#LTV SPOT newsletter

[oliverjones1]

Castlery: Proof that when you want something done right…

Castlery was founded by a group of young professional friends in Singapore who realized that none of them could find stylish, luxurious, and affordable home furnishings in their home country. The friends attended college, worked their first jobs abroad, and realized when they returned to Singapore their local retailers didn’t provide many options that fit their specific taste in furniture.

The founding team started in a 900 sq. ft basement office and grew the brand into a global powerhouse of furniture that appeals to young professionals in the market for a mid-range offering between Ikea and higher-priced, upscale furniture brands like West Elm.

Know where to send your prospecting ads (and to whom)

One of the benefits that Castlery has is that the brand has a defined audience - the exact demographic that the founders were in when they started it. In this interview with co-founder Declan Ee from CNA Luxury, Ee talks about how he and his friends noticed that there was no mid-tier option available between Ikea and high-cost furniture brands before they entered the industry.

Knowing that was their target market, the gender and age distribution for the brand’s site traffic as listed by Similar Web shows that they have found the customers they were seeking - young professionals, mostly female, and mostly in the 25-34 age bracket.

Their audience is already interested in competitor furniture brands, but the listing of the top 10 shows an important aspect of the competitive space for Castlery: the brands at the top of the list would be out of the budget range for many in their target demographic of young professionals.

By creating sleek, luxurious, and high-quality products, the brand appeals to its target customers more than those at the bottom of the list.

By offering their products at affordable prices with many bundle deals, coupons, and promotions, they’ve found the “sweet spot” within their competitive matrix. 

Some of the ads in their library only have 1 ad version, while others have 20, 30, or even 40. Some are ads for a single product, while others are ads for entire product lines. Some use influencers, others have bundle deals, coupon codes, or simply lead potential customers to a product line.

By using data and ad optimization, they can run different ads at different segments based on where they are in the prospecting funnel, what their interests are, or what their actions have indicated they are most likely in the market to purchase.

How to build your marketing mix

Marketing mix allocation is extremely important for a brand and should be constantly optimized based on where the most conversions and LTV SPOT increases are coming from.

Mobile is great and accounts for a large amount of traffic and sales for some brands, but that doesn’t automatically mean that it’s right for all brands. 

Likewise, social, search, display, email, or direct marketing should have budgets allocated according to the response that they deliver, not how cool the tech is or how familiar the marketing team is with that channel.

The marketing channels used by Castlery, and the traffic that those channels bring to the brand’s eCommerce website are smooth considering their significant numbers. This would indicate that their testing and results have borne out their marketing mix allocation and that the brand’s marketing team is putting its budgets in the right places.

If I were a betting man, I’d bet that the decision was made by the Castlery marketing team to bring prospective customers in to see the breadth of products the brand offers, along with the quality they deliver at mid-tier pricing.

Upsells can be one of the best aspects of ad funnels.

Once a well-run campaign and prospecting strategy converts potential customers into buying customers, how does a brand create an uplift or pivot into their other product lines?

Upsells within the sales or ad funnels are an excellent way to do this, especially if the brand knows a lot about its customers.

Young professionals aren’t too keen on sleeping on the single or full mattress that they probably had in college, and if they’re shopping at Castlery they probably know that a bedroom needs more than just a bed.

As a first-time purchaser, the brand doesn’t know a whole lot about my shopping habits or preferences, but it does know that every bed (for a young professional) needs a nightstand next to it.

The upsell offers that come with this bed both match the bedframe itself and provide me with options that can work for different budgets.

Retargeting that finds you where you spend your time.

To get a look under the hood of their sales funnel and retargeting strategies, I clicked on the link in one of their Facebook posts that also corresponds to one from the ad library within the middle-range of ads currently running (The Dalton Bed set).

An important point to note is that I purposely chose to use the Facebook Single Sign On (SSO) to create an account with Castlery to check out the item I’d chosen (The Dalton Bed set pictured above). Castlery gave me the option to use either Google or FB for my SSO, and the tech companies love it when you do this because it creates “stickiness” for their platforms.

Using this option means that people don’t have to remember or enter passwords for the hundreds of different eCommerce, tech, or other websites that they use often. This leaves people more inclined to continue to use those SSOs rather than individual passwords for each site, making them more inclined to use the platform for the SSO more often, and less likely to ditch those accounts in the future.

Despite using the FB SSO for checkout (after which I abandoned the cart and site entirely to see their retargeting), I scrolled and refreshed my FB feed several times looking for a Castlery retargeting ad that never came.

I checked my Gmail for an abandoned cart email, and it hadn’t come within the first half hour.

Logging on to YouTube, where I spend most of my time listening to news, interviews, and some podcasts (most of my social media experience - I’m not on FB much except to do these deep dives), I was hit with several layers of Castlery ads.

When I opened YouTube, the very first thumbnail that I was served was a Castlery ad.

I selected a video to watch (from a creator that I watch on a nearly daily basis) and was hit with a pre-roll ad from Castlery. This shows a relatively advanced level of retargeting, as it didn’t just send me ads on Facebook because I used that platform for the SSO and was currently logged on.

They began serving me ads, in multiple formats, on the platform where I spend the most time.

Some things are out of a brand’s control.

There has been a not-insignificant drop in the traffic and engagement for Castlery since October, and I don’t believe that has anything to do with the brand.

The global economy, along with stock markets, businesses, housing, etc, all have an economic and business cycle that business leaders - especially in the consumer product category - would be wise to always pay attention to.

Economic data shows that job growth is far lower than what was originally reported, credit cards in the West are maxed out, and delinquencies across all types of credit and loans are increasing rapidly.

Each of these data points shows a slowing economy and potential recession, wherein the target demographic for Castlery - young professionals - are likely to be some of the first casualties.

Given that the brand puts so much of its marketing mix allocation into paid search, I would imagine that a portion of its target demographic is in the process of tightening their wallets and budgets, which would make them less likely to be searching for new furniture online.

Can the Castlery team bring traffic & and engagement back up?

The downturns of the economic cycle are nothing new, yet it seems many companies and business leaders seem to be unprepared and surprised when it happens. This environment can either provide disaster or a “once in a lifetime” opportunity for your business, depending on several factors.

Two excellent quotes speak directly to this type of situation, so of course we’d like to share them in meme format for you now.

1.         Make hay while the sun shines.

2.         If you can be a lean cat in fat times, you can be a fat cat in lean times.

3.         At least one of the Castlery founding team members (Ee, the subject of the interview linked in the first section) was educated at the London School of Economics and started his career working in global finance and investment banking.

4.         If anyone is set to help an eCommerce company weather a global downturn, that type of founder would be needed in a senior leadership position.

5.         With their eCommerce and DTC focus, at least Castlery doesn’t have to worry about sharing margins with retail sales channels, so they have a lot more room to work with than other competitors may.

6.         With a 9600% traffic and search growth rate since 2019 and a stellar marketing machine behind them, we hope the brand can find a way to thrive in any environment that the future may bring.

How Can You Apply this?

How can we apply the lessons learned from the Castlery team’s marketing, investments, strategies, and wild success?

Applicable insights:

•          You don’t want your prospecting ads to be a “shotgun blast” into the ether. Take the time to map a potential customer journey germane to your target demographic to make an educated guess on where to reach them. After the first campaign, optimize and refine continuously.

•          In a perfect world, your marketing mix refinement should at some point deliver a relatively smooth chart when looking at your metrics. If there are major ups and downs across your traffic, engagement, and conversions, something is off.

•          Every ad or sales funnel should have an upsell offer. These can be a discount, bundle, or product that goes well with what the customer is purchasing - but it should be a part of every funnel.

•          Marketers have an unheard-of amount of access to data today, and retargeting technology is always getting better. Use the two together and ensure your retargeting efforts are data-driven.

•          The leadership and marketing teams for an eCommerce or DTC company should always be mindful of the economic and business cycle. Keep your eyes out for indicators so that you will know when a downturn (which will result in reduced sales across many industries) is coming.

[danpalomaorig]

Finally, a DTC eCommerce Newsletter that's not boring! LTV SPOT

If you're in eCommerce, you need to be reading the LTV SPOT newsletter. It's packed with valuable insights and strategies that you can implement immediately. The writing style is engaging and often hilarious, which makes it stand out from other industry newsletters. Highly recommend!

[competitorsfbads]

HOW TO FIND COMPETITORS FACEBOOK ADS (AND USE THEM TO YOUR ADVANTAGE)!

Do you want to find competitors Facebook ads? Let's learn it today! Step by step guide..

When it comes to crafting an industry leading Facebook ads strategy, it’s important to take stock of how your competitors are using the platform.

Understanding your competitor's strategies might sound time-consuming… and I hear you, “research” might not be one of the most fun tasks on your to-do list, but it’s an essential part of any great strategy.

Let me explain…

Understanding how your competitors are using Facebook ads can help you:

Save thousands of dollars by not making the same mistakes as them

See what ads break through the noise and drive results

Learn what messaging connects with your target audience

And more...

This information can help you to enhance your own strategy and create highly-profitable ads.

Want to know how to get started to find competitors Facebook ads?

Let me walk you through the best tactics and tools to research your competitors Facebook ads.

3 tools to help you find competitors Facebook Ads:

1. Facebook’s Info and Ads tool

What if I told you can look at every ad your competitors are currently running on Facebook? And as a bonus: What if I said that it takes just a few clicks?

Yep, it’s that easy.

As a way to increase transparency, Facebook allows users to view all ads a Page is currently running via the “Info and Ads” tab.

