Hi Rob! In short: who are you and what do you do?

Hey, I’m Rob Allen, a direct response marketer who’s generated over $100 million in gross sales for clients like Ancient Nutrition, Mama Natural, I Will Teach You To Be Rich, and more.

Which tools do you regularly use in your ecommerce marketing stack?

Which ones are your favorite, and why?

I’m a huge email and retention nerd so I spend a lot of time in tools like Klaviyo and Postscript.

Outside of that, I love LOVE Zipify’s OneClickUpsell tool. It’s probably the best there is on the market and we routinely see it add 15-25% to average cart sizes.

Also, I love Sendtric for timers, because what marketer doesn’t love a good deadline 😁

Ancient Nutrition, one of the ecommerce brands Rob helped generate sales for

Could you tell us about the most exciting ecommerce project you worked on, recently?

One of the things I feel like a lot of brands miss the boat on is a) planning their content calendars well in advance and b) integrating weekly themes into their content across multiple channels. 

I’m working to change this heavily. Because we’ve just seen it be so powerful needle mover when you’re talking about a consistent thing and then reinforcing that on every channel (email, SMS & social).

For example, we recently helped a health and wellness brand build a 6 month content calendar with cross-channel themes baked into every week’s campaigns. And one of the first “themed” weeks we tested was for their Mother’s Day campaign. 

Traditional marketing would just be like, “Send a couple emails!”

• Email 1: “Mother’s Day is coming up? Do you want the marketing about it?”

• Email 2: “Mother’s Day is here. Here’s a sale” 

• Email 3: “Mother’s Day is almost gone. Last chance to ship.”

But we approached the content way deeper. 

For one, we explored unique health angles for the product specific to mothers and we got customers responding on social (which shared on IG stories and encouraged email subs to participate in). 

We also did some gift guides that we had go live on the IG feed and encouraged email subs to share.

Then, we did some live content on YouTube and encouraged all channels to come hang out (a special sale was given to all those who attend). 

Then, we formally launched the campaign on every channel (all socials and email and SMS). 

Discussion boomed. And sales skyrocketed. 

You can do the same thing with all kinds of topics – from sleep to breakfast routines, the possibilities are endless.

We like to start with the theme, find content that will create a discussion and work in the sales content toward the back half. 

It just gets so much attention on offers. 

Don’t sleep on the power of combining channel forces in 2023 and beyond!

Which ecommerce messaging trends have you identified this year?

Which ones will be mainstream and which ones will die out in 2023? 

Minimalism is in. 

I’ll put it bluntly… People bought a lot of sh*t (can we say that? 😛 ) during the pandemic. And I’m seeing a big push back on that now.

And people are not just looking to create less shipping waste (there’s a LOT of boxes that go into the world transitioning to DTC) but also doing less shopping overall. 

And when people do shop, I’m noticing they want to do good for the environment. 

So plugins like EcoCart (a tool that donates to offset carbon footing when shopping online by doing things like planting trees) will be big.

And within that same trend, I think more people are looking to shop Indie/Small creator now more than ever. 

EcoCart is a plugin that helps offset carbon footprints

One thing that really accelerated that trend is just poor customer service experiences by bigger DTC brands after the pandemic (with delayed shipping and workforce cut backs).

I just don’t think customers are going to put up with mediocre support from big brands anymore. 

They want less. They want to shop small. They want to support indie makers.

When it comes to messaging channels, email, SMS and WhatsApp / Messenger are key.

Which channels do you use most frequently, and how do you combine them?

Email is my bread and butter. I love it. And we encourage clients to use it to the fullest extent possible (think daily sends or even multiple times per day).

With that, we often work in SMS into the strategy, as the two channels can feed each other quite nicely.

When it comes to strategy for them, I like to think of both as value creators at all times.

So even when we’re selling something, we like to work in humor or fun into the marketing to make consuming the sales content enjoyable in itself.