We asked. You answered. 

🤑 Connor Rolain on HexClad’s Black Friday offer merchandising strategy.

🏆 Mike Beckham unearths 3 requirements for excellence (the last will shock you).

🎁 Cody Plofker with a countdown + invitation to this year’s biggest event.

📊 Connor MacDonald, Mr. “You’re Only As Good As Your UTMs” … finally delivers.

Plus, this week’s top-five trending news stories with links + executive summaries.

Cody Plofker CMO & CRO, Jones Road

The countdown to Motion’s Creative Strategy Summit is on.

Abir Syed is a CFO and expert on DTC finance. Last year, he explained how to tie creative strategy to contribution margin. This year, he’ll be connecting in-platform creative metrics with rock-solid financial data.

Alex Cooper (founder of AdCrate) has been experimenting like mad with AI in his ad production process. In this session, he’s sharing his perfected system and new flows to help you push out creative at lightning speed.

Fraser Cottrell is a master of high-production storytelling. You’ll learn how to take more ambitious creative swings — including long-form explainers, founder stories, high-production ads, and celebrity collaborations.

Also (if you didn’t know) all three of us Marketing Operators will be there hosting a live Q&A + AMA.

It’s Sept 19 & 20. It’s free. It’s online.

Mike Beckham President, Simple Modern

Over a year ago, in E008 of season one, we talked about the importance of bias to action.

If you want to get good at something, you must start by just doing it. You won’t be any good at first, but that’s the only way to put in the practice required to develop a skill.

Counterintuitively, the only way you build excellence is by making your peace with a simple fact …

Excellence requires being willing to do things poorly at first.

But excellence requires a lot more than just a willingness to act. It has a few other necessary ingredients that should always be mentioned alongside bias to action.

 1. Excellence requires monotony 

Mondo Duplantis won the gold medal in Paris in the pole vault, setting a new world record of 6.25 meters. It was an electric moment to watch.

Think about the training that preceded that glorious moment. How many pole vaults has Duplantis done in his life? 10,000? 100,000? More?

That one epic moment required countless hours of monotonous routine and practice — the same thing over and over and over and over again.

What separates the excellent from the rest is the willingness to hone their craft long after its novelty has worn off.

It’s easy when you see yourself getting 10% better each month. Can you do it when you only get 1% better monthly?

Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that 10,000 hours is what it takes to become an expert. While that number is debated, the concept is not.

Becoming great at something takes an inordinate amount of time. How much is 10,000 hours? That’s like devoting two solid hours a day to something … for 14 years.

 2. Excellence requires judgment 

Because excellence requires so much focused work, it is impossible to achieve in many areas of life.

The easiest way to avoid excellence is to devote a little bit of time to a bunch of disparate pursuits.​
​
I like the analogy of light.

If you stand in the sun, you get warm. If you focus the sun with a magnifying glass, you can light something on fire. If you focus light enough to create a laser, you can cut through anything.

But that leads to a critical question: What areas of your life are worthy of pursuing excellence?

I’ve learned through experience that I can easily get distracted and pour my time into the pursuit of excellence in areas that just won’t matter to me when I’m 70.

If I want to be an involved and committed father, then I’m not going to be great at video games or golf. My competitive fire can sometimes distract me and dilute my focus on things that won’t matter in the long run.

One of my favorite movies growing up was the original Jurassic Park. Jeff Goldblum plays the scientist Ian Malcolm. When he sees the dinosaurs created from DNA engineering, he observes:

I’m often guilty of the same mistake — particularly when I’m not being intentional.

We’re intentional about how we allocate money into different investments, but your time is even more precious than money.

Be exceedingly deliberate about where you choose to use it.

 3. Excellence requires quitting 

If you are reading this, you are likely a person who scores high in persistence — the tenacity to keep going when others quit.

You have the willingness to pay the price of loneliness that often comes with doing hard things.

I’m the same. I just don’t quit. I’ve always viewed persistence as one of my superpowers, an asset.