Here’s how it works:

1. Simply visit any Page. For this example, we’ll use Outback Steakhouse:

2. Click “Info and Ads” in the left-side menu:

3. You can now see any ads that Page is running:

2. AdEspresso’s Facebook Ad Examples

The team at AdEspresso has collected more than 170,000 Facebook ad examples from a range of industries.

You can search the database for ads specific to your industry and even search by brand name to single out competitors from within your niche. You can also filter results by placements and objectives if you’re looking for specific types of ads.

For example, searching for ‘sneakers’ returns some brilliant ad examples:

Once you’ve found an ad that you’re keen to dig deeper into, you can click on it to view an embedded version of the advert, the copy used, and the placement details.

3. Facebook’s “Why Am I Seeing This?” feature

Every ad you see on Facebook contains a goldmine of data about how that advertiser is reaching you.

To access it, simply click on ‘...’ icon in the top right corner of an advert and click the “Why am I seeing this?” option.

From here you can see why that ad is showing up within your feed. For example, I was shown the above advert from Moo.com because they are targeting a lookalike audience and I share some common traits with its customers:

Using this simple trick you can start to unravel your competitors Facebook ads targeting strategies.

But wait, how do I see ads from competitors within my feed?

There isn’t an exact science to this as the Facebook algorithm is pretty complex. But a couple of ways you can encourage ads from your competitors to show up in your feed include:

1. Liking competitor Pages and ads

Many advertisers target their ads towards people who already like their Page and this is a good way to send signals to Facebook that you’d like to see content from this brand in your feed. If you also engage with their ads (react, click, comment) when you see them there’s a chance they’ll show up in your feed more often.

2. Visiting competitor sites

Checkout out your competitors’ websites is another great way to send signals to Facebook that you’d like to see their content, and with many brands running re targeting ads to website visitors this

3. Joining mailing lists

Many advertisers target Facebook users based on existing email and customer lists their email. For example, these are all advertisers who advertise to me based on my details being a part of their list:

(Find yours here).

If you sign up to your competitor's mailing lists, there’s a higher chance you’ll see their ads (if they use this type of targeting), plus you can also keep an eye on their email marketing strategies at the same time. Win-win!

3 Tips on using your competitors Facebook Ads to grow your business

So we now know how to spy on your competitors Facebook Ads, it’s time to put that new-found data into action. Here are four steps to using this information to grow your business:

1. Know what you want to learn

Before you start your competitor research, think about what you want to achieve from this work.

If you go into research without clear goals, you can waste hours of valuable time gaining insights that won’t benefit your business.

Set 1-3 clear goals, and focus your research on those goals specifically.

For example, you might want to look at how your competitors are using video ads to boost product awareness.

In this case, you might want to specifically analyze things like:

Video length

How product(s) are featured in the video

Do they use square, horizontal or vertical videos

Knowing your goals will enable you to remain laser-focused during your research to ensure you’re not wasting time researching every single detail about every competitor’s ad.

2. Click-through to landing pages

Successful Facebook advertising campaigns revolve around much more than just the ad you put together and publish — the landing page that you drive traffic to also plays a major role in your conversion and success rates.

With each ad, you see, ensure you click-through to the landing page and see how your competitors are guiding customers through their funnel to making a purchase.

For example, this advert from Sleeknote talks about a feature of its product:

And drives traffic to a landing page specifically focused on the feature from the ad:

If you look closely at that landing page you can also begin to see how it tries to convert website visitors into users. There are two CTAs on the page as soon as you visit (and these remain visible as you scroll):

And more CTAs appear as you progress through the page:

When you’re looking at competitor landing pages, think about:

What’s the selling point? Take a look at the main selling point they're focused on across the page, or if it’s an e-commerce product page, look at how they’re describing the product: What language do they use? How do they sell the benefits?

Do they have any offers? In the above example, Sleeknote is offering a 7-day free trial to customers, and often, ads are followed up with offers to boost conversions. Make a note of any tactics you see here to keep in your arsenal for the future.

What are the CTAs? If it’s an e-commerce page, the main CTA might simply be “Buy now”, but for other goods and services you might spot a bunch of variations like “Book a demo”, “Schedule an appointment”. Check out what your competitors end goal if with this funnel.

3. Run experiments based on your research

Your research will help you generate a number of hunches about what will work for your business on Facebook ads, but we can’t rely on those entirely.

Take what you’ve learned from your competitors and create a number of experiment ideas that you can test.

A simple way to frame experiments is this formula:

If we (experiment idea), then (expected results), because (assumptions).

For example:

If we create short 10-second video ads, then can build an audience of people to retarget with bottom-of-the-funnel ads, because video ads get more engagement than other ad-types and we’ve seen this work for [competitor].

Or:

If we target ads to our previous customers, then we can increase the lifetime value (LTV) of a customer and encourage repeat purchases, because we know these people are happy to buy from us, so will be more receptive to sales-focused, bottom-of-the-funnel ads.

Use this framework to generate as many ideas as you can come up with — go wild (but aim for at least 20). Remember: sometimes the best ideas are the ones that aren’t so obvious.

Once you have a list of ad experiments, prioritize them so that you know where to get started.

One way to prioritize experiments is by using “ICE” scores. ICE stands for impact, confidence, ease:

Impact: If this experiment works, how will it impact your business?

Confidence: How likely do you think this experiment is to succeed?

Ease: How simple will this be to implement?

Give every experiment a score out of 10 for each of these categories and the experiments with the highest scores are the ones you should prioritize first.

You’re all set, but remember…

You’re now all set to dive head-first into your competitors Facebook Ads and research what makes them successful (plus where they could improve… no brand is perfect, right?).

But remember: What you learn here should just be a guideline to help you formulate your Facebook ads strategy. What works for your competitors, won’t automatically work for you.

Use your leanings to generate some ideas and experiments that you can put into action to figure out what works best for your business. And don't forget to subscribe to the newsletter for the exciting posts!

Originally appeared at: https://blog.sociallyin.com/competitors-facebook-ads

[filipeteimuraz]

Push Strategies for Getting More Visitors

A push strategy usually involves interrupting the content that is being consumed.

You aren’t the tweet they want to read, but instead, you’re the tweet ad that they read on their stream. You aren’t the YouTube video they want to watch, but you are the pre-roll ad that they watch to get to the content they were after in the first place.

Pull is analogous to Hansel and Gretel. The sweets lure the children into the house on their own accord. Push is analogous to the Three Little Pigs. The wolf just huffs and puffs and breaks into their homes. You can pull them into your world, or you can push yourself into their world. That’s the main difference between pull and push tactics for getting visitors.

Understanding Lifetime Value of a Customers

The lifetime value of a customer (LTV) is basically the amount of money that you are going to make from a customer throughout their life. If you built an e-commerce app and you profit an average of $100 per customer, per year, and they typically buy for 5 consecutive years before they get bored with your inventory and stop shopping with you, then your LTV is $500.

This is important because another primary difference between pull and push tactics is that push tactics usually cost money. Going back to our example above, if a customer is worth $500 on average then it would be foolish to spend $501 to move someone through your funnel. You would ultimately lose $1 each time you retained a user. Keep this simple idea in mind with all of the tactics covered in this section.

1. Purchase Ads

It may not seem like growth hacking at first glance, but ads are definitely a place to hack the distribution of your product. Sure, if you just purchase ads without a strategy, void of creativity, doing nothing to gain an edge, and ignore the process of multivariate testing, then you will be like everyone else (and it probably wouldn’t be considered growth hacking). But that’s not what we’re going to do. Here are some things you must keep in mind as you approach this push tactic:

Understand Your Ad Platform Options

There are many different ways to purchase ads. Most people assume that there is just Facebook, Google, and Twitter, but there are so many more. You can also purchase ads on LinkedIn, which would make a lot of sense if you’re selling to corporate customers. There are niche ad networks such as Carbon (carbonads.net) or The Deck (decknetwork.net), both of which will allow you to target specific verticals. There is BuySellAds (buysellads.com) which allows you to purchase website banner ads, tweets, newsletter sponsorships, RSS includes, and even spots on mobile apps. There is a relatively new ad network that just focuses solely on email sponsorships called LaunchBit (launchbit.com). There is even a solution called Trada (trada.com) that will crowdsource the purchasing of your paid advertising and only take a cut if they exceed your goals. If you want to focus exclusively on mobile users then you can advertise using Tapjoy (tapjoy.com).

Here is a screenshot of Carbon, a niche ad platform.

Here is a screenshot of BuySellAds, one of the generic ad platforms.

This doesn’t even include the platforms that focus on retargeting. Retargeting gives you the ability to track users to your site and show your ads only to those people as they browse around the internet. Now, even your ads can be pre-qualified. If this sounds magical it’s because it is magical. In this space alone you have a number of platforms like AdRoll, Perfect Audience, and Retargeter.

Here is a screenshot of AdRoll, which was named the #1 advertising company by Inc. Magazine.

There has been an explosion of ad networks over the last few years. Some would argue we have too many ways to purchase ads. This can be a good thing if you are willing to investigate the options to find the ones that meet your needs.

Learn the Technical Details of Your Chosen Platform

Once you’ve found an ad platform that meets your specific needs then it will be imperative that you learn the technical details of their offering. The difference between making money or losing money could easily be the difference between knowing the technicalities or not. The most complicated and advanced platform is probably Google AdWords, and it could easily take months to truly master their product, but most of the other options can be learned in a weekend with a high degree of proficiency.

