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Welcome to season 11 of limited supply, a place for hot takes on what.

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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.

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All right, welcome back to Limited Supply. In today's episode we're actually going to do something a little bit different. We're just going to go through a bunch of topics that have been on my mind and that people have been emailing me about or dming me about. So a lot of things on the docket one is that there's a lot of events coming up. So hopefully if you plan to be at Shop Talk, if you plan to be at Tripoli, Miami, if you plan to be at Commerce Summit, Commerce next sub summit, let me know. You know we'd love to host a meetup at one of these. Maybe a limited supply meetup like we did in Canada. I believe there's one happening in the UK next week. Also if you're not familiar with any of the meetups nearby, go to the limited supply Slack channel, limited supply pod.com and join the slack. You can see all of the local meetups happening. There's a bunch that happen all around the world. We are also going to be putting on a social shopping and top of funnel style event. There's, you know, I basically talk to 15 plus brands per week. Anybody who is pre launch and launching something in the, you know, with a massive celebrity all the way to brands that are doing 50 to 100 million brands that are doing 400 million and they all sort of have this same problem which is generating top of Funnel more awareness. How do you make sure the brand feels cool, well represented and basically just make it relevant so that your performance marketing ads work properly. And there's a few things that we've definitely talked about here before in the scale episode, which was a few episodes ago, we were talking about everything from advertorial to YouTube to TikTok and all of that. And through these conversations and even just talking with more brands that have successfully done it, it's pretty obvious that the easiest and biggest arbitrage opportunity here is the social shopping kind of short form content platforms and figuring out how to game those. So we're going to be hosting a virtual summit for that in the coming weeks. So if you want to be a part of the virtual event and grab an early ticket, we're going to do free tickets for the first few hundred people. So join it. Just go to Nick co Nik Co VirtualSummit and it will bring you to a Google form. Fill that form out and as soon as everything is scheduled and locked in, we will go ahead and send you a ticket. Okay, so there's a couple things I want to go through today in today's episode. One is how are telemedicine brands getting around all of the Meta changes that are now going to be hitting this month? The second one's going to be how you can make your subscription business stronger, more resilient and focused on acquiring longer LTV customers. And then if we have some time, I want to get into some of the AB tests that we've run with some of our clients and what some of the best wins have been. Okay, so starting with telemedicine. So if you are not aware, there's actually been a lot of changes that are coming that have been written out and explained, I guess somewhat clearly to telemedicine brands. And that is basically that Meta is changing their policies around what data gets collected and stored and how it's stored and how it's processed and then how it's internalized and then leveraged, of course, for advertising. And basically what they're trying to do is eliminate any sort of knowledge around people's personal problems. They don't want to know if somebody is going through depression and is looking for medication. They don't want to know if somebody has acne issues and is looking for a solution. They don't want to know about erectile dysfunction. They don't want to know about hair loss. And it's partially that a lot of these kind of telemedicine brands are sending so much data back to the ads platform, which obviously creates a liability on Facebook side for hosting that or holding and then leveraging that pii. The other problem is there's all these companies like hospitals and Insurance companies and pharmacy websites that all have a Facebook pixel. And without knowing it, they're actually accidentally sending back a bunch of pii that their customers are not even aware of. And there's been a lot of legal or government concern around Facebook having this data. And so in order for them to try to comply and get past this, what they're trying to do is just say, hey, going forward, we're actually not letting anybody run purchase objective campaigns. We don't want to be involved in anything related to that. And so it kind of leaves most brands figuring out exactly how are you going to continue running purchase based campaigns or how are you going to continue acquiring customers if you can't run a purchase objective campaign in Facebook. So I'll tell you how brands are getting around it and basically what I've seen work well. So first off is you have to be a brand that is focused on brand awareness and branding itself. Right? You should have good name recognition, good name association with your brand. If you're a brand like Curology or Roman or one of these companies, like obviously that's, you know, that