Welcome to The Flywheel #1

Your source for growth via Affiliate, CRO, and Paid Marketing

Author

Tye DeGrange
September 06, 2022

Welcome to the show!

Thanks so much for following along with my adventures in performance marketing and the work of the Round Barn Labs crew.

Our goal with this is to entertain, inform, and continue to connect with great people.

Thanks so much for following along with the work of the RBL crew.

Our goal with this newsletter is help you make more informed decisions for your business and make meaningful strides in your growth.

We'll help do that each week by sharing our learnings from the front lines of building truly meaningful companies through our expertise in:

  • Growth Marketing aka 👇

    • Affiliate

    • Paid Media

    • Conversion Rate Optimization

Sprinkle in some occasional data nerd and pop culture references and BAM! Your weekly dose of growth insights and what is on the brains of our team.

Now onto what you can expect from us on a weekly basis 🔥

Let’s drop some knowledge, connect, and have some fun.

Affiliate Marketing - PARTNER

Affiliate Marketing is the most misunderstood performance marketing channel.

Tye DeGrange, CEO, Round Barn Labs

Want to know why I think that - respond to this email and I'll share!

Paid Marketing - ACQUIRE

While we predicted this in our RBL Flywheel blog post about 4 years ago, but we are still surprised how often User Generated Content (UGC) beats out more traditional ad units in paid social (Meta, Snap, TikTok ads) from a creative performance perspective.

Mike McElhaney, VP of Paid Marketing, Round Barn Labs

What to do: Make sure you have at least some UGC in your ad stack right now. If not - go create a few TikTok's yourself and test them out.

Conversion Rate Optimization - OPTIMIZE

While there has been a massive push into Artificial Intelligence (AI) and it's influence will continue to grow, most uses of AI are not ready for prime time in a well managed Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) program. It does not mean it cannot be considered for some use cases.

We utilize the following to build our A/B testing and conversion rate optimization experiment pipeline: historical data, analytics platform data, heat map data, qualitative customer insights.

Being very thorough and curious in your questions of stakeholders (engineers, founders, PMs, marketing leaders) as well as customers (the latter being a significant priority) is crucial to unlocking insights that others do not. This ensures that our customers voice is front and center in the priority of what we test and how we think about experiments that will deliver the most impact.

Gary Marx, Senior Director Conversion Rate Optimization, Round Barn Labs

Why it matters: As you devise your landing experiences, make sure you ask questions of your customers to drive better conversion. You can do this through:

  • Post purchase surveys

  • Automated email 1-2 day after purchase with survey

  • Reaching out to 10 customers to get a quick call on the books with them. (this does not scale but the information is invaluable)

That's it! 👊 we'll add some stuff in the weeks to come. Thanks for taking this journey with us and sharing your inbox with us!

Best,

Tye