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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 and 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 hundred thousand dollars in revenue. Today's episode is a good one, but before we dive in, let me tell you about our chosen sponsor for this week's episode. If you're a Shopify brand, pay attention. Roku Ads Manager is built for growth marketers and makes connected TV way easier to test. Go to advertising.roku.com Limited Supply welcome back to another episode of Limited Supply. I'm your host Nick and today we've got kind of a different episode. So normally I have these episodes where I come in with a really baked in plan of what to talk about and it's usually somewhat connected to something I'm doing or a project I've worked on recently. But today's is going to be a little bit different because it's essentially taking something I've seen as a huge pattern over the last probably at least two months. Definitely like this year I've come across at least one, maybe one brand a day in this position and I've started working with a couple of them to kind of get them out of this position. So because I've seen so many of these, my hope is that today's episode is super valuable and very tactical and will help you create kind of a checklist of things you might have. You know, There might be 60 things on this checklist today and you might have 16 of them done, but there may be another, you know, 44 things that you could do that would really help your brand. And so I'm going to just describe kind of the starting case of these brands where, you know, basically when I talk to them I kind of feel like they are or where they're stuck and why they're stuck. And then I'm going to go over a list of probably eight category things that, you know, I advise focusing on now. Okay, so let's talk about this. So, so this specifically, this episode outline I made just now is actually based off a brand which looked very similar in terms of why they're stuck, where they're stuck to a number of the others like I mentioned. But this brand specifically is a, you could call it A health and wellness product. You would find it in a cvs, you know, near the pharmacy aisles. It has amazing social proof, meaning the product works really well. It totally, in fact, it over delivers on its promise. They spent, you know, four or five years so far existing as a business, probably two or so years on actual product development with chemists, with, you know, with professional athletes kind of figuring out how do we do this in the best way. Especially when there's, you know, giants in the market right now being sold at places like cvs, Walgreens, Target, Walmart that are pretty much owning the aisle space for this. Now the brand is used by professional athletes. Some professional athletes even swear that, that they can't do practice, they can't do games without this. And I'm talking the top 1% of professional athletes in the world. Okay, so social means the product delivers a lot. Social proof is there. These athletes are on the record even talking about how amazing the product is. It's way better than its competitive set of competitors and brands. And they just can't get past figuring out how do we actually drive sales here. And when you look at it and you pull up the website, which I can't share, but I'll just describe it to you, it's basically, you know, it's got a brand name that doesn't make a ton of sense. It's got kind of weird packaging, you know, very lazy packaging, you could say, like, you could tell it feels like the. And you know, I don't mean any offense to the brand by this, but it feels like there was basically a designer, you know, on Fiverr who was brought in to do kind of version one of the packaging. And, and a lot of times not to the brand's team's fault, there is just usually, like, if somebody's starting a brand, a lot of times their expertise is in the actual product. So product development, making sure it works, knowing how to get it to the right people, it's intended for which this brand, again, checks all those boxes. They just didn't have anybody on their internal team who actually understands what is brand, what is good design, what is good packaging, what does a good name look like, what do good colors look like? You know, how do we make sure the font evokes emotion when you see it or that the packaging stands out on a shelf or even on an online shelf. Right. Just basically on a website, still should look good and pop out. And so let's see on the website, what else? It's just a very plain website. There's you know, a basic hero. It's got value, props in the hero, not benefits or outcomes, emotional ties. You get to the product page, it's got a picture on the left side of the screen, on the right side of the screen, you know, one time or subscribe. Very basic, no sort of stylizing, no customization, no product description, no checkboxes of benefits and outcomes, no understanding of how it works. You know, if you take this product, how long does it take till you feel the effects and what can you expect? You know, two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks down the line. None of that was there. It was basically just product with the ability to hit the buy button at the top and then, you know, very basic reviews widget which didn't really have many reviews, maybe you know, call it 20 to 100 reviews. So you're not. And there's three different SKUs. So all three PDPs are kind of like that. There's no bundling here, even though there's a very clear opportunity for bundling. And you know, as I'm saying this, you can