exists. It's harder for net new companies coming into this space to do that. And so I really encourage focusing on building that upper funnel, focusing on content, focusing on education, you know, try to become a resource versus just a point of sale for consumers. There's a brand called Eden that I recently discovered that does a lot of telemedicine stuff and they've been very fascinating to watch as a brand and kind of how they're playing the content game, the web game, the ads game, et cetera. So I would definitely focus on upper funnel stuff. But now on the lower funnel side of things, how are brands acquiring new subscribers? Well, they're using a lot more content focused pages. So the web pages are a lot more descriptive, they're a lot more focused on education, they're a lot more kind of full funnel approach and they are essentially landing pages. There's also a lot of new custom events being tested. So whether that's time on site, whether that's pages visited within a session, you know, number of pages and it triggers an event. Most brands that are telemedicine brands are finding success by putting custom events inside the quiz flow. But before it starts to ask you anything proprietary. So let's say you've got, you know, a 12 question or a 20 question onboarding flow that people need to fill out before they can become a customer, before you start asking about any sort of information relating to, you know, the reason they're there. The cause that they're there for, that's where you want to put that event. And the idea is that let's say it's on the fourth slide, you have data that says, well, people who hit the fourth slide, what percentage of those people become a customer. And then you basically optimize towards that event and you sort of figure out the math of what percent of those people end up becoming customers. Combining that with incrementality testing is something I would also recommend because that also lets you one, it lets you test that event. But. But incrementality will let you test a ton of events and that too effectively in terms of understanding the conversion because Facebook's not gonna tell you what converts or not. So you're not gonna be able to get that reporting from there. You're gonna have to get it through incrementality testing. And you can actually test other events and see how those compare for your account. So for example, we have clients where we might test something like an add to cart focused campaign and see what that does on the website itself. But also in its omnichannel performance, you can only test stuff like that and measure those results with incrementality testing. And I would recommend doing the same here. Maybe it's not a custom event, but maybe it's website click, maybe it's add to cart. Whatever it may be, it might be something more upper funnel than just purchase. But using incrementality testing you can actually do a look back and understand what impact does that have. Most brands that are doing telemedicine are doing this custom events and incrementality testing and those are basically the things that work. Of course, even, you know, more granular tactics, wise advertorials, whitelisting, sparking, those are still things that are, you know, basically just crushing listicles. Obviously the thing, the kind of the run of the mill stuff that's still working, but this has kind of been the piece of the equation. And this is early on in the equation, right? It's like right when the ad's getting served and deciding who to serve. So this was a thing that was really tough to figure out, but seems like the solution is really lying within custom events and incrementality testing. From my conversations with Facebook, it feels like they sort of feel like their hands are tied as well. They don't necessarily want to do this. They're obviously missing out on a ton of revenue and potential revenue, but at the same time they don't want to deal with taking the fall for the legal stuff, which is why they're sort of just letting this happen. That said, this has been pushed back quite a bit, at least six weeks now. So it does feel like they're trying to figure out, like, how. How they can help brands get around this in a way that is legal. If you remember, when all the Cambridge Analytica stuff happened too, I think in 2017 or 18, there were, you know, we lost all access to those really granular audiences that we used to get. And. But then of course, they opened up the back door to let you know. You could buy these audience, exact same audiences from Oracle, Oracle, Datalogix or Experian, and then bring them right back into your account and sort of pay, you know, basically go around the back door. So it's. It feels like they're basically building the back door right now. Hopefully that's the case. That would be amazing if there becomes a backdoor for, you know, this type of stuff. I do think that there's gotta be a way to, you know, I would even be fine if Facebook said, hey, we're by default not allowing this. However, you can submit to a committee and, you know, basically say, here's my brand, here's my website, here's the products we sell. You know, let your team come, come to us and inspect everything. Make sure from a data and compliance standpoint, we're not sending anything back that is, you know, against your terms of service. And then whitelist us so we can run these ads