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Nick Sharma
Welcome to season 11 of limited supply, a place for hot takes on what it's really like building and scaling consumer brands. I'm your host, Nick Sharma. Let's get into today's episode. As a brand, you know that you're spending hard earned dollars driving traffic to your site. The problem is 98% of that traffic is anonymous and you don't know who they are. And once they leave, it's hard to find them again. There's a new tool that helps you identify these visitors and get in front of them. It's called Instant. Instant gives you another chance to convert these shoppers into buyers using retention marketing platform. You can use their platform to send two to three times more site abandonment emails which you already know generates meaningful revenue and build audiences to retarget on meta. Double your abandoned flow revenue and increase your roas with instant. Go to instant one slash podcast to learn more. That's instant one slash podcast. All right, well, welcome back. This is episode one of the 2025 season of limited Supply. And you know, I was doing a lot of thinking and reflecting. One of the things that I want to make sure I do, I want to try a couple of things. One, I want to try slightly shorter episodes because I noticed that a lot of people asked for, you know, around a 30 minute mark. So we're going to try for that. Second one is people have definitely missed the sort of the back and forth banter that Moise and I used to have. So I, I'm exploring some options, you could say around co host here, but also want to just bring back that fun element. Right. If you're out for a run this morning or you're driving in the car right now, or you know, maybe you're just listening as you're walking around the city. I want to make sure this is a fun listen for you. So for today's podcast, I actually want to go and do something a bit controversial. Every time I do something like this, I get a ton of pushback and a ton of basically upset vendors saying, you know, why did you call us overrated or outdated or overpriced? And so there will be some calling out here, but the whole goal here is to just talk about things that are generally talked about in, in a way that, you know, you should be focusing on it. Either these are companies that are sponsoring events or dinners or conferences, or they just have a really, you know, honestly a really good outbound sales and marketing system or machine that they have at, at play. And then some of these things are also Just tactics that, you know, maybe you hear from reps at your. At the platforms you advertise on. Maybe it's a Facebook rep, maybe it's a TikTok rep, maybe it's a Google rep, whatever it may be. You know, as much as I love the partnerships that these companies offer, it's not the case that a lot of times the reps that you work with have actually run advertising, especially run advertising at a serious scale. And so, you know, a lot of times that they're giving advice to you, it's coming directly from the product marketing teams. It's not even coming from necessarily somebody who's thinking through the lens of growth. And the problem with that is, you know, everybody is just pushing what the product marketing team wants to push, which is basically just whatever new features or products the platforms have and not necessarily aligned with driving performance. Sometimes they are like, you know, if a new placement like stories comes out or reels ads comes out. But, you know, well, as we get started, the first one here is directly around Facebook. So I'm about to let you know. Okay, so getting started here. So things, I basically broke this out into what I think is overrated and what I think is underrated. The underrated ones. I only have a few. But what I want to do is if you guys like this episode and you want me to do a full episode on underrated things, which, I mean, we could fill a couple of episodes on. They're just things that basically I see doing extremely well, that I think people are not doing enough, or they're basically things that drive good results. But again, people are not focused on that because they're distracted by a loyalty program, for example. So if you want me to talk about more underrated things, I'll give a little teaser towards the end here. And if you want more, just let me know and I'll do a full episode on just underrated things. Things that are again, easy to switch on and show immediate impact. So let's get started. First one under overrated. And I'm propping myself up, if you can see on YouTube. By the way, what do you think of this new studio, YouTube? Please leave a comment below, let me know what you think. But. All right, getting started. Top of funnel Facebook ads. This is probably, in my opinion, if. Okay, let's set the context here. Let's say you're a brand doing between, or let's say up to call it $75 million in direct to consumer revenue. Top of funnel Facebook ads. Total waste of money. You do not need to run top of funnel on Facebook for the most part. I've spent millions of dollars a month in a single ad account and not have to run these top of funnel ads. The problem is that people tend to think once you exhaust your purchase optimized Facebook ads you have to move upper funnel. And when they hear upper funnel they don't necessarily think of the broader upper funnel in terms of the whole brand. They start to think within the specific platform. Which