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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. 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 to buyers using their retention marketing platform. You can use their platform to send two to three times more site abandonment emails which you know, generate meaningful revenue and build audiences to retarget on meta. Double your abandoned flow revenue and increase your roas with Instant. Go to Instant One Limited to learn more. That's Instant One Limited. Now back to the show. Welcome back to limited supply, episode three of the new season in 2025. I'm excited to basically extend the first episode today with underrated tactics, strategies, things to do. There was a ton of great feedback on the first episode. I got so many texts and our Limited Supply Slack community really seemed to love it too, where we talked pretty much all about the things that are overrated. You know, the things that everybody talks about, a loyalty program, refer a friend program, you know, whatever it may be, and just things that tend to be wastes of time from what I've seen. So today I want to talk about things that are underrated. Things that don't get enough love or enough attention. But they are things that definitely help make your day to day more efficient, smoother, you know, you find a lot better data or you just are able to generate more revenue. So without further ado, let's jump into it. The first thing is leveraging AI for creative. A lot of people tend to use AI or when you think of AI, you think of ChatGPT, which obviously is the default, but you know. Or you think about Dall E when it comes to making creative. But there are new apps that exist. Butter I've talked about before, Marpipe I've talked about before. Both of those now leverage a lot of AI in their creative generation and just allow you to make a bunch of creative at scale or very quickly. You know, Butter is also cool. You can take a lot of the ad templates that they have in there, insert your own renders or even a image with a background. It'll use the AI to remove the background, turn your image into a 3D render and then you'll be able to use it in the ad, which is cool. I've also seen there's platforms and, or rather a company called TV Ads AI, which I think is also cool. They ingest all of your digital creative that you use on ads or banners or on your website, along with briefs or, you know, data of what's working on new customer prospecting. And then they'll generate new TV creatives which allows you to just test a bunch of TV creatives, you know, versus testing one or two, which is kind of the norm. There's also, I'm sure you've heard of Claude. If you haven't already, you should check out Claude. Claude's great for copywriting, especially when you train it, you know, specific to your brand. It's a little bit stronger than just ChatGPT. And then there's also different things, you know, more industry specific AI platforms. There's one called flockshop AI where you can, you know, if you're a beauty brand, you can actually work with them to make sure that all of your beauty products show up on different skin colors. So making it easy for consumers to understand exactly what it would look like on their end versus just having a generic model for all of your beauty products. The next one is setting up a real time dashboard with all your analytics. So back when I started working in E commerce about eight or so years ago, there was basically an email that my team would send out every morning and we would gather all of our revenue and spend metrics and how we're pacing for the month, put it into Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. We would use tableau to pool all that. And then we would take a screenshot and send it out to the executive team every morning. And that was about the most extensive reporting that we would get on a daily basis. And that was considered our real time reporting. Now today, the way that we go about it is, you know, if you're a smaller brand, you can use one of the general or generic reporting apps that exist, you know, and you can set up a dashboard that gives you real time analytics. Sometimes your attribution software will do a good job of this too. But as you scale, you add more channels, more points of distribution or sales. You have Amazon, you have, you know, email going at full blast. You want to use a tool that's more of a business intelligence tool that you can actually customize. So for example, we use Tido and we have a dashboard that we call Sharmalytics So we go in there, it got everything from Shopify to Meta to Google to organic to email, sms, you know, organic search and traffic, all of those things in one dashboard. And any of our clients can just pull it up whenever they need. The beauty of using a BI tool is that you can actually build it around your business. So if there are specific metrics or specific, you know, math equations you use to hit your goals or, you know, set up to view different numbers, whether it's contribution margin by email or, you know, profit per recipient, whatever it may be, you can actually set all these equations up and see them exactly how you want to see them versus more reporting tools will just tend to have the, you know, what 99% of people need, which is more generic and, you know, more standard versus custom. The next underrated tactic is setting up an affiliate program, but not just with affiliates, more so with editors at publications. So, you know, different affiliates exist. You have obviously TikTok shop