My thoughts on building businesses that make money.
Growth, creative and ecommerce. What works, what needs fixing and what I think more people should be talking about.
LATEST ARTICLEYou can approve the ad and still have a lousy grasp of the route to checkout. That is an expensive place to get a surprise.
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You can approve the ad and still have a lousy grasp of the route to checkout. That is an expensive place to get a surprise.
If the plan needs two of the same person, it is a wish with a salary line attached.
Five purchases, a recommendation to a friend and worse terms than someone who has never heard of you. Strange way to build loyalty.
Sorting by ROAS and pausing the red rows is easy. Understanding what the account actually needs is the job.
I want to discuss margin in the morning and a fairly unreasonable ad idea after lunch with the same person. That should not be an exotic combination.
The customer has learned to wait for the next code. It would be decent of us to ask who ran the training.
Sales double and the ad account looks like a victory parade. Then the supplier’s invoice arrives.
You can buy reach. The customer still notices when you just want to close the ticket.
We have stared at the ad for weeks. The customer may have seen it just as the bus arrived.
A friend sparked the interest and a product post made the customer look closer. Two weeks later, the search ad arrived and collected the applause.
A good month can make anyone a genius in their own head. I would like to look at the numbers before we decide we have cracked it.
You wanted the deck clean before the weekend. Now you are comparing five kinds of cleaning soap as if you were about to give a lecture on them.
We celebrate the purchase in the ad account. Then the product comes back because the customer thought she was ordering something else.
It is easy to want to hire someone better than yourself. It gets much more interesting when that person starts doing things differently.
We can be quick to increase the ad budget and slow to solve a problem the customer has already explained. I think the second speed deserves much more attention.
If your automation makes closing a ticket easier than solving the customer’s problem, you made the wrong thing efficient.
The ad account can look fantastic while the company has less money left. I want to start at the other end: what can a new customer actually cost?
You paid for the attention. Now the product page needs to earn the purchase. Start with the questions the customer actually needs answered.
I like brands where the customer has a natural reason to return. That reason needs to exist in the product and experience long before the next discount email.
Meta published two technical updates in October. They are worth understanding before making the next big account change on someone’s very confident advice.
An installed integration gets no free pass. Pick one order and check what the systems recorded before the numbers get to decide the budget.
Revenue does not pay supplier invoices. Here is our D2C forecast template: P&L, marketing, inventory and cash, with assumptions you can change.
If everyone has seen the numbers but nobody knows what to do next, the weekly meeting has missed the point. I want to know who will do what before the next one.
Try another phrase or choose a different topic.
Working templates for your forecasts, creative tests, modelling and more.
Plan sales, the work behind them and what is left in the bank. A working model for D2C businesses with their own products.
Enter your name and work email on the resource page. Then make your own copy in Google Sheets.
A D2C KPI scorecard covering margin, acquisition, inventory and cash. Keep your targets, owners and next actions together.
Enter your name and work email on the resource page. Then make your own copy in Google Sheets.
Keep the hypothesis, message, format, decision criteria and next step in one row. Start before production. Record what you learnt when the test is complete.
Open it in your spreadsheet app. Use one row per test. The CSV uses commas as separators and contains no formulas or results.
One page to review results against plan, creative, the customer journey and the three decisions you need to make. Print it or save it as a PDF in your browser.
Keep the period, currency and definitions consistent. Fill in what you know, leave the rest open and assign an owner to each decision.