probably start to picture what type of brand you may have seen that's in the same spot. And so, you know, I, I was kind of brought into a conversation with them around how can we work with these guys and basically help turn this around? We've got a product that works immensely well. It over delivers, we have social proof with people whose names we could use that are massive names. And I'll get to the social proof piece in a second towards the end here. And so I kind of put this plan together and basically the plan was, all right, we need to think about somewhat of a revamp when it comes to shipping and logistics. Brand strategy, positioning, website design and the build of it. Email, sms, subscription, churn, reduction, retention, upsells, cross sells, basically extending LTV across the board. Paid media. How are we getting people in the door directly tied to paid media? Social proof as well, Affiliate performance, PR and external media, which I'll get to in a second. Product sourcing and innovation. And then lastly your content creative pipeline. You'll notice that's a lot of things. It's probably pretty much the whole like kit and caboodle of a brand. But the thing I didn't leave or thing I didn't include here is the actual product. Because the product is good, it has good social proof. And really this is like when I see stuff like this, I think of this as a golden platter of opportunity. It's like literally getting a tray made out of gold with a bunch of money on it, and all you have to do is the product is done. The product is always the hardest part. Right? If you think about going and building a product or sourcing product from the right place, creating something that actually competes in the market better than something like, you know, your conglomerate giant has been dominating, that's probably the hardest part is the product. The second hardest part is distribution and basically everything else I just mentioned. So I'm going to go through all of these one by one and just rant a little bit about where I think, you know, what I'm planning to do with this company or what I would propose rather, you know, and then hopefully you can take one, two or three nuggets out of each one and potentially apply it to your own brand. So let's start with shipping and logistics. So when I think of shipping and logistics, I think of the entire kind of logistics package. So that is your production line. Who's producing your product? Are you getting good rates there? Do you have good moqs? Do you have good payment terms? Are you basically doing. Are you getting, I call it like the white person tax, where you're basically paying all everything up front. You're not splitting it, or you're not waiting till it's arrived, or you're not able to get good terms with the supplier from there, you know, how are you trucking it or shipping it air or, or sea, or, you know, if you're producing in the US you're just trucking it to a 3PL, then once it gets to your 3PL, are you getting good rates on storage, on pick and pack, and then of course, actual shipping rates. Most people don't realize shipping rates is a gold mine of opportunity. And especially when you think about adding dollars to your bottom line, most three PLs might use FedEx, USPS, UPS, DHL, you know, basically all the shipping companies that like we grew up with, you could say, and you remember receiving or getting packages from. But there is, you know, a ton of shipping companies, delivery companies, routes, companies that now exist that all work with your three PLs. And there's a very good chance that your three PL is arbitraging you as a client where you're paying those old FedEx rates still. You're still getting your package delivered in two days because they have those carriers, but they're using a cheaper carrier to actually get it through. You might be getting some savings, but. But you're probably not getting as much as you can. So that's something worth checking and again, remember Moyes used to always mention those kind of stupid fees that 3pls add on. So you want to audit your 3pl bill, make sure that you're not getting charged. That's another thing that I would say part of any of these kind of like brand turnaround projects I work on or coming in and advising on a turnaround is you want to make sure that you are auditing every single contract, every single bill from a standpoint of payment terms outclause are you getting the best rate? A lot of people don't chat with each other, you know, brand to brand about what kind of rates are you getting for this attribution tool or for this incrementality partner or for Klaviyo or for Postscript whatever it may be. And you know, you don't want to be paying rate card for anything. That's not how this world works. You can negotiate and you should always negotiate. So back to the shipping carriers. You should definitely make sure you understand what kind of shipping carrier you're using. And depending on your product, you know, the size of it, the weight of it, how far it's going, how often you're you're shipping to these people, you might realize that you should actually instead of just using like let's say you're jolie, right, Instead of just using UPS or FedEx for everything, you might have your net new customer shower head units here in the states at A3PL and you might use a carrier where you get great rates for two day shipping here. And then because your shower filters come and they arrive on a subscription timing, you can actually ship those direct from China using portless because you know exactly what day they have to land and you can plan for that ahead of time. And now you're