channel as a batch-and-blast opportunity. This shouldn’t be the case. In fact, one of the benefits of SMS is that it offers the same segmentation capabilities that you’re currently implementing in your email marketing campaigns. When running your messaging across SMS, you can target consumers by things like product interest, gender, purchase volume, LTV value, and more. Taking advantage of these will be pivotal to maximizing your revenue. For brands worried about sending texts during these time periods, you likely don’t need to be. Our data above shows that conversion rates are regaining steam. Just make sure to be sensitive in your messaging.

Supply chain messaging

As mentioned in last week’s post, one of the easiest ways to increase conversion rates right now is to make it readily apparent that you have the supply and you’re able to ship. What many eCommerce companies don’t realize right now is that Amazon is on shipping delays for almost every item, sometimes up to months out. If you have the inventory, now is a great time to get ahead of Amazon, while building some brand loyalty, by highlighting this availability and immediate shipping capabilities. Take advantage of the 100% open rates that SMS offers by sending messages calling out these facts.

Revenue that speaks for itself

When it comes to SMS, the real reason you should be using this channel now is because the revenue truly speaks for itself. When speaking with Ryan from Greats, he noticed that he’s currently seeing double the revenue from SMS that he’s seeing from email and he’s doing it on a much smaller list of customers. The repeat rate was really high, SMS was nearly double email in Revenue. This is why SMS is a major opportunity for you right now. When polling our audience base during our most recent town hall, we noticed that only about 1/4th of all of them were currently speaking to their customers using SMS. This shows that the channel can help you separate yourself from your competitors and gain a bigger share of potential revenue.

Real-life eCommerce Examples

Key Performance Takeaways & Strategies

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Website revenue is down about 30% from where it should be but only down about 10% since the beginning of March. Overall revenue is trending back up.

Email revenue has had a huge conversion wing from -20% at the beginning of March to just now above 35%.

Retailers selling essentials have seen their revenue spikes from mid-March now start to flatten and fall. This implies that people are done stocking up in a panic mode and now the new normal has set in for essentials.

Conversion rate is flat for omnichannel retailers and the traffic mix has begun to be less dominated by Facebook. This means that revenue is also settling at about 10% higher than they were seeing in early March.

APRIL

For many retailers, it’s important to keep in mind where their different segments of customers live throughout the world. It’s often more nuanced when it comes to affecting sales than people thing. As Charlie Cole mentioned, when he was working extensively with China through the first outbreaks of Corona, he had expected eCommerce sales to remain flat or go up considering brick-and-mortar stores were closed. Well, in actuality, the eCommerce performance flatlined down 70% or more for many merchants. However, as you can see in the charts above, it isn’t that severe in the US and for many retailers, they’re actually seeing better sales from the time period before the virus took off in America. Another thing to think about regionally is how individual populations react with email vs text, or other communication channels. In America, it looks like email is driving increased revenue for the majority of our clients. However, in regions like Europe that use WhatsApp so heavily, that could be the right channel. In countries with heavy cell phone use like Japan, it could be SMS. It’s important to look at regionality when considering how you’re delivering your messaging right now to make sure you’re getting in front of your most valuable potential customers. Consider how hard each region you market to has been hit as well. It will be a good indicator of the type of messaging you should be using.

KEEP REGIONALITY IN MIND

Strategies for regaining lost revenue today

KEY STRATEGIES

It’s a once-in-a-hundred-year phenomenon going on right now. It would be remiss of anyone to tell you that they know what is about to happen with everything from the future of your sales to the state of omnichannel businesses in a year’s time. But what we can do is assess the performance of previous days to help you better understand what changes have already taken effect and how you can act on them. This involves constant evaluation of your performance. If you used to hold weekly marketing performance calls, this is the time for you to hold them daily to make sure you’re pivoting as much as possible. This is also a great time to hedge your bets when it comes to preparation for that unknown. That means you should be sourcing necessary products and materials to make sure you’re not running into any issues come October or November. What’s great about doing this so far in advance is that most materials are at record low prices and your business will be able to stock up at cheaper levels than you may ever be able to do again. Hedging your bets this far in advance will help you ensure you are prepared when it comes to your inventory as we eventually move past this.

CONSTANT EVALUATION IS KEY

KEY STRATEGIES

In this week’s session, we were joined by Charlie Cole, the new CEO of FTD—a floral retailer and wholesaler. Prior to FTD, Charlie served as both the Chief Digital and Chief eCommerce officer for TUMI & Samsonite respectively. With his wide breadth of eCommerce experience and international focus, we were able to pull together brand new tips for how to recoup the most lost profit for your business during this time.

One thing to consider is that attribution will likely change for many different people. But the most important thing to remember is that your measurement should be established on a channel-by-channel basis. The way you measure social, search, email, TV, and more will change because of the way people are intended to interact with each channel. If you’re scaling things like cart & product abandonment emails, the measurement system you should focus on is last-click because people are intending to click straight from that email to your site to take a desired action. For a channel like Pinterest or Instagram, it could make sense to look at different attribution models as people are likely clicking over to your site on their phone before they eventually switch to a desktop to make the purchase. One key mistake we see people do is that they measure performance based on a code that might be given out to an influencer or partner in the space. These are not an effective way to measure. Additionally, if you are working with a partner retailer or an influencer, make sure you’re not doing it during a time when you are running a site-wide sale offering the same benefits the influencer is touting. No one would end up using that influencer’s link and you’ll never know how much benefit they were actually able to provide your business.

ASSESS YOUR ATTRIBUTION

KEY STRATEGIES

Don’t be afraid to be emotive with your messaging. Sometimes brands that have been around awhile (or are so new they’re trying to build up a general base of customers) are the last to jump in on inserting a sense of genuineness and authenticity in their brand messaging. But you shouldn’t be worried, you won’t be offending anyone. Rather, you’ll be establishing an emotional connection with your customers, which is an incredibly important thing. Be smart about the messaging cadence, though. Brand loyalists might like receiving multiple messages from you a week. But if a customer placed an order with you once over 6 months or even a year ago, they’re likely going to be put off by your messaging if you’re speaking to them so formally. Make sure to segment them on first and focus on your highest value customers. A good example of someone who does this is Farm Rio, who makes sure to call out directly on their homepage how challenging of a time this is for many people, in addition to a call to donate funds. Whether it’s supporting a local community, talking about how you’re supporting your own employees, or even just mentioning how difficult this period has been on your business, the vulnerability will likely be respected and valued by potential customers.

RECOMMENDATION: DON'T FEAR VULNERABILITY

One key point that Ryan, Joe, and Charlie hit on is the need to shift your efforts from conservative to offensive. While it can be tempting to sit on the cash you have for now and try to last through this in an as economically safe way as possible, that strategy would do anything to help your business recover lost profits. As previously mentioned, your marginal costs are lower now than they may ever be again, now’s the time to explore different strategies and channels to gain a bigger share of voice in the marketplace over your competition. If you have the ability to do so, this is also a great time to go out and look for other brands that you can purchase or just add to your product suite. Diversification with products from companies who were either former competitors or whose business is complementary to yours will help you bring in more traffic. Additionally, email performance right now has brought in a steadily high amount of revenue and conversions for retailers compared to other marketing channels. After being aggressive in your product acquisition, now’s also the time to be aggressive in your email marketing. One of the best ways to do this is to create (or expand) a customer loyalty program. This is a great way to gain more email addresses for your database, while also giving back to your customers who may not have the same spending power they did previously. After being aggressive on email and setting out your top customers, establish a loyalty program. It’s a great time to give it to people. So if people buy with you, you can get 10% back. Start a loyalty program, or look into expanding or changing what you’re doing.

RECOMMENDATION: GO ON THE OFFENSIVE

ASK THE AUDIENCE

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

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Website revenue is down about 30% from where it should be but only down about 10% since the beginning of March. Overall revenue is trending back up.

Email revenue has had a huge conversion wing from -20% at the beginning of March to just now above 35%.

Key Performance Takeaways & Strategies

Average CPMs on Facebook, Instagram feed, and Instagram stories were relatively even until mid-March, at which point they dropped heavily. However, not dropped as far as Instagram Stories, falling 45%, likely due to the disappearance of key advertisers.

Email open and click rates have settled in at 5-25% above pre-COVID levels, indicating the channel’s high performance is likely here to stay. Email conversions are over 40% higher than pre-COVID levels, driving revenue flat with what brands were seeing before March.

The precipitous fall in revenue that brands carrying everyday essentials saw at the beginning of April has started to flatten over the past few days. This indicates the industry may be settling into their normal post-COVID sales levels.

While the United States has seen their conversion and revenue levels remain low, the UK has steadily seen their performance increase to the point that their revenue is now over 20% higher than it was before COVID affected their day-to-day lives.

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In our latest edition of COVID-19 Retail Pulse Live, we sat down with Justin Yoshimura, CEO at CSC Generation. During the conversation, Justin, Joe, & Ryan touched on three key strategies to help ensure you spend money smarter during times of economic downturn like COVID-19. Here are the key takaways.

Adjust your affiliate compensation strategy

Now’s the appropriate time to cut affiliate payout commissions strategically in order to reallocate that spend to programs that work best for your business. You should be looking to your affiliate partners to see which programs drive the most revenue for your business. When doing so, we recommend bucketing out your affiliate audit in the following ways: Couponing affiliates: For most of our clients, couponing sites that offer codes up to customers are typically the least successful. We recommend that these affiliates should be paid close to zero percent as they’re usually happy to receive any kickback. Loyalty affiliates: Loyalty-based affiliates are companies that reward customers with cashback, think of vendors like Honey in this category. Loyalty affiliates are easily testable. When assessing how much to pay them, look at what others in the industry are and then test out different strategies where you give them less than average, average, and higher than average payouts. If your programs that are spending higher than average are driving the same amount of sales as those spending less, cut them and reallocate that money. First-touch / traffic driving affiliates: Unlike the previous two buckets, these affiliates are not at the bottom of the funnel. They include things like advertorials, bloggers, influencers, etc. You should pay this bucket in the same manner that you spend on other paid new-customer acquisition channels like Facebook and Google (35-40%) to best understand how they drive value for your business.

Test for incrementality in your approach

There are multiple channels that we often recognize people as spending too much of their money on. One of the biggest ones is branded search. One of the biggest one is branded search, with many companies obsessed with how their company appears in search results. While this can be impactful in ways, it can often drive few clicks and even fewer conversions. The same can be said oftentimes with many poorly-planned Facebook ads. The goal of your Facebook Ads should be to reach as large an audience as possible and use that to incentivize actual clicks to your site. While Shares, Comments, and Likes can help with reach, they don’t really mean anything if people aren’t clicking through to your landing page. With both these strategis, and any other you’re doing, you should be measuring how each is individually adding incremental revenue to your business compared to the money you spend on them. If they’re not contributing to your bottom line, scale back spend and reallocate it elsewhere.

Change your merchandising to reflect the times

In the recession of 2008, many of the brands who came out ahead were those who had lots of inventory but knew that they should be bringing it online. The same can be said for COVID-19. Warehouses across the country are full of inventory. If you’re an omnichannel store that typically reserves certain products for your stores or allocates a certain percentage of products to your in-store sales, you should be reevaluating your merchandising strategy. Those stores will not be opening for quite awhile. That’s the new normal now. Instead of letting products sit there, bring it online and sell it to consumers who are held under shelter-in-place restrictions. The same can be said if you’re a wholesaler, move your product to online wholesalers like Guilt or Boxed. If you have a very specific audience, where you know you’re trying to reach a certain set of men or women, use this as an opportunity to bring on a wider range of products that fit their customer profiles. You can get it cheap, often on consignment, and create a wider net for catching new conversions.

DON'T FALL BEHIND

SPEND SMARTER WHEN REVENUE FALLS

Makeup brand Pat McGrath decided to nestle their offering surrounded on four sides by constantly changing videos that fit in with anything they put out on social. The result is an offering that feels effortless, softening the sale while contributing to the brand image they work hard to protect.

PAT McGRATH LABS

Ray-Ban is another example of a brand that doesn't normally run sales. However, they too recognized that this is an important time to bring in revenue. Taking care not to hurt their branding, they chose to deploy a simple banner that follows you as you scroll through their site. They kept their regular branding throughout the page, and even matched their banner to their branding to make it seem native to the normal experience of their site.

RAY-BAN

BRAND-SAFE PROMOTIONS

For many brands, running sales is something they tend to shy away from as they feel that they often do more to hurt brand image than to help sales. We see this most often in luxury brands or brands with large cultural cache. We understand this concern, but during COVID-19, promotions will be a pivotal way to recoup lost revenue and save employee jobs. Here are a couple examples of brands who are doing it well.

PROMOTING WHEN YOU DON'T NORMALLY RUN PROMOTIONS

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

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SPEND SMARTER WHEN REVENUE FALLS

PAT McGRATH LABS

BRAND_SAFE STRATEGIES

RAY-BAN

BRAND_SAFE STRATEGIES

In light of COVID-19, we've noticed many retailers struggling with how to best reach out to their prospects and customers without hurting their brand by being too salesy. To help, we've come up with top tips pulled straight from Ryan and Joe below.

Maintain authenticity in your messaging

Whether it's through an email, text, or you just read about it in an article, I think we've all seen instances of brands making mistakes with their current messaging—forced to apologies and walk away with their tail between their legs. Our goal, is for each of our retailers to never have to do that. But how do you avoid tone-deaf marketing during COVID-19? What exactly is tone-deaf marketing in our new world? It comes down to one thing, maintaining authenticity with your marketing messaging. This authenticity may look different for different brands (we have a few examples below that you can check out of brands that do it well). This is because everyone's brand voice is different. It is your job as a business to continue speaking to your own brand voice, don't change it up with consumers and prospects because they'll be able to spot the different and it will likely sour their opinion of you. Secondly, don't blast out messaging focused on your issues or your bottom line. This is not the time to push products that your consumers don't want or can't use from home. Instead, focus on problems facing your consumers right now. Aim to help them in their everyday. By doing that you're going away from pushing a sale on someone and moving towards helping out consumers during this time of crisis.

Rely on what the data is telling you

This week we brought in Stephen Collins, and industry vet who spent time as CFO and CEO at companies like DoubleClick and Monetate. One of his biggest areas of advice; don't continue following old patterns as a way to help drive more revenue. The world as we knew it before is gone. In its place, new retail rules are being written daily. We won't go back to how things were, it's impossible at this point. Instead dig into your data and understand what's selling well now. Let the data tell you what is selling, because it's likely the case that mainstays for your brand are no longer going to be as viable for you to rely on to drive new revenue. In this regard, If core buyers are not purchasing your product because they can't use them during their shelter in place time periods, then it's time to look for different product because the world will be living and working from home for awhile longer. Similarly, if you're an omnichannel store and know that some product sells really well in store but less so on your site, you shouldn't be promoting that product. It's going to be even longer before stores open back up and your focus should be on driving as much digital revenue as you possibly can.

