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Welcome back to Limited Supply, the podcast where we get deep into the tactical and strategic side of e commerce, digital marketing and building consumer brands. I'm your host Nick Sharma. I've spent the last nine years building, scaling and investing in brands and through this show. In my weekly newsletter at Nick co email, I'm here to share everything I've learned. The wins, the losses, the experiments, the tactics and the insights. All so you can unlock your next.
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Hundred thousand dollars in revenue.
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Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you our chosen sponsor for this week's episode. You may have heard of Applovin before or maybe not, but let me tell you why you need to pay attention. Whether or not you realize it, you've interacted with Applovin as a consumer. They're the largest ad network for mobile games reaching 150 million people per day.
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Not per month, not per week, but per day.
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The network has grown so much that they reached a billion dollar run rate in Applovin just from e commerce spend. It's the fastest growing ad platform for D2C brands and it allows you to Dr. Measurable performance at scale. Sign up to be the first to know when Applovin can onboard you and get to the front of the line. With my special link it's Nick co app beta. See why brands like Hexclad and Ridge rely on Applovin. Go to Nik co app beta that's n I k.co appbeta to see when you can get onboarded to Applovin foreign.
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Welcome back to another episode of Limited supply. I am your host Nick Sharma and today we are going to do a episode where we just basically go through some of the things I see when I talk to founders a lot. So today's going to be kind of a fun episode. My hope is that as you listen to this you find things you relate to and you know, if I can provide a solve for that then you can fix that issue for yourself. So that's the goal for today's episode. It'll be very tactical focused. But you know the, the way that this kind of thought started was I talked to so many different brands and usually it's either founders or CMOs or like a director of marketing. And you know the things I tend to talk to them about related to Sharma brands are usually around acquisition their website, you know, basically how are they acquiring customers, are they, you know, using tools like email and there's just a lot of commonalities of things. I notice that you Know, I always recommend on the call that could be easy wins for everybody. And they're usually very common. So I just wanted to go through those across the website, across the acquisition funnels, even just talk about some of the things that I think could be easy. You know, like if you haven't tried testing these seven things, try these seven things and then finishing out with just kind of talking about an acquisition offer. Because that's usually can be a make or break for, you know, channels like meta. So anyways, let's get into it. You know, when I look at most websites, the first thing I notice is they tend to lack any sort of good design. You know, let's say you didn't raise a bunch of money to go hire a branding agency or a really fancy, you know, Shopify agency to build you a fancy site. There's a good chance maybe you used a theme or purchased a theme or there's a free one on the Internet that you grabbed from the Shopify marketplace and plugged in for yourself. And those are great, but a lot of times they just don't have any sort of lipstick on top. It's just the basic theme. And yes, you'll definitely get sales that way and the store is functional. But if you lack good design, you are immediately not able to signal that there's a high level of trust. Good design today immediately signals like, all right, my credit card's not gonna get stolen and this brand must be legit because they have a beautiful website. It's not just kind of like a standard theme. So that's usually one of the biggest things. And that obviously helps the UX of the website and also just usually sometimes explain things better visually. But parallel to that is assets, which we'll talk about in a second. The other thing though, on that point of lack of good design is there's no empathy to a customer who doesn't know the brand. So there's no clear place to start. Right? Like if I'm coming to your website and I'm not familiar with the brand, I'm just getting there for the first time. There should be something that helps me as the customer know where to go to start. It might be something as simple as highlighting best selling products. It might be something as complex as creating a whole new customer offer that is specific to that. Or I've seen where if a brand is running a radio campaign, for example, or a big podcasting campaign, their homepage, it might be like, hey, coming from a podcast, click here. Just something to help guide the customer and that's the piece of what I mentioned about empathy is like, have empathy for that person, make it easy on them. These people. These people, meaning people who come to your site, they got a million things they could be doing on their phone, and if you are not helping accelerate them getting back to whatever they were doing or