– Brands are paying large sums of money for ad management and email flow setup without collecting meaningful data.
– The author has developed a framework that requires no changes and achieves the desired results in a short amount of time.
– Many agencies in the market lack the necessary skills and experience to effectively do their job, relying on templates and copying past strategies instead of incorporating data.Hire a strategist on retainer to oversee all marketing efforts and incorporate data into strategies.Irony defined: Brands will pay $2000+ per month to have their ads managed and try all the creatives in the world without collecting data in a meaningful way. We’ve been using the same creatives for 9 months and still get a 5% CTR on them. We can now make the same style in less than 5 minutes per variation. We’ve only had to adjust wording based on data. Brands will pay $5000 – $10000+ to get email flows set up. They build them all without data, so they are all the same and generic. I built a framework in half a day that requires no changes at all and does the job just fine. How is this possible? Before starting Formtoro, all I did was consult for companies on best practices with monthly retainers and contract work that far exceeded what brands are currently paying largely inexperienced people to do. The agency market is swamped with people who get away with being better than founders, but that doesn’t mean they are good, have skills, or have the experience necessary to actually do a good job, let alone understand how all the parts of the business fit together. Don’t let reputations, screenshots, case studies, or some copy-paste wisdom fool you. I’ve hired and fired a lot of agencies over my career. It’s pretty obvious by asking one question to each: Ads: What do your UTMs look like? Here’s what ours look like: tcamp101_aud1_ac1_c1_lp1 – nice, neat, short coded, scalable, and easy to reference. Emails: What questions does the customer have, and what is the goal of each individual email you add to a flow? This one is missed all the time, mostly because most people think the goal is to sell. Here’s how we do it: Welcome Flow – Email 1 When: Immediately after sign up Goal: Connection Customer Questions: What are they going to send me? Are they just going to sell me? Tone: Proud, Approachable Format: Who we are, What we’re about, What we make and sell, Why we do it, coupon code (if applicable). I’m not saying there aren’t agencies out there that are good at what they do, but what I am saying is they are few and far between. And for the most part, from what I’ve seen, most are quick to copy paste a template from some best practices thing from the past rather than actually build a strategy around incorporating data. Let’s be honest as a brand I’m sure you’ve hired someone and then immediately gone, “I could be doing this” or “I could have done this” yet you’re the same brands that won’t hire a strategist on retainer for $60k a year to oversee all the work your spending tons of money on. The problem with brands in ecommerce is they would rather spend that $60k on ads, plus an additional $36k on an agency to manage them. Short game and long game are different. Trust me when I say this, if you’re a brand, you should start playing the long game as soon as you can. Because right now, I can pretty much guarantee you, you’re paying for templatized guessing. Or worse, you’ve already paid for it ;)#ecommerce #marketinghttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco