E-COMMERCE
Spotify now integrates with everyone… almost
Ever feel like you’re frantically busy…
… only to learn your old college friend is pursuing two masters degrees, has four kids, and trains Seeing Eye dogs?
Shopify’s kinda like that: The company announced 100+ features yesterday, including…
- Twitter Shopping. Now the Twitter sales channel integrates with Shopify, putting your products right in users’ feeds and making it easy for them to purchase, among other features.
- Tap to Pay on iPhone lets Shopify merchants collect offline payment from customers with a tap of the iPhone.
- Local inventory sync on Google enables merchants to alert nearby customers about product availability.
… But wait, there’s more: Shopify is also launching new tools like pre-orders and expanded selling plans, B2B selling capabilities, badges for stores that guarantee two-day delivery, and more.
There’s lots more than we have space for here, so we’d suggest reading the full announcement to get all the deets.
ADVERTISING
Facebook and TikTok want to make friends with the US and the EU
Usually, big tech and governments are squared up like gunslingers on a dusty street.
But based on two recent updates, it appears they’re shaking hands instead of holsters…
Meta’s playing fair with US home buyers: Meta announced a settlement with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development that will change the way they deliver housing ads in the US.
In Meta’s own words, they developed a novel use of machine learning technology to:
“… ensure the age, gender and estimated race or ethnicity of a housing ad’s overall audience matches the age, gender, and estimated race or ethnicity mix of the population eligible to see that ad.“
In other words, the goal is to avoid discrimination in housing ads.
… And TikTok’s doing a dance routine with the EU: TikTok has committed to “align its practices with the EU rules on advertising and consumer protection.”
What does this mean for TikTok in practice? Well, quite a few things, but here are the main points:
- Users will be able to report ads and offers that could trick children into purchasing goods or services.
- Branded content that promotes alcohol, “get-rich-quick” schemes, and cigarettes is prohibited.
- If an account has more than 10,000 followers, TikTok will review their videos.
- Paid ads will be identified with a new label.
That’s only part of the list. You can read the whole thing in the announcement.
SPONSORED BY HOPIN
Why virtual events can be more successful now than during lockdowns
For one thing, they’re hella cheap—both for organizers and attendees.
Given the current state of the economy, people are more inclined to save money rather than pay a lot to attend in-person events.
Now, the downside of virtual events is that the moment attendees think their time is better spent elsewhere, they can easily leave.
But that won’t happen if you follow the 2022 Guide to hosting Virtual Events by Hopin.
Learn how to create outstanding virtual events that people will enjoy and remember for months to come.
Download it for free to discover:
- The 5 simple steps you need to take to organize a stand-out virtual event.
- A promotion channel that 78% of event organizers find successful, plus how to plan a campaign, step-by-step.
- Gamification strategies for keeping attendees engaged.
… And more.
So if you want to plan an outstanding virtual event… you know where to click.
CONTENT MARKETING
3 lessons from bootstrapping a SaaS company to 8 figures
In 2012, Patrick Campbell cashed out his 401(k) to start ProfitWell, a software company that helps subscription businesses reduce cancellations and optimize pricing.
A few weeks ago, he sold it for over $200M.
He recently got on Reddit for an “ask me anything” (AMA) session.
He shared several incredible lessons from his experience. Here are our favorites:
Acquire your first customers. Patrick used a mix of content marketing and cold outreach. He:
- Wrote an ebook.
- Created blog posts to get traffic to get ebook downloads.
- Reached out to people that downloaded the ebook and offered a free pricing audit.
- Once the prospect realized they could do better, and how, he went for the sale.
Build an audience. ProfitWell created a media strategy. They created a newsletter, a blog, and a strong presence on social media.
And they treated each channel differently.
When you have an audience, scaling your revenue is easy if your product is good.
Use a tangential freemium model. Creating a free product that is better than your competitors’ paid offers will attract your ideal buyers.
Then you monetize those free users by selling them different products.