Buying Ads is a Business Model Competition

It’s always hard to know how much you should spend for a single click, or for a set of impressions, but the answer is actually a factor of your business model. If you are targeting the same audience as another company, but your business model is more efficient and your LTV is higher, then you can afford to pay more for the traffic without going upside down. The best thing you can do to win customers using ads is to have a great business model. It’s almost an unfair advantage because no amount of tips or tricks can overcome this one stronghold. If you can pay twice as much to acquire a customer then you have a very defensible strategy.

Consider the Various Personas of Your Customer

Your customers can probably be reached using various platforms. For instance, they are more than likely on Facebook and LinkedIn. You must then decide which persona they are utilizing when they want a product like yours. When someone is on Facebook they are thinking about friends and family. They are looking at photos of other people’s experiences. When people are on LinkedIn they are thinking about climbing the corporate ladder and how networking with others can help them reach their goals. If your product is for project management in agile environments then I wouldn’t choose Facebook, even though technically you could reach your demographic there. Yes, they would see your ad, but their mindset would be incorrect because you are introducing yourself to them in the wrong place. Always think about the persona your customers exhibit while using your particular product before choosing an ad platform.

Circumvent the Ad Networks When Possible

This tactic may not scale easily, but it is still well worth mentioning. You could go to BuySellAds (or other places) and buy banner ads on a particular blog that your audience reads. However, if you cut out the middleman (BuySellAds) and go directly to the owner of the blog then you can get cheaper rates for two reasons. First, BuySellAds is making a cut of every transaction, so if you go direct that is money that you can recoup without the blog owner losing anything. Second, you are able to negotiate. Very rarely is the lowest price and the advertised price the same thing. You can ask for a lower rate and often close a deal relatively simply.

If You Are Paying Per click Then Qualify Every Click

There are two ways to buy ads. First you can purchase them on a CPM basis, which means you pay for set number of impressions and it doesn’t matter how many clicks they get. Second, you can pay per click and this means that it doesn’t matter how many times your ad appears, you only pay when your ad is clicked. If you are paying per click then you don’t want people to click your ad unless they are seriously interested, because it costs you money every time they do. Luckily, there are things you can do to qualify clicks using the ad itself. Consider putting the price of your product in the copy so that people don’t click unless they are interested in spending money. Also, don’t use emotion to pull them in unless that same emotion will cause them to buy from you. Don’t put a picture of cute cat on your ad, just to get cat lovers to click on it, if your product doesn’t have something to do with cats.

Test Variations of Your Ad

One of the most fundamental lessons of ads is that you have no idea what your audience will respond to. You have to test multiple versions of the copy, multiple versions of the imagery, and then multiple combinations of the copy and imagery together. The numbers will tell you the truth about which ads you should be running, but your intuition or gut is probably not accurate.

2. Promo Swap

One of the easiest, and free, ways to drive traffic to your site is through cross promotions with other companies. If you find a company who is already serving your target demographic, and you wouldn’t be considered a threat to them, then there are plenty of ways that you could coordinate to promote each other. Here are some ideas to help you brainstorm possibilities:

Swap Tweets: Each company sends out a tweet to their followers about the other company.

Swap Facebook Posts: Each company writes a post on their Facebook page about the other company.

Dedicated Email Swap: Each company send out an entire email about the other company.

Sponsored Email Swap: Each company puts a “sponsored by” link in their existing newsletter, linking to the other company.

Ad Space Swap: Each company allows the other company to place a banner ad on their website or blog.

Pre-roll Video Swap: Each company gives away video ad space to the other company.

Giveaway Swap: Each company promotes a giveaway from the other company on their blog.

3. Affiliates

Another way to push people toward your site is by hiring affiliates. This is an arrangement where you pay someone every time they reach a certain goal for you, like getting a visitor to your site, or activating a member. An affiliate might use many of the tactics in this book, but you are paying them to do it instead of worrying about it yourself. Here are a few things to know if you are going to use this tactic:

Think Carefully About the Incentives

If you give an affiliate $100 for every new signup, but there is no clause that says the new signup has to stick around for a certain number of months, then you could find yourself in a situation with misaligned incentives. The affiliate would be rewarded for getting you low quality customers that cancel quickly because it doesn’t affect their profit either way. Create a system where the affiliate only benefits if you benefit.

Don’t Roll Your Own Affiliate Solution

There are a number of products that will allow you to easily get up and running on the technical side of creating an affiliate system, and on the acquisition side of finding affiliates to promote your product. There are products like Commission Junction that will connect you with affiliates, and products like Omnistar that actually track affiliate payouts.

Vet Every New Affiliate Early On

When someone becomes an affiliate for you then they are representing your business to some extent. The tactics they use, the language they employ, and their general style, is a reflection on you. They may not be an employee, but they will be the front of your brand for the people they reach. Choose your affiliates very carefully.

4. Direct Sales

I’m going to be honest, this is a hard one to categorize as a growth hacking tactic, but it is a way to get traffic at the top of the funnel so I would be remiss to completely ignore it. Direct sales teams do not work for every kind of product, but in some cases it is a worthwhile tactic. AppStack, a startup that creates mobile websites in conjunction with mobile ads for local businesses, was able to grow revenues to over 50k a month in a relatively short amount of time, and their primary strategy was direct telephone sales. I use them as an example because it’s hard to imagine a startup using this method, but some of them do, and it actually can work.

Key Takeaways

A push tactic usually involves interrupting the content that is being consumed.

Push tactics usually cost money.

Since money is involved with push tactics you must understand the lifetime value of your customers (LTV), so that you don’t spend more money on a customer then you’ll make from them.

We covered 4 push tactics: purchase ads, promo swap, affiliates, and direct sales.

http://www.quicksprout.com/push-strategy/

Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/04/push-strategies-for-getting-more.html

[martechadvisor-blog]

6 Digital Marketing Tips to Boost Ecommerce Sales

As ecommerce grows in the U.S., Digital River’s Jeff Dahlby shares six digital marketing strategies for driving traffic, streamlining the customer experience, and ultimately boosting online conversion and sales

According to Forrester Research, online sales in the United States are expected to rise 56 percent by 2020 and online holiday sales will reach $19 billion in 2017-up 12% from 2016. This is not surprising when you consider that 79% of shoppers have made purchases online. So how can merchants successfully grab a larger share of this ecommerce pie? Here are six digital marketing strategies for boosting ecommerce sales as we move into the holiday season.

Reduce those “Abandoned Carts”

As consumers browse around for the best online deals, **it is not uncommon for them to place something in their carts, get distracted and leave the site**. Marketers can re-engage these shoppers at a later time with a strong “abandoned cart” strategy that includes targeted ads, reminder emails, incentives or other promotions and offers. For example, if consumers have already given their email addresses, send them a reminder within 24 hours offering a coupon code for 10 percent off to complete their order. Alternatively, try intent-based, predictive “wait, don’t leave” messaging, which provides an immediate incentive to get shoppers to purchase now rather than leave your site.

SEO is More About Quality than Quantity

One underutilized strategy to improve a search engine optimization (SEO) program is to move a small handful of select keywords up the search engine results page rather than trying to rank a large quantity of keywords. When a selection of important keywords leap from sixth to third position on the SERP, the differences in click-through rates can be noticeably large and impactful for commerce-focused sites. **Keywords need not be ranked in the first position to move the needle**.

To model the potential revenue impact of propelling select keywords up the SERP by three positions, marketers can follow this basic formula and then map out their plan of attack. Begin by identifying high volume terms that rank low on the first page of the SERP-these will be your targeted terms. Multiply any resulting website traffic increase (from bumping those keywords up the SERP) by the conversion rate for the site, and then multiply that new value by the average order value. This approach is manageable, less time consuming, can be accurately measured, and places the focus on moving quality rather than a quantity of keywords.

Strategically Compete on Price

Under pressure from discounters and online marketplaces, direct-to-consumer brands need to rethink their pricing strategies. When it comes to their D2C online stores, they need to weigh the importance of earning new customers through market competitive pricing relative to MSRP, which can fuel their business for the long-term. **Use analytics to find the sweet spot in pricing relative to a low-cost benchmark** like Amazon. Also, selectively use flash sales to drive impulse shopping based on limited time and quantity, but be sure to track long-term customer behavior to ensure profitability and LTV metrics are met.

Focus on Value

Steep discounts alone don’t always guarantee a sale. In an economy flooded with special offers and limited-time sales, consumers can never feel completely certain that there isn’t a better deal out there. This is why it is so important that brands deliver added value beyond cost savings. The savviest brands offer white-glove customer service, special product bundles, loyalty programs, newsletters, personalized product recommendations, compelling interactions with the brand, and more.

Don’t Ignore “Leaks” in Your Conversion Funnel

**You must remove unnecessary steps in the path to conversion or suffer the impact to revenue**. Marketers should focus on conversion funnel optimization because it can impact 100 percent of the orders coming through a site. Is it really necessary to require account creation during checkout? Guest checkout functionality can lift conversion rates 3-10 percent. Do you require shoppers to fill in both billing and shipping information? Can you remove all non-required form fields? This will minimize the amount of information consumers must enter, increasing their speed to checkout.

Marketing Needs to Embrace Global Promotional Calendars

With each passing season, the boundaries between international online holidays continue to blur. For example, on China’s Singles Day “holiday” on November 11, 2016, shoppers from 235 countries shelled out a whopping $17.7 billion in just one day as part of the fever to snap up great deals. This world record in online spending puts a spotlight on the global ecommerce opportunity. To build on this momentum, brands need to embrace promotional calendars that consist of a melting pot of global holidays versus events that were once defined by geographical borders. Today, European shoppers expect promotions on their local sites during U.S. Black Friday and Cyber Monday while American shoppers now seek local deals on other international holidays such as China’s Singles Day. Brands should adjust their promotional calendars moving forward or risk missing out on sales.