buying fractional air freight, you're skipping any cost of US based 3pls and you're able to get that product to the customer at the right date. So it may be that, you know, there's the names of these shipping carriers are escaping my mind. But you know my friend Jimmy at Tondo, he always tells me about all the new shipping carriers that he's able to plug in and for him he passes on a lot of the discount on. But you know, I think you can hit them up if you want to see those different carriers anyways after the shipping then you have the actual packaging of the box. So that's another place where I know brands overspend because a lot of times when you're starting out, you're paying Lower, you're paying a tax for having a low order volume. Meaning if you're only ordering 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 boxes, you're going to be paying a tax versus if you're ordering 20,000 or 50,000 boxes. So again, another place to negotiate. And also just pin vendors against each other and see who you can, who can give you the best price for the product. And then the last piece there I would say is inserts. So you know, little insert cards, which if you're just starting those, or even if you're at kind of a smaller quantity, I recommend using uprint and then branded tape. Now you might be wondering, well, why does it matter if I have good packaging or branded tape or inserts? You know, people are just going to get this thing and throw it away. Well, it makes a huge difference when you think about the brand. And one thing you'll find consistent in this whole podcast that I'm going to keep coming back to and touching on is the actual look and feel and emotion and presentation of your brand across any touchpoint. Whether it's a packaging insert, whether it's the tape, whether it's the email pop up, whether it's the landing page, the website, the Facebook ad, the follow up email, you know, at any point that you know, the subscription reminder that hey, your next subscription's about to hit, at any point or touch point, your brand needs to feel like a $500 million brand. Whether it's from the visual identity, the consistency in the copy, the positioning, the messaging, the iconography, which is so easy to make, you should have no excuse to not have custom icons for your brand, right? You can literally go to flaticon.com, download the icon SVG, put it into Figma and slightly alter something and that's now your custom icon. The animations you use, the infographics, you know, any sort of badges, all of that stuff creates brand cohesiveness and consistency across the board. And that is how you make something feel like a quarter billion dollar, half a billion dollar, even a billion dollar feeling brand, right? If you go and look at the best brands that you love, Apple, Parachute, home feastables, you know, whatever it may be, you'll notice that every piece of that consumer journey, you know, it doesn't look like anybody cheapened out on the emails or the packaging or whatever it may be. And that's how you build brands that your grandchildren are going to know about versus ones that pop for a little bit, maybe six months to two years and then die. Because you know, you were Chasing a trend. You weren't building a brand and you were just selling a product versus selling, you know, a feeling and emotion or really that brand lifestyle and experience. So that's what I've got on shipping and logistics, packaging, branded tape, inserts, 3 PL with good shipping rates, good place that you're producing the product. And I'll get to product innovation in a minute. You want to make sure you have two day everywhere. You may have to combine different shipping carriers together to get the most optimal shipping rates and margin profile for you in this category, shipping and logistics and yeah. So let's move on to the next one. Shopify brands. This is the one Roku Ads Manager lets you connect directly to your Shopify store and run streaming TV campaigns that can drive action, not just awareness. Roku's positioned this as a big differentiator, shoppable TV through action ads and their Shopify integration. If you want top of funnel on the big screen with a proper path to purchase, go to advertising.roku.com Limited supply. The next one is kind of the biggest one in my opinion, which is brand strategy and positioning. So brand strategy and positioning is something that is so, so much of an afterthought for a lot of companies. And I'm not just talking brands that are starting, I'm even talking about brand that are doing 30 million, 50 million, 100 million, sometimes 200 million. They have. A lot of times if you've got a product that is really, you know, it's comfortable, it's good, it over delivers, it fulfills its promise, it gets people to tell other people about it or maybe you have a biggest celebrity attached to it. So it's like you've kind of been able to ride off that person's coattails and the brand, that person has spent years or a decade building for all those reasons. Brand strategy and positioning is usually an overthought and there's usually some attention paid to it. You know, we feel like this is our customer or this is our tagline. You know, this is kind of the, the visual identity we're going for. This is our style guide. But a lot of times it's, it's not like super, super snapped in. And again, that goes back to the same reason I mentioned before. It's not that the brand is intentionally trying to be lazy or you know, not have this kind of brand strategy put together, but it can usually just be because they just don't have somebody internally who understands this and so they've never