Inbox Mailers (DS)

I have three dogs. Marley, Sedona, and Timber. Which is why I hate the rainy season. Because, muddy paws mean a muddy floor. Even when we wipe their feet every time they come back into the house.

BUT…

Harry Potter. That’s why I love the rainy season. Couch vibes. Cozy vibes. And a Harry Potter bingeathon is on the horizon this weekend.

But before we dive into this playbook, a huge thank you to our partners Smart Recognition and minisocial.

How To Create a Movement with Your DTC Brand

When someone’s going through a hard time and I can’t be there in person, I send them flowers.

urbanstems is my go-to, and I’m not alone. They’ve become one of the most trusted brands I’ve seen.

How?

With minisocial, they created over 50 fully licensed video testimonials from creators and ran them as paid ads.

I’ve written about this countless times. Seeing real people post testimonials builds trust. FAST.

If you’re struggling to scale your UGC strategy, try minisocial.

I got you hooked up with 15% off your first project to test it out.

Anonymous traffic. A marketer’s nightmare.

So I learned how to capture the emails of these anonymous visitors.

And it generated an insanely low $0.48 cost per lead.

But first, what’s the typical lead funnel look like?

There are a few variations:

  1. Gated content > Sign-up > New subscriber

  2. Free content > Call to action > New Subscriber

  3. Squeeze page > Sign up > New Subscriber

To list a few.

But even if 30% of this traffic opts-in, then you’re still losing 70% of potential buyers.

This sucks.

Because of a friend, who connected me to a friend, then to another friend, I got introduced to a tool called Smart Recognition.

And in layman’s terms, their tech can:

  1. Identify anonymous traffic with an associated email address.

  2. Use AI to check for buying intent and recent activity.

  3. Send you the leads that are most likely to engage/buy.

Mind-boggling. I know.

So, I tested it. Wanted to see if it actually worked. Or was it just another AI tool promising a lot and delivering a little?

We installed the pixel on our pages. Continued to drive traffic from paid ads and organic content.

And after one month, it matched 23% of our anonymous traffic to email addresses (the average match rate is 20-30%).

Which doubled our subscription rate…

And for clarity - because these leads have all opted into 3rd party marketing - messaging them is CAN-SPAM compliant.

And because of the additional data about which pages each lead visited, we can design personalized welcome flows to further nurture them.

Context and intent are key here.

So, how do we do it?

How To Nurture Leads Based On Intent

Visit our subscribe page? We’ll email them our top case studies with a CTA for a one-click opt-in.

Visit our case study pages? We’ll send similar content to the ones they browsed to increase familiarity with our brand before adding them to newsletter sends.

Visit our advertise with us page? We can share the leads with our partnership team to reach out with relevant case studies to book a meeting.

The key takeaway here is that content personalization based on intent is how you nurture effectively.

In a marketing world where trust is broken daily, make it easy to opt-out.

And so, I found another DTC mini-case study that is crushing with this tech.

FinMC retargets anonymous shoppers during product launch with 5X ROI.

Nothing is more stressful than a product launch, especially the time between launch and your first purchase. But with product launches comes and influx of traffic. And a lot of anonymous traffic.

So FinMC set up Smart Recognition. Put the code on their checkout pages. And linked their ESP (email service providers) to the data via Zapier.

In 31 days, FinMC generated 3,400 leads from 18,000 anonymous visitors.

Then the magic occurred.

Here’s what they did:

  • They emailed the anonymous users to come back and complete their purchase with personalized messaging based on their cart content.

  • Added email addresses to a network audience on Meta or Google to retarget them.

Result? 5x ROI.

So, here’s the playbook I’m working on to convert our leads:

  • Design personalized email flows based on visited URLs, funnel stages, or traffic sources.

    • Abandon cart email, ”X number of people have purchased [Product they were browsing] today. Get yours now.”

    • Product Education, “Why [Product they were browsing] has hundreds of 5-star reviews.”

    • Share similar content to [Content they were browsing].

    • Book a 30-minute free demo.

  • Start with a low product offering and upsell later.

  • Add the email addresses to other Networks like Meta, Google, or Direct Mail to retarget them in other channels. You can know their funnel stage based on the pages they visited and put them into the right campaigns accordingly.

  • If you target a B2B audience, based on the email address domain, you can get expanded insights into who your potential prospects are and reach out to the ideal ones instead of targeting them all.

Look. You probably didn’t know that you could capture email addresses from anonymous traffic.

I know I didn’t.

The fact that Smart Recognition can match your website traffic to email addresses that you can email market to is a freakin’ gold mine.

You honestly can’t afford not to integrate this into your marketing strategy.

And I got you a free trial to try it out.

Rabbit Hole Reads and Resources

That’s all she wrote. See you in December. And lastly, if you’re in Austin and interested in our creator/founder meetup, then reply to this email and I’ll shoot over the deets.

Much love,

Alex

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