Look at what's successful, not at what's failing

There's an adage that many of us working within the digital landscape here often from companies around how they wish to move fast, fail often, learn from their mistakes and move on. We're here to tell you that this is not what you should be doing right now. As previously mentioned, focusing on how products aren't selling right now will likely result in you spinning your wheels as the market demand remains at a much lower point than it has been previously. Instead, focus on your success. Look at what's doing well for you right now and explode into that. Instead of monthly, or even weekly, do this on a daily basis. It will give you a better sense of what products are performing well right now. Once you have that information, feature a banner or homepage overlay on your site promoting this product to make it easier for visitors to find. But you shouldn't be stopping there. Beyond just products, look at which channels and marketing strategies are performing best for you right now. For example, in the graphs above you can see that email open rates have recently seen 40% higher performance than they were seeing before COVID-19. You should be taking advantage of this incredibly lucrative channel for getting your messaging in front of your customers. Because these open rates are so high, it's clear that these types of messages are resonating as one of the most authentic means for marketing at this time.

GETTING SCRAPPY

CREATING AUTHENTIC MARKETING

Key Performance Takeaways & Strategies

For omnichannel consumers, Facebook spend has moved from down 36% to now up about 12% in just a few days. Revenue has increased along with it.

We’re still seeing great trends in email. Open rates are going up and up and up. They’re now above 40% higher than they were pre-COVID-19.

Fashion revenue dropped significantly when stores first closed but now we’re back up to essentially seeing the same revenue levels as we were seeing pre-COVID 19.

Website visits and conversion rates have fully steadied to what we view as the new normal, which is 10-20% lower than what we saw before March 1st. Expect performance similar to this moving forward.

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We’ve all seen tone-deaf marketing, during this period that would be when a business is focused on their own problems instead of the problems their consumers are facing. Now is the time to look at your marketing content and your creative to make sure you’re bringing relevant messaging to consumers that speaks to how they live right now. Here's a couple examples of brands promoting in an authentic way.

HOW INDUSTRY EXPERTS ARE CREATING AUTHENTICITY

We’ve recently been highlighting a lot of onsite promotional tactics, so this time we wanted to showcase a brand who is creating authentic messaging when using their social media accounts. BarkBox does a great job of this by creating funny messaging that centers around the fact that everyone who currently has a dog is navigating how best to live with their furry pets 24/7. As you can see, it often leads to unintended results. This is a great way of highlighting their brand without being overly salesy.

BARKBOX

Here’s another fantastic example from the luxury shoe company, Greats. One way that they’re driving home authentic messaging is by focusing on how they're giving back. Even though they’re running a promotion, they do a great job highlighting in the copy how they’ll not only be helping the consumer but also help out their community by donating $15 from every purchase. This is a great way to maintain authenticity and not turn off any potential customers during this time.

GREATS

GIVING BACK

WE ALL NEED A LAUGH

For omnichannel consumers, Facebook spend has moved from down 36% to now up about 12% in just a few days. Revenue has increased along with it.

We’re still seeing great trends in email. Open rates are going up and up and up. They’re now above 40% higher than they were pre-COVID-19.

Fashion revenue dropped significantly when stores first closed but now we’re back up to essentially seeing the same revenue levels as we were seeing pre-COVID 19.

Website visits and conversion rates have fully steadied to what we view as the new normal, which is 10-20% lower than what we saw before March 1st. Expect performance similar to this moving forward.

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BARKBOX

WE ALL NEED A LAUGH

GREATS

GIVING BACK

Maintain authenticity in your messaging

Rely on what the data is telling you

Look at what's successful, not at what's failing

GETTING SCRAPPY

HOW INDUSTRY EXPERTS ARE CREATING AUTHENTICITY

CREATING AUTHENTIC MARKETING

As you can see from the data above, we may have originally been skeptical of how much effects the stimulus checks would have on spending habits. But it's clear to see from initial results that Americans are using them to drive unprecedented mid-year sales for retailers. So, in our bi-weekly COVID-19 Retail Pulse, we decided to see if retailers were seeing these spikes in their online efforts. The results confirmed what we thought. Over 1/3rd of respondents are seeing above average performance, with an additional 11% seeing Cyber Monday-level performance. Many of them are likely to see performance continue to rise as checks continue to be distributed. With this in mind, we decided to dispense the key strategies you can follow to provide value to your customers during this time that drives new revenue for your brand without coming off as tone deaf.

Take advantage of email performance on the right day

As far as strategies for reaching your customer base at this time, email essentially reigns king. After an initial drop in early March, email conversion and revenue rates have risen drastically. Since March 20th, email conversions have seen a 100% swing to performance that’s nearly 80% above pre-COVID levels—driven even higher since stimulus payments have been distributed. Similarly, email has seen a nearly 80% to performance levels that are 40% higher than what retailers were seeing before March 1st. If you’re not currently looking into this channel, you need to be doing so as quickly as you possibly can. But one thing we've also noticed when looking at email open rate performance throughout time is that not every day is equal. For the past 4 consecutive weeks, email opens have drastically spiked on Mondays and fallen every day from there until it spikes again the next Monday. People who are working from home are clearly using their Monday mornings to get back into the swing of things at the start of the new week instead of working right away. Use this time to communicate your most influential offers to them.

Change merchandising and UX strategies to meet the times

Each week, we bring in a special guest speaker to lend their expertise on how to navigate the times. This week, we spoke to Cricket Whitton, Chief Digital Officer for Spanx, to see what her key strategies are to get in front of customers. One key takeaway that especially resonated with the group was that, as digital marketers, you need to constantly be looking at your digital merchandising strategies so that you can change them as customer sentiment and buying trends change with the times. Her company, Spanx, is a clothing company that specializes in products like intimates and shapewear. However, they also have a robust side of their business focused on leisure. Cricket worked to change how products were being spotlighted on her homepage, choosing to focus instead on clothing customer would most like to wear at home. More than that, she worked to change the wording to emphasize the soft, comfortable aspect of her product line. Additionally, Spanx has made an effort to make the at-home buying user experience even easier for customers as they continue to shelter in place. One strategy they especially emphasized was featuring a "chat" functionality prominently throughout their site. This helps increase engagement between brand and customer. Spanx as even taken it a step further than this by tapping every employee, up to their founder, to hop on the chat and interact with people who are shopping online.

Run offers, but in a smart way

One question that we consistently get is around whether or not a retailer should run an offer at this time. Many are hesitant because they don't normally run offers and are worried about how it will affect their brand. Many more are hesitant because of negative responses they've seen other brands receive. We're here to say, that these performance metrics are not something you may see again for awhile. It's important to treat this time like you would Cyber Monday and run offers. Here are some good ways to do it. Focus on AOV - Early in the month we mentioned focusing on sales as a way to help out customers. Focusing on sales is still a great way to help increase conversions but the messaging should be adjusted. Many people are using these stimulus checks to buy what they want. Instead of focusing on total sales, run a promotion that offers tiered-step discounting to incentivize higher spending. If your AOV is $100, offer a 15% discount for spending $150, but then increase it incrementally from there to capture shoppers who would have purchased more product. Authentic Messaging - In our discussion today, we also mentioned the importance of authentic messaging (there's a good example below for you to check out as well). Keeping your messaging authentic to your brand voice ensures that you won't come off sales-hungry to your customer base during this difficult time. Whatever your brand messaging was before the virus hit, stick with that. If you were empathetic before, whimsical, serious, whatever it may be, stick with it. Because, ultimately, it's what drove your consumers to convert in the first place. Media Mix - Now is the time to test your media mix, but, perhaps, not in the way you might think. Instead of testing out different media channels, cut the ones that aren't working for you. This is not the time to test out a fledgling social media platform. Look at the channels that are driving very low ROI and pause or cut your spend with them. Instead, move your marketing dollars to the channels that are driving the most revenue for your business and then test out different strategies for different audiences within each one. This is a great way to test new ideas for driving more conversions, without wasting budget on low performing inventory.

UNPRECEDENTED PERFORMANCE GAINS

STIMULUS CHECKS BOOST SALES

Key Performance Takeaways & Strategies

Revenue for omnichannel retailers rose over 60% from what we were seeing at this time the previous year—in just one day. Stimulus checks are making a difference.

For email, we’re seeing open rates spike every Monday—for the past four Mondays. Combine this with the huge gains in email revenue we’ve seen, and you should look to double down on email sends on Mondays.

What are people spending these checks on? Luxury items. This vertical has exploded. We’re seeing revenue up 94% from where it was YoY.

While conversion rate has remained steadily above pre-March levels, it’s even seen a boost in the past few days. More strikingly, total revenue is above pre-March levels for the first time since COVID-19 hit.

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Each week, we highlight a few eCommerce brands who are employing effective marketing strategies to drive more sales during COVID-19. This ranges from creating discounts that strive to help their community through this epidemic to crafting messaging that avoids any tone-deaf pitfalls. Here are this weeks' spotlight brands.

RETAILERS WHO ARE DOING IT RIGHT

Here's another example that touches on an aspect we've discussed in previous weeks. We all know a brand that's had to send an apology email for striking the wrong tone when reaching out to customers. Trade Coffee does an amazing job avoiding this with their spot here. It highlights actual video of people forced to make coffee from home while they simultaneously connect with the people in their lives. It then reinforces that Trade Coffee will deliver 's brand mission by mentioning they'll deliver fresh coffee from local roasters right to people's homes. The results? Tens of thousands of views in just a couple weeks and even some media pickup. Job well done.

TRADE COFFEE

As we previously mentioned, the stimulus packages that Americans are receiving is clearly showing immediate, positive impact in how brands' onsite sales and revenue metrics. This is time nearly akin to what many usually see over Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Hugo Boss does a good job of using discounts without hurting sales at a time like this. They do that by offering step-discounting. Meaning, the more you spend, the more money off they'll give you. This is a great way to increase AOV, without risking the loss of revenue.

HUGO BOSS

SHOWCASING STIMULUS DEALS

BRAND AUTHENTICITY

Revenue for omnichannel retailers rose over 60% from what we were seeing at this time the previous year—in just one day. Stimulus checks are making a difference.

What are people spending these checks on? Luxury items. This vertical has exploded. We’re seeing revenue up 94% from where it was YoY.

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TRADE COFFEE

BRAND AUTHENTICITY

HUGO BOSS

SHOWCASING STIMULUS DEALS

Take advantage of email performance on the right day

Change merchandising and UX strategies to meet the times

Run offers, but in a smart way

One question that we consistently get is around whether or not a retailer should run an offer at this time. Many are hesitant because they don't normally run offers and are worried about how it will affect their brand. Many more are hesitant because of negative responses they've seen other brands receive. We're here to say, that these performance metrics are not something you may see again for awhile. It's important to treat this time like you would Cyber Monday and run offers. Here are some good ways to do it. Focus on AOV - Early in the month we mentioned focusing on sales as a way to help out customers. Focusing on sales is still a great way to help increase conversions but the messaging should be adjusted. Many people are using these stimulus checks to buy what they want. Instead of focusing on total sales, run a promotion that offers tiered-step discounting to incentivize higher spending. If your AOV is $100, offer a 15% discount for spending $150, but then increase it incrementaly from there to capture shoppers who would have purchased more product. Authentic Messaging - In our discussion today, we also mentioned the importance of authentic messaging (there's a good example below for you to check out as well). Keeping your messaging authentic to your brand voice ensures that you won't come off sales-hungry to your customer base during this difficult time. Whatever your brand messaging was before the virus hit, stick with that. If you were empathetic before, whimsical, serious, whatever it may be, stick with it. Because, ultimately, it's what drove your consumers to convert in the first place. Media Mix - Now is the time to test your media mix, but, perhaps, not in the way you might think. Instead of testing out different media channels, cut the ones that aren't working for you. This is not the time to test out a fledgling social media platform. Look at the channels that are driving very low ROI and pause or cut your spend with them. Instead, move your marketing dollars to the channels that are driving the most revenue for your business and then test out different strategies for different audiences within each one. This is a great way to test new ideas for driving more conversions, without wasting budget on low performing inventory.

UNPRECEDENTED PERFORMANCE GAINS

RETAILERS WHO ARE DOING IT RIGHT

STIMULUS CHECKS BOOST SALES

Last week, we noticed an unprecedented spike in performance across the board. Everything from website conversion rates, to revenue, to email sales, to geographic-data shot up and to the right. With the announcement of the stimulus checks being delivered to people across the US, we were sure that was the case. After pulling 4 more days of data, we've noticed performance regress back down to the mean, suggesting that the stimulus checks are providing eCommerce companies with significant, albeit short-lived, boosts to their businesses. With this in mind, one of the biggest questions we received on our most recent Retail Pulse Live was around how retailers should go on the offensive in order to make the most of these bumps in performance—especially as more stimulus checks are likely on the way. Joe and Ryan joined CEO & Founder of LUMA Partners Terry Kawaja to unlock some key strategies.

Look for arbitrage opportunities in paid media

Each week, in addition to BounceX CEO Ryan Urban, we're also joined by WITHIN CEO Joe Yakuel, who also walks us through some of the metrics they've been pulling since the start of this pandemic. One thing they noticed that is an incredible opportunity for all retailers is the drop in overall paid media costs. In fact, when looking at the data, the only paid media cost that did increase was CPMs on desktops for Facebook. This offers an incredible opportunity for arbitrage for any retailer out there. In fact, the only likely reason Facebook desktop CPMs have increased is because of retailers offering last-click credit to programs they're running on channels they view as high-converters. This is also true for search-based marketing prices. Since it's such a low-funnel, high-intent channel, prices here will likely not fall as steadily. But that still leaves a ton of opportunity for marketers. When looking at the data, we're noticing that CPMs across mobile platforms and social platforms (outside of Facebook on desktop) are seeing significant price drops that have held flat since the beginning of March. These drops in CPMs mean that customer acquisition costs are going to be significantly lower for you, giving you the opportunity to test out channels you may not of had the opportunity to test before. For example, if your conversions are only 10% lower than what you typically see at this time of year, but the CPMs are 30% lower like WITHIN is seeing, you have an incredible opportunity to reach and acquire more people at a much lower cost. Continue to hit on the cheaper, high performing channels that have always performed well throughout this pandemic like email and SMS. These will make sure you're maximizing the return on spend that you're seeing. Simultaneously, use this as an opportunity to test out paid media like connected TV or even in-app messaging. If you haven't tried it before, but have always wanted to, knows the time to get onto new platforms with much less risk of wasting money.

