Moiz Ali, our client at Native, shared this on Twitter a couple of weeks ago:
Moiz went on to sell Native to Procter & Gamble for $100M.
So what if everyone in your company, from the top down, supported customers? How would it change your priorities? Small companies operate this way out of necessity in the early days, but I'd argue that this mentality should be engrained in your culture forever. At Rejoiner, our entire team answers Basecamp threads, takes customer support phone calls, and holds themselves accountable for the outcomes created by our platform.
As Founder & CEO, I manage accounts like HVMN, Mother Dirt, and Triumph every day. Not because I have to, but because it keeps me close to the real, ground-truthed challenges that our customers face. We build a better product because of it, and aside from recruiting, this responsibility is the most critical part of my job.
Your advisors will say stuff like, "That won't scale," or "Your job is to fire your self from customer-facing work," or "You should outsource support so you can focus on more important things."
Please don't listen to them.
I don't care if you are an engineer, salesperson, marketer, designer, VP, or CEO—the foundation of building a great company is to establish empathy for the customers you serve. What drives them? What are their motivations? What causes them to buy again? Figure this out— one customer at a time. It works for direct to consumer brands in the same way that it does for technology companies. The most effective way to establish empathy is to help customers achieve their goals, day in and day out. It's messy work.
But if you try it, you'll be surprised by how real, genuine empathy impacts your decision making.
We get a lot of questions about fixing damaged domain reputation. The simple answer: Send emails that generate more positive signals (opens, clicks, replies) than negative (opt-outs, complaints, bounces). There's more to it, of course, and we wrote this post to go deeper.
Improve your domain reputation →
We just published a 10,000-word guide that covers everything one needs to know to grow an email channel for a direct to consumer brand. The guide includes deliverability best practices, segmentation strategy, 14 lifecycle trigger ideas, advice for measuring performance, and a bunch of great creative examples.
High bounce rates are detrimental to your ability to inbox reliably. We recently rolled out programmatic email validation that can identify and filter problematic (inactive, spam traps, junk emails, syntax issues) email addresses in real-time. Validation prevents you from sending to an address that would inevitably bounce. Give me a shout if you want to activate this feature.
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