4 Common Patterns Among Successful Brands

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In this newsletter, you'll find:

💠 4 Common Patterns Among Successful Brands

💠 A/B Testing What REALLY Matters

💠 How This Brand Achieves an 80% Completion Rate in Their Quiz Funnel

4 Common Patterns Among Successful Brands

This men's grooming brand stands out.

But, they do nothing extraordinary.

The other day I had the chance to interview them on The DTC Insider podcast.

And while I was chatting with them, I identified some things they had in common with other successful brands.

Some of these common patterns are:

🔄 Product development:

They have spent 2 years (not 2 weeks, or months) iterating the product.

Until they finally found what they were looking for.

Some other brands I've talked to spent 5 or even 10 years.

Lesson: take the time to offer a product (forget about your ads for a minute) that stands out.

✅ Product validation:

After they had a high-quality product, they needed to test it.

How did they do that?

Affiliates?

Ads?

E-commerce?

No.

It's simpler...

Distributing products to:

👉 Friends and family

👉 Colorists

👉 And many other people in their target audience

Lesson: as Jack Ma - Alibaba's founder - said: when you start, you need to do non-scalable things before you can scale. Test your product before mass-releasing it.

🌐 Funnel:

This is super interesting.

They wanted to create a unique funnel, something very different from the typical e-commerce store.

But, the first version flopped. 😞

It turns out, being SO different wasn't good either.

As people were used to navigating websites in a certain way.

That means, back to square 1.

They needed to re-think the whole thing to find a solution in the middle.

One that's different but also user-friendly.

What they came up with is a Quiz Funnel.

Why a quiz funnel?

It's basically a guided process to help people find what they're looking for.

For them, it makes sense. As they sell products that have many variants (ie. skin color, hair color, and beard color, among many more).

Did it work well since day 1?

No.

It required many iterations, and eventually, they found great results with it 🙌

Currently, listen well, it converts 80% of those who start it. 🤯

Lesson: spend the time to analyze what works for others in the space, but also chase your own vision and design something unique that stands out. Then, test, test, test (and iterate), and don't be emotional about it.

👫 Personalized purchase experience on a very rigid channel:

You can do whatever comes to mind on your website.

But not on Amazon.

So, how do you keep a personalized experience in a third-party channel that doesn't offer a high level of personalization?

What they did is inform their Amazon customers of a QR code they'll see in the product packaging.

Where they can get more info on how to use the product, among other relevant information.

Lesson: there's always to achieve what you want. You're just not thinking hard (smart) enough.

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A/B Testing What REALLY Matters

"A/B testing" is such a buzz term, isn't it?

You can actually A/B test anything you want, BUT...

If you're not strategic about it, it may spend a lot of time and effort and yet not have an impact on your marketing.

So, what can you do about it?

1️⃣ PLAN AHEAD

It's important to plan for your tests and be intentional about them.

For example, we've audited an email account, and they were A/B testing branded vs non-branded headlines in the email body.

It's a valid test, but they were not in a position to test at that level yet, as they had many other relevant variables to test first.

Do you think there was a difference in performance that justified testing whether to add the name of the brand at the end of the headline or not?

No...the test result showed that it was almost the same.

When defining your tests, keep the following aspects in mind:

👉 What variables do you think will be worth testing and why?

👉 Are you testing 1 variable at a time?

👉 How long are you going to run the test?

👉 How would you consider the test successful?

👉 How are you going to choose the winner?

Last but not least, use a test log to keep track of what you've already tested and will test next.

Including the hypothesis (what you're trying to validate), end date, and how you'd consider it successful (ie. X purchases at $X CPA).

2️⃣ ITERATE

The first test batch is only that...the first.

Don’t expect it to be the last one.

Keep iterating to find new winners, so your communication is better at every iteration.

3️⃣ USE THE WINNERS

You'd be surprised by the number of times we audited accounts that were bragging about how many tests they were doing...

...and yet they weren't using the winning variants for future implementations. 🤦

If you're investing time, effort, and money in testing, put it into action in your current/next campaigns!

How This Brand Achieves an 80% Completion Rate in Their Quiz Funnel

On this episode of The DTC Insider podcast, Brian Roisentul interviews Carlos Barreto, founder, and Mariana Lee, COO, of Cleverman.

Learn about their personalized website, effective use of social proof, and daily backend actions contributing to their success.

We discussed:

👉 Introduction to Cleverman and Its Mission

👉 Key Components for DTC Success: Product, Offer, Funnel, and Message

👉 Cleverman's Unique Website Personalization and Social Proof Strategy

👉 Insights from Amazon's Personalization Approach

👉 Behind-the-Scenes: Daily Backend Actions for Success

👉 Acquisition and Retention Strategies

👉 Cross-Platform Effort Tracking

👉 Current Challenges for DTC Brands

👉 Cleverman's Outlook for 2024

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

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