gotten to it. There's so many brands that I find in this spot where they've got all the pieces, but if they just had tighter brand strategy, positioning, cohesiveness, you know, consistency across the board would be in a completely different position, you know, maybe even like annihilating competitors. But because they don't have this, this sort of stops them usually. Because when they don't have this, they're almost solely relying on performance marketing to get them to the next level. Brand strategy and positioning, you got to think of it kind of like SEO or how people think about SEO, which is it's not going to have an immediate effect tomorrow or next week or, you know, the following Monday or next month. It's something that over time, you know, adds 0.1% of, you know, you could call it like, it just helps 1% every time. Meaning it's not going to be like you're not going to be able to do something overnight just because the brand looks good. It's going to be converting well and everybody's going to love it. Brand is something that's built with consistency over time by doing the right thing over and over again across every touch point to every customer and making every customer feel like the brand is doing something for them versus just buying a product and feeling super transactional. So when I think about brand strategy, I think about, yes, the visual identity and the taglines and the icons and all the things that make a website feel good or an email feel good and separate from just the standard Shopify theme. But I'm also thinking about, okay, who are our customer Personas and why are they buying and what problem are we solving for them? And for those individual Personas, what are the things that they feel the other brands aren't delivering on? Because each Persona is going to have a reason they buy and a thing that kind of gets them over the fence and a thing that makes them nervous to actually buy and try our product. You know, they have a different thing that's going to get them excited about posting the brand or talking about the brand or sharing it with, you know, with a friend of theirs. And so in this, I like to create different Personas and really just understand who these people are. Are we, are we finding them in the right way? Are we maybe just going after the wrong people? That's why our LTV super low people aren't coming back. And then the second piece to this is positioning. So, like, basically, when I think about positioning, it's a fancy word for basically just what's your wedge in the market, right? What like if you sell a sleep supplement, right now I'm thinking beam, beam sleep or let me sleep, right? If you sell a sleep supplement, what is the reason that your sleep supplement is actually worth trying and better than the other 367 sleep supplements in the market? And that's what, that's where positioning comes in. It's kind of like if you were to go up in a comparison chart next to a competitor, what are you saying doing showing to sort of get a wedge up on the person who's next to you. That might be a certain ingredient that you use. It might be. You know, there's a drink called Update that I'm an advisor to. They launched today and announced Kim Kardashian as a founder for them. The wedge is an ingredient called paraxanthine, which is extracted from caffeine and basically because it's extracted from that, it doesn't have the crash. So like this ingredient, it's innovation, right? This innovation of an ingredient is their wedge. And so that's their positioning. So positioning is sort of like your wedge in. Brand strategy is your Persona, your identity, your taglines, your copy, your tone of voice, all these things kind of put together. Now the reason that that is so I should have probably started with that one before shipping and logistics, because the brand strategy and positioning plays itself into every other part of everything I'm mentioning here. It pays into what your packaging looks like, what's written on your packaging, what's on the insert, the icons that are on the insert and all of that. So that's brand strategy and positioning. Now I'm going to get to website design and build. Now if you're a limited supply listener, you know that I'm obsessed with good websites. Personally, I think I make some of the best websites in E commerce. I always try to find that intersection of conversion rate, performance, marketing, but also, and direct response, but also, you know, really beautiful brand positioning, creative site design, ux, you know, like, I love to add upsell widgets, but I never want it to feel like I'm trying to push somebody to buy the next thing. And because of that, the sites turn out really nice. They convert well. They make people feel like they're coming into a $500 million brand. You know, I'm never a fan of like launching a Shopify themed website, meaning that you just buy a free theme or grab a paid theme, change a couple of things and boom, you're live selling your product, right? That feels like a product business versus like creating a brand. I always think about it as if, you know, think about like the, the fancy road that's near you, whether it's in Miami, whether it's Rodeo Drive in California, you know, where all the fancy stores are, whether it's Fifth Avenue, York, when you walk into that store and you feel that brand, you know, and what they stand for or their luxuriousness or whatever they're trying to, you know, convey with their design of the brand and how everything is set up in store. That's how your website should feel to people who come on their iPhone or their laptop. Everybody should feel like they just