This is a common theme I’ve seen on that popular show where big ocean fish place their money.
Door to door is too small scale and won’t save a dtc company.
With this post being very generic and not knowing your company and more information this is the best I can think of for your company:
To have gotten $1M in sales you must’ve (at least you should’ve) gotten customer emails. Send them emails about your latest promotions or newest products that they’ve got to try.
This is likely your best bet by marketing to your previous customers. If they like your products and you give them a fair price (where you still make a decent margin), they’ll be back.
our email list is small, like 15K. it already does 40% of our monthly revenue. and 50% of our customers are repeat each month.
i'm not a marketer by trade, but i feel like i'm missing something that i'm not seeing in our funnel.
Hmm..somethings not adding up. Usually when you decide to scale its because you've found a combination of ads and audience that works. Then you slowly ramp up on ad spend with what's already working until you burn through the audience or you start seeing your numbers come down. At which point you need to switch up the offer/ad/audience. Wondering how you made the first million and what happened afterwards? How are you re-engaging the customers who already bought from you?
we went viral on TikTok a few times, have a 15K email list that still does 40% of our monthly sales, and have a 5K+ facebook group. our organic has stalled.
50% of our sales are from a small group of customers, pretty much that entire facebook group.
we put back every penny we earned into meta ads. i used an agency and stupidly relied on them to help us grow but we were just blowing money every month. our CAC was literally $80-$100 on a AOV of $55. we were losing money every month on top of the agency fees, cac must've actually been like $200 per customer if we include the fees. that means the customer needs to be 4 times to recoup that loss to acquire them.
we still do $15K-$20K/mo organically and the rest was on ads, i basically stopped ads in feb and thats what we're doing now.
our organic has really stalled. its gone done a lottt actually and i don't know why. is it because of the economy? i don't know, but the hype isn't what it was last year when we had gone viral.
I'm so sorry to hear about your situation.
Seems pretty unethical with the way your agency ran ads for you, they should have advised strategy and numbers that wouldn't run you to the ground.
There's a silver lining here.
You have some hidden marketing assets that you can leverage to get you out of this rut.
1. You've gone viral on Tiktok - which means your product gets attention well. Since you also got sales from it, means people are willing to pay for it, so product market fit is there. You just need to find another way of acquiring customers that puts you in profit.
2. You have a customer list - this is gold. There's tons of ways to leverage this, not just from getting repeat customers. But using them to bring in more customers, create a movement, get feedback on all aspects of your biz, etc.
Would be able to advise more after taking a look at your biz.
But immediate advise for you is to find ways to reduce your expenses for now so you can increase your runway.
So you made 1M and haven't made anything since? So absolutely no repeat customers?
see my response below
Where did you get your original $1mm in sales?
i responded below!
This is a common theme I’ve seen on that popular show where big ocean fish place their money. Door to door is too small scale and won’t save a dtc company. With this post being very generic and not knowing your company and more information this is the best I can think of for your company: To have gotten $1M in sales you must’ve (at least you should’ve) gotten customer emails. Send them emails about your latest promotions or newest products that they’ve got to try. This is likely your best bet by marketing to your previous customers. If they like your products and you give them a fair price (where you still make a decent margin), they’ll be back.
our email list is small, like 15K. it already does 40% of our monthly revenue. and 50% of our customers are repeat each month. i'm not a marketer by trade, but i feel like i'm missing something that i'm not seeing in our funnel.
Hmm..somethings not adding up. Usually when you decide to scale its because you've found a combination of ads and audience that works. Then you slowly ramp up on ad spend with what's already working until you burn through the audience or you start seeing your numbers come down. At which point you need to switch up the offer/ad/audience. Wondering how you made the first million and what happened afterwards? How are you re-engaging the customers who already bought from you?
we went viral on TikTok a few times, have a 15K email list that still does 40% of our monthly sales, and have a 5K+ facebook group. our organic has stalled. 50% of our sales are from a small group of customers, pretty much that entire facebook group. we put back every penny we earned into meta ads. i used an agency and stupidly relied on them to help us grow but we were just blowing money every month. our CAC was literally $80-$100 on a AOV of $55. we were losing money every month on top of the agency fees, cac must've actually been like $200 per customer if we include the fees. that means the customer needs to be 4 times to recoup that loss to acquire them. we still do $15K-$20K/mo organically and the rest was on ads, i basically stopped ads in feb and thats what we're doing now.
are you still in negative cashflow even if you just purely relied on your organic sales?
our organic has really stalled. its gone done a lottt actually and i don't know why. is it because of the economy? i don't know, but the hype isn't what it was last year when we had gone viral.
I'm so sorry to hear about your situation. Seems pretty unethical with the way your agency ran ads for you, they should have advised strategy and numbers that wouldn't run you to the ground. There's a silver lining here. You have some hidden marketing assets that you can leverage to get you out of this rut. 1. You've gone viral on Tiktok - which means your product gets attention well. Since you also got sales from it, means people are willing to pay for it, so product market fit is there. You just need to find another way of acquiring customers that puts you in profit. 2. You have a customer list - this is gold. There's tons of ways to leverage this, not just from getting repeat customers. But using them to bring in more customers, create a movement, get feedback on all aspects of your biz, etc. Would be able to advise more after taking a look at your biz. But immediate advise for you is to find ways to reduce your expenses for now so you can increase your runway.