goes to a whole debate of how growth marketers have evolved to now just channel managers, media buyers or you know, single function roles. Whereas I think growth 10 years ago was all encompassing which is why you know, some of these things didn't used to happen anyways. Top of funnel Facebook ad campaigns, you know, reach and frequency video views, website clicks, landing page views, even view content focused conversion ads are all for the most part a waste of money. Like you are basically paying. If you look at, if you install a heat map tool on your site and you tag the utms, you know UTM campaign equals FB upper funnel test and then you look at that UTM campaign on your heatmap tool. I guarantee you when you see the website clicks campaign you you're going to see traffic coming in. The page isn't even going to fully load and they're out. You're going to do view campaign. It's going to be people who come the product page loads, they view the product and they're out. If you run a add to cart campaign, it's going to be people who come in add to cart and they're out. These are people who are never coming back. And you know, why would Facebook give you if they already know you're willing to pay for purchase ads? Why would they give you and they know other people are too. Why would they give you people who are likely to purchase ad if you're just asking for site clicks or viewing content? Right. It's not as simple as it sounds. And therefore the top of funnel Facebook ads product in my opinion is baloney. You know it works if you're a household brand name and you're running site traffic or in store shopping optimized campaigns. But you have to be like Coach or Michael Kors level household name to do that. You can't be know a hundred million, two hundred million dollars a year in revenue and expect these top of funnel Facebook ads to work. Well, what would I do instead? Well, I would probably focus on things that actually contribute to more upper funnel marketing, content creation, turning creators into evangelists, turning Customers into evangelists, creating some sort of content that people actually want to engage in. You know advertorials I've talked about many times here. Advertorials are the best form of upper funnel ads because you're bringing people in through an engaging story that they rel to before you transition it into something that then benefits you, AKA them buying a, buying a product or generating a sale. So anyways, that's my first list of things is overrated top of funnel Facebook ads. Which leads me directly to number two which is programmatic display ads. You know I started my career in programmatic ads and I remember the first sales meeting I was in, the CEO is basically teaching us like hey what you're going to do. This is what Critio does. They have a four month long attribution window. So 120 day attribution window. That is a view through based attribution window, meaning that nobody has to click in order for Critio to get that credit. They just have to view, meaning the ad pixel just has to fire on the same page that they're on. So they could open a popsugar.com article. Right. And the very last ad unit could be that Critio ad unit. They maybe never see it. They but the ad loads and therefore it fires in the Critio platform within 12820 days. Every other channel you're running is going to help drive this person to convert. And then Critio is going to take credit and tell you hey, you actually got, you know, you're getting a $55 CPA on Facebook. Well our platform got you a $13 CPA. You should be spending more here. And every, every programmatic banner ad ad tech company will do that. They'll basically run a view through based attribution for their reporting because obviously that gives them the most credit. And they'll say well you know, this is a middle of funnel product that doesn't necessarily, you know, people don't click banner ads, they view them and then that reminds them to go push to go purchase. Well I would suggest if you're, if first of all if you're running programmatic display ads you should be spending well over seven figures a month on paid social. Or maybe you're running programmatic display ads to drive you know, people into your retail store, which I have seen work at massive brand scales like global retailers do that well and it works well for them. But if you're running programmatic display ads and you know again you're doing less than $100 million online. And the display ads for Programmatic are supposed to drive customers online, then you're most likely wasting money. And I would highly recommend running a proper incrementality test. When I did this, basically what I found was that programmatic display on its own does nothing. If you just have display ads running, nothing happens. If you couple programmatic display with Facebook, you can see some efficiencies. If you've got a high level of spend, it's not that much though for the most part, you can not run programmatic display ads and you will see. You would be just fine. You'd probably better off investing whatever that 10 grand, 20 grand, 25 grand. Take that and invest it into creators or invest it into generating eyeballs, new eyeballs in different ways. Don't focus on programmatic display ads. In fact, I would ask you what is the last Programmatic display banner ad that you saw and that you remember? You can't even remember because our eyes are not trained to look at banner ads anymore. And you