entered a new world when they come to your site. And that's why if you look at brands like, you know, tastesalud.com or parachutehome.com or imate health or David Barr, these are just a couple of the sites I've worked on. You'll see and kind of feel what I mean when you get to the site and that brand is just coming into you compared to, you know, a generic, regular Shopify themed website where you can feel that it's got all the components of kind of a general Shopify theme. Nothing against that, you know, you're, I'm still using Shopify for all of this, but the design and the UX and the customer journey that you create, the funnel, the, that whole experience, right, that should be heavily prioritized because you're driving all your traffic there. You're trying to extract as many people who hit that website to give you their email or phone number. You're trying to get as many dollars or units per transaction in when somebody's on there. You should definitely invest in building one of the best websites you possibly can. Because otherwise, what's the point of spending so much money driving all these people to your website if, you know, you're basically just gonna, they're just gonna get there and feel like, oh, this isn't really super trustworthy or, you know, I clicked the ad which promised all these things. Now I get to the website and there's no mention of the thing that the ad promised or the color is mismatched or it's a different style, or I clicked for a product, now I'm on the home page or a collections page. You know, if you're not using landing pages, for example, like these are all things that count toward the website design and build, but then have huge dividends when it comes to email, sms, paid media. You know, you get an influencer shout out, you get randomly selected and your product is featured on, you know, a podcast A huge podcast, they talk about your product. Now people come to your site and now you've just wasted all that traffic that you know is it's priceless traffic. So you always want to have a website that's built properly. Another thing that I would say is becoming even more important now with just how much more SEO is becoming important because it feeds right into geo, which is generative engine optimization. So asking ChatGPT or Claude perplexity Gemini questions is how well your site is actually coded and developed and marked. So do you have all the right content there? Do you have expert reviews or social proof? Do you have how your product works? Do you have that txt file that Dylan Ander talked about a couple of episodes ago, which you can email him d ententionstack.com to get that snippet and put on your website. So these LLMs know how to go and crawl your website and understand what you're selling and why you're selling and what, what you have to offer. All of these things are now a much bigger deal. So make sure you in your website you also take into account SEO, aeo, geo stuff, you know, making sure you're properly putting alt image, alt text in your images. You're labeling images properly. If I were you, I would basically just go to ChatGPT or Claude and say hey, I am trying to maximize SEO and geo potential for my website. Help me name all of my image files and come up with all of the alt image text and give me all the opportunities of things to backlink across the site. If you have a blog on your website, you should backlink to your PDPs. PDPs. If you're explaining something, you should backlink to a blog that explains it in even more detail. All these things really help and make a huge difference. The next one is email and SMS updates across the board. And when I say this, I also mean everything around subscription. It's basically LTV across the board. So that should include email SMS subscription optimization, meaning how do we get more people to subscribe? Whether it's the first time or sometimes you might realize first time subscribers are actually not the best because they don't get to sample enough to. So then how do you upsell people into subscription from being one time purchasers and then churn reduction. So how do we reduce the number of people who are unsubscribing and also how do we understand why they're unsubscribing so that we can go ahead and reduce that earlier in the Funnel maybe the way that we're promising the benefits of what you get or what's gonna be delivered from the product in the ads and the landing pages is not consistent with the actual experience. And that's why people are unsubscribing. There was another supplement brand I worked with where, you know, they, they had initially, they would say, yeah, one scoop per serving. And then they realized that, oh wait, we have, you know, if you have one scoop a day of our thing, by the time your month ends, there's still half a tub left. So we actually need to readjust our serving size or our subscription cadence because now people are unsubscribing simply because they, they just have too much product by the time that their next thing is coming out. So you want to understand that. But then also across email, right? You want to think about, or actually I should say before I get to email, just around your brand and website and existing customers, right? You want to think about your promotional strategy. So what is your promotional strategy? If you sell, you know, something that requires replenishment like skin care, beauty supplements, personal care, you know, beverages, you have a different promotional strategy than somebody selling a $2,000 mattress, right? Because now you're going to segment differently. You're going to, you know, you're not going to go. If