Use customer LTV as a North Star

You'd think this might go without saying, but we've noticed many retailers who aren't keeping LTV top of mind during this time. That's a big mistake for anyone to make. The truth is, you have a lot of opportunity at this time to increase the overall LTV for your clients. Think about it, you likely have many cohorts of customers who are now shifting their purchasing habits online in ways they haven't every done before simply because they can't go to the store anymore. But what's so interesting about that is when you think about the growth of eCommerce over time, it hasn't really ever gone down—it keeps going up and to the right. The same holds true for your cohorts of customers, they're likely going to switch to purchasing from you online where you can constantly reach them with messaging. Many retailers have a fear that they'll waste resources bringing in customers on eCommerce who will go back to brick-and-mortar, but this likely isn't the case. So how should you look at your new LTV for your customers now? As mentioned, we're in a new normal now, it is likely important for you to begin to look at how your LTV is shifting on a monthly basis. A great way to do this is to split up your audience and look at, at least four different cohorts. Back out each cohort and see what the average repeat rate is for them after a year. Then look at the average after 90 days. Finally look at the repeat rate after a month. This repeat rate over the previous month will give you a good sense of how your customers have been shopping since COVID-19 and will let you know how their shopping behavior is changing during COVID-19. Finally take each cohort and look at how each groups ratio differs when compared to their average repeat rate over a full year. It's likely that some cohorts will have much better ratios than others and this will give you a good idea of which sections of your audience will be the best to focus on during this epidemic.

Increase payment opportunities for customers

Our last point here will likely also be our most succinct. Our point we're trying to make is that, as a retailer, you should aim to make the purchasing process as easy as possible for your potential customers. You don't want to drive away any potential revenue, especially during these uncertain months. One of the easiest ways to do this (besides putting sales and promotional messaging across every page of your site) is to employ physical agencies that make payment easier. That means if you aren't already giving consumers the opportunity to pay with Apple or Amazon Pay, you should. This holds true for PayPal and other online payment systems. Beyond this, look into implementing companies like Afterpay and Klarna on your site. These vendors will help you split up the payments on your items over multiple months and allow poeple who may be a bit strapped on cash at the moment to still purchase from you.

SMART WAYS TO REACH CUSTOMERS

FROM A DEFENSIVE TO OFFENSIVE MINDSET

Key Performance Takeaways & Strategies

Stimulus bumps for omnichannel retailers are now essentially flat back to where they were. This suggests that if more checks are sent in the future, omnichannel companies may be able to expect similar,short-term bumps to their business.

With email, it’s official. Monday is the day to send them out. We’re now in the 5th straight week of Monday performance spikes across email—likely a factor driving the channel’s huge performance boost.

The short, dramatic increases in performance could also be seen across industries as well. For example, fashion retailers saw a huge spike that eventually regressed back towards the mean. However, some industries like Essentials, so no real bump at all.

After seeing huge performance spikes across the board from US stimulus checks being sent out, these most recent days have seen a regression back to the mean. However, eCommerce is still seeing higher conversion and revenue performance than before March 1st.

APRIL

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

One thing that we've continually hit on in our Retail Pulses is the need for brands to create a sense of authenticity through their marketing efforts. The goal here isn't to showcase a bunch of product you're desperately trying to sell. Instead, focus on how you're working to help out your customers during this hard time. One company doing that really well is Kraft Heinz, who recently released a new commercial highlighting how their factory workers are helping feed families across the US. Instead of featuring glossy graphics, they kept it relatively plain, which we feel was a great choice here as it kept the attention on the content at hand.

KRAFT HEINZ

As previously mentioned, now is a great time to try out eCommerce and paid media channels that you may not have used much in the past because you will be getting out ahead of competition that is too scared to take advantage of the high-performance through channels that are less easy to measure. One company that does this well is Dior, who has recently set up VR eCommerce stores as a way to bring the in-store shopping experience to customers currently under stay-at-home orders. And, so far, it's worked. According to an article from Glossy, the VR stores drive a 70% higher conversion rate than traditional grid e-commerce.

DIOR

TESTING INNOVATIVE APPROACHES

BRAND AUTHENTICITY

APRIL

Kraft Heinz

BRAND AUTHENTICITY

Dior

TESTING INNOVATIVE APPROACHES

Look for arbitrage opportunities in paid media

Use customer LTV as a North Star

Increase payment opportunities for customers

SMART WAYS TO REACH CUSTOMERS

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

FROM A DEFENSIVE TO OFFENSIVE MINDSET

Over the past couple weeks, the news in the US has been flooded with images of disgruntled Americans gathering in place to protest closed businesses and stay at home orders from their respective states. While this is an incredibly dangerous action that puts fellow humans' lives at risk, it has—coupled with the flattening of the curve—spurned many states to start the re-opening process. Coupled with this fact is that data above, which shows—outside of the performance spikes due to stimulus checks being dolled out—steady eCommerce performance data for the past couple weeks. It seems, to those looking at the data at least, that the country is beginning to reawaken. Without any of us having the benefit of foresight, it does appear that we've entered into the new normal when it comes to online retail trends. To expound upon this point, we decided to spend a large portion of today's Retail Pulse Live, discussing recovery strategies for the next 8-12 weeks. Here are some of the top strategies you can follow too.

Invest in media to grow your business

Stop looking at media spend like a cost center, instead look at it like a profit center. Media is a lot cheaper than it previously was at the moment of publication. Use this to your advantage to get in front of your customers at a much cheaper price point while your competitors are still lagging behind. We see many brands slashing their media budgets but this isn't the best way to recover your business. Cutting spend will reduce profit and reduce your cash flow. Instead of cutting to cut costs, you should look at how much of your profits are coming from individual channels and then pump more money into the highest performing programs.

Alternate your promotional cadence

This week, our special guest was Tracy Heller, Chief Customer Officer of Universal Studios. One marketing area she focused on was how to best alter your promotional strategy as markets start to reopen and people begin to purchase in higher volumes again. Her suggestion was to look at the cadence of promotions you run and potentially alter it to one week of running promotions followed by one week off and so on for the next 8-12 weeks. This gives you a great opportunity to continue to offer your customers cost-saving opportunities to shop during this cash strapped time. Importantly, it also gives you a way to focus the team on forward-looking marketing initiatives as ew begin to move out of this epidemic and into the real world again.

Adjust onsite merchandising and messaging

Another suggestion that Tracy had was to adjust your onsite merchandising. We've discussed this in the past, where you should be looking at which products you offer that fit most into people's new stay-at-home lives so that you can take them and adjust your homepage to feature them prominently. However, this is also a great time to pair your merch with a charitable element on your homepage. Maybe it's donating to a specific charity, making products for healthcare workers, or offering to give away product for every purchase that occurs. Whatever it may be, aligning your merch with a giving-back element on your site not only increases sales it also helps your community heal—which, above all, is the right thing to do during this time.

STRATEGIES AS THE WORLD REOPENS

MARKETING DURING THE NEW NORMAL

Key Performance Takeaways & Strategies

Website revenue and conversion rates have been up for long enough of a time—around 10-15% overall compared to before March 1st—that this is likely the new normal.

Omnichannel saw a stimulus check spike that saw a near immediate regress to the mean. However, it has again picked up steam and because of this we’re still seeing 205 higher performance levels for revenue and conversion rates.

Commerce only brands are now seeing flat to slightly higher performance compared to this time last year. This means if you have turned programs off, you should turn them back on.

Email is the new gold standard. It’s been up around 25% and holding steady. Focus on this channel over the coming months & continue to send out emails on Monday—when performance spikes.

APRIL

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

One thing that Custom Ink does really well is that they use their homepage to feature new merchandising that reflects the current state of everything from the economy, to the health crisis, to how people are working from home. Using a carousel on their homepage they call out cloth masks that you can buy from their site to help stop the spread of the flu. They feature ways to support charities that they're currently partnering with. They even showcase ways to buy custom gear for your remote team to help employees feel more connected. Follow Custom Ink's lead and put merchandising strategies like this in place on your homepage.

CUSTOM INK

Bed, Bath, & Beyond is a great example of a retailer who is doing nearly everything right when it comes to optimizing their homepage and they're doing it in a way that's subtle—to the point most customers wouldn't realize it's happening. They've dynamically pulled in my zip code and called out their shipping timeline to highlight the fact that deliveries are still taking place. They offer membership discount information to increase their membership base and grow their marketing list. They also clearly offer alternative payment methods to increase the likelihood of a conversion. They show how many people have the product in their cart at that time. The more you look the more there is. Follow Bed, Bath, & Beyond's lead when setting up your product pages and you'll be sure to increase conversions.

BED, BATH, & BEYOND

PRODUCT PAGE PERFECTION

MERCHANDISE TO THE TIMES

Website revenue and conversion rates have been up for long enough of a time—around 10-15% overall compared to before March 1st—that this is likely the new normal.

Omnichannel saw a stimulus check spike that saw a near immediate regress to the mean. However, it has again picked up steam and because of this we’re still seeing 20% higher performance levels for revenue and conversion rates.

Commerce only brands are now seeing flat to slightly higher performance compared to this time last year. This means if you have turned programs off, you should turn them back on.

Email is the new gold standard. It’s been up around 25% and holding steady. Focus on this channel over the coming months & continue to send out emails on Monday—when performance spikes.

APRIL

CUSTOM INK

MERCHANDISE TO THE TIMES

BED, BATH, & BEYOND

PRODUCT PAGE PERFECTION

Invest in media to grow your business

Alternate your promotional cadence

Adjust onsite merchandising and messaging

STRATEGIES AS THE WORLD REOPENS

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

MARKETING DURING NEW NORMAL

Resources strapped team? Repurpose everything

One common thing that we hear from marketers is that they know they should be running promotions at this time but they just don't have the resources at hand to pivot quickly enough to meet the demands of our changing retail landscape. We completely get that. One way to alleviate this pain point is to look at what you currently have and repurpose it. Dive into your best performing email segments, your highest converting ad, and more to see what has resonated with customers in the past. Take these assets and just slightly modify the messaging to to reflect the current retail landscape. It will be true to your brand because it uses what you've done in the past, but it will also likely lead to higher conversions for your business.

Create product page-level urgency

We touch on this in our Bed, Bath, & Beyond example below, but now is the time when you need to create as much product page-level urgency for your customers as possible. If you're worried about something like a countdown timer looking cheesy, simply add a line in the code that shows how many people are currently looking at the item or how many people currently have it in their cart. This adds an additional layer of social proof to your site while also suggesting if your customer doesn't act fast on the item, they could lose the color or size that they want.

Resources strapped team? Repurpose everything

Create product page-level urgency

Key Performance Takeaways & Strategies

We started to see comebacks in website revenue and traffic until a huge spike during stimulus time. Now we’re seeing stability at a new normal, regressing towards the pre-COVID mean. Now that we’re in the new normal it’s time to go into growth mode.

Click rates for email are stable to where they were before COVID-19, but Email open rates are up massively, with Monday’s seeing open rates 40-50% higher than normal and conversion rates across the board up almost 80%.

Average order value was trending a lot higher, with carts worth $200-$400 seeing more overall sales than carts trending from $100-$200. Take advantage of this by offering discounts to customers who spend more with your brand.

Your seeing much less edge behavior, where people would normally pull the trigger and purchase products they may not know if they need, we’re seeing that people are not taking decisive action on that. One way to improve this is to improve your site speed

APRIL

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

EMAIL CAPTURE PROS

For many people around the world, we're entering a stage where we're experiencing more than one consecutive month of quarantining. While we don't know what the future may hold, we do know one thing for sure. Whatever world we were in, in the past is completely gone. To help provide strategies for how brands can drive more sales and engender positive feelings in teams that may be feeling isolated and a bit scared, we brought on the GM of DTC for Clorox, Jackson Jeyanayagam. Besides sporting some amazing tattoo art for everyone to see, Jackson came on to give everyone advice on how he's approaching marketing for one of the world's largest manufacturers of home and health goods. From how you should consider working with Amazon to engaging with remote teams, creating empathetic marketing messages to testing influencer strategies, here are some of the best tips from Joe & Ryan's conversation with Jackson.

Be where your customers are with Amazon

During the last 10 minutes of our latest Retail Pulse Live, we spent time discussing the role of Amazon for brands. It surprised us how few are on the platform. Some feel it takes money away from them, while others feel it is the only way to scale their brand. While we all agree that the platform shouldn't be driving any more than 25% of revenue for your business to avoid over-reliance on them, we do agree that you need to be on Amazon right now. Why? Because that's where your customers and competitors are. If you have a brick-and-mortar product offering many consumers are looking to the platform to continuing purchasing from you. But even if you don't, consumers are on it daily ordering things like essentials. If you don't showcase your brand there, many customers may head for competitors.

Engage with your team empathetically

One thing we've talked a lot about in Retail Pulse Live's of past, but haven't brought up much in these recaps is the necessity to reassess your working relationship with your teams. Across the country, many employees are not only dealing with recession information and fears of contracting COVID, they're also dealing with 7 or 8 weeks of quarantining. Their entire lives have been changed for good in less than two months. When working with your team, keep these thoughts in mind. Not every discussion needs to be about work. Even further, not everyone needs to be held to the same expectations for working hours as they were in the past. As a manager, now is the time to help alleviate any issues that may be appearing for employees.

Bring that empathy into your marketing messaging

One key point that Jackson hit on that was incredibly poignent was around the distrust that can be built from brands that use their marketing just as a way to make an extra dollar—regardless of how it affects their consumers. Just like some of those 1-800 ads on tv, I think we can all conjure up examples of brands that are selling products regardless of how it affects consumers or whether or not it even benefits them. The majority of brands are currently avoiding that approach, but the point we're trying to make is that many people are going through recession-level layoffs and mental health hardships. Now's the time to avoid any type of sales speak to focus on language that showcases your empathy for their current situation.

Test every channel you can

With the exception of Facebook CPMs, essentially every paid marketing channel is seeing a drop in overall buy-in costs at this time. If you have the ability, take advantage of this to test out different channels you haven't used before. If you have workers at home with a sudden drop in their usual levels of business work empower them to take over the research and strategy of how to make a channel work for your business. This doesn't just extend to CPC, social media, and display campaigns. Look into how smart TV's or even TV spots could impact your business right now. Formulate a new PR plan, perhaps around content not related to COVID-19, and see how that performs in the market.

Help influencers help you

We've mentioned this a bit in previous Retail Pulse Live's but one of the highest impact marketing strategies that you can employ right now is to work with influencers. The majority of where influencers live is still under lockdown so they're looking for ways to engage with new content. But when we say influencers, we don't just mean social media stars. Reach out to lower-level actors who are stuck at home without work to see if they can help. Or, engage with local sports teams on testing different promotional strategies so that they can regain some lost revenue and you can see if that type of partnership would work for you once the pandemic has ceded.

