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This is FERMAT Fridays, your backstage pass to what’s going on at FERMAT.
Join us every Friday as we chat about what we're cooking up, the strategy behind it all, and of course our general musings.
Expect juicy insights on new features, our latest experiment results, and whatever else is making waves in our world. Whether you're an existing customer or just a little FERMAT curious, this podcast will keep you up to date and entertained.
Alex McEachern (00:00.926)
Welcome back to another Fermat Friday and today is a little bit interesting. No guest. You're actually just going to be listening to me. Is that a good thing? A bad thing? I guess you are about to find out. But what I wanted to cover today on the pod is something we've been talking a lot about here at Fermat and that concept is creative velocity. So it's not uncommon for a brand to be testing dozens
hundreds, sometimes thousands of different creatives inside of their ad account testing different hooks, different messaging, different audience targeting, different bid strategies. The list goes on and on and on. Experimentation has become something that is just embedded in what we do in the DTC community, especially when it comes to our ad account and the meta ad account. But with all that testing, how do we determine what is the best ad, the efficacy of our ads and
It's really interesting, right? Because if you talk to a creative person, they're going to be evaluating an ad's ability to grab and hold attention. They might be looking at the hook rate, the hold rate, the click through rate. But if we're asked our performance marketers or growth marketers, they're going to be totally locked in on efficiency. What's the ROAS? What's the CPA? What's the CPC? Is this ad making me money?
The problem is that when we look at these through the creative lens or the growth marketer lens, both of these parties are right. But the problem is today, as we're testing everything inside that ad account, is we're generally sending everything into a single funnel approach. It's all going back to the website. It might be going to a PDP, might be going to a catalog page, a homepage, and for the more sophisticated brands listening to a custom landing page.
when all of those ads are pointing into just a handful of different landing experiences, you're taking those dozens and hundreds of thousands of learning and then kind of like just moving the bottleneck a little bit further with like those five landing pages. Instead of being able to take what you're learning, experimenting with all these different things and being able to propagate that all the way through the funnel. And I'll give you an example of what I mean by this. Say you have an ad that has an incredible hook rate.
Alex McEachern (02:21.268)
Click through rate is looking good, but ROAS is not where you want it to be. Generally speaking, if I was going to ask any of you what you do with that ad, you're gonna say that there's a disconnect between the ad experience and the landing experience. The thing is, most of the time the landing experience is difficult to change. If I'm gonna change something on the site, it's gonna have to go through dev approvals, maybe some design approvals. There might be some app conflicts I have to figure out, some theme conflicts I have to figure out,
Changing up the landing experience to match an ad that is great at hooking and holding attention, but not converting is not the likely outcome of what's going to happen to that ad. The most likely outcome for that ad is that it is going to be changed and adjusted to more reflect what exists already on the landing page. And that might be doing you a huge disservice because if that ad was potentially unlocking a new audience, discovering a new value prop,
has an offer that isn't propagated onto the actual landing experience itself, you might've found a better winning combination with all of that creative experimentation you're doing, but once it hits the post -click experience, it's just not giving you the juice that you need. So this single funnel approach is actually not very good for the creative, not very good for the growth marketer. Being able to carry that creative velocity all the way through the funnel is becoming very, very, very
and not just into the landing page, actually into the PDP, the offer, being able to extend what you are talking about, what you're showcasing in that ad, all the way from that ad click to the actual conversion. Again, custom landing pages get a little bit better at this, but say you are targeting a completely different audience, that landing page that you are building is probably pulling in Shopify PDPs, it's probably using a generic offer inside of the cart upsell like,
Hey, if someone puts this in their cart, offer this best seller. If you're targeting a very specific audience, if you don't carry that specificity all the way through the funnel, you're probably losing someone. That's why here at Vermont, we talk a lot about the hub and spoke methodology. So it's not about dropping all of these ads and all this creative and all these experiments that you're doing into just a single funnel that maybe branches a few times with some landing pages. It's the ability to run an individualized funnel.
