Guest Blog Post By: Mark Friedman, President, Details Interactive and host of The Marketing Playbook Podcast, Mark is an expert in e-commerce marketing.
I started my consulting practice, Details Interactive, 12 years ago. It was the first time that I did not have a job working for a company.
I had no idea if anyone would pay me for what I had learned over 20 years working in the direct-to-consumer space. One day I was working; the next day, I set up shop for the first time.
It took 60 days, but I got my first assignment, an e-commerce project for the Maidenform brand.
Over these last 12 years, I have spent 7 of them at Steve Madden as President of e-Commerce. Steven Madden, Ltd. is a publicly-traded company based in Long Island City, New York. Founded by the eponymous designer and businessman Steve Madden, the company designs and markets shoes and fashion accessories for women, men, and children.
I have also consulted for many other direct to consumer brands, and they all had two things in common:
- They did not pay enough attention to the “basic blocking and tackling of their business.”
- They all told me that “they did not know what they did not know.”
Details Matters
The name of my consulting practice, Details Interactive, was born out of my attention to detail. Years ago, while at Hanover Direct, I worked with someone who was sometimes frustrated by my attention to detail until one day he said, “now I know where they got the phrase, the devil is in the details!”
The intention of that remark was a compliment because he saw that we were getting real value in the time spent to get to the bottom of our issues.
Well, it’s true; companies very often do not focus on the details. I have been lucky enough to be able to bring strong strategic thinking along with the ability to roll up my sleeves and get into the details of making brands stronger.
Basic blocking and tackling will become more critical as we all think about growing our businesses best. Do not mistake the basics for being easy, but those things that you need to know and understand about the company to make informed decisions.
Here are a few suggestions if you are building an e-commerce brand direct-to-consumers. The following are a few things that MUST be on your radar.
Building Blocks for DTC Success
- E-mail programs
- STOP that batch and blast and finally leap to some personalization and segmentation.
- Trigger programs- if you do not have multiple touches for abandoned carts, you must be doing that at a minimum and then let abandoned browse and others follow along.
- How far back are your mailing address without engagement? If beyond six months, you need to rethink that and set up a reactivation journey
- Analytics
- You often get what I will call “tag-creep “as you make changes to your site. People forget to make sure that Google Analytics or whatever tools you use are formatted and tagged correctly; you risk relying on insufficient data. Execute a quick check and ensure that all are reporting as you expected.
- Paid Search
- Revisit your ad copy and the testing you are doing. It would help if you ALWAYS had your control and tested against it. Especially now, as people might be thinking differently about your brand as they sit at home.
- Is your acceptable ROI the same as it was before the pandemic started? Maybe you have a business that will take longer to come back, and since cash is king, perhaps you revisit your near-term value of new customers. However, don’t forget that new customers are your lifeblood, so you cannot walk away from capturing new people.
- Double-check your PLA (product listing ads) feeds. Are they optimized? It’s probably been a while since you have done a check-up.
- Leveraging your Partners
- Think through all the relationships you have—marketing, infrastructure and otherwise and those you do NOT have now and see if you have opportunities to do more with what you already own. Most of us buy tools and forget that we need people and, often, content to make them work as advertised. And we likely are only using 50% of the capability.
- For those you do not have, can you evaluate and implement installment payments quickly to drive conversion and AOV or post-purchase conversion paid loyalty, as examples?
- Were you using SMS in your marketing mix?
- Those pesky text messages that you get from brands (of course, you have opted in for them) are a very productive method of driving revenue. If you do not have an SMS program today, you need to get going.
To be successful at e-commerce, you need to think of your marketing effort as a marathon, not a sprint. Changes in the marketplace require an agile and flexible approach to building revenue and enhancing your customer’s experience.
And yes, the devil is in the details.
About Mark Friedman: Details Interactive LLC is managed by Mark Friedman, a digitally focused, direct-to-consumer marketing veteran. His career has spanned more than 25 years, working with brands like Steve Madden, Brooks Brothers, Calvin Klein Underwear, Calvin Klein Jeans, and Speedo. His experience with multi-channel retailing, database management, e-commerce marketing programs, loyalty, private label credit, and direct mail segmentation allows us to offer your company strategic marketing services that will improve your business performance.
Listen to Mark interview me on his The Marketing Playbook Podcast here.
You can set up a time to chat with me about your marketing challenges using my calendar. Email me jeffslater@themarketingsage.com Call me. 919 720 0995. The conversation is free, and we can explore if working together makes sense. Watch a short video about working with me.
Photo by Dan Sealey on Unsplash
