The Perspective #8

Welcome to the eighth edition of The Perspective by Oddit! 

Twice a month we send out actionable tips for creating brand-first and conversion-optimized customer experiences from the best in DTC.

In this edition 🗞:

• Brand-first breakdown with Barstool Sports

• 5 questions with Muddy Bites Co-Founder Jarod Steffes

• How to run a successful DTC sale with help from Kulin 

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If you missed our last editions, you can read them here! 

Brand-First Breakdown: Barstool Sports

Barstool Sports is a blog website and digital media company that produces content on sports and pop culture.

We're breaking down their e-commerce site and offering a couple of tweaks to make it an even better user experience and conversion machine. Let's jump in!

Empty Cart

 Suggestions to test: 

• Suggestion 1: Pull in the # of items to your cart/bag title so it’s crystal clear.

• Suggestion 2: Add some brand voice to the empty cart to make it feel more cohesive with the overall site and brand experience.

• Suggestion 3: Pull in your primary product categories to help drive them down a specific funnel, rather than forcing them to a blanket action like “Continue Shopping” – this leaves them lost and doesn’t tell them where they're going.

Shopping Bag

Suggestions to test: 

• Suggestion 1: Again, pull in the number of items in cart to the title.

• Suggestion 2: Move ‘remove’ to the right so it’s separate from quantity selector. Where it currently sits there’s a high chance of accidental clicks when adding units.

• Suggestion 3: These are great upsells, but there’s no reason for them to take up so much vertical space. Tighten the screws.

• Suggestion 4: The additional information in the cart is fine, but it’s long and pushing the key action down. The user is here to checkout, not shop, so make sure the primary goal/action is the most accessible. Create a sticky panel at the bottom so that the checkout action is easily accessible no matter how long the cart is. 

Homepage Header

Suggestions to test: 

• Suggestion 1: Rather than surfacing your products on an automatic carousel, remove that completely and utilize a single featured category at the top.

• Suggestion 2: Pull in a clear action button, and make sure it’s done using CSS, rather than being a part of the image itself. This reduces weight, and allows us to adapt the section easier on different screen widths.

• Suggestion 3: Pull in the additional categories from the top carousel, into this secondary row, allowing users to swipe through them.

• Suggestion 4: Pull in a simple title for each that allows a little more description. The less time it takes users to understand what they’re clicking, the more likely they click. 

The Power of Bundling

Suggestion to test: Barstool products are perfect for bundling together – Add a cross-section showcasing an example bundle of products, and let users know that shopping in bundles has cost savings associated with it.

For example, 5% off your order for every product you add (up to a max)

More Products

Suggestions to test:

• Suggestion 1: Make sure users know that they need to hit the action button to lock in their filters. Update the button label to communicate the action better.

• Suggestion 2: Surface the selected filters above product cards when the filter panel is closed so users can easily change/alter selections.

If you enjoyed these tips, reply to this email and let us know. We love feedback :) 

How to run a successful DTC sale 💰 

Our sister company Kulin (An awesome growth agency) is jumping in with a breakdown on how to run a successful sale for DTC brands. 

Think about it in 5 phases: 

1. Planning

2. Lead generation

3. Early access

4. Sale

5. Sale Extension

1. Planning: A successful sale will depend on what products you’re focusing on and what discount you can give that will drive either the highest LTV or the highest profit, or both:

• Best selling products

• Best selling products with the highest margin

• Products that have the highest LTV when purchased first

• Products that are frequently purchased by returning customers

• Products that compliment each other when bundled together

• Products that people buy more than 1 frequently together

• Low cost products that could be thrown in free

Depending on the route, also consider existing customers and how you plan to speak to them vs new customers. Sales are great for attracting new customers, but if you’re not doing something special for existing customers and talking to them the same as a new customer, chances are they may not stick around much longer.

2. Lead Generation: About 30 days out from launching the sale, increase lead generation and provide more support to your email team - they'll likely do a lot of the heavy lifiting during the sale.

This can be done with a quiz, a giveaway, a ‘hype up’ form to get early access for an upcoming sale, etc. The goal is to add enough friction so that you’re not getting poor-quality leads that only want free stuff.

The worst thing you can do is spend a ton of money acquiring potential customers, but find out they’re never gonna buy from you. 

3. Early Access: If the sale is really generous, you have limited stock, or you want to do something special for your email list– consider an early access sale with a slightly different discount from the public. It can do wonders for your brand.

It'll help make your customers feel more special, which can increase loyalty/retention.

4. Sale: Make sure all your touchpoints are covered

• Google Ads: promotion extensions and copy is updated

• Email/SMS: campaigns are ready to go

• Paid Social: creative speaks to your sale, and is different from evergreen

With Paid Social, we normally try to keep the end date vague in order to drive more immediate sales. Then as you get closer to the end of the sale, weave in some additional ads that drive urgency: “sale ends today” “final hours” “last chance”

Neat trick: Use creative showing UGC of people who purchased at a higher price. That’ll get people going! 

