Origins #38 — The things we leave out

Short-term sacrifices when building a brand

Published in

The Needle

3 min readNov 22, 2017

In our last Origins post, we shared the plan for the near future, when it comes to the website and our digital marketing strategy.

In this post I want to touch on some things that we are intentionally leaving out, in order to be consistent with the brand we want to build and the experiences we want to create.

Most of the things that I’ll mention will affect us in the short term, most probably leading to less conversions and/or emails collected.

We are making this decision completely intentionally, looking at a macro level of building DULO as a brand representing the idea of creating and saving time and thus enabling people to focus on the things that matter to them.

Popups

Email collecting popups have become the de facto UI that appears on most e-commerce websites. The data shows that, they convert and collect more emails, compared to a non-intrusive email input field, let’s say at the footer of a website.
Even though most people close it instantly, the mere thought that it’s a piece of UI that we don’t like and it takes time away from your experience on the website, classifies it as a NO GO under time creation rules.

Intrusive/spammy/automated emailing strategy

Another high-converting mechanism that we’ll pass on, is an email strategy that includes sending emails often, nagging and reminding people to buy something.
A large mailing list is definitely a huge advantage, when it comes to creating a platform on which to communicate with your audience. Even more so, in times where organic reach on the biggest social media platforms is declining, pushing the game to be a pay-to-win one.

Ideally, we don’t want to be dependent on any particular social media platform, whether they are the current big ones, or any others that might become hot in the future.

So, understanding the importance of gathering emails, but respecting the philosophy that drives us in building DULO, we want to use our emailing list only to communicate what we consider to be important, interesting, or useful information for our audience. These might be major product announcements, including new colours, new fits, or new products. And any other important company information, such as milestones, crowdfunding campaigns, lessons learned etc.

We will keep the frequency of sending emails, very low, saving folks time and hopefully making our emails that much more relevant and valuable, once received.

Upselling

Upselling is another high-converting technique that we will be very careful of using. At this point, we don’t have the product catalogue to make a proper implementation of this approach, but going forward, we will only consider it, if we decide that it brings disproportionate value to our clients.

Our decision process is driven by the idea of creating and saving time. This will be our framework going forward, whether it is for the UI of our website, or introducing new products. We will structure our processes around making it easy, fast and pleasant for people to get our products and do our best to create a pleasant post-purchase experience as well.

Possible future ideas

Besides being non-intrusive, we also want to start curating content that people might find interesting/useful, based on lessons we learned while building DULO and the process we’ve been documenting, but that’s a topic for another time ;)

Best,

Thank you for your time! Please give a few 👏 and/or leave a comment. It means a lot us and helps other people hear about our journey!