STRATEGIES AS THE LOCKDOWNS LESSEN

TIPS FOR 2 MONTHS LATER

Key Performance Takeaways & Strategies

Website visits and revenue is seeing more stability but we’ve also seen a lot of upwards performance just over the past few days. Website revenue is up around 30% alone, it’s been a powerhouse.

Email has become the new mall. They’re browsing gmail like they browse a mall, that’s why open and conversion rates are looking like they’re performing so high.

Higher AOV orders went up a lot in performance during the middle of the month likely due to stimulus checks and promotions being run. However, they’re now a lot more close to where they were before COVID, likely as promotions slow and stimulus checks run out.

People have normalized their purchasing of essentials. So we are seeing higher performance as people move to buy their necessities online, but we’re seeing essential companies lessening their total amount of spend.

MAY

APRIL

As the weeks have gone on, we've seen a lot of up and down performance across our key metrics above. When the lock-downs first started spreading across the US and Europe, we noticed that performance fell dramatically. And it makes sense. People were seeing less revenue come in and were dealing with uncertainty around when they would be allowed back out in the world on a regular basis. However, over the past few weeks—especially since the stimulus checks have rolled out—we've noticed this trend reverse. Now, performance is up across the board and it's holding steady day-in and day-out. This was reflected in our most recent Retail Pulse Live where nearly 50% of respondents said that their business has been up over the previous weekend—and only 4% said it's been down. To take advantage of this increase in performance, here are a few key strategies to follow taken from Joe, Ryan, and this week's guest, Clifton Vaughan of Natural Baby Shower in the UK.

Focus on your email strategy

Email open rates are trending nearly 50% higher than they were before March 1st. Better still, conversion rates are up nearly 80% from what they were just two months ago. This shows that people are ready to purchase products through the emails they're receiving. Set up multiple different email cadences depending on where the prospect falls within the sales funnel and what actions they took on site. This is a great way to increase the personalized aspects of your outreach. You can also use back-in-stock emails to grow your marketing list by asking for an email as a way to let your customers know when things are ready to ship out.

Maintain customer relationships

We all know that it costs much more money to acquire new customers than it does to maintain your current customers and grow their LTV over time. But that's not always easy. Customer loyalty starts with you being loyal to them first. The best way to do that right now is to surprise and delight them at every step. This week, Clifton mentioned that for the new parents that shop at Natural Baby Shower they'll often send merchandise to them for free. Doing giveaways like this not only show your clients that you care about them but it also helps your do product testing while working with real customers that you can use to create UGC for email and social.

Explore new content channels

Content is one of the few things that we can currently work on no matter if performance is up or down. It is the simplest and most effective way to get in front of prospects and engage with current customers. Take this to heart and explore new ways to get content in front of your target audience. One thing that works really well for Natural Baby Shower is unboxing videos that showcase the products but can also be used across social and as validation on their site. Another big success for them is to partner with the vendors whose products they sell. It showcases to the vendor how much you appreciate the partnership while also helping spur more sales for your site.

Reassess your merchandising approach

We've mentioned this before, but it's incredibly important that this point be hammered home. You should absolutely be changing your merchandising strategy to showcase products that customers are most likely to buy right now (there's a great example of this from GIR just below). This doesn't just mean switching up which products you market (although you should be doing that). It means taking the products people are most likely to buy now and showcasing them heavily on your homepage. If you're looking to get rid of hard-to-sell inventory, featuring those products on your homepage can also work well to sell of some of your stockpile. It worked well for Clifton at Natural Baby Shower and could for you too.

Our last suggestion is to look into leveraging influencers for your marketing campaigns. The fact of the matter is that many of them are desperate for good content to post while they're shored up at home, so now is a great time to engage with them under terms that are likely to be in your favor. Don't worry about going after the largest influencer or the one with the most followers. Instead, build from the bottom and look at smaller influencers with a few thousand key followers who can help get your story out and grow your sales without costing you an arm and a leg to do it.

STRATEGIES AS THE WORLD REOPENS

DRIVING NEW BUSINESS GROWTH

Focus on your email strategy

Maintain customer relationships

Explore new content channels

Reassess your merchandising approach

Leverage influencers in your campaigns

STRATEGIES AS THE WORLD REOPENS

DRIVING NEW BUSINESS GROWTH

Focus on your email strategy

Maintain customer relationships

Explore new content channels

Reassess your merchandising approach

Leverage influencers in your campaigns

STRATEGIES AS THE WORLD REOPENS

DRIVING NEW BUSINESS GROWTH

Be where your customers are with Amazon

During the last 10 minutes of our latest Retail Pulse Live, we spent time discussing the role of Amazon for brands. Some feel it takes money away from them, while others feel it is the only way to scale their brand. While we all agree that the platform shouldn't be driving any more than 25% of revenue for your business to avoid over-reliance on them, we do agree that you need to be on Amazon right now. Why? Because that's where your customers and competitors are. If you have a brick-and-mortar product offering many consumers are looking to the platform to continuing purchasing from you. But even if you don't, consumers are on it daily ordering things like essentials. If you don't showcase your brand there, many customers may head for competitors.

Engage with your team empathetically

Bring that empathy into your marketing messaging

One key point that Jackson hit on that was incredibly poignent was around the distrust that can be built from brands that use their marketing just as a way to make an extra dollar—regardless of how it affected their consumers. Just like some of those 1-800 ads on tv, I think we can all conjure up examples of brands that are selling product regardless of how it affects consumers or whether or not it even benefits them. The majority of brands are currently avoiding that approach, but the point we're trying to make is that many people are going through recession-level layoffs and mental health hardships. Now's the time to avoid any type of sales speak to focus on language that showcases your empathy for their current situation.

Test every channel you can

With the exception of Facebook CPMs, essentially every paid marketing channel is seeing a drop in overall buy-in costs at this time. If you have the ability, take advantage of this to test out different channels you haven't used before. If you have workers at home with sudden drop in their usual levels of business empower them to take over the research and strategy of how to make a channel work for your business. This doesn't just extend to CPC, social media, and display campaigns. Look into how smart TV's or even TV spots could impact your business right now. Formulate a new PR plan, perhaps around content not related to COVID-19, and see how that performs in the market.

Engage with influencers, not just on social

STRATEGIES AS THE LOCKDOWNS LESSEN

TIPS FOR 2 MONTHS LATER

Focus on your email strategy

Maintain a relationship with your best customers

Explore new content channels

Reassess your merchandising approach

Leverage influencers in your campaigns

STRATEGIES AS THE WORLD REOPENS

DRIVING NEW BUSINESS GROWTH

A good example of a brand who is altering their merchandising strategy to reflect the current climate is GIR. The company typically makes tools for the kitchen like spatulas, whisks, and bottle stoppers. However, with the pandemic still raging on, they switched their approach and used their resources to make reusable masks. Instead of hiding this information, they feature the masks right at the top of their homepage. So, not only are they doing good for their local community by offering masks and featuring a donation, they're also able to capitalize on the shift in consumer behavior by refocusing their merchandising on products that their customers and prospects would want to buy most.

GIR

Here's another example that we absolutely love, it comes from underwear maker Shinesty. If you're familiar with the brand, or have ever been to your site, you know that part of their branding is to create wry, oftentimes cheeky, products that they then promote in the same manner. What's great about them is that they kept this unique approach to their brand messaging and applied it to their onsite overlay. Instead of offering a dry promotion in order to incentivize the email capture, they have fun with it. They acknowledge that oftentimes the emails we get haven't had a lot of thought put into them and showcase why they're different along with a cash offer. This is a great example of how to do email capture right.

SHINESTY

MERCHANDISE TO THE TIMES

We're now two months into our bi-weekly Retail Pulse Live sessions and we're still going strong. This week, Ryan and Joe were joined by Divya Gugnani, co-founder of beauty and makeup brand Wander Beauty. This week, to kick off our session, we asked our attendees what strategies they had recently implemented as a way to provide value to their customers while also driving more sales. We let them choose as many different strategies as made sense for their own marketing efforts at this time and the results were essentially equal across the board. What is this telling us? That people are open to trying out new and innovative things for their brands, below are a few strategies you can follow that will help you to test out new strategies for your business.

Invest more in Facebook & Instagram

If you've regularly been joining us for our Retail Pulse Live sessions, you've seen the CPM and spend performance from WITHIN around the cost of certain channels. One key performance strategy that they've illuminated for us is that, while Facebook costs are a bit up on desktop, the costs for almost every other channel is down. Nowhere can this be seen more presently than on Instagram, which is seeing CPMs 30% lower than on average. Combine this with the fact that they have a lot of open inventory for marketers right now and you've discovered a channel that is essentially giving free money to you to advertise with them. Take advantage of Instagram before things swing around and prices go back up.

Leverage real people to help you create content now

As brands, I think we all worry about how we'll be able to cover all of our basis during this pandemic. Many of us are working overtime to help provide value for our customers and drive more sales, which has resulted in some normal day-to-day tasks being dropped. One of those tasks we often hear about being dropped is content creation. But content is pivotal right now to get in front of customers who may be bored, stuck at home looking for entertainment. If you're struggling to create content, send a survey out to your customers to figure out which content they want to see so you're focusing on what matters to them most. Then, engage with them through channels like email and social media to help create content for you—this could be testimonials, pictures, or even video streams.

Change your messaging based on the channel

Another great suggestion from Divya ties back to a mistake that we often see, which is that brands will send out uniform messaging to customers regardless of what channel that messaging is being sent through. But doing this will likely cause you to lose out on conversions you may have gotten with the appropriate messages. Consider the fact that Facebook audiences have started to skew older than audiences who use Instagram or TikTok. Messaging for each channel should reflect that. Similarly, messaging being sent to mobile heavy channels needs to be optimized specifically for the limitations that accompany a smaller screen instead of featuring messaging or branding that is more reflected for channels that people primarily use when they're on their desktops.

Red-team everything that you’re doing

One key topic of conversation today was "red teaming," which simply means the practice of rigorously challenging plans, systems, and assumptions by adopting the opposite or adverse approach. This is especially important during COVID-19 as many systems we used to rely on in order to drive sales for our businesses may not work anymore. You need to constantly be challenging your status quo to help understand which channels will be the biggest game changers for your business. For example, many marketers have felt that email has lessened in efficacy over time. Yet our data is showing that email is driving massive revenue spikes for businesses. Now would be a great time to test out this channel in order to better understand how you can put email to work for you.

Test, test, & test again

Just like in red teaming, you need to always be testing different approaches to marketing for your brand. One great thing that Divya said in today's Retail Pulse Live is that any day Wander Beauty isn't testing something is a day when Wander Beauty isn't on brand. From the merchandising of products on her site to the content topics that she writes about in blog posts, Divya is always testing different strategies. The most successful companies are quite often the ones that the public perceives as being innovative in everything from their products to their marketing. The only way to create this innovation is to constantly strike out and test every aspect of your brand experience to better provide an experience for your customers that will surprise & delight them—likely also leading to them converting over time.

Sustained Performance

DRIVING NEW GROWTH TODAY

Key Performance Takeaways & Strategies

We previously thought things were trying to stabilize but now we realize conversion and revenue rates are just up. People are starting to move their purchases online exclusively.

The new normal for email is that it’s up 30%. Take advantage of this by combining email with SMS to give yourself the best way to drive new conversions and revenue right now.

Pure-play ecommerce is seeing spend and performance now up above what it was the previous year. It seems that online retailers aren’t being affected to the same level.

Omnichannel isn’t spiking like it did in the past, it’s likely because there isn’t a promo craze or stimulus buying frenzy anymore to help fuel this industry.

MAY

APRIL

GIR

MERCHANDISE TO THE TIMES

SHINESTY

EMAIL CAPTURE PROS

Focus on your email strategy

Maintain customer relationships

Explore new content channels

Reassess your merchandising approach

Leverage influencers in your campaigns

STRATEGIES AS THE WORLD REOPENS

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

DRIVING NEW BUSINESS GROWTH

Website visits and revenue is seeing more stability but we’ve also seen a lot of upwards performance just over the past few days. Website revenue is up around 30% alone, it’s been a powerhouse.

Focus on your email strategy

Maintain customer relationships

Explore new content channels

Reassess your merchandising approach

Leverage influencers in your campaigns

STRATEGIES AS THE WORLD REOPENS

DRIVING NEW BUSINESS GROWTH

Focus on your email strategy

Maintain customer relationships

Explore new content channels

Reassess your merchandising approach

Leverage influencers in your campaigns

STRATEGIES AS THE WORLD REOPENS

DRIVING NEW BUSINESS GROWTH

Focus on your email strategy

Maintain customer relationships

Explore new content channels

Reassess your merchandising approach

Leverage influencers in your campaigns

STRATEGIES AS THE WORLD REOPENS

DRIVING NEW BUSINESS GROWTH

Email has become the new mall. They’re browsing gmail like they browse a mall, that’s why open and conversion rates are looking like they’re performing so high.

Higher AOV orders went up very high in performance during the middle of the month likely due to stimulus checks and promotions being run. However, they’re now a lot more close to where they were before COVID, likely as promotions slow and stimulus checks run out.

MAY

This week, Joe and Ryan were joined by Rob Schutz, Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer at Ro. One topic, as you can see in the graph below, that they really hit on was the continued success of email. For the seventh week in a row we've seen a huge spike in email open and click rates on Mondays. Combine this with the fact that email conversions are up, and it's clear that people are shopping around their inboxes for more products and details. Explode into this channel right now in order to meet your company-wide performance goals. Beyond that, the team today really focused on more operational aspects of how to optimize your company during this time. This means topics around how best to communicate with people, how to remotely address conflict, and good ways to focus on the mental health of employees. Read below to learn more.

Alter your communication based on the channel

In working with your internal team, it's mission critical to determine the right channel in which you should get your message across. If there is any room for miscommunication, it likely makes sense to hop on a quick call or zoom hangout. There is a lot of room to misinterpret people over slack or email. A lot of your company is likely in a state where they feel they aren't themselves, or they might have a lower mental health state than before. This contributes to the ability to misunderstand different people. Being extra vigilant about your communication styles will help alleviate this fact.

Address areas of conflict

In the same vain as the communication piece, now is the appropriate time to be extra careful to address any areas of conflict. One of the best ways to avoid this is to assume positive intentions in everything that your coworkers are doing. It's likely that they don't know that they are causing any conflict with you. However, sometimes it's not possible to avoid the conflict. This means that you need to stress the importance of hoping on a quick call to alleviate any feelings you may have of conflict and to help suss out the best way to overcome the potential issues.