Alex McEachern (04:45.844)
for a different campaign, for a different product, for a different audience and being able to manage that all the way through. What does the landing page look like? Cool. What does the PDP look like? Am I using images on that PDP that match who I'm speaking to? If I am talking to a more rural audience than I usually am, do the images reflect that? Do the reviews that are on the PDP reflect that person I'm targeting? Is the offer consistent to what was in the ad at the PDP level?
and the ability to boost AOV and increase conversions with cart offers and upsells that are relevant to the person who's actually coming through there. If you were able to use Shopify as that hub and then have all these individualized funnels that live outside of the Shopify ecosystem, so you have more and better and full control over that and push it there for the transaction, you're going to be able to find more winning outcomes out of all that creative experimentation you're doing.
and you're going to have the ability to pull that creative velocity and experimentation into different areas that you never thought possible before. So to illustrate how this can potentially look, I want to talk about a few ways that you can use creative velocity inside of funnel builds. So the way I look at it, you can use a individualized funnel to potentially unlock new revenue streams that you weren't getting before. Because if you were
tailoring all of your ads to meet the lander, all of your ads kind of end up being optimized to the same thing. You're not necessarily gonna find go carve out something new. There was an excellent LinkedIn post by Preston from Chubbies that I'll put into the show notes that talks about, hey, what is the row as you want? I can manipulate things to get that. But if you're always looking for efficiency, you're not necessarily finding the next big thing.
that's going to take you from where you are today and grow your audience and who you're actually selling to, to be able to grow to where you want to go. So some ways that you can find what that next thing is, is through what I call audience testing, merchandise testing, and offer testing. So go through a few examples of these. Let's start with audience testing, because I think that that has the highest potential to unlock a meaningful new piece of revenue for
Alex McEachern (07:06.952)
So one of the most extreme examples you can look at for something like this is to go after a completely different demographic. So in this example that I'm showing here, Nude is actually using a Fermat funnel to have male targeted ads that go to a male oriented funnel. So Nude is a device that allows, is for hair removal. And traditionally when they first started was marketed towards women.
but quickly realized that the product had benefits for men as well. Obviously they are removing hair from different areas. They care about different things. So the ad has a male user that directs to a funnel where that male user is explaining all the benefits. All of the visuals on inside of this landing page and PDP are all directed to the male audience. Even the reviews are from men and making sure that the women, like women reviews aren't inside of there. So.
That's a pretty drastic, like, going after a completely different demographic, but there's also ways that you can potentially get to a different audience through different value props. So this example here from Armora is one of my favorites. So if I was to go and look at the Armora, PDP on their site, a lot of different value props, a lot of different things that the product, the Colostrum product is talking about here,
They have a funnel that is completely devoted to a specific value prop. So they have this funnel set up for bloating influencer ad, talking about how this is helpful for their bloating problems. Click into that wanting to solve my own bloating problems greeted by this experience here that is long form content on why this is a great solve for bloating. Again, if I was to drop this into my regular, let's call it the PDP here.
Bloating would just be a bullet point inside of that regular PDP as the landing experience here. But if I want, if I came in specifically looking for a solution to bloating and I'm greeted by this landing page where I get all the different reasons, this is going to be great for it. It dedicated PDP where the bloating value prop is brought to the forefront instead of just a bullet point. And think about what you can do here. If you also incorporate the cart as part of this specific individualized
Alex McEachern (09:27.176)
I'd be able to upsell this person into other bloating related products or other things that I would find relevant for someone who I know is coming in looking for this exact thing. So if you use individualized funnels and hub and spoke methodology, audience testing like this becomes a lot more viable than trying to mess at the ad level, see if there's something there, but then have it fall off on the efficiency metrics because it's just going to the same old place that you would send everyone.
where you're not carrying that story or the consistency all the way through. So if you do those types of experiments, you can potentially find new slivers of revenue that you weren't capturing by sending those ads into your existing landing pages. Second thing I want to highlight is merchandise testing. So finding different ways to merchandise your product without needing to re -merchandise the main site.
You want to see if offering certain products together leads to higher AOV, better conversion, if putting them inside of a bundle is a way to boost AOV. But again, you don't want to invest in that in the main site. Do it as part of a test. Put together ads that are focused on a specific group of products, merchandise a Vermont funnel or an individualized funnel with those products and make it very scoped and specific to what you're
So I'm going to show an example here. this one's from Katas and they have a very complex catalog. And we actually had Erin on the show a few weeks ago. So I'll link the, the episode where she talks about this herself. So you guys can give it a listen, but what Katas is doing here is their catalog basically has different colors, different frame types, different magnification levels. And traditionally when they were going to send someone to their usual landing experiences,
they would have to merchandise those LPs and like the product pages by showing all of these different combinations because they all exist as individual skews inside of Shopify. But what they did inside of Fermat is they started to combine these different products into looking and feeling to the end customer, like it's an individual product. But in fact, behind the scenes, it's still all of those different skews.