whatever is stimulating for them, then you're going to lose them as a site visitor. So, yeah, good design and empathy are usually the first things I noticed. Now, secondary to that is there's no sort of like easy offer or guarantee for the customer to try the product. Right. It might be that, you know, maybe you're selling protein powder and the entry price is super high. There's no sort of like sampler pack. There's no sort of bundle deal. If I'm spending, you know, $49 for a tub of really premium protein, there should be some sort of an intro offer that gets me in and makes me feel like, you know, I'm getting some sort of a deal there. But I'm going to save a little bit of the intro offer talk for later. The next point I wrote out, I wrote down, because I wrote this down as I was on a call earlier today, was that assets are usually not bright enough or good enough, which brings down the rest of the site. You know, if you don't have good photography or videography, if you don't have nice styling of, you know, the bottle or the shampoo or whatever it is that you're selling, the watch, the wallet, if you don't have nice styling around it, you know, which doesn't have to be crazy expensive. I know that sometimes when you are scoping a photo shoot, you add like a food stylist or something like that. It adds in thousands of dollars. Just go look at what looks nice on other brands and just grab the same stuff or grab something similar to it anyways. The, the quality of your assets, you know, if you can make them look really rich and really bougie and really beautiful and bright, it completely elevates the entire website. It elevates your ads, obviously, because your ads are a compilation of these different assets. But it totally elevates the website, elevates your emails as well, any of the GIFs or images you might send on text as well, add that kind of brightness and go the extra mile on the photoshoot piece because it really can drive up, click through rate and engagement on a website. One brand that I think does this really well is, is Cadence. The travel capsules. KeepYourCadence.com if you go to their website, they use a combination of renders and really beautiful photography and it makes the website feel like you're on the Apple equivalent. I guess Apple's also a great example of this too. Okay. Another easy one that is missed is missing out on very like obvious product cross sells or upsells, you know, making sure the, the buy section where you're choosing variant selection, so choosing your flavor, your color, your size, you know, three pack, six pack, nine pack. Also one time purchase versus subscription. That whole kind of all that real estate right there, making sure that that's really dialed in and optimized. A lot of times again, if you're using a theme for a website, you still want to go and find a developer designer and try to make that feel custom to your brand. You don't want to use the default ones unless the default ones perfectly fit what you're selling. Otherwise go the extra mile and try to make that better and easier. Again, more empathetic with the design. It goes a long way in terms of increasing that add to cart rate. Last note here is also making sure proper pixel tracking is being done or is in place. So no matter what integrations you're using, just making sure that all of the integrations are properly working, they're tested. You're seeing the data go through and flow through apps that need to talk to one another are and you're seeing that validated. There's a lot of times where we'll see a website is set up and they say yeah, we set up the pixel this and that, but then it was never properly checked and maybe there's a miss like the wrong data is being sent back, which obviously does not help any of the algorithmic focused platforms, whether it's ads or anything else. Or maybe it's not tracking at all or it's over counting things, you know, whatever it may be. But properly testing all of that is huge. Another point, bad email and SMS number collection. This is, it's 2025. There's literally softwares like Alia that now even have AI built in to just test everything. So you just have to get it set up and it will continue to optimize and test on its own. But if you're not collecting, you know, 10 to 15% of your site traffic as emails and then, you know, maybe half of that as phone numbers, you're just missing out on opportunity. Those emails, right, your welcome flow. Anybody who's entered your klaviyo list but has not made a purchase is a huge opportunity to Generate revenue. And a lot of people really sleep on that because they tend to think that email is really just a retention play or retention channel. But you know, all those emails that are sitting there pre purchasing something, those is where you think about email as an aggressive acquisition channel. That's where you can get really focused on your email flows, testing things, trying dynamic blocks. That's why it's worth maximizing your collection rate of email and phone numbers so that you can really make use of that and try to maximize how much revenue you can pull out of that. And you know, if you can't get somebody to convert after a certain window, take them out of the list or suppress them because otherwise you're just paying klaviyo to email somebody who's likely not going to buy. But of course you can leave them in your, you know, Black Friday or whatever your massive promos are. Okay, going back to an earlier