Equally focus on internal teams

As previously said, many of your employees are likely experiencing heightened amounts of anxiousness about their current situation, so now is a the time to make sure you're being more transparent than ever. No employee should ever be unprepared for their future situation with your company, make sure to communicate different changes so they are best able to understand where their work life stands. Another great thing to do is make their work-days more fun by offering socially-distant rewards they can share in like team hangouts or mailing them rewards for good work.

Create empathizing branding for your company

Customer-first marketing and branding strategies are the most important thing that your company can do right now. Messaging or branding that makes it apparent that you're trying to make money off of different people at this point is really not going to play well. Instead, focus on how your brand can actually help your customers right now. This is not only the morally right thing to do, but it also creates a stronger presence for your brand in the market place. It creates relationships with customers based on the good deeds you're doing and will likely lead to more sales once the pandemic is over.

Don't stop your marketing efforts

As we've said in previous Retail Pulses, many clients are trying to save money by slashing their marketing budgets. This is the opposite of what you should be doing. If marketing channels are still bringing you positive ROI then each dollar spent is actually bringing in more revenue for your business. Instead of slashing budgets, look at which marketing channels are giving you the highest ROI right now and then take money from underperforming ROI channels to feed into your high performing ones. Exploding into the high performing channels will make the biggest revenue impact for your business right now.

INTO THE NEW NORMAL

MARKETING AS IT STANDS TODAY

Key Performance Takeaways & Strategies

APRIL

Email is the new gold standard. It’s been up around 25% and holding steady. Focus on this channel over the coming months & continue to send out emails on Monday—when performance spikes.

Commerce only brands are now seeing flat to slightly higher performance compared to this time last year. This means if you have turned programs off, you should turn them back on.

Website revenue and conversion rates have been up for long enough of a time—around 10-15% overall compared to before March 1st—that this is likely the new normal.

Key Performance Takeaways & Strategies

APRIL

For the first time ever, New York is up above pre-COVID levels. This is a great sign that things are starting to normalize, even in one of the hardest hit quarantined parts of the world.

Email is up 30%. We’re now in the 7th week of email open rates spiking on Mondays. Email is the new shopping mall, so use this channel for your business.

Instagram arbitrage is still happening right now. Make sure you’re capturing the 20-30% lower prices for Instagram that are happening right now.

We’re still up 20% on conversions and revenue but we’re seeing a lull, with performance going down this week. We’ll probably have to wait until the second wave of stimulus checks to go up again.

Key Performance Takeaways & Strategies

MAY

This week's example comes from the brand of our very own guest speaker, Wander Beauty. They do a lot of amazing things with their brand, but one thing that we particularly love is how they format their PDPs on their site. One mistake we see many people do is that they use their product pages like an extension of their cart pages. You should absolutely try to avoid this. Just because a visitor is on a product page, doesn't mean that they're likely to convert. A couple key tips from Divya, don't be afraid of large content blocks with substantial text. If a prospective customer doesn't want to read it, they'll ignore it. But if they do, it will likely help convince them to convert. Furthermore, try your hardest to replicate the in-store experience on your product page. If a site visitor can't physically touch your products, show what they look like on models and in action in the real world. Divya does a great job here of showing what this makeup will look like on multiple different skin tones.

WANDER BEAUTY

PDP PERFECTION

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

Open rates for email are remaining incredibly high—especially on Mondays. We can't recommend enough sending a second email each Monday to engage your shoppers on the day they want to see email the most.

This stability can also be seen across multiple different types of businesses. Both Omnichannel and pure-play eCommerce brands are seeing their performance levels stabilize to what they were at this point last year.

eCommerce has started to basically stabilize to just positive or about at the same levels as pre-COVID-19. This includes overall site revenue and conversions, but it also includes things like email performance.

MAY

This week, Joe and Ryan were joined in our Marketing Pulse Live by Laura Joukovski, President of Global Fashion Brands at TechStyle Fashion Group. Our discussion with her today covered a wide range of topics, but the overarching theme dealt with the poll below we took of all attendees. Our partner, WITHIN, has noticed that CPMs for almost every digital marketing channel have drastically dropped across the board from what we were seeing them at the previous year. Yet, we only see 19% of the retailers who joined are call increasing their media spend at this time. Worse still, nearly 60% were lessening their spend. As we briefly discussed in the past, this is the opposite of what you should be doing for your business. In this week's session, we dived into a ton of different strategies that you can implement today in order to make sure you aren't missing out on opportunities to beat out your competitors by reaching your audience on platforms that are cheaper than they may ever be again. Check out the strategies below.

Behave opportunistically at every moment

It's not a time for you to sit on your laurels, or to try to protect what you currently have at the risk of losing even more money by driving fewer sales. You need to behave opportunistically at every moment. As mentioned above, CPMs are way down compared to where they were before. Yet channels like email are seeing huge performance upticks. If you have conversions that are holding or outpacing the drop in CPM prices than you should be spending more to take advantage of those real opportunities for brands. Take spend from underperforming channels and move it to these over-performing ones to drive continued success for your business.

Approach LTV differently

One big piece of advice from Laura for those concerned about whether or not they should continue to push spend into different media channels is to just watch everything closely. As mentioned above you should be looking at CPMS, but you should also be looking at how your customer LTV is changing over time. Many retailers are actually seeing much higher performance, while driving more sales from newly acquired customers. But what we can't say for sure is if the LTV of these customers will be the same as it is for the ones you acquired before COVID-19. Constantly look at how often customers are repeating purchases or churning.

Lean into channels that your customers spend time on

While this may seem like an obvious statement, it's not. Purely by the fact that nearly 2/3rds of retailers that we surveyed have said that they're lowering their media spend at this time. Instead of lowering your media spend, look to where your customers are spending the most about of their time while quarantined at home and explode into those channels. One great example of this that came from Laura is OTT, which many people would typically describe as streaming TV. We guaranty no matter what demographic you service they've massively increased their watch time on TV streaming services that are supported by ads.

It's ok to lean into what's happening; do it respectfully

One really common question that we get here at BounceX is around how to format messaging in a way that show's you're empathetic while also being effective for your brands goals. We've covered this a lot, the key is to focus on helping customers at this time and showing that you care. But, you can also be playful with your messaging. It doesn't have to be so dim and grim. One great way that Laura does this for her campaigns is by highlighting how customers can use new shoes right now. In previous copy she may have said "From home to work, your feet will stay comfortable." Where now she's saying, "From the living room to the kitchen." It's playful things like this that customers love to see.

Merchandise all aspects of your marketing smartly

One strategy that Laura hit on that we love, and we've discussed it before we love it so much, is the necessity to feature products that users want to buy front and center in all advertising. One point that we constantly hit on is that your homepage needs to feature relevant products for sheltering at home front and center. But, beyond that, you should also look to all aspects of your advertising to make sure you're doing this. This means your display ads need to feature relevant products just as much as the influencer campaigns you're running right now. Giving people the products they want to buy not only improves sales, it helps them out at this critical time.

LOW COSTS, HIGH INVENTORY

DRIVING SALES WITH MEDIA ARBITRAGE

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

STARBUCKS

EMPATHETIC LEADERSHIP

MERCHANDISING MASTERS

We can't pass up an excuse to point out when retailers do amazing things with their onsite merchandising. As mentioned in the section above, JustFab does a great job of putting the products people want to shop for most front and center on their site. Anyone who visits the site cant help but see this exclusive offering. That's why it's so great that it is simultaneously showcasing products that are most likely to increase the bottom line of the business right now.

JUSTFAB

We previously thought things were trying to stabilize but now we realize conversion and revenue rates are just up. People are starting to move their purchases online exclusively.

The new normal for email is that it’s up 30%. Take advantage of this by combining email with SMS to give yourself the best way to drive new conversions and revenue right now.

Pure-play eCommerce is seeing spend and performance now up above what it was the previous year. It seems that online retailers aren’t being affected to the same level.

Omnichannel isn’t spiking like it did in the past, it’s likely because there isn’t a promo craze or stimulus buying frenzy anymore to help fuel this industry.

MAY

Be where your customers are with Amazon

Engage with your team empathetically

Bring that empathy into your marketing messaging

One key point that Jackson hit on that was incredibly poignent was around the distrust that can be built from brands that use their marketing just as a way to make an extra dollar—regardless of how it affected their consumers. Just like some of those 1-800 ads on tv, I think we can all conjure up examples of brands that are selling product regardless of how it affects consumers or whether or not it even benefits them. The majority of brands are currently avoiding that approach, but the point we're trying to make is that many people are going through recession-level layoffs and mental health hardships. Now's the time to avoid any type of sales speak to focus on language that showcases your empathy for their current situation.

Test every channel you can

With the exception of Facebook CPMs, essentially every paid marketing channel is seeing a drop in overall buy-in costs at this time. If you have the ability, take advantage of this to test out different channels you haven't used before. If you have workers at home with sudden drop in their usual levels of business empower them to take over the research and strategy of how to make a channel work for your business. This doesn't just extend to CPC, social media, and display campaigns. Look into how smart TV's or even TV spots could impact your business right now. Formulate a new PR plan, perhaps around content not related to COVID-19, and see how that performs in the market.

Engage with influencers, not just on social

STRATEGIES AS THE LOCKDOWNS LESSEN

TIPS FOR 2 MONTHS LATER

Be where your customers are with Amazon

Engage with your team empathetically

Bring that empathy into your marketing messaging

One key point that Jackson hit on that was incredibly poignent was around the distrust that can be built from brands that use their marketing just as a way to make an extra dollar—regardless of how it affected their consumers. Just like some of those 1-800 ads on tv, I think we can all conjure up examples of brands that are selling product regardless of how it affects consumers or whether or not it even benefits them. The majority of brands are currently avoiding that approach, but the point we're trying to make is that many people are going through recession-level layoffs and mental health hardships. Now's the time to avoid any type of sales speak to focus on language that showcases your empathy for their current situation.

Test every channel you can

With the exception of Facebook CPMs, essentially every paid marketing channel is seeing a drop in overall buy-in costs at this time. If you have the ability, take advantage of this to test out different channels you haven't used before. If you have workers at home with sudden drop in their usual levels of business empower them to take over the research and strategy of how to make a channel work for your business. This doesn't just extend to CPC, social media, and display campaigns. Look into how smart TV's or even TV spots could impact your business right now. Formulate a new PR plan, perhaps around content not related to COVID-19, and see how that performs in the market.

Engage with influencers, not just on social

STRATEGIES AS THE LOCKDOWNS LESSEN

TIPS FOR 2 MONTHS LATER

We’re still up 20% on conversions and revenue but we’re seeing a lull, with performance going down this week. We’ll have to wait until more stimulus checks for it to go up.

Email is up 30%. We’re now in the 7th week of email open rates spiking on Mondays. Email is the new shopping mall, use this channel to spark interest in products.

Instagram arbitrage is still happening right now. Make sure you’re capturing the 20-30% lower prices for Instagram that is happening right now.

For the first time ever, New York is up above pre-COVID levels. This is a great sign that things are starting to normalize, even in one of the hardest hit quarantined areas.

MAY

Alter your communication based on the channel

Address areas of conflict

Equally focus on internal teams

As previously said, many of your employees ware likely experiencing heightened amounts of anxiousness about their current situation, so now is a the time to make sure you're being more transparent than ever. No employee should ever be unprepared for their future situation with your company, make sure to communicate different changes so they are best able to understand where their work life stands. Another great thing to do is make their work-days more fun by offering socially-distant rewards they can share like team hangouts or mailing them rewards for good work.

Create empathizing branding for your company

Don't stop your marketing efforts

As we've said in previous Retail Pulses, many clients are trying to save money by slashing their marketing budgets. This is the opposite of what you should be doing. If marketing channels are still brining you in positive ROI than each dollar spent is actually bringing in more revenue for your business. Instead of slashing budgets, look at which marketing channels are giving you the highest ROI right now and then take money from underperforming ROI channels to feed into your high performing ones. Exploding into the high performing channels will make the biggest revenue impact for your business right now.

INTO THE NEW NORMAL

MARKETING AS IT STANDS TODAY

Invest more in Facebook & Instagram

Leverage real people to help you create content now

As brands, I think we all worry about how we'll be able to cover all of our basis during this pandemic. Many of us are working overtime to help provide value for our customers and drive more sales, which has resulted in some normal day-to-day tasks being dropped. One of those tasks we often hear about being dropped is content creation. But content is pivotal right now to get in front of customers who may be bored, stuck at home, looking for entertainment. If you're struggling to create content, send a survey out to your customers to figure out which content they want to see so you're focusing on what matters to them most. Then, engage with them through channels like email and social media to help create content for you—this could be testimonials, pictures, or even video streams.

Change your messaging based on the channel

Red-team everything that you’re doing

Test, test, & test again

SUSTAINED PERFORMANCE

DRIVING NEW GROWTH TODAY

Revenue visits to sites within the United States are either at pre-COVID levels or slightly below—a big increase compared to March. They’ve rat this level for enough time that it looks like things are at a new normal.

MAY

Behave opportunistically at every moment

Approach LTV differently

Channels that your customers spend time on

One really common question that we get here at BounceX is around how to format messaging in a way that show's you're empathetic while also being effective for your brands goals. We've covered this a lot, the key is to focus on helping customers at this time and showing that you care. But, you can also be playful with your messaging. It doesn't have to be so dim and grim. One great way that Laura does this for her campaigns is by highlighting how customers can use new shoes right now. In previous copy she may have said "From home to work, you're feet will stay comfortable." Where now she's saying, "From the living room to the kitchen." It's playful things like this that customers love to see.

It's ok to lean into what's happening

Merchandise all aspects of your marketing

LOW COSTS, HIGH INVENTORY

DRIVING SALES WITH MEDIA ARBITRAGE

On their site you can see them setting the tone for how to open and how to deal with customers while helping your employees stay safe. Take a closer look at what people like Starbucks are doing. Or even players who have always been open to see how they’re leading the way to help ensure they’re keeping employees safe while still serving their community. They do a great job of showcasing how they’re keeping people safe with their website.

STARBUCKS

EMPATHETIC LEADERSHIP

We can't pass up an excuse to point out when retailers do amazing things with their onsite merchandising. As mentioned in the section above, JustFab does a great way of putting the products people want to shop for most front and center on their site. Anyone who visits the site cant help but see this exclusive offering. That's why it's so great that it is is simultaneously showcasing products that are most likely to increase the bottom line of the business right now.

JUSTFAB

MERCHANDISING MASTERS

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

UK Website Data

Revenue visits to sites within the United States are either at pre-COVID levels or slightly below—a big increase compared to March. They’ve been at this level for enough time that it looks like things are at a new normal.