That was true right up until I founded a company that failed.

Reflecting on that period in 2012, I’m not ashamed of the business outcome. When you make asymmetric bets, often you are going to lose.

The self-criticism I took from the experience was that I kept trying to make the project work long after it was doomed.

I was like the doctor who keeps using the electric paddles on a patient who is clearly already dead.

But I was determined to make it work because … I do not quit. The result? I wasted another year of my life (and another couple of million dollars) because of my persistence.

Persistence is not always a virtue. It can also be toxic.

The person who keeps going deeper and deeper with a destructive addiction. The co-dependant personality in an abusive relationship who keeps trying to make it work. The gambler who keeps doubling down right into bankruptcy.

This isn’t just true of overtly negative situations.

The most dangerous business is the mediocre one. Good enough that you can’t quit. Lacking the potential to be truly successful.

Persistence is only helpful when we apply it in the right places.

How do you harness the positive power of your persistence without the toxic aspects?

You become good at quitting.

It’s completely counterintuitive but 100% true. Here’s how Seth Godin put it in a tremendous book called The Dip:

When you become skilled at quitting, your persistence becomes a superpower.

Quit the stuff that doesn’t matter. Quit quickly. Quit without guilt.

If you aren’t afraid of quitting, it will make you much more willing to experiment and try new things.

Make the decision to quit everything except the most important things. Then, focus your time, attention, and energy on being the absolute best you can be in those areas.

And those areas alone.

THE FEED

Why You Shouldn’t Run a Sweepstakes, Holiday Season Advertising & Temu’s Earnings

• ​YouTube​
• ​Apple​
• ​Spotify​

Ridge’s Sean Frank Drops In! Big Swings, Partnerships & Being a ‘Fireman’ CEO

• ​YouTube​
• ​Apple​
• ​Spotify​

Connor Rolain Head of Growth, HexClad

Offer merchandising is arguably the most important tactic your brand can roll out during Black Friday.

At HexClad, we’re super seasonal. We’ll do a little more than 45% of our 2024 revenue in a 45-day window.

If you’re anything like us, you spend all year building and filling your funnel. We need to ensure our offers maximize conversions, order value, and margin for different cohorts of shoppers.

1️⃣ Offer Segmentation

How do you set up different offers for different cohorts of people? Who are the segments you need to appeal to?

Non-buyers (acquisition), previous buyers (retention), and people who have shown intent to a specific SKU through web visits and ad engagement (product).

• Acquisition
• Retention
• Product

 Acquisition 

People who haven’t bought get pushed into our 6-piece and 12-piece sets or derivatives of them. Here are two examples of what they looked like last year.

These not only drive the best first-order margin but also the best lifetime-value margin.

Unlike our evergreen offer, which pushes to a 12-piece landing page — with “reasons why,” comparison charts, and videos — our holiday campaigns redirect to optimized collection pages.

We’ve tested a lot, and sales collections consistently outperform landing pages.

 Retention 

People who’ve bought likely have a set already. We think about them from two perspectives: self-consumption and gift-giving.

Self-consumption buyers get pushed to discount individual products and “buy more, save more” offers — typically through a build-your-own-bundle experience.

However, they still should see our set offers because — at the end of the day — this is a huge time to gift.

I want existing customers to see those offers, just not as much as folks who haven’t bought before.

And we’re going to infiltrate a lot of gifting messaging into the campaigns targeting them.

 Products 

Do we have offers on all the products that we have evergreen funnels on? Absolutely.

Since we run knife funnels all year long leading into Black Friday, we need to have knife offers during Black Friday.

Same for HexMills, aprons, pizza steels, etc.

If someone has visited a PDP or engaged with an ad for one, they’ll be targeted for those specific products through paid channels, email, and SMS.

2️⃣ Offer Organization

How do we merchandise our offers? We are intentional about how they live on our website.

Our cookware acquisition offers live in one collection — or, more accurately, one set of collections …

Our individual product offers live in another collection. Different cohorts get sent to different collections.

Of course, we want a prospect to buy our $1,400 bundle. It has the best margin and will get us the best LTV, too.

We give folks an opportunity to convert at all costs, even if it’s on a lower-value product. To do this …

• Exit intent pop-ups​
  ​
  Not interested in our sets? Check out our collection of individual product offers. People land on an acquisition collection, show behavior they’re going to leave, and get hit with an exit intent.
  ​
• Bottom of collection CTAs
  ​​
  Make it all the way down to the set collection CTA and you haven’t started a cart? Chances are you’re not going to buy a set. Instead, we’ll drive you to a collection of individual product offers.
  ​
• Navigation hierarchies​
  ​
  Main nav. level one is “Sale Name.” Level two has links to the set’s collection and the product collection. This way, someone who lands on our homepage can quickly + easily get to what they want.
  ​
• Sticky anchor links​
  ​
  If someone has visited a knives page and not converted, then we’re going to show them a knife offer ad during the holidays — with a link that anchors directly to the knives section of the collection page.

Maybe the only thing as important as your offer … is your forecast. Especially spend and efficiency targets.

That’s why (next week) I’ll be sharing a Q4 Contribution Margin Flow Chart — Sheet + Loom.

I’ll show you how to create three different scenarios with wide-ranging revenues and associated efficiencies.

Connor MacDonald CMO, Ridge

“Naming conventions are the heart and soul of every brand.”

I say this facetiously to some degree. But I believe it.

(And, spoiler alert, the EVP of Resident Home agrees with me on an upcoming podcast.)

What do I mean? Businesses have many objectives. They’re growing new categories, launching new products, targeting new demos — it can get messy!

When you have a central data source like Motion, Northbeam, or Google Analytics …

To help, here’s our Creative Key Naming Convention Template + a Loom explaining how we use it across data sources.

THE TRENDS

This week’s top-five trending news stories, curated by the editor of CPG Wire

1. Chomps to Open 300,000-Square-Foot Manufacturing Facility: PR Newswire​

Chomps, a seller of meat sticks and the fastest-growing snack brand in the US, is partnering with Western Smokehouse Partners to open a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Mexico, Missouri. The facility will open next year and create 250 full-time jobs. (Shoutout to Pete Maldonado!)

2. Unilever Ventures Backs Create Wellness: The Information​

Create Wellness, the first company to bring a creatine monohydrate gummy to market, secured $5M in Series A funding from Unilever Ventures and other investors. Dan McCormick launched the brand in 2022. Since launching, Create has generated over $15M in net revenue + sold over 20M gummies.

3. Our Home Buys Another Snack Brand: Food Business News​

Our Home — the better-for-you snack platform — has acquired ParmCrisps from Hain Celestial Group. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. Last month, Our Home acquired Pop Secret from the Campbell Soup Company; before that, they purchased Sonoma Creamery and multiple assets from Utz.

4. Nordstrom Family Submits $3.8B Take-Private Offer: NYT​

The Nordstrom family has partnered with El Puerto de Liverpool, a Mexican real estate and department store company, to take the eponymous fashion retailer private. The $3.8B offer is barely above Nordstrom’s current market cap, so it might take a little more juice.

5. Bansk Group to Acquire Foundation Wellness: PR Newswire​

Consumer-focused private equity firm Bansk Group is acquiring Foundation Wellness, a leading seller of branded specialty orthotics. Bansk Group shelled out $1.5B for PetIQ last month, and they also own stakes in Amika, Ethique, and Red’s All Natural.

Last week, we asked …

Offer strategy was your number one request.

Forecasting was number two.

Connor Rolain will drop his Contribution Margin Flow Chart (Sheet + Loom) in next week’s email to help.

We’d love your input on what to tackle after that.

Until then,
The Operators

PS: Special thanks to Motion for backing us as a sponsor even before day one.

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