Moreover, earning free subscribers helped ProfitWell in different ways:
- Their product became excellent because the data from the free product trained their algorithms for the paid products.
- They were forced to create an extremely efficient infrastructure to keep costs low. This effort compounded over time.
- It made their products easier to learn. Since they had a large base to talk to, they were able to improve customer experiences at a quicker rate than their competitors.
That’s some solid marketing and business wisdom, especially if you’re in the SaaS game. If you want more lessons, read the whole AMA post.
SPONSORED BY STOKE TALENT
Onboard new freelancers in 5 minutes
You’ve finally found the perfect freelancer, but how long does it take you to onboard them?
Stoke automates your onboarding processes, and allows you and your team to complete projects faster, without having to chase after finance, legal, and IT to onboard and pay freelancers.
Companies like Similarweb, Scale.ai, Verbit, and many others use Stoke to boost their productivity by leveraging freelancers more efficiently.
Get a demo of Stoke right here.
THE CREW’S INSIGHTS
Want to bump your e-commerce sales?
Guess what’s trending right now in some e-commerce circles? Listicles.
If you’ve spent more than five minutes on the internet, you know them well: those “top 5” articles telling you to buy things you never knew you needed.
As it turns out, these listicle-type articles can be great for driving sales… But only if they’re done well.
Here’s our best advice for creating listicles that sell:
- Don’t lead with the offer. The reason listicle articles work is that they feel organic. If it’s obvious from your title or introduction that the article is a straight-up promotion, people will be less inclined to trust what you’re saying. Write your listicles so they feel more like objective blog posts than direct-response copy.
- Try hosting the article on a different site. This is grey territory, but some marketers like to post their listicles on sites that their brand isn’t connected to. It feels more organic than if it’s on your brand’s domain.
- Twist the knife. Each header in your listicle should dig a thumbnail into a unique pain point. Help readers understand each and every problem they’re facing, then show them how they can solve it.
And if you want more takeaways… There was a great conversation about listicles on Twitter recently.
Happy selling!
ROUNDING UP THE STACK
INVESTING: Don’t forget this famous quote “be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful”. Catch the market bottom and receive unique insights with The Average Joe, a free newsletter read by 30,000+ investors.*
MICROSOFT: Spend money, make money. Microsoft Advertising just launched automatic Cash back promotions in Edge. When a user buys through your product ads, they get cash from Microsoft. Interesting…
MARKETING: Google wants to help marketers make their advertising more inclusive. They’re expanding their All In marketing toolkit with new features, including tools for reaching people with disabilities. Sounds fair.
E-COMMERCE: Shipping a container from China to the US is four times more expensive than it was in June 2020… But it’s also 50% less expensive than last year. Is the supply chain crisis finally cooling off?
TWITTER: Videos are getting shorter… And tweets are getting longer. Twitter is launching Twitter Notes, a feature that allows users to publish long articles directly on the platform. We wonder how long articles will compare to threads…
SOCIAL MEDIA: Turns out Reels and TikTok audiences have different tastes. TikTok users like puppies and other animals videos. Meanwhile, tutorials, comedy, and augmented reality filters are gaining more traction on Instagram Reels. Good to know!
SEO: Brave Search, a new search engine, passed 2.5 billion queries in the last 365 days. Compare that to Google, which took more than a year to reach that number. Granted, they did it when the internet and smartphones weren’t as popular, but still…
*This is a sponsored post.
BRAIN TEASER
There are 30 cows in a field, and 28 chickens. How many didn’t?
You can find the answer here.
POOLSIDE CHAT
Cool tech, (funny) business, lifestyle and all the other things marketers like to chat about while sipping cocktails by the pool.
A fun anniversary idea to try with your friends
How do you celebrate a 40-year long friendship?
These five friends celebrated by taking the same photo—for 40 years.
They took the last photo a few days ago.
Now, vowing to meet at the same spot with your friends is not a bad idea.
Even when life takes you on different paths, it’s a ritual that keeps the friendship going.
We may start this tradition with The Crew… Will post photos if we do.