you're selling a mattress, you're not going to go sell, put that email of a sale to somebody who's already bought the mattress, but you're selling beverage, you're probably most definitely trying to do that because you're going to get your cost per order really low as a result. So what's your promotional strategy? And then usually paired to that, I like to do what's your promotional strategy and then what is your education strategy? So from a content standpoint, when you're educating people through channels like email and sms, if you're not just sending a message that is a straight sale or offer or promotion, then what all are you talking about? And a lot of times that comes through campaigns. So, you know, I feel like campaigns should always be a split of education promotion versus just pushing on the sales. And when you think about education, you know, it doesn't necessarily always have to be like teaching them something new or feeling like you're explaining something. My bar for what is a good campaign that's not a promotion is just basically is this something that somebody can read today or during the day and then go and talk about at the dinner table and sound smart, you know, bring bring light to some situation. If you're a supplement brand and you're selling, you know, like Love Wellness just started selling these sublingual mouth strips. Right. They might want to put together a couple emails talking about the difference between how efficacious is a injection versus a sublingual strip versus a capsule versus a liposomal capsule versus a gummy versus a powder. That's a great email that a supplement brand could talk about. Granted that it makes them also look good and also that's something that is educational. It's not pushing them to buy the product. It's not a promotion but. But it feels very valuable to the person who is getting that. And then the last piece of email and SMS is basically the flows, right? So somebody just signed up on the website. Okay, what series of messages are they getting? Somebody just abandoned the website, abandoned the cart, abandoned the checkout. What are the emails they're getting based on the dynamic elements, meaning the products they looked at or added to cart or started checkout on and how is that being conveyed and what are we doing from a personalization level to reach that person at the right time and with the right messaging? Instant, you've heard me talk about a lot on the podcast. I think they're the sponsor now too. They do a lot of these AI flows where you can actually create generative AI emails where Instant identifies the person coming to the site it knows, okay, this is the user. They have a massive database across all the brands they work with. They know that this person is most likely to buy at this time of day. With this type of messaging and this type of subject line, they can immediately create the email, send it out via klaviyo and then in the dashboard you can literally see how soon that conversion comes in. So why is that important? Because instead of sending all of your site abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, abandoned emails on a set time delay where it may not be the most optimal. You can actually leverage AI to understand when is the most optimal time, but also what's the best way to message this person based on the existing data that we have. So yeah, that's basically it for LTV retention, email SMS subscription optimization. You know, thinking about when is the right time to get this person into a subscription. When I worked at Hint, we ran a huge analysis and found out that our first time subscribers are actually terrible customers. It's the third time subscribers when they've tried a two basically sample pools of different flavor sets and then they can choose one to go and subscribe to. That's usually the best customer. So subscription optimization in terms of when is the right time and then churn reduction. So again, running those surveys at the end, changing the surveys based on time of year, you know, if somebody is coming in and running and trying to unsubscribe in Jan, Feb, like right now, they may have just subscribed during the holidays. So you want to change those questions, maybe change the downsell upsell, offer to keep them in as a subscriber as well and you know, try to keep your subscription business alive that way. The last couple pieces here so I've got paid media, I've got social proof, both what I call B2C and B2B social proof, affiliate and performance PR product sourcing and innovation and content creative pipeline. I'm going to save that for episode two next week as a part two. But I hope that the first half of this so far has given you some ideas of things you can go and work on and pick up and try to fix. Or potentially, you know, there's maybe just a deliverables list you can create from this episode that, you know, I promise you everything I talked about, if you work on that or make it better, improve it, reset it, or maybe if you haven't even done it at all, you go ahead and try it. These will all work. These are all proven things. I wouldn't be telling you this if I was just experimenting with this stuff. So make a list. I'll maybe even tweet out a list of all these things. And stay tuned for episode two next week where we go through the rest paid media, affiliate, social product sourcing, innovation and content creation. Until then, have a great rest of your week. Thank you for listening as always and I'll see you in a week. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on CPG retail and E Commerce. 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