probably have an ad blocker. Most people do too. Okay. Number three is loyalty and referral programs. So this is going to get some people upset. But you know, in my opinion, if, if your business model is a loyalty program, it, it probably works well. And what I think about, what I think about that, I think about places like Best Buy, Sephora with their insiders club or their loyalty program, Nordstrom with their credit card. You know, these are places where even Amazon, these are places where these, the entire business model of these places is loyalty. Right. Best Buy doesn't necessarily care that you're going to buy a specific TV from them or a specific video game or specific camera. They just want to know that you are going to come to them when you buy a camera or a TV or a video game. Same thing with Sephora. They don't care if you're buying, you know, the ordinary or if you're buying live Tinted. They just want to know that when you're ready to buy a serum or a cream or whatever, you're coming in the Sephora and you're leveraging the points. The entire business is built around loyalty. Now when you have a brand that's just selling a one off product, let's say you're buying a foot itch cream or you're buying, you know, a camera tripod, you know, loyalty programs don't necessarily matter there because how many times are you going to end up going back? Especially if these are non consumable products, Even if they are consumable how many times have you ever thought to yourself wow, I'm so excited I'm in the loyalty program of my shampoo, right. It's just not a natural behavior. And anytime or not anytime, but a lot of the times when I have run the numbers, it's important to analyze what the profit is from the program. Like what is the incremental profit generator from this program and compare that to the time that you've put in. Right? So think about your team resources, cost plus any sort of software investment and any sort of development investment with your web team in order to make sure that these programs are working and live. A lot of times those don't add up and you know, sometimes they absolutely do. That's why I think you should run this exercise. But in most cases brands that get excited by loyalty and referral programs, they just don't end up working. And yeah, you know the best referral programs are not E commerce referral programs. They're usually like things like Dropbox and Uber and app based referral programs because they're much more native. It's not native for me to be at dinner with a friend and talk about this Ridge Wallet I have and then be like wait a second, let me log in real quick and grab my link and then text it to you and make sure you use this code. That's Nick HK 7320 right. Like that's just not normal and it's weird. I think if somebody were to build something that felt a lot more native or natural or leverage things like app clips or SMS or you know, if I was at dinner with a friend named Dan and I said hey Dan, I want you to try this Ridge Wallet. And I made a group chat with Ridge Wallet's phone number and Dan and it used nlp natural language processing with AI to understand my text and give Dan a text that says, oh my God, you know, any friend of Nick's is a friend of Ridge. Here's a code code, blah blah blah. If somebody built something like that, that would crush because that's a natural consumer behavior, right? But most of these don't do it. And you know, most people are not going to change their own behaviors because your shampoo company wants to run a loyalty program. Next one is short and sweet. This one is simple. It's just I don't, I don't like paying for influencer management softwares. I think that a lot of them in our space put you into these 12 month agreements and contracts with no out clauses. They charge thousands of Dollars a month just to basically look up influencers. If you were to ask me how I would go about it instead, I would say I would jump on TikTok, I'd use the search bar, I would search for the type of people I'm looking for and then I would just start going down rabbit holes of who are the other people creating that type of content. A lot of brands in the wellness space love to use these influencer management softwares. I love to just go to Instagram and find a few that I think are aspiring ones to work with and then start understanding and building out the tree of and all the other creators. They might be just as big, they might be bigger, they might be smaller, they might be up and coming. But you know, finding, finding your own talent that way and then building a relationship organically with them, in my opinion at least is so much better and better payoff, you know, six, 12, 18 months down the road than to just use these platforms and blast out a bunch of messages and see who responds and then, you know, try to do a pay per post type situation. Okay, next one is something that I've been saying for years, at least five years now. And finally somebody exposed them on YouTube. I haven't seen the video, but I know they got exposed, which is Honey and Capital One Shopping and basically all these coupon sites. You know, what does Honey do? Well, Honey promises to consumers. Honey is basically a two sided business. On one side they promise to consumers that hey, you install our Chrome extension, it's completely free. Anytime you're checking out, we'll give you a coupon code that we believe has the best discount. And consumers are