has their entire set of creators as affiliates. You've got the, you know, the ones who are posting, you've got the ones that are going live. You've got influencers as affiliates. You've got different email lists that you might tap into. Maybe there's different communities or groups that become an affiliate as well. But the best ones are with publishers. And I'll tell you why. With publishers you get access to their entire, you know, you basically get to be on their website. So a lot of times too pushed by their social or by their newsletters. And the way that I've found is, you know, you can't. Well, first of all, you have to be set up on the tech platforms that they use, which for the most part is skim links. All of their cms, you know, content management systems, their back end, basically where they write the content, it integrates directly with skim links. And what happens is, let's say somebody's writing about Cadence Capsules. They write, last week my husband gave me Cadence Capsules for Christmas and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever they're talking about. When they write Cadence Capsules, it'll pop up and say, do you want to tag this with an affiliate link? And obviously every publisher is going to say yes, because why wouldn't they want the revenue? So you want to first be in skim links. That way you're in the database. And then second is you want to actually reach out and build relationships with all of the affiliate editors or affiliate managers at these publications where your customers are shopping. So for me, in the past, you know, I worked at a brand that was selling beverages, that was making sure I had a great relationship with the affiliate team at Refinery29, at POPSUGAR, Buzzfeed, Business Insider, ET cetera. And what I would do is before every sale that we had, I would make sure that they knew exactly what the sale was, when it was going live, why it was a great sale. And also I'd make sure that they all had their own links and codes that they could offer. Sometimes I would give them a sale before we would send it out. That way they felt like they had the upper hand and they would want to push it harder. The other thing you can do is you can change if you go direct to these publishers versus just through skim links, you can also create better programs for them. So you can say, you can create a tiered commission structure. So, you know, after maybe on a water cliff. So, you know, the first hundred sales are at this commission, the next are at this commission, the next are at this commission, incentivizing them to obviously push harder and harder. You can also say, you know, Amazon's going to give you guys 6 to 8%. Most brands will give you 10. We'll give you 35% commission on anything you guys sell. Obviously you have to make sure your attribution windows are tight, but a lot of times you know that 35% is probably going to be lower than what you're paying Facebook anyways. So it's always important to set these sales up and then make sure that the editors at these publications are aware. They're always putting out gift guides, listicles roundups. You know, obviously in Q4, they put out. If you just go to Insider Picks and look at their website, you'll see how many pieces of content they put out on a daily basis. They make all their revenue from affiliate revenue, so the more you can feed them, the more they're going to want to push it. Next underrated tactic is remove Honey and Capital One Shopping. I can't remember if I talked about this before, but Honey, that browser extension that promises consumers to save money or get discounts, is a total scam. Most brands will be approached by Honey in their affiliate program. You know, you probably use something like Impact or shareasale or Commission Junction, whatever it is. And Honey is just in there trying to add everybody to their list because why not? For them, it's a great deal, right? They get on the browser, they pay once to acquire a customer to install the browser extension. Then every time you go to a cart where Honey is an Affiliate, they will basically just refresh the checkout page and insert their affiliate link at the very end. Now what that does is every time they do that, you are now paying them whatever. You know, your standard affiliate is probably 10%. So you're paying them 10% of whatever sale you just drove by paying for ads or an affiliate, an influencer, et cetera. Honey is now taking credit for that. If it comes from another creator or an affiliate, Honey is removing their credit and adding theirs in, removing the affiliate or the creator's credit. And then they're taking credit for it. And they do this all while promising that, you know, they're going to put you in front of a 20 million size audience network. That 20 million number was from 2020. So it may be bigger now, but if you give them a utm, which obviously you will, you'll see that they actually don't drive any traffic at all. When I did this in 2020 or when I actually realized how big of a scam Honey was, it was because we paid them 2,500 bucks in commissions. And you know, I was like, hey, why? Why are we paying you this if you haven't driven any traffic? It seems like your browser extension is becoming enabled. You know, like I think it was 10 seconds before the checkout happened. And when I looked into that data, I basically just realized all they were doing was taking credit for sales that were not theirs. And on top of that they were not even. It was, you know, I gave them a code that I think was honey 20, something like that, or