MAY

This week, Joe and Ryan were joined in our Marketing Pulse Live by Laura Joukovski, President of Global Fashion Brands at TechStyle Fashion Group. Our discussion with her today covered a wide range of topics, but the overarching theme dealt with the poll below we took of all attendees. Our partner, WITHIN, has noticed that CPMs for almost every digital marketing channel have drastically dropped across the board from what we were seeing them at the previous year. Yet, we only see 19% of the retailers who joined are increasing their media spend at this time. Worse still, nearly 60% were lessening their spend. As we briefly discussed in the past, this is the opposite of what you should be doing for your business. In this week's session, we dived into a ton of different strategies that you can implement today in order to make sure you aren't missing out on opportunities to beat out your competitors by reaching your audience on platforms that are cheaper than they may ever be again. Check out the strategies below.

Behave opportunistically at every moment

It's not a time for you to sit on your laurels, or to try to protect what you currently have at the risk of losing even more money by driving fewer sales. You need to behave opportunistically at every moment. As mentioned above, CPMs are way down compared to where they were before. Yet channels like email are seeing huge performance upticks. If you have conversions that are holding or outpacing the drop in CPM prices then you should be spending more to take advantage of those real opportunities for brands. Take spend from underperforming channels and move it to these over-performing ones to drive continued success for your business.

Approach LTV differently

Lean into channels that your customers spend time on

While this may seem like an obvious statement, it's not. Purely by the fact that nearly 2/3rds of retailers that we surveyed have said that they're lowering their media spend at this time. Instead of lowering your media spend, look to where your customers are spending the most of their time while quarantined at home and explode into those channels. One great example of this that came from Laura is OTT, which many people would typically describe as streaming TV. We guarrantee no matter what demographic you service they've massively increased their watch time on TV streaming services that are supported by ads.

It's ok to lean into what's happening; do it respectfully

One really common question that we get here at BounceX is around how to format messaging in a way that show's you're empathetic while also being effective for your brand's goals. We've covered this a lot, the key is to focus on helping customers at this time and showing that you care. But, you can also be playful with your messaging. It doesn't have to be so dim and grim. One great way that Laura does this for her campaigns is by highlighting how customers can use new shoes right now. In previous copy she may have said "From home to work, your feet will stay comfortable." Where now she's saying, "From the living room to the kitchen." It's playful things like this that customers love to see.

Merchandise all aspects of your marketing smartly

LOW COSTS, HIGH INVENTORY

DRIVING SALES WITH MEDIA ARBITRAGE

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

STARBUCKS

EMPATHETIC LEADERSHIP

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

Omnichannel conversion rates and revenue are up around 50% compared to what they were the year before, this shows that people are still looking to shop in their favorite brands’ stores.

Pure-play eCommerce is slightly below what it was at this same time last year, although it’s been hovering around similar levels compared to what it was last year for the previous few weeks.

Facebook revenue is still up YoY. And it isn’t audience specific. Across prospects, reengaged audiences, and retargeting audiences, we’re seeing revenue from Facebook up from previous levels.

According to WITHIN, Luxury brands are seeing a new high in revenue performance compared to the previous year. If you’re a luxury brand, look to increase digital spend at this time as people are buying luxury items in droves.

MAY

This week, we were joined by Matt Gehring, the SVP of Growth Marketing for Rothy’s—a sustainable fashion brand focused on making products like shoes and bags out of recycled items. One of the key points that Joe and Ryan discussed with Matt was how to maintain a cadence of content creation during a time when many brands aren't able to access the gleaming studios or professional photographs they once employed. With this in mind, we asked our audience "How many of you are employing UGC as a way to close the content creation gap." Surprisingly, half of respondents say they haven't leveraged UGC over the past 30-60 days. We'll dive into this more later, but our first tip is that you need to be doing this. Not only is it an easy way to generate content for your brand, it also creates a sense of authenticity between you and your customers by showcasing real-life examples of your product being used during a time when manufacturing the images just doesn't make sense. Check out a few more tips below from today's session.

Test out different content types

One thing that Matt touched on today was that having a strong brand identity can actually produce tension when trying to test out different strategies. If you have a strong brand identity, don't let that scare you away from testing out different content types and how they may work with your audience. Always try to push the boundaries to step into new areas with your core audiences to see what they're responding to positively. Without testing different things, you may never know if certain channels, messaging, or content types are better suited to interacting with your audience than others.

Don't try to boil the ocean

While testing in general is a good idea, don't go overboard with it. Oftentimes we'll see many brands trying to test out a million and one different strategies at the same time. As Matt mentioned on today's Marketing Pulse Live, if you try to test out everything at once, you'll run the risk of spreading yourself too thin and not appropriately giving attention to any of your programs. Instead, identify which areas of your marketing make the biggest impact of your business, or which areas you'd like to improve the most, and then focus your efforts on testing out different strategies in those key areas first.

Create authentic product imagery

One issue that we've seen come up constantly is the inability for brands to create beautiful, meticulously crafted imagery of their products that they can use in their marketing campaigns. We're here to tell you that this isn't necessary at this time—this is especially true for any social media or display advertising. It's very hard to tell your product story in the few seconds that someone scrolls past your products in their feed or when they're reading an article. Instead, focus on fully displaying each product (you can even show them being used) so customers focus on the most important part (your product) while they scroll.

Put upsells into your checkout process

Many brands that we're currently speaking to are always wondering how they can increase their average order value without pushing potential customers away from converting. One easy way around this is to include upsell opportunities within the actual checkout experience. Customers are so far into the buying funnel at that point that it likely won't dissuade them from purchasing their current product. However, it can incite them to make more purchases by showcasing the product within a bundle of other products. Better yet, include a small discount for purchasing the product bundles as a way to increase sales.

Segmentation is your best friend

At this point, I'm sure we've all seen messaging from some brand discussing how we've "entered a new normal." While this phrase can be cliched, it doesn't make it untrue. The best thing to do in this new normal is to not assume your customers will behave the same way they did in the past. Instead, let your customers tell you how they want to be marketed to in order to convince them to convert. Segment your customers into groups of people based on data points like their location or shopping behavior and then serve them different marketing messages to understand what they'll want to see the most.

FROM SEGMENTATION TO UGC

MARKET TO YOUR CUSTOMERS

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

The client example we wanted to highlight this week comes directly from our guest speaker's company, Rothy's. One thing that they do very well is making their website dynamic, instead of static. If you go to their site you'll notice an ever-present footer that appears on the homepage. Scroll down the homepage and depending where you land, the footer will change it's messaging to match whatever products or experiences you're looking at. This makes it seem like the website is talking directly to you by altering its messaging depending on where you're navigating. This is a great way to inject personalization into your website while also showing your customer you're putting in the effort to create an onsite experience that reflects their personal shopping behavior.

ROTHY'S

WEBSITE PERSONALIZATION

STARBUCKS

EMPATHETIC LEADERSHIP

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

MAY

Behave opportunistically at every moment

Approach LTV differently

Channels that your customers spend time on

One really common question that we get here at BounceX is around how to format messaging in a way that show's you're empathetic while also being effective for your brands goals. We've covered this a lot, the key is to focus on helping customers at this time and showing that you care. But, you can also be playful with your messaging. It doesn't have to be so dim and grim. One great way that Laura does this for her campaigns is by highlighting how customers can use new shoes right now. In previous copy she may have said "From home to work, you're feet will stay comfortable." Where now she's saying, "From the living room to the kitchen." It's playful things like this that customers love to see.

It's ok to lean into what's happening

Merchandise all aspects of your marketing

LOW COSTS, HIGH INVENTORY

DRIVING SALES WITH MEDIA ARBITRAGE

The client example we wanted to highlight this week come's directly from our guest speaker's company, Rothy's. One thing that they do very well is making their website dynamic, instead of static. If you go to their site you'll notice an ever-present footer that appears on the homepage. Scroll down the homepage and depending where you land, the footer will change its messaging to match whatever products or experiences you're looking at. This makes it seem like the website is talking directly to you by altering it's messaging depending on where you're navigating. This is a great way to inject personalization into your website while also showing your customer you're putting in the effort to create an onsite experience that reflects their personal shopping behavior.

ROTHY'S

WEBSITE PERSONALIZATION

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

Luxury brands are seeing a new high in revenue performance compared to the previous year. If you’re a luxury brand, look to increase digital spend at this time as people are buying luxury items in droves.

Omnichannel conversion rates and revenue are up around 50% compared to what they were the year before, this shows that people are still looking to shop in their favorite brands’ stores.

Pure-play eCommerce is slightly below what it was at this same time last year, although it’s been hovering around similar levels compared to what it was last year for the previous few weeks.

Facebook revenue is still up YoY. And it isn’t audience specific. Across prospects, reengaged audiences, and retargeting audiences, we’re seeing revenue from Facebook up from previous levels.

MAY

Test out different content types

Don't try to boil the ocean

Create authentic product imagery

Put upsells into your checkout process

Segmentation is your best friend

At this point, I'm sure we've all seen messaging from some brand discussing how we've "entered a new normal." While this phrase can be cliched, it doesn't make it untrue. The best thing to do in this new normal is to not assumer your customers will behave the same way the did in the past. Instead, let your customers tell you how they want to be marketed to in order to convince them to convert. Segment your customers into groups of people based on data points like their location or shopping behavior and then serve them different marketing messages to understand what they'll want to see the most.

FROM SEGMENTATION TO UGC

MARKET TO YOUR CUSTOMERS

Conversely, Facebook spend has remained almost completely flat since the beginning of April, so companies are generally spending the same amount on this platform as they were months ago.

Pure play eCommerce revenue is also down, this is likely because people are focusing on more important aspects of the current state of affairs than they on eCommerce shopping.

Facebook revenue has come down to an absolute low, likely due to shoppers not using the platform right now to make any purchases as they focus on modern events throughout the US and abroad.

All data points can be found on within.co. Omnichannel is seeing a big drop off in revenue over the previous couple of days. This is a lower point than omnichannel revenue has seen over the past month if not more. This is potentially an impact from protests in the country.

JUNE

Many of us, especially here at BounceX, are outraged by what we've seen over the previous few weeks. We recognize there is a systemic problem throughout the United States and we stand in solidarity with those who are speaking out against racial injustice and police brutality. With that in mind, we didn't feel it would be appropriate to run one of our normal Marketing Pulse Live's this week. Instead, we wanted to focus on what you can do as a company to help support the people in your community who are most affected, and most at risk, by the injustices that we've all laid witness to. With this in mind, Ryan and Joe were joined by Jarrad Berman, Vice President, TZP Group to discuss marketing from today forward.

Blackout Tuesday

We don't all have the answers right now, no one in our panel was able to say how things would change as protests sweep the nation. What we do know is that we're here to support all of our employees at this time. You should be doing the same too. There are differing opinions on the efficacy of #blackouttuesday when the hashtag leads to blank content. Regardless of that, you should be there to support employees who are looking to take part in this event. Foster discussions with them on this important day and as the protests progress.

Pause all media spend

This may seem contrary to popular belief. Right now brands could likely see their lowest CPAs and lowest CPM rates that they've seen all year, if not for many years. So we understand why many brands feel like they should be running spend against media. But this is a short term gain that will cause a long term problem. This is not the time to run media focused on squeezing more money out of customers and prospects alike. As the graphic above shows, almost everyone is pausing their spend unless it's related to BLM. You should do the same.

Pause all product launches

Just like with your media spend, you'll want to pause any product launches right now. There are a couple different reasons for this. The first is that people aren't looking to buy. As the data above shows, many consumers aren't looking to spend money right now while all of these protests are going on. If you push a product out now, it'll likely fall on deaf ears. Similarly, it will make your brand appear insensitive and like you aren't paying attention to all of the support that the black community needs from brands like you at this time.

What you could vs. what you should

The overarching topic in our discussion this week was around doing the right thing. In that regard, we discussed how brands should approach doing what they could be doing vs. doing what they should be doing. Just like the media example above. A brand could be pushing more spend into their display efforts, but they should be focusing on supporting employees and the BLM movement. Your brand advocators want to see you choosing to do the right thing. Show them you can do this with your actions right now.

Show compassion

We've been saying this for weeks around how you should treat your employees during COVID-19 by showing them compassion both while they work from home and as things begin to open. Now's the time to direct that passion towards those affected by what is going on right now. Retailer Alice & Olivia does a great job of this when they posted on their instagram showing one of the brick-and-mortar stores vandalized. Instead of condemning what happened, they used the platform to show support and offer condolences.

STAND FOR WHAT'S RIGHT

HELPING YOUR COMMUNITY

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

One brand that is tuned into the times is Nike. Below is a screenshot of their homepage. The entirety of the homepage is speaking out about why every visitor to their site can, and should, act to be part of the change. As previously mentioned, they were smart in the fact that they also removed all product imagery from their homepage. Like we said, now is not the time to push your products onto customers. Instead, now is a time to support your community and show affected workers that you care. Nike has done similar things in the past, but this is a great example of how they're putting their money where their mouth is and standing up for what they believe in, even if it can draw some flack from their site visitors.

NIKE

SHOWING SUPPORT

NIKE

SHOWING SUPPORT

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

Facebook revenue has come down to an absolute low, likely due to shoppers not using the platform right now to make any purchases as they focus on modern events throughout the US and abroad.

Conversely, Facebook spend has remained almost completely flat since the beginning of April, so companies are generally spending the same amount on this platform as they were months ago.

Pure play eCommerce revenue is also down, this is likely because people are focusing on more important aspects of the current state of affairs than they on eCommerce shopping.

June

Blackout Tuesday

Pause all media spend

Pause all product launches

What you could vs. what you should

Show compassion

STAND FOR WHAT'S RIGHT

HELPING YOUR COMMUNITY

These charts show the weekly or monthly performance changes since early April, when our data indicated that eCommerce performance was starting to drastically change.

Trending Marketing Performance

Facebook spend for omnichannel brands took a nosedive as brands began to pause their social spend. This past week, Facebook spend ended up being down 80% compared to this same time last year.

Pure-play eCommerce dropped their spend across platforms and services, as well. According to WITHIN the retailers in this industry are spending 55% less on Facebook and slightly higher on Google.

Email revenue and conversion rates are way up compared to what they were before COVID-19, we’re seeing them up 20% compared to normal with peaks at 50% above normal throughout May.

Website visits, revenue, and conversion rates for retailers are all trending about 10-15% higher than they were before COVID-19. This suggests that as stores open, site metrics might continue to improve.