like, consumers are simple. Yeah, you got a discount, I install it for free. Now on the brand side they basically go and apply to everybody's affiliate program and try to set up these custom affiliate deals. So as a baseline, they just apply to all the big affiliate program program. So you know, if you're, or I should say they just apply to the affiliate program as a regular affiliate like a normal coupon site after that then they will try to reach out to you directly and try to build, you know, some sort of a custom campaign program with you. And basically what they'll do is they'll say, well, we want to hire commission because we're going to drive traffic from our network of 20 million plus shoppers. That was five years ago. 20 million, I'm sure it's bigger now. And essentially what they do is the reason it's a scam is let's say you're, you're a brand, right? So your brand yourself, you sell glasses, you give them a code that says honey 10. And your generic code is welcome 10. Well, what happens is honey is going to tell you that they're going to promote you in front of their million tens of millions of eyeballs. But they actually don't, they don't do for promotion. In fact, it's almost close to nothing. And if you look at the actual direct traffic from their specific UTM or coupon code uses of their specific code that you give to them, them to use exclusively, it's going to be close to zero. What is interesting though is you will see that in your site analytics that as soon as somebody reaches checkout, all of a sudden, 30 seconds before they pull the trigger and make the purchase, they've now come in through a honey, a honey attributed affiliate link. And this whole order that you just worked so hard between Facebook and Google and influencers and email and text and whatever to get somebody to that final purchase. Well, the honey is going to come in and take 10% because they're at the, they're at the checkout and somebody use, somebody going through your checkout had the honey extension and all it did was just reload the page, brought in their affiliate URL for attribution. Now they get 10% and they're using a coupon code of Welcome10. So now you're giving 10% off again. And you've already paid Facebook, you've paid Google, you're paying for these email and text messages to go out. You can see how basically all they're doing is they're just scamming you. They're not even using the code that they're supposed to use. They just found a little glitch that is somehow legal. It should be totally banned. And they're basically scammers. Now the reason this blew up recently is because with influencers, the same thing happens. If I have an influencer code of Sharma 20, what happens is they swap it out and make it their own attributed thing. It screws me as the influencer and that's why it just blew up on YouTube. But all that said Capital One Shopping and Honey, they do the exact same shit. Most of these coupon extensions do the same thing. My recommendation, get them out of your affiliate programs, get them out off of your coupon sites, get all coupon sites off of your affiliate program because it just messes up the attribution. And also this is 2024, not 2012. Nobody is going in. You know using these coupon sites to. Nobody's discovering your brand on coupon sites. Right. It's a very, very, very bottom of funnel thing. If anything, you should have a. You could make site of your own that is entirely full of deals. Another thing I saw Poo Pourri do, I don't know if they still do this, but they used to do this is on their own site. They have a page that talks about the deals, active deals. What are the best deals you can get on all their products. What are all the offers that exist? Might be a holiday offer, it might be your welcome offer, it might be refer a friend offer. Might be join some program offer whatever it is. Might be join a membership. And essentially you just have that page pop up when people are searching for coupons of your brand. That way people are coming to your site, they're seeing your best offers. And you can also be very clear there that like hey, any, any coupons and whatnot you see elsewhere, they're all fake. Hundreds of merchants like July Luggage, the College and Company and the Ootie are making six figures in incremental revenue through Instant Supercharged retention marketing platform. It takes less than 60 minutes to go live and you see results within days. You most likely already send site abandonment emails, but because most of the traffic on your site is anonymous, you don't get to email 98% of these visitors. Instant gives you another chance to convert these visitors into buyers and send two to three times more cart abandonment emails than you were before. Learn how you can double your abandoned flow revenue at instant1/podcast. That's instant1/podcast. Now back to the show. Next one is, is that most paid for UGC content? You know, UGC user generated content, it really should be. Customer generated content is how we should be focusing on it as an industry because that's when it feels real. But most of the UGC and these UGC creators that you find, and again no hate against these people, but most of the content, it looks like an ad from a mile away. That's why if you're ever scrolling TikTok and you see one of these fake UGCs, a lot of times you'll see that their comments are turned off when it's an ad and that's because people are roasting them in the comments for