Welcome to Make life easy, Breezi.

Your friend who sends you a weekly update on what she's working on, reading through, and thinking about – in a list.

In case we haven't met yet, here are 8 things I would love you to know about me

1. I graduated in 2020 with an offer letter to be a technology consultant at Accenture

2. Then COVID hit, and everything changed

3. I decided to withdraw my offer and join as the first employee at Three Ships Beauty – a direct-to-consumer natural skincare brand

4. My official title at the time was Digital Growth Marketer but when you're the first employee on a 3-person team, job titles don't mean too much

5. Over the course of two years, we grew to 9 full time employees, launched 15+ new SKU's and most of our exponential growth came from our e-commerce channel

6. My responsibilities included paid + organic customer acquisition, building conversion funnels, website optimization, retention marketing and running various marketing campaigns throughout the year

7. Long story short, my job was to grow online store revenue every month

8. And I did :)

Best resources I found when to start learning about growth marketing

• Nik and his Sunday newsletter on actionable marketing tips

• Eli is the absolute GOAT with his newsie on CX and retentino

• For paid media buying: Andrew Foxwell courses

• For paid media creative: Social Savannah's Twitter

• For broader CPG and consumer news – I'm a big fan of Nate's newsletter, Express Checkout and Ari's newsletter, Go-To-Millions!

The 3 non-negotiable's to any successful DTC brand

1. Strong Branding: your brand needs to be recognizable and memorable

2. Optimized Funnels: you need to show people the right message at the right time

3. Be data-driven: you need to know your metrics inside out

Okay, now tell us the specific strategies you used to scale Three Ships from $10,000 to 7-figures

• Buckle in, this is long

#1 Prioritized growing our email list

Between 2020 and 2022, we grew our email list in Klaviyo from 2,000 to 100,000 subscribers. My goal was to ensure email always made up between 30-35% of our online revenue. Growing your email list requires both passive and active efforts

• Passive efforts: increasing site sessions through FB/IG ads, reviewing your email capture popup biweekly and ensuring it's converting above 10%, adding email capture efforts in organic social (IG Story swipe up) and other marketing channels

• Active efforts: organizing email giveaways, running a waitlist before ANY campaign (new product launch, new bundle, Black Friday, etc.) and driving people to sign up for your email list to be the first to know – everyone has FOMO so they love this

• In the beginning, I was responsible for all things email marketing – list growth, segmenting, campaign calendar planning, design, copywriting and implementation

• Eventually, we brought on a designer and strategist to take work off my plate (shoutout to the best: Lexie!)

• You learn so much about your customers through email. That's why I advise early stage brands to avoid working with an agency off the bat

• From the subject lines they engage in, to which part of the email they click, to which product drives the most sales – it's important to have someone internal understand these insights

#2 Tested new channels quickly and invested in the ones that had a spark

The strongest growth marketers identify new channel, spend a small test budget on it and decide whether it's worth doubling down on or scrapping. Here are all the channels I've tried:

• FB/IG ads: Must have for any brand that sells product online. Unless you're spending $50k+ per month, I would do it in-house and test beautiful static ads first. You can iterate faster on statics if you have a template already, but make sure you invest time in making the creative look stunning

• Email: Must have for any brand that sells online. I won't go into details here but aim for metrics of 50% open rate, 1.5% CTR and $0.15 revenue/ recipient

• SMS: Personally, I advise all the brands I work with to start SMS marketing as soon as possible. My agency runs SMS programs for six different brands on Postscript and we see on average: 8% CTRS, 15% conversion on those who clicked and $0.47 earnings per message, with minimal unsubscribe rates

• SEO: My tip for SEO is get started by doing this yourself, and once you reach six-figure months – look for an agency to work with. Doing it yourself includes: identifying which keywords to rank for then writing long form blog posts that include them. If you're on the hunt for an agency, I've worked with Gr0 before and liked them.