honey 10. And all the codes that they were taking credit for were Judy 20, which were. Those were coming from a landing page that I had coming from Facebook. So anyways, it came to be very obvious that Honey is just a scam. And all they do is refresh the cart at the last second or the checkout at the last second and then they take their commission. So if you have Honey as an affiliate, you know, and you believe that you're being promised something, you're probably not. And I would also double check the utms from which you had told them and look into that. Same with Capital One Shopping or any of these other browser extension style affiliates or coupons. Most of them are just taking credit, but not actually driving revenue. The next underrated tactic is actually more on the brand marketing side. So brand marketing is something we don't talk about often, but it plays a direct role in performance marketing. When I think about the brands that did the best last year in terms of revenue and you Know, even just brand building, engagement overall, just overall how, how the brand is doing perception wise, the. The brands that did the best and not just perception, but also revenue and bottom line were the ones that had a really strong brand. And that really comes down to tone of voice and messaging and positioning. A lot of times too, when people want to do a rebrand cause they believe that their brand's not strong enough, it's really not that they need to do a full design rebrand, it's really just that they need to rethink their messaging and positioning. So there's actually a. You know, you've probably seen Vogue's 20 Questions videos on YouTube where they ask, you know, a celebrity 20 questions and that's how you get to know them. It's about a 15 minute video. You should check it out because I bas rewrote those 20 questions, although I did 21 for what how your brand should be perceived. And a great exercise to do is you could actually find at Nick Co 21 questions, 21 questions. And if you go there, you'll see 21 questions written out. I would recommend putting that into a Google Doc and answering all of those 21 questions. You know, it's everything from, you know, if your Instagram, sorry, if your brand were to post a story on Instagram, what would they post? If they were to retweet something on Twitter, what would it be? And what this helps you do is sort of nail down your tone of voice and who you are and how you want to be represented and everything you put out after that, you know, you can always reference back to this doc and see, well, does this align with how I would perceive my brand to be as a human? And I. The thing that it does, it just helps humanize the brand and you know, just make it more real. A lot of times brands spend a lot of time on product development and then performance marketing, but they lack that kind of human soul or human element to it, and it can make all the difference. Right along the same vein is the next one which is investing in a good organic social presence. So most brands, you know, you run ads and you just tend to gain followers as a byproduct of running ads. But you should really be treating every new follower like someone who just walked into your store. Your Instagram profile, your TikTok profile, especially with the younger generation, you know, Gen Z, Gen Alpha, your Instagram profile with millennials and Gen Z, those are your storefronts. Your website is not as important as the Instagram page for your brand. Sometimes. So I would recommend, you know, if you're on Instagram, you should have highlights that follow, you know, that talk about all the main things. It shows your reposts from people, right, because that's social proof. You've got press highlights, you've got FAQs, maybe you've got a how the product is made, why it's different, whatever it may be, you should have a ton of highlights. People should be able to scroll through and find everything that they're looking for within the highlights. Anytime you have a promotion or a sale that should be announced on Instagram, you know, maybe it's not in TikTok and Twitter and Facebook, honestly everywhere. Maybe it's not a full post, but maybe it's just a story post. Creating a broadcast channel is another easy win. I've seen some brands do this really well. A lot of influencers do this well too. But it's an easy opportunity to stay in touch with people who they themselves will opt in and say, yeah, I want to be in this broadcast group and see and hear every new update from the brand. So you can do that. I would use Instagram to also make sure you're dming with creators and building relationships. I think that's a hugely underrated opportunity. Creators love to hear from brands and the more you can do that, you know, the better. You find people who are always going to be evangelists for you too. You can find your top people on Instagram from an engagement standpoint, give them early access to new products, to new sales, to new, you know, variants of existing products. And then the last thing I'd also recommend is leveraging close friends. It's surprising to me how many brands don't leverage close friends with their most engaged, you know, followers, fans, whatever you want to call them, customers. There is such an opportunity to leverage close friends. You know, following a brand in general is not as exciting, but if you do stuff for for a smaller group of people, it makes them feel a lot more exclusive and bought into the brand. And you know, that type of stuff pays back 10 times over. Hundreds of brands like Garrett