Here’s what I learned this week

I hit inbox zero on my work account. I love the holidays.

I’m mildly obsessed with DALL-E

The quality of LinkedIn has gone downhill, I’d really settle for a feed of just founders sharing new features of their products in a space all in one place.

Or aggregated case studies all in one place.

I might just scrape a bunch of agency and software websites and create this, looking for an email agency? Head on over to emailforecommerce.com and check out the case study tab no worries we’ve aggregated the best of the best from all email agencies complete with links back to them.

(If you clicked above on that link and are an email agency we might want to talk)

I’d love to see what new tests people were running, new case studies, new features etc.

A feed would be great for chronology.

I did stop to read the thread about Retention.com though, shout out to Adam Kitchen for sending me a link from twitter around this one.

There’s an awful lot wrong with her post, but it’s entertaining.

There wasn’t any collusion between these two, but if someone was to look into the bribing of every merchant to get on SMS and the subsequent amount of revenue driven by SMS v. email they would get a clearer picture of why price raises and sending caps decided to come out about 12 months prior to IPO or the period known as the IPO road show.

If someone dug into how an phone number can exist on two different lists not attached to an account and they don’t automatically merge and how Klaviyo doesn’t actually have a tool to handle this and brands that had SMS numbers prior to moving over are probably being massively overcharged that would be a different thing. 🧐 

I know, shocking. Fuck DALLE is good.

I’ll save this for a different day though.

Yeah it’s kind of like that.

No now on to the actual work that I did this week. It’s pretty cool.

I’ve been working on some new stuff

So last week I posted about how we need an agency to run partner co-marketing at scale, well after talking to a number of agencies, turns out this is a gap in services and no one really offers it because they are way more focused on client work.

After talking to another friend in the industry, it’s a gap that needs to be filled for all of their clients, I love a good network for quick feedback.

I know as a brand marketer as long as the company was valid and aligned, we would do these usually social on the lesser end email on the higher end but this was years ago, both social reach and email use has changed since 2016 though and how we use email has also changed (at least for me personally).

Honestly, I feel stupid because I did it really successfully for years then decided to move into software because “I had this need to innovate!”.

Or something like that…

Turns out after telling people to do this for the last 4 years very few people have been able to create a successful program around this.

So I sat down for two days and built a system that will work for just about every brand out there, flexible enough to be adopted, to be on brand, will print money and will make it very easy for people to run co-marketing activities.

I know there is a need, now just time to validate.

I’m going to onboard a bunch of brands for free and get them sync’d up with other brands.

I’ll manage the whole thing, collect the data, look at list size, engagement, aov, etc. then pair them up with offers that make sense.

This is part something of the ultimate goal:

PAY ME LIKE YOU PAY FACEBOOK!

The ROI on this stuff is nuts. The problem is the amount of time needed to do it, it’s a lot of coordination.

But I have a plan…

I’ve been testing a lot of things in this space for a while and I’ll be damned if nearly every single one of my hypotheses came out in my favor.

[Insert all top secret strategies that have worked over the years, but leave stock language in brackets, a good tease never hurt anyone]

So I’ve done this stuff, the problems with the way most brands approach this is overly complicated in an effort to “stay on brand” when most of them don’t really have a brand yet.

Let’s break all the rules.

If you’re a brand and/or you work with brands I’m rolling out Unicorn Hunter (unicornhunter.com).

Let’s see how close to $0 CAC we can get.

Because $0 CAC is a mythical thing these days but I do think that using partner marketing in the right ways you can build a massively profitable brand that avoids the full on bear trap that is overreliance on Facebook, Google, TikTok or any other paid network.

Or at the very least offsets all the money you’re spending.

Submit your brands and we’ll match them with complementary brands and manage the templates, advice, deliverables, and time schedules soup to nuts.

If we don’t have a brand, we’ll go out and find complementary brands.

I was going to have to build this anyway for our Krakatoa Underwear so I figured I would double up my efforts and allow other people join so we could help multiple brands.

We’re also sitting on quite a few brands we work with in Formtoro that we can match people up with.

You know, the type of clients that have data about what matters to them in products…

If you want to co-market with us and have a brand that is aimed at guys, you’ll get a behind the scenes peek of what this looks like and get you started quickly.

The long term plan

This likely turns into a paid membership, because it’s all focused on new customer acquisition it will be priced more like a service than a product, most products in this space don’t work well because of the need to service the accounts and coordinate.

Like most things I talk about, I’ve actually done this.

I also know how much work was involved in doing it.

But I’ve been reading a lot about consumer behavior and simplification these days and I think there’s some serious optimization that can happen to help this work more easily.

I’ve personally driven millions in net new first time buyer revenue from email co-marketing.

If you’re interested, sign up at Unicornhunter.com.

Automated UGC UPDATE

I mentioned this in a past post: https://ecomwithjon.beehiiv.com/p/ecom-jon-november-9-2023

We’re close, like really close, to be safe, going to launch in January.

It will be a cobbled together mess of stuff for now, but it’s playing into my longer term vision of what Formtoro can do.

If the test is successful we’ll build in the remaining functionality directly into Formtoro, for those keeping score, that will allow us to own signups, quizzes, post purchase surveys, and post purchase UGC product feedback which you can upload to your review platform.

Now that’s a dirty data combination of the entire customer journey from signup to purchase to product feedback all mapped together.

Now couple that with co-marketing matchmaking I think you can see what kind of year 2024 is gearing up to be.

With more companies installing Formtoro and collecting data relevant to what matters to them and what they are interested in, we can start connecting the dots and setting up co-marketing partnerships that will crush.

These things aren’t new or flashy, they are complicated time intense activities that are slowly being automated to allow smaller brands greater access.

Ultimately, it’s not about technology or programs, it’s about strategy and understanding how all the elements of the customer journey can be molded for success.

The Takeaway

I hope you all have an amazing holiday and are able to step away from your screens for a few days and just enjoy going outside and breathing in some fresh air.

Have a great week!

-Jon

P.S. Remember go sign up your brand or tell your client’s to sign up at unicornhunter.com this is how you grow in 2024 also feel free to share it to your private slack groups as well, the more brands the more opportunity for great co-marketing opportunities.