Hi there,
Welcome to the 10th edition of "State of anew sleep".
Every month I share snippets of what I (and the team) at anew sleep are working on.
Here's what happened.
It's soooo close guys
We're going into the busiest season ever for e-commerce and DTC brands.
I don't even need to say what it is.
I've always worked hard to prepare for this season and this year is no different. Though I've decided to change a few things up.
This year I made a ruleset for myself to secure revenue for this season and avoid unnecessary work.
Here's what I decided:
- I will not try new things out unless I know 100% they will work.
- I will not change important things (payment, shipping etc).
- I will not produce too much content "in case I need it".
There is no crazy experiments and initiatives planned.
Only focus on doing more of what's already working.
Or actually, there is one thing. We'll get to that later. 😎
In terms of our goals:
We plan to 2x of our revenue in November compared to last year.
SMS marketing - hit or miss?
This year we invested heavily in acquiring more e-mail subscribers (and SMS permissions).
During the past few months, we've been redirecting +30% of our ad spend towards leadgen for our permission base.
Something that has helped us grow the base of +80% in no time.
Now we also have sooooo many permissions for SMS.
So I was lying when I said we wouldn't do new things. SMS is something we're going to test out this year.
Our CPCs were about $7 last Black Friday. I can send out many SMS for that price. With the assumption that the CTR is at least 1% the calculation makes sense.
I am looking forward to seeing what it can do for us.
Black Week Q&A for anew sleep
I get some questions on how of much we plan to do X, Y, and Z.
Here are some quick Q's and A's.
How many e-mails do we intend to send out in November?
About 14 campaign emails. Less than last year.
How many creatives have we created for Black Week?
About 10 new videos. 8 repurposed videos. 40 banners. All thanks to the creative team at PL & Partners for delivering amazing content that performs good.
How do you pace the budget during the month?
We plan to spend about 30% of our ad spend from Nov 1-21. Already from Nov 1 we're upscaling the ad spend to prepare our audiences.
The rest of the budget is spent on the last days of November. This will be me after Nov 21st on Google & Meta:
TikTok?
Smaller portion of our budget. Currently TikTok is running a campaign for $600 in free ad credits for new accounts spending $600 - I'll take it.
Google or Meta? Who do I bet on?
I'll be using more on Meta this year, but it's quite close. If something work well (according to platform & zero party data), I'll increase the budget.
ROAS target?
Higher than normal. About +25%. But we downscale ROAS to upscale spend.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading so far. I will be doing this every month. If there's something specific you want to hear about in these updates: Shoot me a message on LinkedIn.
See you in a month.