how bad of an ad it is. TikTok is one of those platforms that does not reward people who post shitty ads. So what's a, what's a better alternative to UGC? Well, open up TikTok again and just look at what are highly engaging posts defined by number of comments, number of shares, number of likes relative to the number of views. What are highly engaging posts looking like that are selling products through TikTok Shop. And you can, you can, there's, there's a link online somewhere where you can see what the top TikTok shop brands are. Or if you're, if you have a personal account, I think you can easily switch it to a creator account and then you can go and see what are the top performing TikTok shop products that you can promote as a creator. And then you can see what are examples of the top performing posts. You should go see that. That is what UGC should look like. Not the fake value prop congested bullshit that you pay $50 a video for. That stuff is not going to drive you any sales. And the problem with that too is that people then run that and then they think oh well, ads don't work or well UGC doesn't work, or you know, that style of ad doesn't work. Well. It's not that. It's partly that the fact that the creative looks like shit and fake and people can smell that from a mile away. And it's partly, probably the fact if the fact that you maybe don't have a good offer or good messaging or a good angle or a good story. And that comes from the fact that the angle in the story part comes from the fact that these people are just paid to read a script. They're not, they're not active and consistent users of whatever your product is, right? So they're not going to know what it feels like to now use this product versus what they used to use or how their life has been impacted in a positive way that they can talk about. So that's my rant on on ugc. Here's another one. Building landing pages off of Shopify, especially where you have a scaling pricing model, that to me is a waste of money. I mean, I've been building landing pages since 2014 and I, you know, at first it was just building landing pages and whatever CMS we used to use. Eventually I moved to start using Unbounce. Why? Because the pricing was the cheapest and it was all drag and drop. Me, unfortunately, I'm one of the Indians in the world who does not know how to code. So I had to resort to drag and drop. I use unbounce and everything is very easy to put together. You know, a landing page is essentially UX first, then ui and obviously it's gotta Be fast and good copywriting and good content and all of that. But it's really a UX focused page. And like it's 2024. There's free wi fi at Starbucks and around the city in New York City. Why are you paying a landing page software on a scaling pricing model? The cost of hosting that is pennies compared to what you're paying for it. So what would I recommend? Well, everything you build for a landing page should just be built into Shopify and specifically Shopify 2.0. All of the sites that we build at Sharma Brands are on top of the dawn theme at Shopify. And the reason is that that's what Shopify updates the most and it's their latest and greatest up to date. The benefit too is like when we build a landing page or a product page or whatever it is, every single module is easily like duplicatable across other pages. So if we find that a comparison chart and a landing page does really well, it takes two seconds to copy that to a product page. If we find that a landing page performed really well for the Thanksgiving Black Friday promotion, we can duplicate that and just swap out the product bundle that we're promoting for New Year, new you, or for Valentine's Day, whatever it is. And they're all. I mean, Shopify for the most part is now like if you've got good UX design and you've got a good developer, it's for the most part drag and drop, very easy to edit. And yeah, there's just no reason you should be not building landing pages inside Shopify. There's almost no reason to do that. I'm having a hard time thinking of reasons why. But even the most complex custom application forward type stuff, you can build that directly in Shopify. You can build headlines that change dynamically based on the UTM source or UTM campaign name or what the headline in the ad that's driving the trap. You can do all that in Shopify. You don't need to be off of Shopify and you don't need to be paying an insane amount. You should not be paying more than a few thousand dollars to develop a landing page unless you're doing something very specific and special and then you should own that page. That was the whole idea behind Hooks and I guess why. One of the reasons it didn't do so well was because we made it so founder friendly, where we were entirely focused on building a page and then giving it to the founder so they can duplicate. We had some clients who would duplicate a page 50 times. You should not be paying 50 times or, or per traffic that hits your site for landing, you should pay once and that's it. Okay, next one is sporadic influencer and event marketing. This happens so much where, you know, brands get flooded all the time in their inbox. Hey, we're doing this event, you know, you want to donate product, you want to sponsor. Oh, this influencer's birthday party is happening. Do you guys want to sponsor this? Oh, this celebrity is hosting a dinner for some charity. Do you guys want to sponsor this? Then in Instagram you