point is, you know, a lot of PDPs and a lot of homepages. First of all, a lot of websites only focus on making the PDPs and the homepages nice. But they don't make any of the other pages. They don't really invest time or design or content into any of the other pages. So I would highly recommend focusing on that because, you know, that just helps sort of build the brand. That's like having two sections out of a retail store. Really nicely done. And even though nobody's gonna go to some of the other sections, maybe they just look rundown or like not properly built. So it's kind of weird. And again, it goes back to the trust piece, all those other pages built out, it adds trust. It's also just more content, right? Like if you have a really nicely. If you sell a supplement, you have a nice page built out about the subscription program or, or about where the ingredients are grown or the founding story. Those are just nice things to have. And some people want to read those. Not obviously everybody, but you want to take snippets of that, you know, where things are sourced from the origin story, the why of the brand, and bring those into the PDP and the homepage. And of course, you know, I've mentioned this before, many times, but if you run any sort of catalog ads, your PDPs are the landing pages and the destination pages, unless you have some really complex URL set up with catalogs, which I doubt mostly anybody has. So your PDPs have to be as strong as a landing page, which is why you want to take those snippets of the story, the origin, where the things are grown, where the fabric is from, how it's spun differently, all those kinds of little things and bring that to the PDPs then the last thing I want to add just on that note actually perfectly lines up is listicles do extremely well. So you should actually figure out what an equivalent version of a, you know, a five reasons why somebody likes this product type of a listicle, what you could do to bring that into a PDP Flaus, which is that mouth flosser, their pdp which we designed at Hooks back in the day, has a nice 7 reasons why. Within that does a side scroll, which does really well. And I think that's probably the easiest way to incorporate it. You could have it kind of elongated out top to bottom, but that would probably maybe take up too much space on a pdp. Those are the most common things that I find as it relates to a website or just like very basically just looking at basic, you know, find their ads, click them and see what happens. So many of these things are just one time fixes, to be honest too. Like getting a good collection for email and SMS setup is a one time fix. And you know, maybe you have like a monthly check in to see how you can make that 10% better each month. Adding sections to your website, you know, kind of these content sections. That's a one time thing with a designer and a developer. Good design, one time thing, good assets, one time thing. Like a lot of these things are super basic. And you know, I always think about this. I don't even know if I made this up because I don't think I've ever heard anybody else say it. But this weird concept I always visualize in my head which is like you want to set up your best possible at bat. So if you're going to go up to home plate to hit the ball, you want to make sure your gloves are tight, your shoes are, you know, tied nicely, your helmet's on snug. Because why would you want to set yourself up for anything less than what could be 100% hit by not having, you know, whatever's in your control already set up to the max. So when I say all that, I don't know if that makes sense, but I basically mean here. Why would you drive traffic to a website that's not properly set up right? It's like, yes, you can still get traffic there, but why be okay with a lower conversion rate if there's easy things you can do to increase it and Maximize what that traffic is doing. Okay, so now moving on. So another thing that we do a lot of is paid media audits and there's kind of just paid media is one of those things that the platforms obviously do more and more on their own. And a lot of kind of what happens with paid media is now not just channel management or like, you know, busy work of media buying. Even though there is an art, a little bit to art and science to, you know, campaign structure and audience exclusions and inclusions. But a lot of the kind of science or strategic thinking with paid media is around everything outside of that. So what is the audience you're trying to test? What is the positioning or the reasons that that audience is going to be interested? What does that content and creative look like? What does the copy look like? How are you properly building landing page experiences or web experiences? The media buying is important, but the bigger important pieces are the creative, where you're driving traffic to what is the offer there and are you doing a good job of following up like in that welcome flow for people who get to the site. And if 3% are converting and 15% are giving you their email, you've got 12% of your traffic giving you their email that you could be focused on optimizing. So these are all the things and then if that 12% starts to convert, then. Well, when you look at your attribution of Facebook orders, those all factor in because they were driven in by Facebook initially, right? So on meta and on Google Google, it's usually a lot of like little tactical things. Sometimes