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor

[oliverjones1]

Tactacam: From tinkering in the garage to a massive success story

Tactacam: From tinkering in the garage to a massive success story

Most marketing agencies, product development teams, and executive leadership for large companies in the US are located in the coastal areas or big cities (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc), and don’t really have a solid understanding of what makes middle America “tick.”

Every once in a while, a company comes along that has that understanding, and it’s usually because the founders themselves are from the proverbial “flyover country” of America. Today, we’ll talk about one such company that started with a single type of niche product - hunting cameras - and how their understanding of what their target demographic wants leading to a 99x traffic growth over 4 years for camera manufacturer Tactacam.

One type of product can be enough.

One might look at Tactacam and wonder how a company that really only offers one product - cameras built for outdoor enthusiasts - could achieve a 99x growth rate in traffic and massive business success.

Those who understand the outdoor enthusiast economy know better.

$536.7 billion was spent by Americans on outdoor gear in 2022, and that’s a trend that has risen pretty much every year as long as it has been tracked. Tactacam is not the first type of camera that is targeted towards outdoor enthusiasts (GoPro), but the brand focuses on a totally different Total Addressable Market (TAM).

While GoPro focuses mainly on adrenaline sports (mountain bikers, skiers, etc), Tactacam targets hunters, conservationists, farmers/ranchers, off-grid residents, RV owners, campers, boaters, and fishermen.

It may surprise some city slickers who read this LTV Spot newsletter that 29% of the traffic for a company that focuses on the above activities would be female, but it’s not surprising for those who grew up in the Midwest or South.

What is surprising is the age distribution that is relatively even from age 25 all the way up to over 65.

And while we call the wide suite of Tactacam offerings “one” type product, we do understand the major differences between their multiple lines of that type of product.

While they are all essentially cameras, the variations sold by Tactacam are each designed for a different purpose:

Many of the products listed above will be targeted and sold to the same general audience - think Iowa or Texas vs New York City or Los Angeles - but even that population has to be segmented for offers based on interests.

The very first Tactacam was an early beta version of the brand’s best-selling action came series. Founder Ben Stern went to school for videography, and his grandfather made fun of him for telling a story about a buck he shot while hunting but not having any video to back up the story.

Ben used what he’d learned in school to build a very basic camera that could be mounted to his rifle, took it out hunting to test and refine it, and began to share it with friends. It soon became so popular that the company was born, and the product lines grew from the action camera to other offerings which facilitate all of the activities listed above.

Ben knew his customers, knew the current demands that were not being met within the marketplace, and got to work building an outdoor camera empire.

Patents & IP can make you primed for a buyout or acquisition offer.

As of this writing, Tactacam has 12 patents for its technology, from the cameras to mounts and stabilizers. Some entrepreneurs go into business out of a love for what they do or building teams, but some just want to make as much money as humanly possible - and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Getting patents for your products or ideas can be an expensive, time-intensive, and bureaucratic process, but if your product is new or novel it can be well worth your time to do so.

And if your goal is to see your company eventually acquired by a larger brand or private equity firm - after which you can cash out and live the rest of your days on a beach sipping mai tai cocktails - having the rights to IP or patents that can be sold or licensed to other companies is a good way to do it. Patents & IP can make you primed for a buyout or acquisition offer

As of this writing, Tactacam has 12 patents for its technology, from the cameras to mounts and stabilizers. Some entrepreneurs go into business out of a love for what they do or building teams, but some just want to make as much money as humanly possible - and there’s nothing wrong with that.

And if your goal is to see your company eventually acquired by a larger brand or private equity firm - after which you can cash out and live the rest of your days on a beach sipping mai tai cocktails - having the rights to IP or patents that can be sold or licensed to other companies is a good way to do it.

Know what your customer wants and where & when they want it.

The core of marketing is understanding how to reach your customer with the perfect marketing tripod of, “right time, right place, right message.” Tactacam is a hybrid DTC eCommerce company with most of its products sold through retail channels because it knows how its customer’s shop.

Additionally, and most importantly, they know where their customers shop:

If you know anything about hunting, fishing, or outdoor enthusiast culture, you know the brands listed above. Tactacam also has deals with outfitters, which are companies that lead and “outfit” hunters with gear and supplies on hunting trips.

Each of these tactics - outfitters and retail channels - allows the brand to meet its target consumers in the places where they are already seeking gear for the activities Tactacam products are used for.

If a hunter or fly fisherman doesn’t even know that Tactacam exists but is provided with one of the brand’s action cams for a big game hunt in the backcountry of Montana, there’s a better-than-average chance that hunter will go home and buy one for themselves.

You can also see this conscious tactic play out where Tactcam doesn’t offer sales channels:

Despite the social media focus, the brand doesn’t have stores on any of its social media platforms. In fact, the links included in these videos point you to the brand’s website, but the only products that can be purchased on that site are the Reveal brand cameras (and not the flagship action cameras):

Outdoor enthusiasts are more prone than other groups to be in the “trust, but verify camp.” They are more likely to want to put their hands on an expensive product before buying it, especially if it’s going to be a part of their trusted kit or hunting load out.

By putting its products on the shelves in trusted retail channels, the brand gets additional marketing through shelf placement, which is noticed when its target customer is already shopping for the gear they need.

It also forges alliances with these trusted retail brands.

And as stated above, the brand’s customers aren’t likely to buy something just because they saw a cool ad or post for it on social media.

Know how to talk to your customer and where.

Besides the retail sales channel, where else does Tactam put its marketing focus?

Direct, organic search and paid search are the top 3 channels for the brand, with the remaining 3 marketing disciplines (referrals, social, and display ads) coming in far behind.

With their focus on creating social media videos for content, it’s not hard to understand why a lot of the traffic comes from mobile users:

Notice where the paid vs organic is. The target demographic for this brand may see things they like on social, but will go to their desktop to perform searches, and likely when it’s time to buy. They aren’t as likely as urban customers to conduct a purchase via mobile.

Let’s have a look at the keywords that Tactacam targets in its search efforts:

Most of these keywords focus on the brand name, which could indicate it’s a strategy built to ensure the brand catches people who either hear about the products from a friend (word-of-mouth, some of the most powerful marketing in the world), or who see products somewhere and decide to perform their own search.

What about the search ads that Tactacam runs?

Notice the search ads also focus on the brand name (Tactacam) or brand name + products.

The brand knows that it’s already a “known quantity” in the industry and is pointing potential customers in the right direction to do their own research on Tactacam products.

Since the brand owns a dozen patents for its technology and products, they don’t have to worry as much about knockoff competitors as other brands would.

Social can help brands build communities.

There are many social groups that were extremely popular in the days of our parents and grandparents that have fallen on hard times because not as many people these days are inclined to be a part of those groups.

In certain demographics, however, the desire to commune with like-minded individuals is as strong - and even stronger, in some circumstances - than ever.

The Tactacam potential customer demographic is one of those groups, and the brand has capitalized on that quite well.

With over 83k ratings for the Tactacam REVEAL app bringing it to a nearly 5-star average, the brand has a lot of “social proof” to help bring in customers and new users for the app - which is required to use the functionality for the brand’s products.

The brand also has communities within each of its social media pages:

Retargeting and upsells.

Even though Tactacam follows an eCommerce/retail hybrid, the company still incorporates the tactics that we at LTV Spot constantly say that every brand with an online presence should: upsells in the sales funnel and retargeting.

Let’s go down a quick sales path for the Tactacam products that are offered on the website. Remember, the company doesn’t sell many of its products on the website and has no social media shops.

I clicked a link in one of the brand’s social media posts, which took me to the product line page of the website:

I selected one of the products that were neither the most nor least expensive:

And was immediately hit with the accessory upsell offers that would go well with this product:

After selecting to purchase the item above and abandoning the cart, I began to check my various social media accounts for retargeting efforts, and quickly found this:

While the brand didn’t end up in any pre-roll ads on YouTube, it did get this tile icon sponsored on my YouTube dashboard, which would have been a good location for it.

I didn’t find any more retargeting efforts but given that the demographic most likely to purchase these products will do so through the stores listed above, it’s not hard to see why retargeting wouldn’t be one of their greatest ads spends.

Even if it’s minor, every brand should have comprehensive upsell and retargeting strategies baked into its marketing allocation.

The Marketing Machine and Numbers Behind Tactacam:

Tactacam has had 137 different installs into its website tech stack over the years but is currently down to only 42. This very well could have been a shift in strategy dictated by the private equity firm that bought the company out, but it certainly highlights a change:

Nearly all of the brand’s former advertising programs were removed (DoubleClick, Google Ads, Facebook Advertising, Pubmatic, Google Remarketing), but the video platforms remained (Vimeo, YouTube).

It very well may have been the PE firm that moved Tactacam from a pure e-commerce business model to a hybrid e-commerce and retail model, which would certainly necessitate a reduction in online ad spend.

Additionally, once the brand started seeing a meteoric rise within the closely-knit communities that make up its target customer group, the need for advertising greatly reduced - as happy customers are doing it for them.

The employee headcount ranges depending on where you look, with ZoomInfo reporting <25 employees and GrowJo reporting 160. Pitchbook puts the number at 326, and that platform is likely to have the most accurate numbers based on the LBO deal from the PE firm that bought Tactacam.

Revenue numbers also vary, and as a privately held firm Tactacam doesn’t have to report them as a public company would. ZoomInfo puts revenue at <$5mm, but GrowJo seems to be a little closer to an accurate estimate at $7.5mm per year.

Overall, Tactacam has made great leaps and strides since it started off in the garage of founder Ben Stern. The brand’s story just goes to prove that if you know what your customer base wants and how to deliver your value proposition to them, the sky is the limit.

 How Can You Apply this?

Tactacam started when founder Ben Stern’s grandpa made fun of him for not putting his education to good use. Deciding to get to work and turning a hobbyist hunter into a brand-building success story certainly has some insights to be gleaned from Ben’s experience.

So, what insights can we glean from the story outlined above?

Applicable insights:

If there is enough unmet demand within the marketplace, one core type of product can be enough to build a successful brand - if you know how to play your cards right.

If your product is new or novel, establishing and owning the patents & IP behind it can be a game changer that leads to a very successful future (and protection against competition).

Know what your customer wants before you even start building a company or product.

Know where to sell to your customer - it may not be the places where other brands are putting their efforts.

Know how to talk to your customer, and where. Different platforms will often require different messaging and strategies. Know the difference.

Social media platforms are a low-cost way to reach a wide audience. If you have a community-inclined target demographic, social should be used to build communities.

Every single eCommerce brand needs to have strategies within its sales funnel for retargeting and upsells.

[oliverjones1]

Sallve: Why Investors are Fighting over this Brazilian Skincare Brand

Sallve: When a dozen VCs are willing to part with $40mm for a skincare line, pay attention.

In 10 minutes or less, here's what you’re discovering:

Sometimes the most important business decisions you make are those made at the very founding of your company (how, where, in what business, and for whom you will compete).

Ad spend on platforms where your target demographic doesn’t spend time could very well be like lighting your hard-earned capital on fire.

Many startups and brands today like to choose unique or “edgy” names that may be difficult to spell properly - doing so means you will need a great search team to help your customers find the right website if you don’t want scammers to eat your lunch.

For some customers, the only internet access they have is through a phone. Mobile plays a key role in eCommerce with customers in developing regions.

According to Pitchbook, Sallve is an “Operator of a beauty company intended to focus on catering to the discerning needs of Gen Z and millennial consumers.”

If you paid attention to the opening stats for the company, you may be wondering just why in the world a Brazilian beauty company that targets Gen Z and millennials would be able to raise over $40 million from VC firms.

The firm’s 9800% increase in web traffic and nearly $16mm gross revenue last year shows that they certainly know what they are doing - let’s dig in deeper to figure out exactly what that is.

The appeal of a Brazilian skincare company to Venture Capital

Even the most successful Silicon Valley Venture Capital firms have a roughly 10% investment success rate, and their entire business model is centered around finding the one unicorn that will pay for all of their laggard or totally unprofitable investments.

So why would a dozen global VC firms (including Google Startups) be willing to pour over $40mm into a skincare line in Brazil through its Series B funding round?

This may be the first key:

Firstly, we are surprised that 41% of this DTC eCommerce skincare brand’s traffic is coming from males. More importantly, however, is that Sallve seems to be able to attract and convert the age groups that are well renowned for ditching the favored brands of their parents and setting out on their own path in pretty much every way.

Gen Z and millennials aren’t down with evergreen brands or big box beauty retailers. They want to find their own favored brands that speak to them. Gone are the days when several generations of men in a family would share Old Spice aftershave or young women would borrow mom’s makeup.

It’s not just the ability to court the younger generation that makes this brand so attractive to professional investors. Although its products are relatively cheap (R$60-160, roughly $12-32), the key to the investability of a skincare company is its LTV.

Those who care about their skin don’t want to change brands or simply buy whatever the “cheap stuff” is off of the shelf at the store. They are more likely than most consumers to find a brand they like, that works well with their skin type, and stick with it for a very long time.

For skin care in a country full of people who love to spend their days at the beach and in the sun, that can mean monthly sales of one or multiple products per successfully converted customer, every month for years or even decades.

To add the icing on top of this fudge sundae for VCs, understanding the culture in Brazil makes this an even more attractive investment opportunity.

Most people understand that geographical locations in the USA like Beverly Hills (California) or Manhattan (New York) are the global capitals of cosmetic surgery for vanity-filled celebrities, debutants, and the “Real Housewives” casts of characters.

But do you know which country is number two on the list? 

Brazil

Let’s take a moment to summarize a few of the financial incentives that make $40 million look like a fair amount of money for VCs to throw at Sallve:

Targeting a demographic that all brands want to court – successfully

In an industry that has an exceptionally high LTV if you can win a customer

In a country where the populace cares very deeply about their appearance

Only dorky old people are on Facebook today

Facebook successfully built one of the first - and by far the best - marketing and advertising platforms across all of social media. I attended a weeklong course to become a certified Facebook marketer, and understanding its algorithm and what went into it is mindblowing.

So why is this how Sallve treats Facebook ads?

To be perfectly candid, they do have a Facebook store:

But it seems as if they don’t see the site (or its top-tier ad platform) as being worth the investment.

During my retargeting deep dive, I noticed that there wasn’t any retargeting efforts coming at me through my own YouTube normal viewership, so I wandered over to the brand’s YouTube channel as well.

Guess what:

The view counts on their videos are all over the place (some have a few dozen views, while others have tens of thousands), which is paltry for a brand with that much funding and so much web traffic.

As it turns out, social only comes in 4th place in regard to where their website traffic comes from. The brand knows that the demographic it is targeting doesn’t spend their time on Facebook or YouTube, so the brand goes where its audience is:

TikTok

Instagram

Pinterest

Retargeting (or lack thereof)

I was rather surprised when I did my retargeting test for Sallve that I didn’t receive any retargeting ads on any of my preferred platforms, any abandoned cart emails, or any retargeting efforts whatsoever.

Because they have an FB store, I selected one of their products there and had it lead me to the Sallve website:

The FB store took me to the Sallve.com.br website and the product page, where I noticed something that we love to see during our deep dives here at LTV:

An upsell offer! While the upsell offer may be something that we constantly say should be done by every eCommerce company, it's especially smart in beauty brands like Sallve.

People who take care of their skin will often have several “routines,” including morning, evening, going outside or to the beach, and sometimes others in between.

Each of these routines will use different products, which makes each an LTV-increasing opportunity for Sallve. If they can convert a new customer into getting two, three, or more items right off the bat and keep those customers using the brand, it can be a long-lasting relationship.

Organic and paid search

When you look into the traffic sources to Sallve’s eCommerce website, both #1 and #3 come from search:

And they are nearly 75% organic with a little over 25% coming from paid:

The keywords targeted by Sallve are also interesting:

Notice that of the 10 keywords targeted here, 8 include the brand’s name directly. Rather than generic searches for things like cosmetics, UV moisturizer, or acne cream, the brand is focused on making sure that people searching for Sallve already find the right eCommerce website.

Of the top 5 search ads, all are sending traffic to the vegan products portion of the Sallve eCommerce website:

And while Sallve is a global company with headquarters in South America (Sao Paolo), the US, and the EU, nearly all of the brand’s traffic to the website comes from Brazil:

Their bounce rate is also pretty gnarly for a brand with so much money in the bank - hopefully they clear that up at some point.

Sometimes, it’s all about mobile traffic

Sao Paolo is a rather modern and industrialized city, but a relatively large part of Brazil is rural and what many in the US or Western Europe would consider 3rd world living standards. When it’s time for Carnival all bets are off and even Sao Paolo becomes a mass of humanity…but on a normal day it’s pretty civilized.

Westerners are spoiled in terms of infrastructure, and often don’t understand that smart phones are the only access to the internet that the vast majority of the world has - Brazil included.

As a result, Sallve’s traffic isn’t just almost exclusively from Brazil, but almost all is mobile as well:

If you want to have a successful eCommerce or DTC business that has a customer base outside of the West, you must, must, MUST optimize your website and systems (including payment) for mobile.

Build communities

You may have noticed in the photo of Sallve’s Instagram profile above that they have a community on that platform that is dedicated to the brand, and not just followers. The brand does the same across all of its social platforms, and even has this:

The app gives Sallve’s Gen Z and millennial customers a place to connect, learn beauty secrets, keep track of their skincare routine, and of course share tips with each other. These age groups are not known to be big fans of joining communities or social groups with older generations, but they love the chance to link up with their like-minded and similarly-aged cohort.

Building a community around your brand can be a great idea for any DTC or eCommerce company, but for those seeking to court the Gen Z and millennial demographic, it should be seen as “table stakes.”

Referrals, referrals, referrals

We saw something during our investigation into Sallve’s exponential traffic gain that we don’t see very often, but we absolutely love it when we see it.

Referral traffic!

Granted, the referral traffic to the Sallve website isn’t all that much of their total traffic, but looking more closely at the referring sites paints a picture that helps us see another one of their marketing strategies:

We looked at their display and ad networks, and they aren’t really worth sharing (only around 5k of the total traffic). What this tells us (especially with LinkTr.ee being the highest referral traffic provider) is that they likely have a solid influencer and affiliate marketing program in the making.

If you look at the variety of industries the top referring websites come from (finance, gambling, lifestyle, shopping, business services), there’s no single common theme - it seems to be people who just want to make their cut of the rapidly growing Sallve brand.

Doing so is one of those wonderful situations in which everyone wins.

Affiliate and influencer strategies are a pretty simple way to get a diverse audience for your growing brand, and to borrow the fans of others and introduce them to your products, while the affiliates and influencers also get their own share of the spoils for sending their followers or traffic your way.

Everyone wins, and that’s a game we can all get behind.