have a bunch of DMS from, you know, every possible UGC creator in the world. And also just a bunch of cold dms from influencers asking to do work together, right? They're like, hey, we love your brand, we want to work. It's all fake and, and a big, I forget the, the phrase for it where you basically go down a rabbit hole. But the, the downside of this is sometimes you get, you know, excited. Oh, this influencer wants to work with me. Oh, this celebrity is doing a dinner and they want me to sponsor it. And you put, you know, two grand here, seven grand here, ten grand here. All of a sudden you're out 200 grand and you have nothing to show for it. There's nothing attributable to those things. Sure, you might get content back from it, but you know, did that content drive the equivalent of profit for you? Probably not. Or at least brand awareness. Probably not. What I would recommend is you have to have a proper strategy around influencers and events. Don't just spend to spend or don't just spend to participate. These types of events and opportunities exist 24 7. They're never going away. It's not like this is the last dinner or whatever that's going to happen. And if you have a consumable product, let's say your supplement, let's say you're a beverage, let's say you're a protein bar, a snack, a bag of chips, whatever it is. You should just. Most of the times people actually just want to reach out to you because they want the product. So offer to them, hey, instead of us sponsoring with, you know, $10,000 plus product, we'll just give you product in exchange. All we want is a couple of social tags and content. Most of the time they'll say yes, they'll just do it because of course they want the product and they can probably get the sponsorship from somebody else. So next up is non net new customer acquisition. So what does that mean? That Means that channels that are driving new customers that are non net new customers. You know this. Actually the first place I see most brands mess this up is ASC. They don't put a 0% existing customer cap. Sometimes they leave it anywhere from 10 to 30%. Don't recommend if you're trying to go for net new customers, which is what you should be focused on with your largest campaigns. Another channel, AppLovin. Also, if you look at some of the incrementality studies or just talk to some of the marketers and people running applovin campaigns, you'll notice that they don't have exclusions. And so you're not necessarily always acquiring net new customers. You are getting reorders and that works. But if you're a highly consumable product or repeat purchase type product, then you know, it might not be the right channel for you. All that said, you want to make sure that in general, any sort of channel you're running, any sort of campaigns, platforms, whatever it may be, it's focused on net new customer acquisition. Next, and I believe the last one for now is paying PR agencies an egregious amount of money. The amount of. First of all, I don't know why PR agencies have set a standard of, you know, a $20,000, 25, $30,000 retainer to get written up. Basically, you know, these agencies, they have relationships with editors, sorry, with editors. And that is what they leverage in order to try to get you written up or your brand written up in these publications. You know, a ridiculous retainer, not worth it. What would I do with that 25,000? Instead I'd invest it into a creator focused agency that will get you 500 to a thousand videos lit up per day on a platform like TikTok or Reels or YouTube Shorts. That to me is a better way of driving new eyeballs and awareness than PR is. Problem with PR is yeah, you'll get that Forbes exclusive for your launch or you know, the Variety magazine, not even Variety magazine, maybe a variety.com feature or you know, something like that. But that's gonna get 472 views written or sorry, 472 views on that whole article. Whereas you know, 800 videos per day that are going up for the Same retainer of 25k a month is gonna get way. It's gonna get 472 views per hour per video. You know what I mean? It's not worth paying for PR agencies. Instead you should work with creator agency or something that again, this is. If you have this 25k budget, put it towards getting eyeballs with creators and if you still want the PR, you want the logos, etc. Go to those places and get a sponsored piece of content. Or there are honestly companies that exist. I think Press Cart is one of them, where you can literally just buy a sponsored article on a specific site for a flat fee. It might be Vogue Australia for 1500 bucks. It might be GQ United States for 3700 bucks. You pay once you get your article, you get the logo and move on. Honestly, people don't even trust that stuff as much anymore. They want to know that real customers and just the everyday person, like random creators on TikTok are using the products and enjoying them and liking them and that they're living up to the promise that they said they would. Okay, now that concludes the portion of overrated tactics channels things to focus on. Now I want to talk about a few things that are underrated and I'm just going to name a couple here. If this is if you like the underrated part, let me know because I'm going to do a whole episode just focusing on underrated. So the first one that I think a lot of people don't focus on that is such an easy focus overnight it'll dramatically drive new revenue for you is just