The biggest cheatcode in DTC: Community

Hey there!

Welcome back to another bite to chew on.

We hope you’re having a great week and are crushing your to-do list

In today’s newsletter, we’ll talk about one of the core pillars behind our success at Obvi.

That is: Community

In case you don’t know, we’ve grown our Facebook Community to +70,000 members in 4 years - and it’s probably one of the most important assets to our business.

But…

Enough about us.

Let’s talk about how you can grow YOUR community

5 Reasons why you should start building your community today rather than tomorrow

First things first, let’s talk about WHY you should start building a community right away

1). Educate: You can use your community to educate your customers on how to use your products helping them get better results with them.

If your customers are happy = You (as a brand owner) are happy :)

2). Over-communicate: Build a relationship with your customers by telling them what you’re working on, how are you implementing their feedback etc.

Basically being transparent here and giving some BTS of your brand. This goes a long way in building trust with your customers.

3). Get Real UGC on autopilot: Building a community is the easiest, cheapest and the most authentic way of getting content from real customers.

Community = biggest content cheat code in DTC

4). The cheapest and best type of R&D: No need to go out and invest in market research firms, when you can get real-time feedback from your own customers.

5). Re-sell new products without spending on ads: The people who are in your community have some affinity with your brand implying they already trust you.

Where should you build your community

This is a question we get asked quite a lot, and the answer is always rather simple:

Go where your customers hang out

For us, that’s Facebook.

But…

If you’re selling professional services to eCommerce owners, Slack might be the best place to build your community - since your audience is (most likely) spending a lot of time there already

So, always go where your audience is already spending a lot of time

That’s always rule number one

Now, another thing you want to consider in relation to where you’re building your community is whether you actually “own” the community or if you’re just “lending it”

An example of an owned community is through a branded mobile app (because it’s not reliant on Meta)

… and speaking of that - let’s talk more about branded mobile apps

Why every brand should have a branded mobile app

Our branded mobile app is the place where we can create additional value to our best customers through recipes, blogs, exclusive offers, and more - WITHOUT thinking about the ROI

For example,

We can send them motivational messages.

We can send them new recipes to try with our product.

We can essentially remind them that we exist and continue to care about them even after they’ve bought.

… and what do we expect in return?

Nothing.

Because it literally costs us nothing to deliver the value and the message to them through push notifications (no incremental cost at least)

And therefore, we can keep doing it without expecting any ROI from it.

Now - does that mean that we don’t get an ROI from it?

Absolutely NOT.

Adding value to your customers will always drive ROI.

But, sometimes that ROI may be first come in the future (in the form of brand loyalty, retention, and Word-of-mouth)

Myth Bust: Building an app is impossible for first-time founders

Before we built our app, we thought that building an app would cost us both A TON of time AND money, because none of us (nor Ankit) are technical in any way.

But, thankfully - that wasn’t true

Tapcart has made it super-easy for first-time founders to build an app from scratch with their drag-and-drop tool.

With tools like Tapcart, you can literally get up and running in a matter of days, sometimes even 48 hours.

However, if you want to build something fancy, they even have some developer tools to give your customers that custom mobile experience that they can’t get elsewhere.

They are our go-to mobile app tool - and we always recommend every brand founder to talk with them and get a branded app built

Tool of the week

We work with a ton of incredible tech tools who make our businesses run smoothly and fuel our growth

… but

There’s ONE tool in particular that has completely blown us away over the last few months.

That’s Pretty Damn Quick (PDQ)

Now - let’s put checkout optimization, ROI, and money aside for a moment.

In the competitive landscape of tech, that’s table-stakes now. If you don’t deliver ROI, you won’t get our money.

… but the ONE thing about PDQ that has really blown us away is the level of service they provide to their clients.

Said in other words; How much they actually care for our success

They come up with the A/B test suggestions

They work with our developer to implement everything properly

If there’s a problem in OUR backend (for example with our 3PL), they will go in and sort it out for you directly with your 3PL (they actually did this. You can read more about it here)

Now, of course ROI and business impact is also important - and they do a great job there too (as showcased in this newsletter)... but the second most important thing in working with ANY type of vendor is knowing that they actually care for your business’ success.

And Pretty Damn Quick definitely does that.

Go check them out and test it out for yourself. You have our word, that you won’t regret it!

Thanks for reading along

As always, we appreciate you taking the time to read this. We hope we were able to provide some value to you and look forward to serving you again on Wednesday.

All the best,

Ron and Ash