JUNE

We're back! This is our 18th edition of Marketing Pulse Live. It's been nearly three months since we kicked off this endeavor, and we hope you've enjoyed it as much as we have. This week, Ryan and Joe were joined by Ovadia Labaton, co-founder of The Perfect Jean. His company started off as a side hustle with his friends and has now morphed into a constantly-growing, profit-generating clothing brand. The main focus of our conversation today was around content creation and engagement. Ovadia came prepared with tons of ideas around content. But it didn't stop there. Dive in below to learn more about how to approach your contribution margin, how to deal with people trolling your comment threads, and how to get content featuring customers with your products for free.

Don't ignore your contribution margin

As big brands, we know you're not ignoring your contribution margin on a company level, but we're here to tell you that the marketing team needs to be keeping this in mind as well. They're the ones managing the marketing spend. Make sure that you are having constant conversations with marketing around CAC and ROAS to make sure everyone is aligned and you're getting the most out of your budget as possible.

Pay close attention to your comment feeds

In your free time, we highly suggest checking out The Perfect Jean's social media accounts. They're amazing examples of how a brand can interact with customers in a really fun way. Looking to your product feeds for content is a great way to open up a direct dialogue with your customers. Use them to ask for product feedback or engage with them to have them help you create user-generated content.

Use your customers to generate content

One thing that Ovadia and his team are really good at is engaging their customer base to create content for them. This is a great way to build brand loyalty and, best of all, it's completely free. All you need to do is email your customers after purchase asking them to send you content in return for a discount. Tier your discount to incentivize for whatever content is most important to you now.

Capture emails when products are out of stock

Here's another gem, this time from our very own CEO, Ryan Urban. On The Perfect Jean's product pages he noticed that many of the products were out of stock due to COVID-related shipping issues. He suggested to not make that information public right away and instead employ an email capture when a user clicks on a certain size that may be out of stock. Chances are, they're going to give you their email.

Understand product pages are landing pages

A really nice example of this can be seen in the screen capture from The Perfect Jean below. But the gist of it is that we see a lot of brands who use their product pages simply as a vehicle to capture someone's purchasing information. But the sale doesn't end when they get to that page. Use your product pages instead to host fun content, reviews, action shots, and more to ensure that customer purchases.

CONTENT IS KING

CONTENT FOR MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

We're staying on brand this week by also highlighting some things that The Perfect Jean is doing really well with their own product pages. As mentioned above, product pages must be viewed in the same vain as any other landing page. The Perfect Jean does a great job of understanding this by featuring a robust comment section on their product page. They also include videos that give off the energy and vibe of their brand in a succinct way. Bring content onto your product pages. If you're wondering where to start, The Perfect Jean's website is a great example of content that serves to further brand initiatives and drive more sales.

THE PERFECT JEAN

CREATIVE BRANDING

THE PERFECT JEAN

CREATIVE BRANDING

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

Email revenue and conversion rates are way up compared to what they were before COVID-19, we’re seeing them up 20% compared to normal with peaks at 50% above normal throughout May.

Pure-play eCommerce dropped their spend across platforms and services, as well. According to WITHIN the retailers in this industry are spending 55% less on Facebook and slightly higher on Google.

Facebook spend for omnichannel brands took a nosedive as brands began to pause their social spend. This past week, Facebook spend ended up being down 80% compared to this same time last year.

June

Don't ignore your contribution margin

Pay close attention to your comment feeds

Use your customers to generate content

Capture emails when products are out of stock

Understand product pages are landing pages

CONTENT IS KING

CONTENT FOR MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

Website visits, revenue, and conversion rates spiked really high in mid-April but this has almost completely stabilized as we've started to move through June.

As far as specific industries go, fashion is seeing a drive back to the performance that they were seeing before COVID-19, while essentials is slightly higher.

Open rates are remaining steady at a higher performance level compared to before COVID, while email revenue is up a lot compared to before April 1st.

Omnichannel is not seeing their spending rates hit pre-COVID levels. Their revenue is lower right now as well, which is likely causing this drop in media spend.

JUNE

We're nearly at 20 total Marketing Pulses between Ryan and Joe, and this week we were joined by Teju Prabhakar, CEO & Co-Founder at Share Local Media. Share Local Media is a premium direct mail solution for startups, technology companies, and high quality brands of all types. Because Teju joined us, we spent a good deal of time this week talking about a marketing strategy that we haven't touched on in our previous 18 sessions—direct mail. Many eCommerce professionals that our three panelists had talked to since the start of COVID-19 had reduced media spend and cut direct mail or decided not to start it altogether. But if you're a brand that's currently seeing your online store reach performance levels that are similar, or higher than, what you were seeing before March, it's time to consider reaching your clients through mail. After all, most people are still under stay-at-home orders and a trip to the mailbox is likely the highlight of many peoples' day. Here are a few key strategies that the panelists discuss, and how you can begin implementing them for your brand right now.

Keeping clients first

Before we dive into the strategies around direct mailers, we wanted to highlight something that Teju did that is at the core of why he has such a successful business, and that is keeping his customers top of mind. When COVID-19 first hit, he knew that many clients would pause their April sends as they tried to assess the damage that may happen to their business. Instead of holding them to their contracts, Teju dismissed April sends and let anyone who wanted to pull out from a shared direct mailer do so without penalty. While this ultimately ended up costing Teju some business since they were relying on that month of income, it did something better for them in the long run by creating a sense of loyalty between themselves and the brands they work with. This will end up paying them back in droves over the long run.

Consider shared vs. solo direct mailer sends

When I used to work in field marketing, I would always send direct mailers to clients and prospects that were branded head to toe with my company's logo and coloring. We wanted it to be as identifiable as possible as coming from us. But this isn't always the best approach (as I learned today). Instead, you have the option between shared sends and solo or standalone sends. The standalone sends have an advantage of giving you 100% share of voice with your customer, but they can be more expensive and might not work as well if you're a new brand. If you're just getting into the direct mailer game, one good place to start is with shared direct mail sends. They often take an envelope and combine messaging from multiple different brands in one. If you're a newer company, this helps give you clout as you build your name.

Your design is mission critical

As always, we have a great example of a brand who designed their direct mailer wonderfully below. But before we get to that, it's important to mention why your design is mission critical to the success of your direct mailer campaign. The reason is simple: time. You won't always have a lot of time to get your messaging and your offer in front of your target customers when they're opening their mail. You have a couple seconds to grab their attention and then maybe a couple more to get your offer in front of them. Because of this, you want to be as clear cut, simple, and easy to find as possible. Your direct mailer should not be the size of a novella. Instead keep it to a short marketing message and then an attention grabbing offer. Fill up the rest of the space with beautiful, on-brand imagery to let that person know what you're all about.

Measuring through incrementality

As an inherently offline effort, measuring the success of direct mail campaigns has been hard. But, there are a few ways that people have done it. Often, they'll create programmatic direct mail campaigns that are easier to track online, or feature a unique URL on the direct mailer to understand how much traffic the send generated. But, one of the easiest ways that Teju mentioned, had to do with incrementality. Simply take your desired audience and split them up into two different groups: a group that gets the mailers and a hold out group. The hold out group doesn't need to be more than 10-15% of your target audience. Once you've done this, continuously check to see how each group is converting on your site. If the direct mailer group is converting more, you have a winner. If not, it's likely time to find new strategies for this channel.

Testing your direct mail sends

One thing that Teju always tries to do for his clients when they're first onboarding is to A/B test at least one major element of the direct mailer. This could be anything from the imagery that's being used, to the offer being sent out, to the actual copy that's on the page. Why does he do this? Because direct mail is inherently a different beast than email, CPC ads, or even display ads. Something that works well on Facebook, might perform terribly through a direct mailer. Testing out different versions of your sends will help you understand what is actually resonating with clients and what isn't. This type of test works primarily for your solo or standalone direct mailers because you have 100% share of voice. For the shared sends, it's harder to draw concrete evidence since you're sharing the space with other retailers.

SNAIL MAIL

DRIVING PERFORMANCE WITH DIRECT MAILERS

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

In light of what we discussed above, we wanted to showcase an example of a company that is currently creating engaging direct mailers. This week's example comes directly from Share Local Media, who highlight the direct mailer you see below from Minibar on their site. What's great about this, like we previously mentioned, is that they are really thinking about the format of their ad when they created this mailer. It isn't full of convoluted text or hard-to-find messaging. Their one marketing tagline tells you exactly what they do in only three words. Furthermore, their offer is clear to find on the page, with the text sizing weighted in order of importance. Finally, they use visually captivating imagery to showcase their brand without taking away from the messaging that's on their mailer. This is a great example of how simplicity and directness can work really well in your direct mail campaigns.

MINIBAR

ENGAGING MAIL

MINIBAR

ENGAGING MAIL

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

Omnichannel is not seeing their spending rates hit pre-COVID levels. Their revenue is lower right now as well, which is likely causing this drop in media spend.

Open rates are remaining steady at a higher performance level compared to before COVID, while email revenue is up a lot compared to April 1st.

As far as specific industries go, fashion is seeing a drive back to the performance that they were seeing before COVID-19, while essentials is slightly higher.

Website visits, revenue, and conversion rates spiked really high in mid-April but this has almost completely stabilized as we've started to move through June.

June

Keeping clients first

Consider shared vs. solo direct mailer sends

Your design is mission critical

We have a great example of a brand who designed their direct mailer wonderfully below. But before we get to that, it's important to mention why your design is mission critical to the success of your direct mailer campaign. The reason is simple: time. You won't always have a lot of time to get your messaging and your offer in front of your target customers when they're opening their mail. You have a couple seconds to grab their attention and then maybe a couple more to get your offer in front of them. Because of this, you want to be as clear cut, simple, and easy to find as possible. Your direct mailer should not be the size of a novella. Instead keep it to a short marketing message and then an attention grabbing offer. Fill up the rest of the space with beautiful, on-brand imagery to let that person know what you're all about.

Measuring through incrementality

Testing your direct mail sends

SNAIL MAIL

DRIVING PERFORMANCE WITH DIRECT MAILERS

Similarly, over the past couple of weeks, revenue, conversion rates, and visits have remained essentially flat for brand websites. However, this could easily change as COVID-19 rates begin to spike again across the world. For now, it’s holding steady.

There is still a heavy amount of volatility across Facebook and Instagram's CPMs. Facebook CPMs are up 30-50% on desktop, a hefty fee. But they've been on a roller coast ride for the past 3 months, so it's hard to say where they'll land.

Since the beginning of June, email revenue and conversion rates have only shifted 10% in either direction—a small amount compared to other channels. Because of this, It looks like we’re in the new normal when it comes to how email is performing.

Overall, it appears that Google isn't fairing as well as Facebook during this time. Their CPMs are much cheaper across nearly every industry. However, this is a great opportunity for arbitrage should your company want to run CPC campaigns.

JUNE

This week, we were joined by Seth Goldman, the CEO of UrbanStems—a direct to consumer company that offers freshly cut, impeccably styled flowers. Seth joined Ryan and Joe, both of whom he's worked with in the past, to discuss some of the key strategies that marketers are pursing over the most recent weeks. This includes everything from how to approach marketing as COVID-19 spikes again, to strategies to help minority customers as protests continue to rage on. Unsurprisingly, they also covered marketing best practices to support LGBTQ+ peoples throughout June—which has been officially celebrated in the United States as Pride Month for just over 20 years. In our weekly poll, we found that the majority of respondents were celebrating Pride in a public manner. However, not all were. If you're one of the 44% who don't do anything, consider a couple of the following strategies to implement.

Craft your messaging to Pride

I know this may seem somewhat obvious, but it wasn't to many people on the webinar with us today. The most important thing for you to do during Pride Month is to craft your messaging to this time that celebrates a section of the US population that doesn't experience the same protections and legal privileges as heterosexual Americans. But this doesn't mean you're messaging should be depressing. On the contrary, many people are having a hard time right now. Instead craft your messaging to reflect how much you care about this community. Better yet, host a money-raising initiative for LGBTQ+ peoples like UrbanStems is doing to help show your customers and employees you're putting your money where your mouth is when it comes to supporting this group.

Create a special box-opening experience

This is not just a great idea to do for Pride, it's great to do any time you're sending your products to customers. We all know that many of us aren't the Amazons of the world. We can't offer basement level prices or 24-hour shipping for pennies on the dollar. So what can we do to showcase the added value our products provide? One thing we can do is to create a really special box-opening experience for our customers. Make it feel as though they're opening a present. In doing so, put time and consideration into the design of the box that you send, also include fun copy on the outside and inside of the box. If possible, add in a few cheap, free add-ons like bumper stickers or branded merch. Each of these things will help show your customers how much you care.

Create a Pride partnership

Here's another example of something that's good for marketers to do throughout the entire year. However, it's especially prescient a thing to do right now. There are many non-profits who are looking for funds to help them stay afloat throughout this really uncertain time. Partner with them to help share some of your profits and showcase that you care about Pride month initiatives. If you're not sure where to start, partner together with a brand that is complementary to your product offerings. You can use this partnership to create unique bundles for both of your brands. These unique bundles can command more money for your business because they're a limited time offer. This will give you a higher average order value and pass more money to the non-profit.

Pay close attention to your creative

One thing that Seth, Ryan, and Joe specifically hit on was how to approach creative during this time—and we love Seth's approach. Instead of staying with their normal slogans and messaging, they re-did 100% of their copy in March to better speak to what was going on around them in the world. And this hasn't changed over the months. They've done the same as protests have ramped up and they've created specific messaging for campaigns that support their Pride initiatives. While it may take more time in the short-run to do this, it will end up paying dividends to your brand in the long run because it will show your prospects and consumers that you're keyed into the times and interested in helping them navigate this new normal we've found ourselves in.

What to do about the Facebook boycott?

As you may or may not know, many companies are deciding to boycott Facebook ads throughout July to protest their claimed inability to censor hate speech and their proliferation of misinformation. Here at BounceX, we don't disagree with many of the things that these companies are fighting for when protesting Facebook. However, we suggest you do this very tactically. For large corporations, shutting off their Facebook Ads for a month will only hit 1% or less of their sales. We know that many of you push much larger budgets into your Facebook campaigns and see a much larger portion of your revenue coming from this channel. If you do protest Facebook, make sure it won't take down your business too. If you don't, be sensitive in how you market on the channel.

SHOWING SUPPORT

MARKETING STRATEGIES FOR PRIDE MONTH

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

There are a ton of companies helping to celebrate Pride right now. From Forever 21 to Morphe, Adidas to Quay Sunglasses and so many more. But in keeping tune with the previous weeks, we're focusing on how UrbanStems is helping support. There's a couple things that they do really well here. The first is that they include a Pride Month section in their category drop-down, making it much easier for site visitors to find. Secondly, they theme the banner on their website to Pride, while also keeping it in line with their product suite by featuring a rainbow made of flowers. On individual product images they include a rainbow banner to show you which ones are pride related. Why is this important? Well, once you click into the product you see copy letting you know that $5 from each sale is going to support the Trevor Project. Overall, a great onsite experience that makes it clear to anyone who is visiting that their brand is in support of Pride Month.