The Marketing Machine and Numbers Behind Sallve

When analyzing the marketing tactics and strategies behind the success of Sallve, one intersting tidbit of info came when we looked at the tech stack present within the company’s website. It seems that over the past 6 years, the company has had 122 different programs installed into their stack at one point or another:

But over half of those have been uninstalled, and the stack is now down to only 62. Of those removed were a lot of advertising (FB Ads, Google Ads, Taboola, Pubmatic, FB Custom Audiences, YouTube, and others) as well as a lot of marketing analytics software.

They still have tech to help run the marketing for the platforms that they do focus on (Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok), but it seems there was a conscious decision made that those listed above weren’t worth the effort - or even space to have installed on their website.

The public numbers for their employee count go from <25 (ZoomInfo) to 100 or 200, but Pitchbook put the headcount at 174, and they’re usually pretty accurate.

Their revenue estimates were a little tough to find, and getting the different funding deal amounts required going through several different sources, each of which would have one or another of the rounds censored. Piecing them all together allowed us to come up with the +$40mm (just over $41,000,000 to be exact), but thankfully the 2022 revenue was listed directly on ECDB ($15.9mm).

Sallve has played all of its cards right so far, and we expect to see good things from the brand in the future.

[danpalomaorig]

If you're starting your store on Shopify, you've got to read this: The LTV SPOT Newsletter

I've subscribed to a lot of newsletters, but the LTV SPOT newsletter is by far the best. The insights it provides are so actionable and easy to understand. It’s like having a weekly masterclass in eCommerce. The humor and pop culture references make it a fun read, which is a nice break from the usual dry content.

[danpalomaorig]

The Truth About the LTV SPOT Newsletter

Running a small eCommerce business is no easy feat, but the LTV SPOT newsletter makes it a bit easier. Each week, it delivers actionable insights and strategies that have helped me improve my operations and marketing. The writing style is engaging and fun, which is a nice change from other dry industry newsletters. It's become a crucial part of my weekly routine.

[danpalomaorig]

Mistakes to avoid when building your Shopify store! From the LTV SPOT newsletter

As someone who’s been deeply involved in the eCommerce space, I’ve reviewed numerous stores and studied all the in-depth case-studies of LTV Spot’s newsletter. Here are a few common mistakes that many people make when setting up their first, second, or even third store. I’d like to share some of these key takeaways from the newsletter that can help you avoid these pitfalls:

First Mistake: Not Having or Not Filling in Your Policies One of the first steps to building trust is having all your policies in place. Shopify provides templates, but you need to actually fill in these templates correctly. Don’t just click the button and leave the placeholders blank. According to a study by PwC, 84% of consumers say they will not engage with a brand if they do not trust it. Legally, you also need these policies, so it’s not just about trust but compliance too (source: PwC Consumer Insights).

Second Mistake: Blinding Your Target Market with Bright Colors Avoid using overly bright colors that can be off-putting. Stick to a toned-down color palette that’s easy on the eyes. A study by the Institute for Color Research found that people make a subconscious judgment about a product within 90 seconds of initial viewing and that between 62% and 90% of that assessment is based on color alone (source: Institute for Color Research).

Third and Fourth Mistakes: Random Product Selection and Lack of Categories It’s crucial to have cohesive branding and product organization. Throwing random products together and calling it a store just doesn’t work. Each product needs to make sense next to each other and within your brand’s context. Categorizing your products is also vital. If you have more than five products, organize them into logical categories. This not only helps with SEO but also enhances the user experience, preventing potential customers from aimlessly scrolling through your site. Research by Nielsen Norman Group shows that categorization significantly improves user experience and navigation (source: Nielsen Norman Group).

Fifth Mistake: Using Supplier's Titles and Descriptions Using the supplier’s titles and descriptions won’t sell your products. Incorporate at least one keyword in your titles, keep them between 60 to 75 characters, and write product descriptions that are 150 to 300 words long, addressing at least one pain point of your target market. Meta descriptions should be concise, no more than 175 characters. According to HubSpot, personalized and detailed product descriptions can increase conversion rates by up to 20% (source: HubSpot).

Sixth Mistake: Front Page Layout Your homepage design is crucial. Simply plastering products on your front page isn’t effective. You need to provide some information and value between sections to keep your visitors engaged. The idea is to welcome your visitors with value, not just shove products in their face. A study by Stanford University found that 75% of users make judgments about a company’s credibility based on its website design (source: Stanford University).

Final Advice: Know Your Target Market Understanding your target market is crucial for everything from product selection to marketing strategies. According to a survey by Salesforce, 76% of consumers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations (source: Salesforce Research).

Alright, take these insights to heart and avoid these common mistakes – it will benefit you in the long run. And one final piece of advice: make sure you thoroughly understand your target market!

[danpalomaorig]

LTV SPOT Newsletter: An Honest Review

As a seasoned consultant working with a variety of eCommerce businesses, the LTV SPOT newsletter has quickly become a cornerstone of my resource library. The depth of insights and strategies provided is unparalleled, covering a range of topics from customer retention techniques to advanced media buying strategies. One issue focused on the importance of storytelling in brand building, which I found particularly enlightening. The practical advice on crafting compelling narratives has helped me guide my clients towards more authentic and engaging customer interactions. The newsletter’s witty and engaging writing style, often sprinkled with clever pop culture references, makes it a joy to read and share with my network. It's a must-read for any consultant looking to stay ahead in the eCommerce landscape.

[danpalomaorig]

Looking for some Must-Read Ecommerce Newsletters? Don’t Miss LTV Spot!

If you’re working in the ecommerce industry, you must be very well aware of the competition in this space. With countless resources available, it can be challenging to filter through the noise and find valuable, actionable insights. That’s where top-tier eCommerce newsletters come in. These curated sources deliver the latest trends, expert advice, and innovative strategies directly to your inbox, helping you stay ahead of the curve. 

From mastering digital commerce to optimizing customer lifetime value, these must-read newsletters cover all aspects of the industry. 

Here are some of the best eCommerce newsletters that every entrepreneur should follow to drive growth and stay competitive:

LTV Spot

Focus: Tactics, insights and secrets behind the fastest growing eCommerce brands, Customer retention strategies.

Description: LTV Spot is dedicated to providing insights and strategies on maximizing customer lifetime value. It covers topics such as customer retention, loyalty programs, personalization, and advanced analytics to help businesses understand and increase the long-term value of their customers.

Why Follow: Essential for entrepreneurs and eCommerce professionals looking to deepen their understanding of customer behavior and implement strategies that drive sustainable growth and profitability.

2PM

Focus: Digital commerce, media, and brand strategy.

Description: 2PM delivers a blend of industry insights, market trends, and strategic advice. It covers a wide range of topics including DTC brands, retail innovations, and the evolving landscape of digital commerce.

Why Follow: It's a valuable resource for staying informed about the latest developments and strategies in the eCommerce world.

DTC Daily

Focus: Direct-to-consumer brand news and trends.

Description: DTC Daily provides daily updates on the latest trends, news, and insights specifically for direct-to-consumer brands. It includes case studies, expert opinions, and market analysis.

Why Follow: Perfect for entrepreneurs and marketers who want to keep up with the rapidly evolving DTC landscape.

Retail Brew

Focus: Retail and eCommerce insights and news.

Description: Retail Brew delivers concise and engaging news on retail and eCommerce every morning. It covers topics such as market trends, emerging technologies, and consumer behavior.

Why Follow: Ideal for staying updated on the broader retail environment and how it impacts eCommerce.

eCommerce Fuel

Focus: Independent eCommerce store owners with industry news and tips.

Description: eCommerce Fuel is tailored for independent eCommerce entrepreneurs, offering practical advice, in-depth industry analysis, and community support.

Why Follow: It's a go-to source for actionable tips and strategies that can help small to mid-sized eCommerce businesses grow.

The Hustle

Focus: Business news and insights, often touching on eCommerce topics.

Description: The Hustle provides a daily dose of business news and entrepreneurial stories. While it covers a broad range of topics, it frequently includes valuable insights into the eCommerce sector.

Why Follow: Great for staying informed about the business world in general, with relevant eCommerce insights.

Lean Luxe

Focus: The intersection of modern luxury and commerce.

Description: Lean Luxe covers the latest trends and developments in modern luxury brands and commerce. It offers a unique perspective on how luxury is evolving in the digital age.

Why Follow: Essential for those interested in the luxury market and its impact on eCommerce strategies.

Chubby’s Shorts Friday Insights

Focus: Fun and informative newsletter with insights into their business and eCommerce strategies.

Description: Chubby’s Shorts shares a weekly newsletter with a mix of humor and business insights. They offer a behind-the-scenes look at their brand and eCommerce tactics.

Why Follow: A refreshing and entertaining way to gain insights into effective eCommerce strategies from a successful DTC brand.

Morning Brew

Focus: General business news with a section dedicated to retail and eCommerce.

Description: Morning Brew offers a daily newsletter that summarizes the most important business news. Their retail and eCommerce section provides valuable insights into the industry.

Why Follow: Perfect for getting a quick overview of business news with relevant updates on eCommerce.

EcommerceBytes

Focus: News for online sellers.

Description: EcommerceBytes provides independent news for online merchants, with a focus on marketplace platforms like eBay, Amazon, and Etsy.

Why Follow: Essential for sellers looking to stay informed about marketplace trends, policies, and changes.

Ecommerce Insider by Shopify Plus

Focus: In-depth articles and industry trends for eCommerce professionals.

Description: Ecommerce Insider by Shopify Plus offers thought leadership articles, case studies, and insights on the latest eCommerce trends.