there's a lot of keywords that are being spent on that are not driving conversions and vice versa. There's keywords that drive conversions very efficiently, but don't have spend, you know, don't have the budgets behind them to continue scaling, but have a ton of opportunity to. We find that a lot. We also find that there are usually just like. Well, in Google it tells you right away. It just tells you fix these things and you'll be in good standing with Google for this. A lot of times those help. But on meta, a lot of it is really like bad creative. Lack of proper creative testing with different angles, lack of testing, different statics, lack of testing offers paid media. And especially with meta, which tends to be the channel that drives majority of new customers for people, is it's not just going to work the same way that it doesn't just work. You have to either make it very compelling on the performance marketing side, meaning be very aggressive with creative, be very aggressive with copy, with messaging, testing with offers. Or you have to go very, very, very heavy on brand building to where you're a brand like Kate Spade or something like that, they turn their ads on and their roas is through the roof. But that's because the brand is insanely well known. Most brands are not and probably will not ever get to that level of being well known. So you have to obviously invest in brand but at the same time you have to massively focus on, on testing things like offers and tons of different statics and Listicles and all of that. So a lot of times when we look at this, you know, I always think like, well, here's a quick hit list of things to try. One is try a Listicle because chances are you probably have a good product, but you just are not. You're terrible at explaining it, which is normal because again, you're drinking your own Kool Aid. So makes sense why you'd be bad at explaining it if you feel like you already know everything about it. So Listicle, you know, call it five reasons why people love, you know, five reasons why X whoever the audience is you're trying to get after in this listicle can't stop loving why. Why is your product a shampoo, an energy drink, you know, so five reasons why CrossFitters can't, you know, can't stop drinking Celsius. Five reasons why moms love caraway home cookware. So you know, try Listicle. Those tend to work really well and you can basically all you're doing is just qualifying people to get to the landing page or a product page. So your add to cart rates are much higher and you also tend to build much more higher qualified list emails out of the listicle as well.
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We just onboarded two brands who are new to Applovin but very heavy Facebook spenders. One is a high AOV in home product and one is a supplement brand.
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Now why?
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Well, AppLovin sees 150 million active users per day. The same way you'd want to test a channel like Snap is the same way we approach testing Applovin. So far the onboarding was super smooth, but we've been able to ramp up.
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Spend in just a short amount of.
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Time and I think we're still hitting.
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Our planned ROAS targets.
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Candidly, I haven't seen many platforms able to ramp up this quickly and I'm excited to continue investing into the channel throughout the season. I'm gonna keep you updated with how our results are going, but right now you can get updates on Applovin's E Commerce beta and be the first to know when opportunities become available at Nick co appbeta. That's Nik Snap.
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Check it out. Next one is landing page with a new customer offer, which we'll get into in a second. But you know, these landing pages tend to just have all the kind of main content points or blocks that help sell. So, you know, a nice hero, different modules of social proof, comparison chart. You know, maybe that five reasons why is kind of built into that. A nice shop section. You know, maybe a section showing, you know, the founding story behind the brand, whatever it may be. But you really kind of focus the shop section around a new customer offer. So, you know, something that's giving a discount but also offering enough product for the household to test another one. You know, most brands when they are running ads and we look at it like 80% of their ad spend is going to one to three creatives and you're basically in a very risky spot and you never know when that creative is going to stop working. And so you really want to get in there and just test a bunch of statics. You can do this in Canva. If you have zero design chops or design skills, you can literally use canva. You can also use figma. And I like Figma because once you find something that works, then you can use a copywriter or chatgpt to get a bunch of different copy and then plug it into Figma and immediately churn out 25 statics within 5 minutes. Love using figma for that. You can also then export statics on your computer, use giphy Capture, which is available or at least in the Mac App Store. I think it's probably a Windows app too. And you can just record a window toggling through statics