URBANSTEMS

LGBTQ+ SUPPORT

URBANSTEMS

LGBTQ+ SUPPORT

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

Overall, it appears that Google isn't fairing as well as Facebook is during this time. Their CPMs are much cheaper across nearly every industry and retailer type. However, this is a great opportunity for arbitrage should your company want to run CPC campaigns.

June

Craft your messaging to Pride

Create a special box-opening experience

Create a Pride partnership

Pay close attention to your creative

What to do about the Facebook boycott?

SHOWING SUPPORT

MARKETING STRATEGIES FOR PRIDE MONTH

Now that blackout Tuesday is over, everyone’s advertising on Facebook is up again 50-60% relative to before COVID-19. However, it will be interesting to see how many brands stop spend during July’s boycott.

Similar trends can be seen for pure-play eCommerce brands. It appears that these brands are increasing their Facebook spend this week to hit July 4th sales goals before people begin to Facebook in July.

Email has settled in above where it was before April and is seeing pretty steady open and click rates over the past three months. Owned channels in general are doing really well right now for retailers.

We’re starting to finally get into the crux of summer as we come up on July 4th weekend. Even still, we're seeing website performance and conversion rates 10-20% above April, which is great for retailers.

JUNE

We're now solidly into our third month of running Marketing Pulse Lives, and we don't plan on slowing down in the near future. This week, we were joined by Chelsea Grayson, the former CEO of True Religion & American Apparel—who is also consulting regularly with BounceX. She joined Joe and Ryan to lend her years of industry experience to help provide strategies for retailers and eCommerce marketers as we head into the onset of Q3. One of the main topics they discussed was the Facebook Ads boycott, which asks advertisers to not run any spend throughout Facebook through July. We asked our attendees what they were planning to do and it appears that many of you are planning not to participate in the boycott because of the adverse affects it could have on your business. We understand this mindset, but we also feel that many retailers should look into what the boycott would mean to their brand, their employees, and their customers. Below, we dive into that in a little more detail, along with some other great strategies from Ryan, Joe, & Chelsea.

Approaching the July Facebook Ads boycott

As mentioned above, many brands are boycotting Facebook Ads in July to protest against their perceived proliferation of misinformation and far-right content on the site. Here at BounceX, we fully support the reasoning behind this boycott. However, we recognize that the boycott may not be the best choice for every brand. On the one hand, if you have a young, liberal, and diverse customer base, then you should consider enacting a boycott at least for some of July. However, this should only be done if it doesn't greatly affect your sales. If you rely on Facebook to drive a significant portion of sales, then the boycott likely isn't something for you to consider.

Merge branding and performance marketing

One thing that Chelsea mentioned, which I'm sure we all have experience with, is the practice of eCommerce companies to split their branding and performance marketing efforts into different. But these departments should not be separated. Branding is, in and of itself, about building a connection with your customers. One of the simplest ways for your performance marketing efforts to drive more sales for your business is for your target customers to feel an emotional connection with what is being served to them. Having branding and performance marketing work together to test out what works best to create this connection that drives sales for your brand.

Include accurate, customer-reflective images in advertising

This idea, may well now be more top of mind than ever, but it's something that we need to keep reminding ourselves about. The fact of the matter is, that many marketing teams across eCommerce are predominantly white and straight. But this doesn't mean that your customer base reflects those demographics. Yet, we still see the majority of advertising featuring those specific demographics. If thats the case for you, it's time to reassess your advertising and bring in a more diverse set of people to model with your products. During this tumultuous time, it will engender a sense of authenticity with your target customer base that will go a long way.

Don't think of marketing as a cost center

One thing we've hit on a bit, but that Chelsea and Joe did an excellent point explaining today, was that brands need to stop thinking of their marketing department as cost centers. During COVID, we've seen a lot of brands slash marketing resources. This is the wrong thing to do. Not only will it limit your performance driving programs, brining down revenue, it will also likely affect the amount of profit you're seeing because you're not able to bring in a steady stream of prospects and customers. Take advantage of the fact that CPMs are down across the board for online channels and push more spend behind your digital marketing efforts at this time.

Increasing brand loyalty during COVID

As we all know, our most valuable customers are our repeat customers, who cost much less to target and provide a longterm, lifetime value for our brands. But getting these users to come back and convert during COVID-19 can be tough. In fact, Mckinsey & Company estimated that retailers lost an average of 20% of their repeat business during this time—with it potentially being more. Do not give your customers an excuse to move to a new brand. Make sure you have everything in stock (even if it ends up costing you in the short run) because it will mean you keep customers away from looking at other brands and potentially purchasing from them for a long time.

SOCIAL WOES

APPROACHING THE FACEBOOK ADS BOYCOTT

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

As always, we're highlighting a company that is currently doing an absolutely stellar job with some aspects of their marketing. This week, that company is Blade, the private helicopter and jet company that is used by many coastal elites to get up and down the seaboard. Blade's product is entirely wrapped up in the travel sector, so they've been incredibly focused on how they can maintain membership and revenue in their company throughout the pandemic. And we love what they did. Instead of hiding from the issue, they faced it head on. They launched a unique landing page that describes how they're keeping their fleet safe. Additionally, they provide relevant imagery throughout, which serves to assuage the fear of a lot of potential customers because it shows that they aren't just doing small cleans. Rather, they're taking this incredibly seriously and cleaning everything from top to bottom. Great job to them for showcasing this front and center on their site.

BLADE

FLY ME TO THE MOON

BLADE

FLY ME TO THE MOON

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

June

Approaching the July Facebook Ads boycott

Merge branding and performance marketing

Include customer-reflective images in advertising

Don't think of marketing as a cost center

Increasing brand loyalty during COVID

SOCIAL WOES

APPROACHING THE FACEBOOK ADS BOYCOTT

Watch More Episodes

Website conversions and revenue performance is starting to trend back down a bit towards what we were seeing before the stimulus checks came out in the middle of April. However, we’re still seeing performance higher than what we were right after COVID-19.

Email revenue and conversion rates peaked in April and May as people received their stimulus checks. But, they've settled in now to a regular performance level. Our data is showing them at around 20-30% higher than what we saw at the beginning of April.

CPMs for Facebook in California have dropped dramatically in July. In fact, the average CPM has dropped nearly 60% in the first few weeks of the month alone. This has directly led to an increase in average CPAs retailers are seeing on the platform.

Facebook spend for retailers is proceeding at a normal rate—with barely any brands turning off or lessening their spend in any dramatic manner. This is surprising considering the nationwide boycott of Facebook ads many companies are doing right now.

JULY

This week, Ryan and Joe were joined by TJ Papp, Senior Vice President Global Brand, Digital Brand, & DTC at Kenneth Cole Productions. TJ has been working with both Ryan and Joe for a long time and was able to break down any professional barriers, cut through the jargon, and discuss with our team which strategies they need to focus on right now. The most present topic this week had to do with how retailers are choosing to measure the success of their marketing efforts as we relaunch campaigns with COVID here to stay and the stock market performing higher than expected. While many retailers are focused on a myriad of different KPIs (as you can see below), TJ made sure to point out that the most important thing for online businesses to focus on right now is their ability to turn one-time purchasers into repeat customers. With this in mind, let's dive into some of the key strategies you can implement to do just that.

Gaining more repeat customers

Determining your product line

Surprise & delight your customers

TJ jumped in during our discussion to reveal how retailers can turn first-time visitors into long-term customers. Or rather, he revealed a common mistake that many retailers make when trying to do that. Instead of immediately trying to send marketing messaging out to customers to get them to come back, says TJ, you should be focused on unifying and stitching your data together. You'll then be able to take insights from this to help your marketing team understand what messaging, format, channel, and more, works best to convince customers to convert again and again.

Focus on tangible utilities

When it comes to increasing brand loyalty or onsite conversions, any retailers try to boil the ocean. Try not to do this. Instead, go through your own check out process. look at the 5-10 aspects of your site that customers interact with most and figure out ways that you can improve the experience for your customers. This includes everything from the landing page, to the checkout, to the unboxing experience. Optimizing each of these stages will help build affinity between your customer and your brand and will increase the likelihood of them coming back and converting again.

Above all, continue testing

As eCommerce marketers, we're all incredibly interested in the KPIs that will help us increase sales and profitability for our brands. But many of us forego initial groundwork for vendors who can just give us flat KPIs. This is great but it doesn't tell the whole story. As TJ mentioned, you'll have a lot more success reaching and converting customers if you continually A/B test different advertising, copy, email, and other marketing options. Focus on running multivariate tests that, while a bit more time consuming, can give you a better sense of which levers to pull to increase sales.

INCREASING LTV

TURNING ONE-TIME BUYERS TO REPEAT SHOPPERS

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

Many retailers that we've spoken to used to spend a lot of their time focused on connecting with their customers in-store or in the real world. But that's just not possible anymore with the pandemic still raging across much of the United States. Savvy brands are finding ways around this by extending their brand into the homes of their customers. One great example of this is Amazon's Camp Prime. Through Camp Prime, Amazon has partnered with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America to offer families and young children access to activities, books, videos, and more that simulate what a child might actually do in a summer camp scenario. This is a great way to help customers during this uncertain time without pushing your brand on them in ways that may leave a sour taste.

CAMP PRIME

BRAND EXTENSION

CAMP PRIME

BRAND EXTENSION

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

JULY

Gaining more repeat customers

Determining your product line

From here, Ryan asked TJ what the best strategy is for retailers to determine the most effective product entry point for their brand. For TJ and the team, it's all about the data from the ads that you serve. Look to the ads you serve on Facebook to see which products result in the highest click-through and conversion rate individually. This will give you a short list of products within each of those two buckets. From there, you can run A/B tests for each product to determine which combination of creative and messaging leads to the highest performance for your business.

Surprise & delight your customers

We've mentioned this a lot in our live Marketing Pulses (if you haven't tuned in, sign up above!), but we haven't mentioned it a lot in our recaps. One thing TJ mentioned that many brands tend to forget is the necessity to surprise and delight your customers. Without this, you run the risk of losing them to your direct competitors. A simple way to do this is through customer support. Email your top 1-5% of customers with a VIP email that goes directly to the top of your customer service queue. This will show them you care by telling them you are invested in helping solve their issues.

Focus on tangible utilities

Above all, continue testing

INCREASING LTV

TURNING ONE-TIME BUYERS TO REPEAT SHOPPERS

For eCommerce, we’re also seeing that July is a bit slower. And it’s slower across revenue rates, conversion rates, Facebook spend, and Google spend. So it’s a lot lower, but this does offer opportunity for arbitrage.

Facebook CPMs are trading almost completely equally on mobile devices as they are on Desktop. This is a recent trend update that has been taking place as the summer has set in. Instagram, however, is still trading much lower.

Email revenue and conversion rate is driving a bit down right now. Although, it is still up around 10-20% since before COVID-19 so email is still a great channel for you to use for your different marketing channels.

Seeing a malaise after July 4th, it’s because there aren’t a lot of events to go to and there isn’t a lot of travel happening right now. So, all of this couple with government money running out, is causing a drop on conversions.

JULY

This was episode 24 of our weekly marketing pulse and we were once again led by Ryan and Joe—who were joined by Sandro Rocko, the CEO and founder of Sanzo, an Asian inspired sparkling water company. This week, we noticed that the summer lull has taken full affect and is likely showing itself in our weekly data pulls. Website conversions and revenue for retailers is slowly trending slightly downward the farther that we've gotten into July. However, email performance rates are still 10-20% higher than they were in the beginning of March. Use this time to explode into email and other owned channels for your business. Below, we recap a few other key strategies you wont want to miss directly from the mouths of Sandro, Ryan, and Joe.

COVID is changing online shopping, and not just for fashion brands

As we've previously made note, people's shopping habits are changing dramatically during COVID-19, and this isn't just true for retail brands or the Amazon's of the world. Sandro made note how online grocery shopping had seemingly raised to nearly 30% of the shopping population during COVID-19. While he doesn't expect this to last, he does feel that the pre-COVID rate of 3-6% will likely double. If you're in the grocery business, focus on digital efforts right now.

Think about your eCommerce packaging

Seeing, touching, and otherwise interacting with your products right now, likely isn't going to happen for many people. But that doesn't mean that they aren't interested in your brand. Adopt your eCommerce packaging and branding to reflect the consumer shift to online channels. Replicate the experience of being able to interact with your product by providing action shots, real life images, and a bunch of different angles to give your site visitors a feel for your offering.

BOPUS is your best friend right now

BOPUS is an industry term that means buy online, pick up in store. It's already grown in mass popularity in places hit hard by the pandemic and is likely to remain a large part of the modern shopping experience after this pandemic is over. If you have a back-log in shipping or products that people will want immediately, offer a pick-up-in-store or at the curb option so that you can continue to make sales without forcing anyone into a store who may be uncomfortable doing so.

Leverage UGC for your brand

One thing that Sandro also made sure to mention was how successful UGC has been for his brand during this time. And it makes sense. UGC at it's core is an authentic way to market your products. Now, more than ever, people are looking for brands to be authentic. Spend a few hours each week on your social media sites searching for people who may be hashtagging your brand. Then, slide into their DMs and ask if you can feature their post. Most people will be happy to say yes.

Employ messaging that speaks to your brand right now

Speaking back to authenticity, make sure it's prevalent throughout all of your messaging. This includes emails, social channels, your website, and more. If you're brand didn't often address social issues before 2020, think before you post. Think about how it will be perceived. Remember, the goal is for you to provide help and support to your community at this time, not to come off like you're profiting from everything going on right now.

MARKETING FOR NOW

AVOIDING THE SUMMER SALES DROP

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

This week, we're taking out example directly from our friends at Sanzo who, as Ryan mentioned, did a fantastic job in less than two years designing their cans for consumers. As we've mentioned before, their designs are a fantastic way for them to surprise and delight their customers and give them a good experience with their branding. Something you can't see as well on this page is that they also offer a pop-up on their site. Not only is this a great way to gain more emails for their marketable list, it's also another way for them to continue that surprise and delight mentality by offering their customers discounts and free products for giving their emails over.

SANZO

CONSUMER BRANDING

SANZO

CONSUMER BRANDING

RETAILER SPOTLIGHT: STRATEGIES TO FOLLOW

JULY

Employ messaging that speaks to your brand now

COVID is changing online shopping, not just for fashion

Think about your eCommerce packaging

BOPUS is your best friend right now

Leverage UGC for your brand

MARKETING FOR NOW

AVOIDING THE JULY SALES SLUMP