Popcorn, July Luggage and Selfie Leslie 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 just 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 site 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 Instant One Limited. That's Instant One Limited. Now back to the show. Next underrated tactic. This one's more for you know, if you work at a brand and you're looking to find other peers, I would highly recommend building a group chat with your equivalent at different companies. This is something that I learned about nine years ago and as soon as I did it, it was the best thing ever. I used to go, I basically just reached out to when I lived in San Francisco. I reached out to the other directors of performance marketing or direct consumer from ThirdLove and Madison Reed and Stitch Fix and we would go grab lunch once a month. This lunch would net us at least six figures in revenue just from whatever information we exchanged there. And then to take that and make it more real time, we just turned it into an imessage group chat. Now the imessage group chat's great because every day you're seeing all, you know, everybody is sharing stuff. So if you don't see something or if you don't read something on your own, you're then seeing what other people are seeing and sending to you. Group chats, in my opinion, are the best way to get access to information. And they are also the fastest way a lot of times what you'll see in publishers, you know, industry publications or newsletters or even podcasts like this, it comes, you know, at least a day late than the group chat. The group chat also, you know, you get real time insights. So if you're a performance marketing manager or if you're a copywriter, or if you're a, you know, you're an inventory planner, you will just get real time insights and learnings from your peers about what they're doing differently or something that they did that, you know, can be a breakthrough for you. I would highly recommend setting up a group chat. Next underrated tip is taking meetings with new vendors just to see what's new or coming in your space. There's a lot of vendor meetings that I'll take just because, you know, I know that we may not use them right away, but it is always fascinating to see, you know, how is a company going to challenge what is currently existing? For example, I mentioned TVads AI earlier. That was a meeting I took a couple of weeks ago because I thought what was interesting is how they think about multi. You know, basically testing creative, a ton of creative for TV versus just one or two pieces of creative, which is what most TV platforms will advise you to do and you end up doing because generating TV creative is not that fast and easy as it is for Facebook. Now what that taught me was what is about to come to this space of tv, how generative AI and ingesting your entire library of creative, how that can turn into TV creative or how that can evolve into even using that same technology around Facebook ad creative. Anyways, I highly recommend taking vendors seriously when they reach out to you and just set up meetings. You don't always have to go through with it. A lot of times too, you can just be up front and say, hey, we're not in the market for this, but I'd love to get a demo and see what the platform's capable of in case we end up doing this down the road. But if nothing else, new vendors are usually challengers in the space and they're usually coming in because they have some edge or something that the current players don't have. Which is why I always enjoy meeting them and seeing what they've got. Next one is cleaning and cutting your list for more efficiencies. So think about your customer lists. There's a lot of inefficiencies because people love to have this. You know, in everybody's head. There's a vanity metric of how many. How big is your email list, how big is your SMS list. You know, you feel like the more emails and phone numbers you have, the more you're going to be able to make out of them. But the reality is most of these platforms bill you for every email or every phone number that's there. And you are exporting all these lists and putting them into ad platforms without cleaning them because you know, you want to keep sending to as many people as possible in the email side. And so when you upload these lists, you're also giving, you know, bad signals to Google Ads, to YouTube, to Facebook, etc. There's one company I found that does this well, it's called Waste Not Tech. That's the URL. And basically what they'll do is just go through your list and help you identify who are people that you should stop including in these lists or not include in Google Ads or Facebook ads and just make your overall, you know, targeting more efficient and your ad spend also more efficient. So I would highly recommend doing this. It's also, it's going to save you over the course of a year, it's going to save you thousands of dollars to clean out your klaviyo list and make sure that you're not sending emails or multiple emails to people who are not to buy. You know, if you've got a list of 100,000 people and 15,000 people are just inactive, but you're sending them every single campaign. You're sending two campaigns a week. That's a lot of money you're spending on people who are just never going to buy. All right, the next one is whitelisting. I've talked about whitelisting forever. I've been doing it since 2014 when I worked with publishers on driving traffic to their sites. And you know, whitelisting is essentially the concept of just running ads that are not