to create a GIF or a video and plug that into Facebook as well. And the statics and creating these little static videos are really good ways of testing new copy, new messaging, new positioning without having to really pay like an editor or use any sort of outsourced talent or resources. So that's why I mention it, because a lot of times if you can't figure out what is the messaging or the thing that's going to get consumers to click and get to the next spot, then this is a very easy way to kind of try to get over that hump. All right, last thing I want to talk about is the acquisition offer. And I'm just going to kind of riff on this, but you know, the acquisition offer is usually something that is focused to help A channel like paid media. However, if you're a brand that does a lot of, you know, kind of brand marketing or like when I was at Hint, we started really doing this on Facebook, but then when we started running TV and podcasts, then we just kind of put this on the homepage as like, hey, this is our new customer offer. If you're not a new customer, go find your flavors, but if you are, click here. We're going to give you a special offer. You know, we found that it worked really well to acquire customers because, specifically because at Hint, you know, it's flavored water, so it gives the opportunity to a family to try different flavors. And we, as the people at the brand, we know what flavors are likely gonna have the highest chance of being well liked or well loved. So we would basically curate what those flavors were. At first it was a variety pack of four flavors, three bottles each. But then we switched it because we wanted a little bit higher AOVA to three cases of water for 36 bucks, which was messaged as a dollar a bottle. And, you know, you can change that messaging to be, you know, I've seen supplements brands do less than $2 a day. I've seen hydration sticks that are for 29 bucks for a 30 day supply. They talk about it being less than a dollar a day. 8 Sleep used to say less than, you know, their pod is basically less than the price of a premium latte every day. So if you get better sleep, you don't need that expensive latte. We used that messaging and basically would push out 36 bottles in a new customer offer and that would allow the entire household to try the different flavors and kind of figure out which one they like. And then we would follow up and try to get them back for a second purchase or to subscribe. That funnel for us had a really high conversion rate and success rate. But what it highlighted was that on meta, the thing that worked well was not telling people to go try something or find the one they like and buy it and take 20 off or 10% off. It was creating or curating a acquisition offer based on what we knew about that customer. So that customer was a household. So we did that. But, you know, if, if I was a supplement brand like Thorne, and, you know, I wanted to create the athlete bundle, then maybe I would create three things and build a landing page around that and create an offer. You know, maybe it's 15 bucks off the bundle. Maybe it's, you know, you get a free Stanley cup or Thermos or something. Like that with the bundle. But you can kind of understand the idea is to basically create a curated bundle based on the audience you're going after. It gives them an incentive because they're getting a discount or a gift with purchase which adds perceived value discount. And they get to try ideally more than just one sku like two to four things, which gives them the opportunity to sample either just themselves or their household and then decide what they want to come back for. This obviously requires you to have really good execution on the retention side to go after them again, but that's the gist of the acquisition offer. All right, well let me tell you something. We have the Q4 summit coming up on September 16th. So if you're in New York City and you want to come and hang out with about 400 other E commerce operators, marketers, tons of different brands, some really high end luxury fashion, some supplements, some beauty, some beverage, some telemedicine, all different kind of worlds but all focused on the same thing, which is crushing Q4. Then go to ecomfounders.com Q4, just the letter Q& the number 4 and sign up for a ticket. It's a free ticket if you're a brand. We have a ton of really awesome speakers coming that are talking about everything from how they're retaining customers to how they're leveraging AI within creative or analytics to how they're setting up TikTok shop to, you know, well the guy who's doing this is basically he's probably going to do $50 million plus just on TikTok shop this Q4. So anyways, we have a bunch of killers coming and you should be there. You should sign up and come hang out. There's also a bunch of events happening in New York that week. So if you're going to be here, there's a ton going on and if you're not going to be here, consider coming for that week and grabbing a hotel. There's a ton of good stuff going on. Ton of good people will be here as well. And lastly next week I'm going to be coming in fresh with a bunch of Black Friday content. So prepare for that. We're going to get busy around Black Friday and all of the tactical Q4 planning. So I hope you have a good rest of your week and I'll see you on the next episode.
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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.