focusing on increasing your opt in rate for email and sms. Most people. So I think according to Klaviyo, the average opt in rate for email is about 3%. You know, depending on how well you are, most likely you're probably around like 4 to 6%, 4 to 7% opt in. That is way too low. You should be leveraging two tools that I like to use. One's Black Crow which yes, I invested in and they partner with me all the time. But I truly love the tool. I've been an investor for years now. Their tool understands user patterns and user behavior on the website and what that generally means to the outcome of what that user is going to do. So based on how I interact with your website, they can pretty accurately predict whether or not I'm going to be an HIL TV customer, whether I understand what what you're selling, whether I still require education, whether I have no idea what I'm doing on your side. I just happen to come across it and they will basically then decide when to serve a pop up based on the interactions I have with the the site initially. And then I use a tool called Alia for the actual pop up itself. And with that combination between Black Crow deciding when to serve the pop up. And Alia actually being the pop up, we can usually get a 15% opt in rate for email which if you just think about the difference between even 7% and 15%, that's an 8% difference of traffic. 8% of your traffic is not being collected and harvested in welcome flows. And think about all those, all that low hanging revenue of that just 8% spread sitting waiting for you to go collect the revenue. It's not happening. So focus on the opt in that directly translates to welcome series revenue. I don't know why you wouldn't do that. Next one is collecting and syndicating product reviews. For some reason, product reviews I feel like have been put on the back burner by so many brands. I don't understand why I think that. Do I think that product reviews are like the highest form of authentic social proof? No, I think things like, you know, creator reviews or just everyday people reviewing and unboxing a product on TikTok or on posting on their stories, I think those are some of the best product reviews, most authentic and natural. But it doesn't mean you shouldn't be collecting because the vanity metric of how many reviews you have is a huge thing for the purpose of social proof and driving conversion of the sale. Now take this a step further. So one is actually collecting the reviews, making sure that you are aggressively collecting reviews. You know, if you're just getting a few reviews for every 100 purchases, you're not doing a good enough job. Do not just use the templates that Okendo gives you in their portal. Go in and customize these emails, customize the messaging, you know, make it feel on brand, make it feel like it's you asking genuinely as a small business for something, as a favor from the customer who just bought something from you. And collect the review. Make sure you get that review and do everything you can to make that frictionless and easy. Right? Think about if you were just asking your grandma to give you a review from her iPhone. She already barely knows how to use the iPhone. Now you have to ask her to write a review. Make that process super easy. The second part is then making sure that you're syndicating these reviews. So whether it's on platforms like Target.com, nordstrom.com, TikTok, shop, you know, Shopify Shop app, you gotta just make sure that every review you get, you try to put it in as many places as possible and you know, just distribute the reviews because not one, you know, one place isn't going to get all the reviews you're going to get a bunch of reviews from different sources. So as best as you can, re syndicate those reviews across different channels and then take the collective number of reviews and use that as your badge of social proof on your website. Because, you know, 500 plus reviews is a lot different than 5,000 plus reviews. And if you can add up all the places you've got reviews and that equals 5,000 can be a lot stronger than the conversion rate when you have just 500 reviews. Let's see, I'm going to go, I'm going to skip a couple here. Okay, this one is huge. This one I used to personally do myself. Every day after, you know, after everybody would leave, I would respond to every single ad comment on Facebook and Instagram. And every time that I've run ads myself, there's always two things I love doing. One is you gotta make sure you respond to every single comment. Even if it's a positive comment respond, it might just be an emoji response from the brand. Or if you're whitelisting the ad, it might be an emoji response from whoever's page it is that you're whitelisting. If they've got a question, you always want to have an answer. Because if somebody's got a question, most likely a bunch of other people are going to have that same question. You respond there and you can, you can. What I like to do is link it back to a PDP or if it's a, you know, if it's a question that requires more explanation, you have a blog post on your site that explains and you happen to have a shoppable blog site because that's how you should have your blog sites these days. Then you can link them there. Only thing I would add there is that when you do that, try to make vanity URLs. So for example, you know, you don't want to have. Let's just say I'm just running an ad for a cookbook. You don't want to have, you