Pitstop with Sarah Levinger

Jimmy Feeman of Nobaked is back in the Pitstop Garage talking about how he grew his retail presence.

• You need some sort of authority. This could be a verified account, social media presence, or podcast
• You will have to put in work reaching out to retailers. You may not need to smile and dial, but you'll DM until your thumbs fall off.
• The more you work early on, the faster you can outsource.

Pitstop is a tactical podcast for DTC/ecommerce/Shopify entrepreneurs to keep their store on the track and winning. Updated a few times a week, these short episodes get right to the point with none of the fluff. Hear real stories from operators and experts to get fast fixes and find free money.

Pitstop is presented by Mesa.

Mentioned in this episode:

Triple Whale - Whale Mail

Cofounder of NoBaked Cookie Dough, Jimmy Feeman joins the Pitstop garage. In this episode he shares how his business pivoted to retail, grocery, and marketplace.

• Go where your customer is.
• Looking for different types of advantages.
• Shutting down and pivoting when needed.

Pitstop is a tactical podcast for DTC/ecommerce/Shopify entrepreneurs to keep their store on the track and winning. Updated a few times a week, these short episodes get right to the point with none of the fluff. Hear real stories from operators and experts to get fast fixes and find free money.

Pitstop is presented by Mesa.

Mentioned in this episode:

Triple Whale - Whale Mail

How do you manage hundreds of SKUs? Johnny and Colin from Omnium, and hosts of the Bricks & Clicks. If you enjoyed this bonus episode of Pitstop, subscribe to Bricks and Clicks on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts.

Pitstop is a tactical podcast for DTC/ecommerce/Shopify entrepreneurs to keep their store on the track and winning. Updated a few times a week, these short episodes get right to the point with none of the fluff. Hear real stories from operators and experts to get fast fixes and find free money.

Pitstop is presented by Mesa.

Mentioned in this episode:

Triple Whale - Whale Mail

If you enjoyed this, subscribe to Bricks and Clicks on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts.

What happens during account planning? In short it’s a collaborative process when everyone, from the team at Omnium, heads of sales, account management, and customer marketing go over weeks and years of data to drive and execute the strategy for each account (retail store).

When one store can have 2500 locations, the strategy of a single SKU can make a big impact, it’s about a $1.3M sales opportunity.

Prior to an account planning session, it’s easy to talk about what would be nice to do in terms of promotions and prices, but it’s not until the account planning actually happens that action can actually be taken. Otherwise you’re just guessing and gambling big dollars away.

Hone in on each account to see what you can, and should run.

Typically account planning will look at a year of promotions in advance, this could be your fiscal year, the calendar year or even the customer’s fiscal year. It’s critical to line up your promotions with high seasonality points. If the most shoppers are in the category during Thanksgiving, run your promotions then.

Many products have opposite seasonality, and will come in strong, but finish the year weak. For instance, health products and foods to get healthier typically they do well at the start of the year because people want to undo the unhealthy habits at the start of the year.

You want to avoid running promotions when nobody is buying in your category.

Spending $100,000 on an event can be expensive, work with your retailers to come up with variable rate or blended rates. This mitigates your risk if you run a promotion but environmental factors make it harder to sell.

Historical data is the best friend you have. Looking backwards at how products and promotions have run, will be the best tool for predicting the future.

Mentioned in this episode:

Triple Whale - Whale Mail

If you enjoyed this, subscribe to Bricks and Clicks on Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts.

When you walk the grocery store, you always see the same products. Why is that? It might be easy to ignore when launching a new product, but most products that are launched, don’t make it. Your favourite brands probably started out with one product, and even if you do succeed, it’s very hard to replicate that.

As much as we want to launch the next best item in a category, which is why it’s important to use the analytics and numbers to lower expectations and set budgets accordingly. Other things to consider before launching a product are the previous attempts to launch in the category. Even if you do everything right, you may only have a 5% chance of success.

This comes from the CEO of Wild Planet, Terry Hunt, if you are putting revenue into the plan, plan for 0% margin. Your sales team still has a number to hit, but if it is a flop, that’s what you planned for. Any profit, no matter how small is exceeding your plan.

DTC launches are also risk free environments, especially in small batches.

No matter what you do, you can’t predict the future. Even when you do everything right you can still flop, you need actual sales data to predict what will happen. Velocity in the first 13 weeks is what will determine what your sales look like.

Promotions have a quick burst of sales, but it’s short lived. Over time, more promotions will lead to more sales because customers are used to seeing your promotions but that takes time.

Mentioned in this episode:

Triple Whale - Whale Mail

Ecommerce is great because you can work from anywhere, but that also means that when you work with your mind, you can fight burnout by finding offline to relax.

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Triple Whale - Whale Mail

Reddit is a great social network, but the users tend to hate marketing. Petros Gear makes backpacks and sweaters from upcycles and natural products.

Cofounder Alex shares how he builds out a strategy around selling on Reddit including the margins required.

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Triple Whale - Whale Mail

Connor Meakin is the founder of Bluebird Provisions. Email is a channel that drives 40% of their revenue.

• Opt-in best practices. Aim for a 5% conversion rate, including from sources like SEO. Connor finds quizzes to be the best way to generate sales, and ways to get zero party data.
• This creates an educational funnel as well, even as simply as reminding subscribers they can order directly from the website.
• Bluebird's welcome series lasts about 2 months and sends 10-12 emails with the goal of equipping customers to make purchase decisions and bust objections like shipping thresholds.
• Look to integrate your helpdesk to your email flows.
• Using SMS for post purchase and welcome series in an intimate way as the founder of the company.
• Immediate post purchase upsells.

Mentioned in this episode:

Triple Whale - Whale Mail

Referral Marketing isn't just for real estate agents and lawyers they're for direct to consumer brands.

• Lower your customer acquisition cost
• Increase the number of "the right" customers.
• Make it easy by custom writing forwardable emails and text messages, and giving them something to make it worth while.
• What should your budget be for a referral customer? Look at your CAC through traditional advertising channels and cut that in half.
• Giving people a sense of involvement is a great strategy
• Where do you place the messaging? Post purchase emails as a P.S. statement highlighting an aspirational number gives people something to strive too.
• Customers aren't another marketing channel. If they're going to

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Conor Meakin is an ultramrathoner turned entrepreneur. When your product is logistically hard to ship, you have to focus on channels of customer acquisition that don't rely on a constant run of cash like advertising.

• Start on page with your site. There are some apps you can use to make sure your site is optimized for SEO. Make sure your site format is being submitted to Google for rich snippets
• Make sure you preview what your preview will look like.
• When looking at your keyword research, aim for high intent and low competition.
• The skysraper technique for SEO is looking at the first result, then making that article better, longer, more questions answered. You can beef them up with quotes from experts, infographics, and media.
• Once you have your skyscrapper content, create a cluster of content around that article to help building it up.
• You can use your Shopify blog for most of your content.
• Using HARO (Help a Reporter Out) as a way to get traffic and links to your website.

Mentioned in this episode:

Triple Whale - Whale Mail