like normal. I feel like that would make the most sense. And my guess is that's what's coming. Some variation of that, but I'm not sure why that wasn't the way that it started. Anyways, that's all I had on the telemedicine side. Moving on to the next topic is how do you make your subscription business better? So I was thinking about telemedicine. Obviously, telemedicine is largely subscription based. And so I just started thinking, what are ways to make a subscription business better and what are some of the things that I've seen? I've always thought that the best subscription businesses are actually media companies. Media companies like, you know, Wall Street Journal, for example. If you try to cancel, it's nearly impossible and they keep giving you offers and ways out, you know, to not cancel. Churn reduction. New York Times does a good job of this. I think at one point, New York Times made you call and try to cancel, which I think is now illegal to do. Thank God. Wellbell Hubble contacts Harry's Armor These are all great examples of companies that do really well on the churn reduction side and also kind of focused on providing a good subscription experience. So. All right, so here's some ideas I had. One is dead simple. So on your website, a lot of brands don't even have a subscribe and save landing page or collections page or some sort of a page that explains why somebody should subscribe. It's not super obvious all the time why somebody. I keep saying somebody. It's not obvious why somebody should subscribe. You know, it may be for convenience. It may be that, you know, if you stop taking a Wellbel, its effects actually lessen while you're maybe waiting for a new shipment to come in. You know, if you're selling something that you need every day and you don't have that, then that obviously works against you. But whatever it may be, you want to make sure you focus on these benefits on a subscribe and save specific page and that lives on your site. We've found that a lot of times having this in your nav bar is actually the best place to host it because it tends to get a lot of clicks. And if you have a product that is accustomed to subscription or recurring purchases or recurring consumption, then it makes a lot of sense to have this in your nav bar where somebody can click it and go see those benefits. Now the second step to that is then figuring out what are the sections that get the most engagement or actually what are the points on that page that drive the most number of new subscribers and then fitting that into a landing page that you are driving from. Paid social. If you're running a subscription business or looking to run a subscription business, but you're just driving traffic to a product page or to your homepage, it's a very good chance you're working too hard in the sense that you're spending too much to acquire a customer because you don't have the right funnel in place. The best funnels for subscription focused brands is going straight to landing pages. You want to minimize the number of clicks that they need to click around for. Also something to check out is, you know, is your, are your best customers actually subscribing on the first purchase? There's a good chance that they're not. I remember at hint, our best subscribers came on the third purchase. So they would spend money on the sample pack or a variety pack up front. Their second purchase would be choosing a flavor that they liked the best. And the third, if the third purchase was a subscription, that customer had the highest ltv it was higher than if somebody bought the Variety pack and then subscribed or subscribed right away. And so that's one of the reasons that subscribe and Save is not a default option on that site. Although, you know, I'll talk about it in the next segment. But that is something that has been winning lately. So I recommend testing that on a brand to brand basis. But building out a landing page where you're driving subscriber traffic for new subscribers is kind of what you want to do in terms of setting yourself up for the best possible funnels and onboarding of new customers on that page. You want to also make sure that you've got a great welcome offer or new customer offer. And so by that I mean something along the lines of gift with purchase, a discount. You know, sometimes I've even seen brands do digital gift with purchase. So, you know, it's a PDF guide or recipe book or workout, you know, a book of workouts or, you know, whatever. It may be kind of something still along the lines of and related to the product that you have. But you know, that might be a $9, a $19 value that you give for free. And the real cost of that is hosting a Google Drive link that you submit or hosting the PDF somewhere. And having this new customer offer is great because if you can somehow make the new customer offer number equivalent or similar to what they're going to get charged on a recurring basis, either it's similar or the second charge is less. You sort of create this nice little slide for. Well, I think of it as a slide because you start high and go down on the second purchase. Or it's kind of just like monkey bars. You stay at the same level, but that tends to do really well for acquiring customers. It also makes them feel like they're getting a deal coming in and it's just another reason for them to actually try your product.