In addition to my retention clients, I’ve recently taken on some more CMO-style roles.

Today, I want to share the strategy I’ve used to help take 6 figure and 7 figure brands to 8 figures in annual revenue using a combination of financial management, media buying, funnel optimization, and retention.

Financial Management

The first step I take with new clients is to help clean up the financials.

Each client must have at minimum a balance sheet, income statement, and cash flow statement.

It’s incredible how many brands generating multiple seven and even eight figures in annual sales don’t have clean financials.

So it’s always a scramble in the beginning when I start to help clients put together a 13-week cash flow forecast.

A 13-week cash flow forecast is an unusual choice to many, especially since it’s usually used by financially distressed companies near or in bankruptcy.

However, I’ve found that it’s the perfect way to optimize the use of cash in the short-term for e-commerce, where a significant amount of cash is always tied up in inventory.

The reason for this is because many of my health and beauty clients are not profitable on the first purchase, which means that they don’t become cash flow positive until the second or third purchase.

Because of the timing of cash outflows (Meta ads) don’t match the cash inflows (initial sales and repeat purchases), a weekly cash flow forecast is the best way to chart the cash sources and uses in the short-term.

The forecast is informed by metrics such as your 30- and 60-day LTV, which can be pulled from a tool like Lifetimely.

By building a 13-week cash flow forecast, you’re able to understand how much you’re able to scale your Meta ads without running too deep in the red.

Media Buying

Once we understand how much cash runway a brand has, it’s time to start dialing in the media buying.

This means cleaning up the ad account structure via consolidation. I’ve explained my Meta ads setup in my playbook.

The next step is to streamline the ad creative production process.

As I’ve mentioned before, the performance of your ad account is directly correlated with the volume of ad creatives you create and test.

With my clients, I help establish a defined process that includes angle and hook ideation, scriptwriting with B-roll guidelines, content creation, and video editing and production.

Explaining the whole process will be the topic of a series of newsletters in the future, but if you want to always have fresh creator-made content ready to run, check out today’s sponsor, minisocial.

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This content platform has been used by brands like Native, Magic Spoon, Topicals, and Super Coffee and has been responsible for, among other things, ads performing in the top 1% CVR, a 50% decrease in costs per add-to-cart, a 92% increase in organic video views, and over a 30% increase on ROAS.

Funnel Optimization

Funnel optimization to me means a variety of things.

When it comes to a brand in the health and wellness or beauty space, I often like to use advertorials and detailed landing pages. Oftentimes, if a brand is choosing not to use a heavy direct response-focused approach like this, then the focus becomes building comprehensive landing pages that promote bundles.

Promoting bundles is critical because it raises the average order value, which gives the margins and breathing room to scale your ads.

In many cases, it takes some split testing to determine the best bundles and positioning that drives the highest AOV at the lowest customer acquisition costs.

If a brand takes a direct response approach, I’ll often help build out mini-VSLs for ads and write several advertorials that can scale on cold traffic (similar to these ones).

Retention

Much of my overall retention strategy has been covered in previous newsletters, but the goal is to optimize the following critical flows:

1. Welcome

2. Abandoned checkout

3. Post-purchase

4. Browse abandonment

5. Winback

6. Replenishment (for consumable products)

I’ve found the post-purchase flow to be the most important in turning first-time buyers into repeat customers. After all, the majority of your email revenue will come from your existing customers, not non-purchasers.

Having a post-purchase flow to cross-sell and upsell products and increase returning AOV with incentives is key to boosting the 30- and 60-day LTV, which allows your brand to scale (and this all goes back to the 13-week cash flow).

We also typically implement a robust campaign strategy centered on the segmentation of non-customers, one-time customers, and repeat customers to maximize retention and LTV.

In addition, implementing strategic use of SMS flows and campaigns is critical to boosting revenue on top of email marketing.

By addressing each of the four pillars above, I’ve been able to:

1. Improve cash management

2. Reduce customer acquisition costs

3. Increase AOV

4. Increase LTV

By doing so, it becomes much easier to scale your Meta ads and hit multiple seven and eight figures in annual revenue.

If you found the process above intriguing and would like to explore how my team and I can help you execute the same strategy, feel free to book a call with me.

I’ll be back with part three of advanced retention analysis (you can check out part one and part two as well) and will begin work on the series of newsletters on the ad creative process.

I’ve also got the comprehensive retention marketing playbook coming out in May, so keep an eye out for that as well.

Talk soon,

Sharad

@pmktg00

Next Steps

If you own or operate an e-commerce brand generating at least $1,000,000 in annual revenue, feel free to book a call with me to discuss how we can improve your ad creatives, landing pages, and email/SMS marketing strategy.

To further enhance your e-commerce and marketing skills, you may be interested in signing up for one of the options below:

1. Learn branded direct response copywriting and how to create high converting cold traffic funnels here.

2. Learn how to write advertorials here.

Sponsorship Opportunities

This newsletter is growing rapidly, and at the current rate, we should hit 50,000 subscribers by the end of the year. I’m looking for sponsors who want to reach a highly engaged audience (over 50% open rate and 9% click rate) consisting of owners and operators of 8 figure brands, agency owners, and other marketers. For more information and detailed newsletter metrics, feel free to reach out to me by replying back to this email.