Killing it with Rip Van Wafles — Dan Ben-Nun // Adspace Agency

Quotes

• "When you start an E-commerce brand in your garage, you go on to Kickstarter. You do everything kind of the super scrappy bootstrap method; you learn to appreciate the brand side and the struggles of these founders and how they come up from nothing, build multimillion-dollar brands, and have to do everything in-house at the beginning until they have the money and the budget to hire these agencies. And that puts you in touch with the struggle of the brand owners and helps you see things from their perspective." - Dan Ben-Nun

• "When we started working together, they had very, very low, close to zero sales on their DTC channel. We had a big challenge in front of us, and we had to understand how we ramp this up from almost nothing per year into a massive channel." - Dan Ben-Nun

• "Selling candy bars or sweet packaged goods online is already challenging. Number two, the average order value is low. When buying a candy bar, you want to spend four or five bucks, sometimes even less. So combining that with Facebook ads or other ad platforms to pay for the CPA, the cost per acquisition of these low-cost products is already challenging." - Dan Ben-Nun

• "We had to craft a strategy focused on two things bundling number one and number two, which was focused on testing the product." - Dan Ben-Nun

• "If we get people to test the product to taste it once, we could get them to be much more comfortable purchasing a case of 24 or 48. We were still losing money on running ads and running the test campaigns. But the test campaigns help us seed 10s of 1000s of people with the product, allowing them to taste it and see that they loved it. And then, we could retarget them since we have their name, email address, phone number, etc., with the opportunity to buy a large quantity of the product." - Dan Ben-Nun

• "The general strategy we engaged in throughout this campaign was running a taste test campaign, getting as many people to sign up to that as possible, and losing money on the cost of acquiring those customers but then retargeting those customers with a hefty campaign to get them to purchase a 24 or 48 pack with much better margins and much lower acquisition cost to upgrade to that kind of better lifetime value. So that was the general strategy we engaged in the Rip Van Waffles campaign." - Dan Ben-Nun

• "It took a lot of time and wasn't a breakeven out of the gate, right? We were saying something different than excellent results in month one. It took us several months to tweak that strategy, refine it, and understand how to implement SMS email flows and other marketing strategies to augment those retargeting campaigns. But overall, it did propel us into a healthy growth phase on the DTC channel at a critical moment in the company's trajectory, where retail sales were down. They needed DTC sales to augment and offset the downturn in DTC and retail since COVID." - Dan Ben-Nun

• "The Amazon verse Shopify question is a question we deal with on almost every major company we've worked with. And people always ask the same questions. Which one should we focus on? How to navigate between Amazon versus your own DTC channel? We always say that when you have your own DTC channel on Shopify, you own all of your customer data, POV, POS, point of sale, and interactions with the customer. And so, you can custom craft your strategies at a much higher degree and more personalized level. And that creates more long-term value for the brand." - Dan Ben-Nun

• "Amazon can be an incredibly effective channel, especially for new brands out the gate that need they don't want to invest all the money required to create all of the custom emails, SMS Shopify store, CRO, and all of the things you need to do to run an effective DTC strategy out the gate, Amazon kind of is a one-stop shop, you can create your listings, you can run ads, you can do so without with minimum back end infrastructure and having Amazon do a lot of the heavy lifting." - Dan Ben-Nun

• "Our recommendation is to use both channels. But to understand that controlling your channel offers the most long-term value to your brand. And so, while Amazon is a great channel, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to replace your entire DTC strategy since. That's putting your eggs in someone else's basket and leaving yourself up to competition on Amazon." - Dan Ben-Nun