Tips & questions from Klaviyo itself.

Goal: 3:1 return on Lifetime Value (LTV): Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio

Post-purchase optimization:

• Personalized confirmation emails
• Transparent order tracking
• Integrate shipping & logistics data with marketing flows (beware unfortunate timing)
• Smash that unboxing experience
• Don’t forget about them after delivery

Keys to personalization:

• What did you learn during acquisition? (Quiz questions, products viewed, etc)
• Is all this data centralized?
• How are you fostering customer community?

Know your numbers—implement strategies that count

• What was CAC last year?
• What promos earlier in the year had the quickest repeat purchase rate?

Own It Black Friday Cyber Monday panel lightning round:

• Give a gift card with purchase of $X
• Email: shorten time between flow events, warm your list up now, & create a segment of purchasers from past 2 BFCMs
• Personalization: match offer to audience desires (either global or segmented)
• Leverage winback features

More from the Own It conference.

How to create an advantage this holiday shopping season (Black Friday/Cyber Monday+):

• Provide value beyond discounts
• Nail the site fundamentals (speed, flow, etc.)
• Personalization via customer data
• Rethink / remix your targeting & segmenting
• Keep it simple & consistent cross-channel
• Figure out email deliverability now
• Bundles! Gifts!
• Build community / focus on community-based elements
• Be thoughtful with post-purchase messaging
• Keep your flows topical

Most of all, don’t be afraid to show some personality.

Prime Day Part 2: Dealectric Boogaloo returns this October

Holiday shopping season is already forecast to start early, but this should guarantee it does.

Consumer spending continues to climb month-over-month.

July marks the fourth straight month of increased consumer spending, as well as the fastest month-over-month increase of the year.

Which is good for recession fears. But the trend within the trend shows the pandemic splintering is still in play.

Underpinning the entire trend: a nearly 2% spike in online shopping.

institutional retail competitors continue to flounder. Home Depot is forecasting its first yearly revenue decline since 2009. Meanwhile, Target is expected to report its first quarterly sales decline in four years

Just 1% of the Nation’s Homes Have Changed Hands This Year, the Lowest Share in at Least a Decade

Is this a positive or negative economic indicator?

And remember, boomers used pandemic stimulus to scoop up their retirement homes and remove themselves from the housing market.

More Own It insights:

Focus on finding the right customers, not as many customers as possible.

Use your email and SMS lists differently. They’ll have overlap and people will notice if everything is the same.

Some interesting takeaways from Jones Road Beauty’s session at the Klaviyo Own It conference:

• Turned off all TikTok spend
• Prefer free gift with purchase to discounts as they feel the latter devalues the brand
• Focus on contribution margin over revenue (profitability is the north star metric)
• Incrementality over attribution

If you look and act like all the other brands in your category.

To consumers you are the same as all the other brands.

Which means you are no brand.

Podcast ads are doing great.

iHeartMedia, Spotify and Acast reported revenue growth between 12% and 31% year over year in their podcast businesses during the second quarter of 2023, with better performance compared to the first quarter of this year.

Executives told shareholders they are seeing improvements in the U.S. ad market and are bullish on continued growth in the third quarter and beyond.

Podcast networks report Q2 revenue growth, with positive signs for continued improvements in 2023

Black Friday shopping intent breakdown across generation:

• 38% of baby boomers plan to shop on BF
• 40% of Gen X
• 18% of Millennials
• 3% of Gen Z

Cyber 5 creep is here. Gone are the days of Black Friday kicking off the holiday shopping season. This year:

• 1/3 of shoppers will start before Halloween (more than plan to shop on BF)

• Nearly half before Thanksgiving

Cyber Monday may be quiet too, but the older the shopper the more likely they will shop on the deal days.

Continuing the theme of the year, sales and promos will be the most influential factor in shopping decisions this holiday season.

How early is holiday shopping starting this year?

Branding is all about aspiration, so this technique from Droga5 (via Julian Cole is genius.

Don’t ask the consumer, ask their muses.

Go to the influences. The icons. The aspirational selves.

Plus this quote from Serena Williams:

How you get there and how you achieve victories is as important as the actual victory.

Consumers want 2 things more than they want speed:

• Transparency
• Control

A survey found shoppers are fine with longer ship times as long as they got some mix of the following:

• Free shipping
• Guaranteed delivery date
• Delivery date & location control
• Real-time tracking

Consumers prefer these options to fast delivery

Meta’s ad optimization algorithm is an idiot savant (which is the case for most algorithms). It’ll give you what you ask for, even if that’s not necessarily what you want (which is the case for most algorithms).

As humans, the content of what we say is only about 7% of what we’re communicating. Algorithms don’t understand all that other shit, they just get the 7%. So when you ask Meta to optimize for link clicks or landing page views, they’ll give you every single one you can afford. Even if they’re 99% garbage because they came from accidental in-game clicks thanks to the audience network.

The answer isn't news feed only though. For two reasons: 1) it's never good to overly limit the algorithm's choices 2) that's where everyone else is focusing, which means it's more competitive and expensive. (Other placements may be more expensive per action, but traffic quality may warrant the extra cents.)

What is the answer? Optimize for an on-site conversion (and try to make sure you have creative that feels native to each placement option/aspect ratio).

For more on audience network stuff, check out this post by Jon Loomer (your favorite Facebook marketer's favorite Facebook marketer).

For more on algorithms and optimizations, read on below.

Algorithms, especially these days, get treated as akin to magic. Of course, some of the things they can do in our post-ImageNet and deep learning world are plenty impressive. But they're really just super powerful matrix math calculators.

The best way to think of them is like Kevin Kelly said (which is an example I've used plenty before and have heard from many others), they "are best thought of as universal interns." Just like with an intern, you're going to get what you ask for.

The tension comes from the fact that humans and computers speak different languages. The biggest current danger of algorithms is they give us exactly what we asked for, which isn't always what we wanted when the gap between the two gets lost in translation.

To bring it back to Meta, traffic is not link clicks. A link click is an action that happens within Meta's network, which means as soon as that click happens the algorithm stops caring about what happens next. Its job is done.

Tools like Google Tag Manager and Meta's custom conversion builder make it easier to create more and better signals to feed the robots with. Don't settle for optimizing for what you think you want. Take the time to think about what you're trying to achieve, create a trackable event for it, and tell the algorithms to give you as much of that as you can afford.

Disney+ prices are going up…again. Except for the ad-supported options.

The Fed’s rate hikes have changed the math and the days of free money are over, which means:

• No more subsidizing user growth
• Revenue matters more than user count

Consumers will have to pay more or see more ads. Advertisers are about to have a lot more channel options.