• Affiliate: Tested this channel for a month before deciding to scrap it

• Influencer: Tested this channel with paid macro-influencers across quite a few brands and never saw a profitable return. Instead, I always recommend product seeding with beautiful PR boxes and building that organic relationship

• Community: Amazing channel for increasing retention and repeat orders. However, a lot of founders underestimate how much work it takes to build a genuine community – it's a full time job and requires a full time person

• Brand partnerships: A very hit or miss channel. I think this channel is great once you have more marketing dollars to play around with but in early stages, I wouldn't waste time here.

#3 Market the feelings and emotions, not the value-props

I know we're getting close to "brand-marketing" territory now but a lot of early stage companies don't hire for brand managers until later in the business so it's important you know how to write compelling copy. Here are example from brands that I've worked with:

Huppy

• Instead of: We make plastic-free toothpaste tablets that save the ocean

• We say: The quickest and easiest way to make a difference in saving our planet

Dog Is Human

• Instead of: A human-grade multivitamin for your dog, with 12 clinically proven ingredients

• We say: If you love your dog more than life, come join us

Axiology

• Instead of: Our Balmie's come in 14 shades that matches any skin type

• We say: 14 shades, 2400 color combinations – so you can change your mind as much as you'd like

Miniter

• Instead of: Say goodbye to bad breath with our oil-based Breath Serum

• We say: No more breathing into your palms, Breath Serum is your confidence in a bottle

Dandylion

• Instead of: Clean Paws gives a gentle deep clean without stripping your dog’s paws of its natural oils

• We say: More puppy playtime, without the paw prints on the sofa

Biggest mistakes I see early stage founders make when it comes to growth

1. Wanting to outsource every single task to an agency: I get it, we're all tight on time but outsourcing a task without at least giving it a shot yourself just feels lazy to me. Also, by doing it yourself first, you'll be able to better manage an agency when you bring them on because you actually have an understanding of how things work!

2. Not understanding e-commerce metrics and terms like the back of their hand: CAC, LTV, AOV, sessions vs sales, new vs returning, sales by products, product journey – you should know all of this data about your store without even thinking about it

3. Hire a junior employee but expect them to perform at a director level: most brands hire their first full-time employee and pay them between $55-$70k and while it's okay to have high expectations, be wary of how much work you're putting on them and how that affects their mental health. Give them the right resources to succeed, seriously, if you have a junior growth hire – connect them to me so I can help them!

4. Try way too many channels all at once: maybe a hot take but you can scale to your $3-5M with only FB/IG ads, landing pages, email/SMS and organic social. You don't need anything else.

5. Trying to scale when your AOV is too low: I don't work with any brands who's AOV is below $50. In today's DTC landscape, acquisition costs are way too high for you to be profitable if your average order value is <$50. By offering bundles or additional higher value SKU's, you create more flexibility around acquisition and experimenting with different growth tests

If you didn't read everything above, THIS is the most important takeaway I want you to get from this

Everyone wants to hire a rockstar Head of Growth but a lot of the time, I notice that the JD is unclear, includes everything under the sun and is severely underpaid, which then makes it extremely hard for 1) you to hire for 2) for them to excel.

You need to get granular on exactly what is important to you right now in this moment:

• Do you need to find ways to increase AOV?

• Do you need to increase your conversion rate from 1.3% to 2%?

• Are you only attracting women right now and want to expand to the male market?

• Is your website easy, intuitive and enticing?

• Have you tested various landing pages yet?

• How many creatives do you have running every week?

• Are you more focused on first-time customers or increasing retention?

Once you figure that out, you'll be setting your growth person up for success and eventually, they'll take over answering those questions and scaling the brand.

In other news

• I moved back home this week

• I'm currently reading Shoedog for the 4th time

• I have Beautiful War on repeat

• I'll be in NYC 3/26 - 4/4 if anyone wants to cowork

• I just bought this monitor and I can't wait

How I'm spending my time lately

• 60% on building my startup, Breezi

• 20% on helping brands with my consultancy

• 5% playing sports and at the gym

• 5% being creative with making TikToks and curating the perfect Spotify playlists for any occasion

• 5% reading and self development

• 5% hanging out with friends and family

List of the week!

In case no one told you

• I love you! <3 <3 <3

If you found anything in this newsletter helpful, I'd love to connect on Twitter – tweet me a screenshot of your favorite part and let's chat 👋

I'll be back next week with more lists!