know, Nick Co product slash cookbook underscore, you know, question mark, UTM underscore source equals meta comments. Right? That's too clunky. And it just looks janky. And again, it doesn't look, it's not that effortless red carpet style experience for a customer or for somebody scrolling. It doesn't look that trustworthy either. Right. Instead you have Nick Co Cookbook, which as soon as you click it then you immediately get to, you know, whatever the intended Pages with the UTMs already there. You should Have a vanity URL that you're using for all sort of short URLs or redirects that is either a.co or some form of a subdomain, whether it's visit Nick co email for example. But I would definitely do that. And you know, as you're scaling your ads, responding to every comment absolutely has impact on the performance of a piece of Creative and your CPMs. And last thing I'll say is as you scale this in terms of, you know, you're spending more on ads and you're getting more and more comments every single day. It's hard to keep up. Hire somebody from a place like Ocean's. You've probably heard me talk about Remise. That's where I found Remiz is Ocean's talent. You should hire somebody from Ocean's whose entire job is to just sit in business manager and respond to every single comment. And I don't know this for a fact, but I'm pretty sure this is true because this is generally how tech companies are. But responding to all these comments within Facebook Business Manager I believe does better performance wise than responding to all these comments through a third party tool. I don't have any proof for that, but just from my own, you know, running media for 10 years or so and doing this, I feel like I've always seen just better performance doing things within business manager itself versus using third party tools that are built on top of an API. Okay, the last one that I want to talk about here, and I'll save the rest for another episode if this is interesting and helpful, is to basically optimize all of your PDP experiences, even those outside of Shopify. So obviously when I say pdp, you probably think of your own Shopify or website's product page and PDP for Contacts product page. But you know, that doesn't include all of these marketplace places, Marketplace product pages that you're also selling. So whether it's the Shop app, whether it's TikTok Shop, whether it's Meta shops, whether it's goop.com whether it's Revolve, whether it's Amazon, you know, don't, don't just give up on those product pages. Make sure they all have incredible content, incredible copywriting. You know, if you've got Amazon product pages, you should have Amazon specific assets. You can literally just go see what some of the best selling brands are on these different marketplaces and try to copy them. If you're on TikTok Shop, you know, you know that you've basically got three, three places you can play. One is the carousel of images, which should basically be like a massive landing page. Each image is basically a section of a landing page. You've got the product title and then you've got the, the description where you can add text and imagery. So that again, should be treated like a landing page. If you're on, you know, sorry, Nordstrom or Revolve or Goop, and you don't have the right information or, you know, product copy or things that don't make your brand really stand out the way it should, you should absolutely go and fix that because that is a reflection of your brand. It's not just a reflection of the marketplace. And if somebody is looking at that page, you know, that product page on a different website, you obviously want to maximize the conversion rate because at the end of the day, that feeds back into your brand equity, your brand experience, and eventually, you know, your purchase order. Okay, there's a few other things I have here, you know, licensing, taxes, international trade laws, live shopping, other things that I think are underrated on that side. But I'm gonna save that for next time. Let me know what you think. Today's episode, I just realized, is slightly over that 30 minute mark, but let me know what you think. Honestly, I'm. I'm very excited to try new stuff with limited supply. I feel like we had such a great come up with limited supply and then, I mean, I'm just speaking candidly and honestly here, I feel like the energy is just not where it used to be. So I'm looking to bring that back and I would love your help. So shoot me a note. Nharma.com is my email. You can DM me on Twitter, you can message me on LinkedIn. You can do anything to reach me. Let me know, what else do you think would be helpful? I know I hate hearing that question when I hear it from other people, but I want to make this thing pop again and I know a lot of people love listening to it. So I really appreciate you. Especially if you're listening right now, that means you've stayed till the end. I really appreciate you. But yeah, I'm gonna make it fun again. It's gonna come back. We've got a lot of fun interviews planned. And if you've got any other ideas on how we can make this thing spicy and, you know, get people pissed off again, let's do it. All right. I appreciate you listening. I'll be back with the next episode shortly and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on cpg retail and e Commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend? And be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss the next one.