coming from your brand name handle. So if I'm selling, you know, a computer monitor from Dell, but I go through MKBHD and use his handle to, or his Instagram handle, his Facebook page to show the ad. That's called whitelisting. A lot of times too. You know, this can be done from a meme account. I've seen it can be done from a publisher account like the Hustle or Business Insider or, you know, BuzzFeed. And it could also be done with creators and, or influencers. The difference being that influencers have a following. They're going to charge you more to whitelist with their account. Creators don't have a huge following, but they're really good at creating content. And honestly, it still has the same type of effect. The last one you can do, which is really easy and obviously free, is, you know, if you're a founder or even if you're running the marketing, you can run whitelisted ads from your own Instagram account. There's no reason you shouldn't do that, or at least try it out. If you've got a verified person who you're whitelisting through, you'll probably see your CPCS drop half by half. 50%. If it's not verified, you'll still see a significant drop. It may not be as great as 50%, but you can also, you know, now with Instagram, anybody can be verified. So I would highly Recommend Whitelisting on TikTok. The equivalent would be, you know, you could absolutely whitelist on TikTok, but the better equivalent would be those Spark ads. So finding content, you know, if you can seed out a bunch of content, you know, let's say you seed out 250 creators and out of that, you know, for number's sake, 10 of them do really well. They do way above the baseline of what you thought engagement was going to be. You can take those ads Spark them, meaning it runs through the exact same post ID and keeps the engagement, keeps the comments, the likes, etc. And now you run that as an ad in front of everybody else. It feels a lot more natural, feels basically it feels more native to the platform, which is always the goal, right? You want to have advertising feel native to the channel that it's running in. And last underrated tactic that I would recommend is building out a new customer offer. So a lot of times brands will have a beautiful website, they'll have great ads. You know, they might have an influencer who's pushing it or a face of the brand or maybe not. But they do miss a very simple piece of this which is building out a new customer offer that's enticing. And basically this comes down to the merchandising of what you're selling and why. So if you've got, let's say your organ protein, you want to sell customers and bring customers in on a new customer offer. My recommendation is always to focus on what you know, drives the highest sell through for net new customers. So you can export a bunch of reports from Shopify, plug it into ChatGPT and start asking it the questions to get your answer on what is that product that's going to drive the highest sell through. From there, build out an offer. You want to create an offer where you've got a good discount that's enticing for the customer. It's got enough quantity of whatever you're selling or sending to them so that a household of four can try it. You want to always assume that there's a household of four on the other side. Unless you're for sure that, you know, this is a product for one or two people. And you know, in the, in the case of orgain, you know, if you have a protein powder for let's say 39 bucks, you attach their protein bars because that's, you know, easier to ship than their liquids and also gives the opportunity to sample something new but also raise the perceived value of this order. You can add that you throw a blender bottle in for free and it looks like on their site they're running a promotion where you get one month free of center, which is some fitness training app. So now you add the perceived value of all this up and it might come to, you know, just over a hundred bucks. You put this offer out for $59, now you've got an offer that looks like it's 40% off the AOV, might actually be, you know, $45 or $40. And so next time somebody comes in, there's not a sticker shock or a price shock. They're used to that for the brand. In fact, they're used to paying more. They also get to sample some more products in addition to just the protein powder. They get a free gift. You know, you create this offer and the goal is once you create an offer and test it, you might have to create a few different ones to test which one is the best one. But once you find a good offer, your entire goal should be scaling new customer acquisition behind that offer. You can do this if you're an apparel brand, if you're a beauty brand, if you're a food and beverage brand. You know, there's almost no reason why you couldn't do this for across a number of industries and verticals. But building out that new customer offer then also allows you to build landing pages that are focused ads that are focused on that. You can find content creators that are more aligned with the new customer offer you're pushing and the products within it. And, you know, just creates for a better customer experience and better sampling experience. Those are all of the underrated tactics, tips, tricks, strategies that I wrote down for today. If today's episode was a fun one, let me know in the Slack group or by Twitter DM and I will come back with some more overrated and underrated tactics until next week. I hope you have a great week and I'll see you on the Internet. 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.