Alex McEachern (11:44.668)
Now we're presenting it in a way where the customer can just pick these as if they are options within the same product. So they're able to merchandise this in different ways and potentially find winning outcomes where you can choose to keep sending traffic to a funnel like this. But as you start to learn things, you can kind of propagate that out to other experiments, potentially even bring it on site as well. And my final type of testing that I would recommend doing in kind of this hub and spoke methodology is offer testing.
So we got black Friday, cyber Monday coming up soon. And it is difficult and probably not profitable to be testing different offers ahead of black Friday, cyber Monday. You're not going to want to just run 35 % off on the site. And if you end up putting like a collection together, that's 35 % off and you want to test some of these things, you always run the risk that people are going to find these and just kind of like explore to them on the site. And you kind of have to figure out like, how are you going to apply certain things to
products, how are you going to make sure that that is being captured with all of the apps that you have on the site can be a bit of a headache. So it's not usually something people are doing ahead of black Friday, cyber Monday, or really at all. But with something like for month and this hub and spoke methodology, you're going to be able to use different offers inside of ads and be able to have that offer be consistent all the way through the funnel. So, Hey, you want to try a certain percent off. Let's try 20 % off, run that in a certain campaign.
Let's try 30 % off, run that in a separate campaign. Those direct into funnels where the 30 and the 20 can be showcased on the lander as well as showcased in the PDPs. It's like 30 % off, 20 % off and just applied to any of the products that come through that funnel. But offers don't even need to be specific to a percentage discount per se. So in this example here from Wrinkle Schminkels, they are really promoting the cost savings.
of using their products versus going and getting Botox on a consistent basis. So they are highlighting through this funnel. The ad is talking about those dollar savings and that dollar saving offer of moving into bigger pack sizes and buying in bulk is propagated through the entire funnel here. So I'm greeted with this lander that showcasing the difference in price as I move into the PDPs.
Alex McEachern (14:04.584)
I'm given different bundle packs. The more I buy, the more I save again, trying to get people to get this on routine and build it, build it into a bigger purchase and more long -term commitment. And even inside of the cart upsells here, same thing. We're going to be, they're trying to push people into bigger commitments, longer term commitments with that additional savings by doing so. And again, different, completely different experiment here. This one from true classic.
They have ads that are driving people into this funnel experience where they're really pushing bundles or bigger pack sizes. So you have the ability inside of this funnel to purchase an individual shirt, but the happy path that they're presenting is the three pack. And as you progress through this funnel and you get to the cart, you're actually shown shipping thresholds that give you free shipping as you add more. So encouraging you to actually in the cart, swap that three pack out to a six
So in all of these different manifestations of offer testing, can test different percentages off, maybe even try a certain dollar off over a certain threshold, be able to test a savings message all the way through being able to test different pack sizes. Again, I know I talked about it before, but like bundling certain products together here to be the offer. Maybe you don't want to be offering discounts at all. Want to get off kind of that discount hamster wheel.
You could put together specific packs that are only available for limited times for the 4th of July for Father's Day for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and actually have those individualized bundles only be available through here to test their viability before you go into kind of like prime time Black Friday, Cyber Monday. So anyway, we spend so much time in the DTC space, especially on the growth marketing side on creative velocity. What can I test? How often can I test? What can I kind of learn and do at the ad account?
Historically, it's been incredibly difficult to try to match an ad to a lander or sorry, to match a lander to an ad. So we traditionally adjust our ads to be more akin to what the lander looks like. But maybe you can go carve out brand new revenue streams by making new offers, going after new audiences, finding a new value prop to target by making sure that the landers match up with these ads that you're creating.
Alex McEachern (16:28.52)
make sure that you can pull that creative velocity all the way through, not just at the ad level and the landing page, but the PDP and the cart and kind of all the way through. So if you're looking to have higher creative velocity all the way from click to conversion and that hub and spoke methodology seems interesting to you, hit me up on LinkedIn, hit me up on Twitter, I'm at Alex MCEA. I'd love to talk to you about the hub and spoke methodology. If you want an easy way to do this, obviously shameless plug this podcast is from Vermont.
Go ahead and grab them, go ahead and book a demo and we'll show you how the hub and spoke methodology can apply to your business. Find a few different places we think you can experiment to find those different pieces of revenue that maybe wouldn't have been possible to go chase before, but all these different slices that we can get on aggregate are gonna be a meaningful change for your business.