3 Levers To Grow Your Business in 2024

Welcome to this issue of The DTC Insider newsletter. 👋 

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In this newsletter, you'll find:

💠 3 Levers To Grow Your Business in 2024

💠 Don't Let This Fool You

💠 4 Things Media Buyers Should Start Doing

3 Levers To Grow Your Business in 2024

Do me a favor.

For just a moment, forget about your ad account and email marketing strategies.

And think about the business layer of your DTC brand.

According to many authors, the 3 levers to grow a business are:

1. Get more customers

2. Sell higher-ticket products to increase revenue

3. Do repeat business with those same customers

Now, do you need to focus on improving these 3 at the same time?

Depending on your capacity, this may or may not be possible.

So, identify which one of these will be give you the highest leverage, and take action.

For that, I follow a 4-step framework process:

🎯 #1 - GOALS

Think about the high-level goals for your business.

Not sure about your business goals? Well, start there.

⚔️ #2 - CHOOSE YOUR BATTLES

Unless you have a really big & powerful army, you'll need to choose your battles wisely.

Then try to assess what you need to work on to move the needle...

Choose one or two at a time.

It's the 20% of effort (aka focus) that will produce 80% of the results.

A few examples of projects/battles are:

• Increasing AOV

• Increasing LTV

• Decreasing CAC

• Increasing gross margins

• Increasing brand awareness

• Improving reputation

Not all of these are relevant to every brand, so choose the ones with the highest priority for your business.

⚠️ #3 - IDENTIFY BLOCKERS

Ask yourself and your team the following questions for each of these projects:

• Where are the main blockers/bottlenecks that are preventing this project (ie. increasing AOV) from succeeding?

• What are the best channels to accomplish that?

• Do we have the capacity, or the right person/team working on it?

🎬 #4 - TAKE ACTION

Otherwise, the previous steps don't make sense.

Now, you're in a position to lay out an action plan, including the high-level tasks you'll need to work on to move the needle.

For example, let's say you choose "Increase AOV" as your next goal.

• Main blockers/bottlenecks: we don't offer bundles or any in-store upsell before visitors complete the purchase.

• Best channels to accomplish that:

  • The store: using (or not) third-party tools to offer upsells

  • Email: through a post-purchase sequence

• Do we have the capacity/right team to work on it? Yes

Action plan:

• Get a Shopify app - for example - to set up the in-store upsell popups

• Set up an email in the post-purchase flow to promote the upsells

Don't Let This Fool You

It's not enough to have the core email flows in place.

This DTC brand had told us they had all the core flows up and running.

As if that was enough to skip an audit.

When we did a deep dive on the account, we found many areas of opportunity.

I'm writing this as I've been through this situation many times.

In this case, they were:

👉 Sending only 1 email in many of these core flows

👉 Communicating the same message to everyone

👉 Not growing their list

👉 Not encouraging customers to buy again

👉 Not sharing valuable content

And the list goes on...

The bottom line is: the next time you look at your email account and see all the active flows, think about the above list and check what you can improve.

4 Things Media Buyers Should Start Doing

How much do you think the media buyer's role has evolved lately?

After all, media buyers shouldn't ONLY be the go-to people for implementing and optimizing ad campaigns.

The media buying role is changing FAST. And if they don't adapt, they will really struggle to add value in the near future.

Fortunately, there are 4 things media buyers could start doing today to add more value to their clients.

In this episode of The DTC Insider podcast, we discussed:

👉 The evolution of media buying

👉 How new technology and changes in the advertising industry affected their roles

👉 4 things media buyers can start doing today to add more value

🎧 Tune in to our latest episode: https://thedtcinsider.com/

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