Why Follow: Ideal for professionals seeking advanced knowledge and strategies in eCommerce, especially those using Shopify.

If you subscribe to these top-tier newsletters, you will get knowledge in all the areas of ecommerce. From industry trends and market analysis to practical strategies for customer retention and growth. 

Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, subscribing to these newsletters will keep you at the forefront of the eCommerce world, equipped with the latest insights and innovations. Make these must-read eCommerce newsletters a part of your regular reading, and watch your business thrive in this dynamic industry.

[danpalomaorig]

Top Shopify eCommerce Newsletters to follow in 2025

If you’re working in the ecommerce industry, you must be very well aware of the competition in this space. With countless resources available, it can be challenging to filter through the noise and find valuable, actionable insights. That’s where top-tier eCommerce newsletters come in. These curated sources deliver the latest trends, expert advice, and innovative strategies directly to your inbox, helping you stay ahead of the curve. 

From mastering digital commerce to optimizing customer lifetime value, these must-read newsletters cover all aspects of the industry. 

Here are some of the best eCommerce newsletters that every entrepreneur should follow to drive growth and stay competitive:

LTV Spot

Focus: Tactics, insights and secrets behind the fastest growing eCommerce brands, Customer retention strategies.

Description: LTV Spot is dedicated to providing insights and strategies on maximizing customer lifetime value. It covers topics such as customer retention, loyalty programs, personalization, and advanced analytics to help businesses understand and increase the long-term value of their customers.

Why Follow: Essential for entrepreneurs and eCommerce professionals looking to deepen their understanding of customer behavior and implement strategies that drive sustainable growth and profitability.

2PM

Focus: Digital commerce, media, and brand strategy.

Description: 2PM delivers a blend of industry insights, market trends, and strategic advice. It covers a wide range of topics including DTC brands, retail innovations, and the evolving landscape of digital commerce.

Why Follow: It's a valuable resource for staying informed about the latest developments and strategies in the eCommerce world.

DTC Daily

Focus: Direct-to-consumer brand news and trends.

Description: DTC Daily provides daily updates on the latest trends, news, and insights specifically for direct-to-consumer brands. It includes case studies, expert opinions, and market analysis.

Why Follow: Perfect for entrepreneurs and marketers who want to keep up with the rapidly evolving DTC landscape.

Retail Brew

Focus: Retail and eCommerce insights and news.

Description: Retail Brew delivers concise and engaging news on retail and eCommerce every morning. It covers topics such as market trends, emerging technologies, and consumer behavior.

Why Follow: Ideal for staying updated on the broader retail environment and how it impacts eCommerce.

eCommerce Fuel

Focus: Independent eCommerce store owners with industry news and tips.

Description: eCommerce Fuel is tailored for independent eCommerce entrepreneurs, offering practical advice, in-depth industry analysis, and community support.

Why Follow: It's a go-to source for actionable tips and strategies that can help small to mid-sized eCommerce businesses grow.

The Hustle

Focus: Business news and insights, often touching on eCommerce topics.

Description: The Hustle provides a daily dose of business news and entrepreneurial stories. While it covers a broad range of topics, it frequently includes valuable insights into the eCommerce sector.

Why Follow: Great for staying informed about the business world in general, with relevant eCommerce insights.

Lean Luxe

Focus: The intersection of modern luxury and commerce.

Description: Lean Luxe covers the latest trends and developments in modern luxury brands and commerce. It offers a unique perspective on how luxury is evolving in the digital age.

Why Follow: Essential for those interested in the luxury market and its impact on eCommerce strategies.

Chubby’s Shorts Friday Insights

Focus: Fun and informative newsletter with insights into their business and eCommerce strategies.

Description: Chubby’s Shorts shares a weekly newsletter with a mix of humor and business insights. They offer a behind-the-scenes look at their brand and eCommerce tactics.

Why Follow: A refreshing and entertaining way to gain insights into effective eCommerce strategies from a successful DTC brand.

Morning Brew

Focus: General business news with a section dedicated to retail and eCommerce.

Description: Morning Brew offers a daily newsletter that summarizes the most important business news. Their retail and eCommerce section provides valuable insights into the industry.

Why Follow: Perfect for getting a quick overview of business news with relevant updates on eCommerce.

EcommerceBytes

Focus: News for online sellers.

Description: EcommerceBytes provides independent news for online merchants, with a focus on marketplace platforms like eBay, Amazon, and Etsy.

Why Follow: Essential for sellers looking to stay informed about marketplace trends, policies, and changes.

Ecommerce Insider by Shopify Plus

Focus: In-depth articles and industry trends for eCommerce professionals.

Description: Ecommerce Insider by Shopify Plus offers thought leadership articles, case studies, and insights on the latest eCommerce trends.

Why Follow: Ideal for professionals seeking advanced knowledge and strategies in eCommerce, especially those using Shopify.

If you subscribe to these top-tier newsletters, you will get knowledge in all the areas of ecommerce. From industry trends and market analysis to practical strategies for customer retention and growth. 

Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, subscribing to these newsletters will keep you at the forefront of the eCommerce world, equipped with the latest insights and innovations. Make these must-read eCommerce newsletters a part of your regular reading, and watch your business thrive in this dynamic industry.

[danpalomaorig]

Top Shopify eCommerce Newsletters to follow in 2025

If you’re working in the ecommerce industry, you must be very well aware of the competition in this space. With countless resources available, it can be challenging to filter through the noise and find valuable, actionable insights. That’s where top-tier eCommerce newsletters come in. These curated sources deliver the latest trends, expert advice, and innovative strategies directly to your inbox, helping you stay ahead of the curve. 

From mastering digital commerce to optimizing customer lifetime value, these must-read newsletters cover all aspects of the industry. 

Here are some of the best eCommerce newsletters that every entrepreneur should follow to drive growth and stay competitive:

LTV Spot

Focus: Tactics, insights and secrets behind the fastest growing eCommerce brands, Customer retention strategies.

Description: LTV Spot is dedicated to providing insights and strategies on maximizing customer lifetime value. It covers topics such as customer retention, loyalty programs, personalization, and advanced analytics to help businesses understand and increase the long-term value of their customers.

Why Follow: Essential for entrepreneurs and eCommerce professionals looking to deepen their understanding of customer behavior and implement strategies that drive sustainable growth and profitability.

2PM

Focus: Digital commerce, media, and brand strategy.

Description: 2PM delivers a blend of industry insights, market trends, and strategic advice. It covers a wide range of topics including DTC brands, retail innovations, and the evolving landscape of digital commerce.

Why Follow: It's a valuable resource for staying informed about the latest developments and strategies in the eCommerce world.

DTC Daily

Focus: Direct-to-consumer brand news and trends.

Description: DTC Daily provides daily updates on the latest trends, news, and insights specifically for direct-to-consumer brands. It includes case studies, expert opinions, and market analysis.

Why Follow: Perfect for entrepreneurs and marketers who want to keep up with the rapidly evolving DTC landscape.

Retail Brew

Focus: Retail and eCommerce insights and news.

Description: Retail Brew delivers concise and engaging news on retail and eCommerce every morning. It covers topics such as market trends, emerging technologies, and consumer behavior.

Why Follow: Ideal for staying updated on the broader retail environment and how it impacts eCommerce.

eCommerce Fuel

Focus: Independent eCommerce store owners with industry news and tips.

Description: eCommerce Fuel is tailored for independent eCommerce entrepreneurs, offering practical advice, in-depth industry analysis, and community support.

Why Follow: It's a go-to source for actionable tips and strategies that can help small to mid-sized eCommerce businesses grow.

The Hustle

Focus: Business news and insights, often touching on eCommerce topics.

Description: The Hustle provides a daily dose of business news and entrepreneurial stories. While it covers a broad range of topics, it frequently includes valuable insights into the eCommerce sector.

Why Follow: Great for staying informed about the business world in general, with relevant eCommerce insights.

Lean Luxe

Focus: The intersection of modern luxury and commerce.

Description: Lean Luxe covers the latest trends and developments in modern luxury brands and commerce. It offers a unique perspective on how luxury is evolving in the digital age.

Why Follow: Essential for those interested in the luxury market and its impact on eCommerce strategies.

Chubby’s Shorts Friday Insights

Focus: Fun and informative newsletter with insights into their business and eCommerce strategies.

Description: Chubby’s Shorts shares a weekly newsletter with a mix of humor and business insights. They offer a behind-the-scenes look at their brand and eCommerce tactics.

Why Follow: A refreshing and entertaining way to gain insights into effective eCommerce strategies from a successful DTC brand.

Morning Brew

Focus: General business news with a section dedicated to retail and eCommerce.

Description: Morning Brew offers a daily newsletter that summarizes the most important business news. Their retail and eCommerce section provides valuable insights into the industry.

Why Follow: Perfect for getting a quick overview of business news with relevant updates on eCommerce.

EcommerceBytes

Focus: News for online sellers.

Description: EcommerceBytes provides independent news for online merchants, with a focus on marketplace platforms like eBay, Amazon, and Etsy.

Why Follow: Essential for sellers looking to stay informed about marketplace trends, policies, and changes.

Ecommerce Insider by Shopify Plus

Focus: In-depth articles and industry trends for eCommerce professionals.

Description: Ecommerce Insider by Shopify Plus offers thought leadership articles, case studies, and insights on the latest eCommerce trends.

Why Follow: Ideal for professionals seeking advanced knowledge and strategies in eCommerce, especially those using Shopify.

If you subscribe to these top-tier newsletters, you will get knowledge in all the areas of ecommerce. From industry trends and market analysis to practical strategies for customer retention and growth. 

Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, subscribing to these newsletters will keep you at the forefront of the eCommerce world, equipped with the latest insights and innovations. Make these must-read eCommerce newsletters a part of your regular reading, and watch your business thrive in this dynamic industry.

[danpalomaorig]

Top DTC eCommerce Newsletters to follow in 2025

If you’re working in the ecommerce industry, you must be very well aware of the competition in this space. With countless resources available, it can be challenging to filter through the noise and find valuable, actionable insights. That’s where top-tier eCommerce newsletters come in. These curated sources deliver the latest trends, expert advice, and innovative strategies directly to your inbox, helping you stay ahead of the curve. 

From mastering digital commerce to optimizing customer lifetime value, these must-read newsletters cover all aspects of the industry. 

Here are some of the best eCommerce newsletters that every entrepreneur should follow to drive growth and stay competitive:

LTV Spot

Focus: Tactics, insights and secrets behind the fastest growing eCommerce brands, Customer retention strategies.

Description: LTV Spot is dedicated to providing insights and strategies on maximizing customer lifetime value. It covers topics such as customer retention, loyalty programs, personalization, and advanced analytics to help businesses understand and increase the long-term value of their customers.

Why Follow: Essential for entrepreneurs and eCommerce professionals looking to deepen their understanding of customer behavior and implement strategies that drive sustainable growth and profitability.

2PM

Focus: Digital commerce, media, and brand strategy.

Description: 2PM delivers a blend of industry insights, market trends, and strategic advice. It covers a wide range of topics including DTC brands, retail innovations, and the evolving landscape of digital commerce.

Why Follow: It's a valuable resource for staying informed about the latest developments and strategies in the eCommerce world.

DTC Daily

Focus: Direct-to-consumer brand news and trends.

Description: DTC Daily provides daily updates on the latest trends, news, and insights specifically for direct-to-consumer brands. It includes case studies, expert opinions, and market analysis.

Why Follow: Perfect for entrepreneurs and marketers who want to keep up with the rapidly evolving DTC landscape.

Retail Brew

Focus: Retail and eCommerce insights and news.

Description: Retail Brew delivers concise and engaging news on retail and eCommerce every morning. It covers topics such as market trends, emerging technologies, and consumer behavior.

Why Follow: Ideal for staying updated on the broader retail environment and how it impacts eCommerce.

eCommerce Fuel

Focus: Independent eCommerce store owners with industry news and tips.

Description: eCommerce Fuel is tailored for independent eCommerce entrepreneurs, offering practical advice, in-depth industry analysis, and community support.

Why Follow: It's a go-to source for actionable tips and strategies that can help small to mid-sized eCommerce businesses grow.

The Hustle

Focus: Business news and insights, often touching on eCommerce topics.

Description: The Hustle provides a daily dose of business news and entrepreneurial stories. While it covers a broad range of topics, it frequently includes valuable insights into the eCommerce sector.

Why Follow: Great for staying informed about the business world in general, with relevant eCommerce insights.

Lean Luxe

Focus: The intersection of modern luxury and commerce.

Description: Lean Luxe covers the latest trends and developments in modern luxury brands and commerce. It offers a unique perspective on how luxury is evolving in the digital age.

Why Follow: Essential for those interested in the luxury market and its impact on eCommerce strategies.

Chubby’s Shorts Friday Insights

Focus: Fun and informative newsletter with insights into their business and eCommerce strategies.

Description: Chubby’s Shorts shares a weekly newsletter with a mix of humor and business insights. They offer a behind-the-scenes look at their brand and eCommerce tactics.

Why Follow: A refreshing and entertaining way to gain insights into effective eCommerce strategies from a successful DTC brand.

Morning Brew

Focus: General business news with a section dedicated to retail and eCommerce.

Description: Morning Brew offers a daily newsletter that summarizes the most important business news. Their retail and eCommerce section provides valuable insights into the industry.

Why Follow: Perfect for getting a quick overview of business news with relevant updates on eCommerce.

EcommerceBytes

Focus: News for online sellers.

Description: EcommerceBytes provides independent news for online merchants, with a focus on marketplace platforms like eBay, Amazon, and Etsy.

Why Follow: Essential for sellers looking to stay informed about marketplace trends, policies, and changes.

Ecommerce Insider by Shopify Plus

Focus: In-depth articles and industry trends for eCommerce professionals.

Description: Ecommerce Insider by Shopify Plus offers thought leadership articles, case studies, and insights on the latest eCommerce trends.

Why Follow: Ideal for professionals seeking advanced knowledge and strategies in eCommerce, especially those using Shopify.

If you subscribe to these top-tier newsletters, you will get knowledge in all the areas of ecommerce. From industry trends and market analysis to practical strategies for customer retention and growth. 

Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, subscribing to these newsletters will keep you at the forefront of the eCommerce world, equipped with the latest insights and innovations. Make these must-read eCommerce newsletters a part of your regular reading, and watch your business thrive in this dynamic industry.

[danpalomaorig]

Top DTC eCommerce Newsletters to follow in 2025

If you’re working in the ecommerce industry, you must be very well aware of the competition in this space. With countless resources available, it can be challenging to filter through the noise and find valuable, actionable insights. That’s where top-tier eCommerce newsletters come in. These curated sources deliver the latest trends, expert advice, and innovative strategies directly to your inbox, helping you stay ahead of the curve. 

From mastering digital commerce to optimizing customer lifetime value, these must-read newsletters cover all aspects of the industry. 

Here are some of the best eCommerce newsletters that every entrepreneur should follow to drive growth and stay competitive:

LTV Spot

Focus: Tactics, insights and secrets behind the fastest growing eCommerce brands, Customer retention strategies.

Description: LTV Spot is dedicated to providing insights and strategies on maximizing customer lifetime value. It covers topics such as customer retention, loyalty programs, personalization, and advanced analytics to help businesses understand and increase the long-term value of their customers.

Why Follow: Essential for entrepreneurs and eCommerce professionals looking to deepen their understanding of customer behavior and implement strategies that drive sustainable growth and profitability.

2PM

Focus: Digital commerce, media, and brand strategy.

Description: 2PM delivers a blend of industry insights, market trends, and strategic advice. It covers a wide range of topics including DTC brands, retail innovations, and the evolving landscape of digital commerce.

Why Follow: It's a valuable resource for staying informed about the latest developments and strategies in the eCommerce world.

DTC Daily

Focus: Direct-to-consumer brand news and trends.

Description: DTC Daily provides daily updates on the latest trends, news, and insights specifically for direct-to-consumer brands. It includes case studies, expert opinions, and market analysis.

Why Follow: Perfect for entrepreneurs and marketers who want to keep up with the rapidly evolving DTC landscape.

Retail Brew

Focus: Retail and eCommerce insights and news.

Description: Retail Brew delivers concise and engaging news on retail and eCommerce every morning. It covers topics such as market trends, emerging technologies, and consumer behavior.

Why Follow: Ideal for staying updated on the broader retail environment and how it impacts eCommerce.

eCommerce Fuel

Focus: Independent eCommerce store owners with industry news and tips.

Description: eCommerce Fuel is tailored for independent eCommerce entrepreneurs, offering practical advice, in-depth industry analysis, and community support.

Why Follow: It's a go-to source for actionable tips and strategies that can help small to mid-sized eCommerce businesses grow.

The Hustle

Focus: Business news and insights, often touching on eCommerce topics.

Description: The Hustle provides a daily dose of business news and entrepreneurial stories. While it covers a broad range of topics, it frequently includes valuable insights into the eCommerce sector.

Why Follow: Great for staying informed about the business world in general, with relevant eCommerce insights.

Lean Luxe

Focus: The intersection of modern luxury and commerce.

Description: Lean Luxe covers the latest trends and developments in modern luxury brands and commerce. It offers a unique perspective on how luxury is evolving in the digital age.

Why Follow: Essential for those interested in the luxury market and its impact on eCommerce strategies.

Chubby’s Shorts Friday Insights

Focus: Fun and informative newsletter with insights into their business and eCommerce strategies.

Description: Chubby’s Shorts shares a weekly newsletter with a mix of humor and business insights. They offer a behind-the-scenes look at their brand and eCommerce tactics.

Why Follow: A refreshing and entertaining way to gain insights into effective eCommerce strategies from a successful DTC brand.

Morning Brew

Focus: General business news with a section dedicated to retail and eCommerce.

Description: Morning Brew offers a daily newsletter that summarizes the most important business news. Their retail and eCommerce section provides valuable insights into the industry.

Why Follow: Perfect for getting a quick overview of business news with relevant updates on eCommerce.

EcommerceBytes

Focus: News for online sellers.

Description: EcommerceBytes provides independent news for online merchants, with a focus on marketplace platforms like eBay, Amazon, and Etsy.

Why Follow: Essential for sellers looking to stay informed about marketplace trends, policies, and changes.

Ecommerce Insider by Shopify Plus

Focus: In-depth articles and industry trends for eCommerce professionals.

Description: Ecommerce Insider by Shopify Plus offers thought leadership articles, case studies, and insights on the latest eCommerce trends.

Why Follow: Ideal for professionals seeking advanced knowledge and strategies in eCommerce, especially those using Shopify.

If you subscribe to these top-tier newsletters, you will get knowledge in all the areas of ecommerce. From industry trends and market analysis to practical strategies for customer retention and growth. 

Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, subscribing to these newsletters will keep you at the forefront of the eCommerce world, equipped with the latest insights and innovations. Make these must-read eCommerce newsletters a part of your regular reading, and watch your business thrive in this dynamic industry.