Build it and … TELL them about it

Origins #53

“Build it and they’ll come.”

Coming from the IT industry, I’ve heard that a few times.

Now, having my own business, I realize that in a noisy, content-filled, attention-pulling world, there is a chance they won’t hear about “it”.

We built it alright. Very proud of the product we managed to create, together without manufacturing partners, but even though we heard about funnels etc. we’ve been a bit naive throwing random ads around and thinking we can create a substantial number of conversions with a “spray and pray” approach.

Following a chat we had with a friend of ours, very experienced in e-commerce, we had a much-needed talk that it would be smart to step up our “conversion” funnel and create a framework, where we interact with people over a “multiple touchpoint” approach.

In this post, I want to quickly take you through what we’ve been implementing in order to increase those touch points and have a more effective way for more people to know who we are and what we do.

Email collection

Old becomes new again. In the current social media platform dynamics, you don’t want to be at the mercy of any one platform, or an algorithm change that can drastically reduce the effectiveness of your work building a brand.

Having said that, email becomes that much more important as a contact point with people who’ve shown interest in what you are doing. When you send an email out, you are 100% sure that the recipient will receive it in their inbox.

We set up a few popups on our website (some timely based, some based on scroll) as well as a section in our footer (present on every page) that has a call to action to either subscribe to follow our journey and stay in the loop, or drop down your email to enter our monthly giveaway draw. We collect every new member to our mailing list, have a draw at the first of each month, and then pick a winner who can choose any one shirt from our collection to be sent to them completely free of charge.

Follow up

Once the above process takes place and a person signs up, we’ve set up a multiple step drip campaign (automated emails) that go out on a weekly basis. We’ve designed them in a way to cover a few things:

• A personal video to welcome them to our community
• Some more information about us
• A more detailed product information
• Information about where our different types of content can be found (video, audio, text etc.)
• Links to all the different places our story has been featured. It’s an outsiders view to what we’ve been doing, so the source of information is not only us, but also adds some external validation and social proof to the DULO brand.

So far we’ve had some encouraging results in terms of building up that list, our popups are converting at about 6%, which is a big step up from the less than 1% we had previous to having that email collection mechanism in place.

Periodically, we’ll be sure to go through those automated emails to make them more valuable to recipients, as well as update them if we decide that we have something new that has happened and it’s worth to share in that context.

We realized that we’ve kind of gotten ahead of ourselves, without having the basics down. By learning and implementing these insights we want to make sure we don’t miss any opportunities to establish a connection with a potential visitor that may be interested in what we are doing.

It’s been a good lesson that often you want to run fast ahead, but the biggest potential wins might be in taking your time to build solid foundations and understanding of the dynamics of the game and the current, in our case, digital environment.

Have an extra 15 minutes to spend on your passion project. You will forget about ironing with DULO — the dress shirt that stands for time!