5. Sale Extension: This might not always be necessary, but if your sale is crushing it and still have stock then consider extending the sale. Make sure to have your emails and creative ready just in case, so that you’re not scrambling last minute.

🚨 HEADS UP: The Kulin team has a couple of roster spots opening this summer. Book a call to chat with Kulin's founders here or reply to this email and we'll introduce you. 

They can help with paid social, search, email & creative 😎

Founders Five 🖐

Founder: Jarod Steffes is the Co-Founder at Muddy Bites a CPG brand selling the best part of a sundae cone - the last bite.

Oddit: If you could go back to the start of Muddy Bites and change one decision you made early on, what would it be and why?

Jarod: Hire SOONER! Granted, not everyone may be in that position to hire at the start (& we surely weren't) but one of the biggest things I've learned in the last 6 months or so that I wish I had learned earlier is just to hire people WAY smarter than me.

Starting out as an entrepreneur, you want to do everything around your business. We can all be guilty about that but as soon as we started higher people WAY smarter than us (founders) our business has changed in a totally different way, and for the better. We're going to have a record year, break into some key retailers, and set ourselves up for a HUGE 2023 because of the hiring we've made. So if I had to re-do something from the start, would definitely be to hire sooner.

Oddit: In 2021 you made a pretty significant rebrand, what’s one piece of advice you’d give to other brands who are looking to make similar moves?

Jarod: Rebranding is scary, but for our case, it was needed. When you're thinking about rebranding, you need to think about the REASONS for rebranding. If you're doing it just because you want to update for a "cooler" experience, you've lost already.

For us, we rebranded for a variety of reasons; our old fonts were pretty sloppy and hard to read on a bag, and our colors were really poor which made the fonts hard to read on a retail shelf (our end game is to be on retail shelves everywhere), and overall create a better brand experience by creating a super nostalgic feeling (we did this with some retro ice cream parlor vibes, introducing Buddy the Bite our mascot, new fonts, new packaging, etc.). So when you're looking at rebranding, be sure to understand the reasons for doing it in the first place.

And secondly, rebranding (depending on how you do it) can be VERY expensive between new logos, merch, packaging, etc. so you need to make sure you actually have a budget for it because costs can add quickly (and account for at least a 10% random items that will come up around the rebrand). 

Oddit: Outside of Muddy Bites, what’s a new snack/dessert brand you’re a fan of?

Jarod: Few brands I'm a big fan of; Dream Pops, Licorice.com, and Dots Pretzels!

Oddit: For anyone wanting to start a CPG food brand, what’s one question they should ask themselves before jumping in?

Jarod: "Are you sure you really want to do this?" Hahaha, the thing about CPG that no one really thinks about before starting, its extremely hard. For CPG, you can stay DTC your whole business life but if you really want to win at scale and have a big exit, you NEED to get into retail/wholesale, and getting into those channels is not easy. They eat at your margin, test your supply chain, and keep you on your toes at all times.

Secondly, cash is KING - of course this is true for every business - but as you venture into retail/wholesale, cash flow is your most important thing. Retailers will pay out net 30-90 and with you having to provide your products up front, you need to get super scrappy. That being said, look to hire a finance (in-house or agency) as early as possible. 

Oddit: Muddy Bites crushes on TikTok - what’s your number one piece of advice for brands looking to up their TT game?

Jarod: 2 items; First, HIRE an individual who is actually good at producing content and understands social media. We did this probably one year after launch and our social channels blew up from there (leading to a second hire on our social team).

Today, we have two amazing social media people (Emma and Jessica) - with them, we produce all of our content in-house, understand the latest TT trends, and are able to throw content out whenever we please. Secondly, put more videos out!! Many brands only do 1 or 2 videos a week and we're guilty of that sometimes, but you need to put more videos out.

For example, for one week we tested 1-2 videos a day for 7 days in a row and had several videos go viral. Along with this, you need to use trending sounds! It can be tricky sometimes to make sure your product/content match the sounds but that's the fun of TT. Today we've had several videos on our page and some of our influencer pages hit 20M+ views.

And pretty much all for free. TT is still young, get on there and produce some videos... send products to influencers, and pay some, you really need to do testing and see what works best for your brand as every brand is different.

Classifieds 🔎

🚀 We're launching Email & Paid Media Oddits very soon - jump on the waitlist here!

🔵 New brands we discovered this month: The Light Phone, Yoto, Plus, and Home Dough 

📱 6 ways to simplify your product display page

✅ Nik Sharma breaks down the importance of establishing your brand's presence through fonts, especially in the apparel industry 

Want your own brand-first breakdown? 🚨

Check out the essential and premium reports!

 If you don’t find any value you’ll get all your $$ back. No questions asked. 

The Perspective is written by Shaun Brandt, Taylor Davies, and Thomas Schreiber

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