Tiah Smith

Most brands overthink acquisition and underthink what happens after. The first 7 days post-purchase are prime time for building trust, clarity, and connection. Here’s what works: - Clear “what to expect” messaging - A check-in email that feels human - Prepping customers for when they'll see results We saw this at fatty15, the shift from “automated order confirm” to a real onboarding sequence changed everything. Retention starts earlier than you think.

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Congrats! New Sr Director Marketing job. Now you’re probably already treading water. Tight timelines. High expectations. Leadership wants results before you started. Totally normal. But remember this role isn’t just about showing quick wins. It’s about balancing them with smart long-term bets. Start by getting your sh*t in order. Run a split-funnel analysis. Look at what’s converting into pipeline and what’s just driving vanity metrics. I’d reco search program. I ran one recently and saved a company $38K a quarter. You’ll probably find ~30 percent of your non-brand paid search is dead weight. Cut it. No questions. Just data. That gives you breathing room. Now take that reclaimed budget and put it to better use. - Double down on content that answers real buyer questions - Improve the post-lead experience so sales isn’t chasing ghost leads - Invest in brand plays that make your name familiar before someone’s in-market If your entire plan hinges on performance marketing, you’re not building anything sustainable. You’re just renting traffic until the budget runs out. Performance is great for showing up when someone’s ready to buy. Brand is how you make sure they think of you when they are. It’s not either-or. It’s both. Managed intentionally. Quick wins will get you attention. But long-term bets are what make you irreplaceable. Be the strategy leader. You got this.

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Email marketing isn't broken. Your approach probably is. After years in the trenches, I've seen the same story play out countless times: Marketers with brilliant email ideas... but nowhere near enough resources to execute them. Sound familiar? 📧 The frustration is real. You know email could be driving serious revenue, but you're stuck in a cycle of compromise and underwhelming results. But here's the real problem: It's not just about resources. It's about perception. The "email is simple and cheap" myth is killing your results. "What's so hard about sending an email?" they ask. Everything, actually. Effective email marketing requires: ✅ Strategic audience segmentation ✅ Compelling, personalized content ✅ Thoughtful design and UX ✅ Complex automation workflows ✅ Continuous testing and optimization Yet email keeps getting overshadowed by flashier channels. Social media. Paid ads. The new shiny thing. Email delivers the highest ROI in digital marketing. Yet it’s the most overlooked. The irony? Companies will throw thousands at unproven channels while nickel-and-diming the one platform where they actually OWN the relationship with their audience. This isn't just frustrating. It's a massive missed opportunity. So the question isn't whether email marketing works. The question is: Are you willing to invest in doing it right?

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“We don’t want our loyalty program to just be another punch card. We want to build a deeper emotional connection with our customers.” We hear this all the time at Stitch. And then those same brands go launch a revamped program that… earns you discounts based on how much money you spend. “Spend $$$, get $.” Mmm, babes. That’s exactly what you said you didn’t want. But we get it. There’s pressure to launch something fast because all of your competitors are launching loyalty programs left and right, and falling even further behind isn't an option. And the punch card model is the easiest path. Low effort, low strategy, low creativity. And hey — I’m not saying it’s bad. Sometimes the simplest solution is the best one. Most people do join loyalty programs for discounts. But let’s be honest: if you want a loyalty program that’s genuinely differentiated, you need a brand that is, too. That’s why Sun Bum’s new loyalty program caught my eye yesterday. It’s a masterclass in building something deeper — and more fun. Instead of earning cash, you earn bananas 🍌. And the ways you earn them? Not just “buy more sunscreen.” Instead, they reward behavior that builds community and reinforces their brand: 🌅 Sharing pics of sunsets (UGC!) 🥼 Learning about skin cancer prevention (brand education!) 📷 Sending funny pics of you eating ice cream (more UGC!) It’s not just about buying more sunscreen. It’s about living a life of fun in the sun while staying safe doing it. Another thing that stood out to me about Sun Bum's loyalty program: they’re not driving app downloads because they “didn’t want to join a landscape that is crowded with some great but many bad loyalty apps.” 👀 Bravo, Sun Bum. What a great example of distilling your brand values into every little facet of your brand experience. This is how you turn loyalty into real brand love. Let this be a reminder to all brands who want to "deepen emotional connections with their customers:" ✨ Know what your customers care about outside your product ⏰ Take the time to build something meaningful ⚙️ Just because everyone is doing it doesn’t mean you should

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A hard lesson I learned early in my CRO career; just because something can be tested, doesn’t mean it should be. I once spent weeks designing an A/B test for a page that I assumed was important. We changed the copy and layout of that page. But after all that effort? Crickets. Turns out that page only got about 2% of total clicks. It was a ghost town. No one cared. And neither did the conversion rate. That’s when it hit me: Before you test anything, you better make sure it matters. An experiment on a low-impact page doesn’t just waste time, but it also gives you the illusion of progress while teaching you nothing. Don’t waste your dev cycles on meaningless tests. Running fewer impactful experiments is better than having a high-testing velocity with low impact meaningless tests.

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I'll get on my soapbox about sweepstakes because we sit at a unique place in this industry: Consumers want sweepstakes casinos. Full stop. When we run ads for sweepstakes casinos versus ads for real-money casinos, there is virtually no difference in click-through rates. People are equally interested in both. The massive difference comes AFTER the click. Sweepstakes brands far outperform regulated brands because they offer a more intuitive user experience. They understand that consumers are product and experience-oriented. Regulated brands love to scream, "They're skirting regulation!" No, they're not. Sweepstakes still have KYC, AML, and responsible gaming requirements. In fact, I was talking to a client last week who pointed out that sweepstakes often require MORE information from a regulatory perspective than RMG brands. There's a reason it's called responsible gaming, not responsible gambling. Regulated real money brands think they sit on some pedestal, and everything different is somehow "bad." It's not bad. It's just different. And often, it's better.

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I'm going to hold your hand while I say this: you're overqualifiying hook rate. I've managed millions of dollars in ad spend across dozens of DTC brands, and while I am very familiar with the thrill of a 40, 50, 60%+ TSR (cue Sally Fields you like me, you really like me!!), I'm just as familiar with the logical fallacy that that high hook rates = high conversion likelihood. Your ad hook's job *is* twofold: 1. Stop the scroll (be interesting) 2. Tell Meta who is in market for your product (be literal) The unspoken part of the twofold rule is that your ad needs to be interesting to the right person for your product at this moment in time, not GenPop at large. This is where I see teams get tripped up, again and again. Some ads perform at scale, within a brand's in-platform CPA goal, without wow-worthy hook rates. Does that make them bad ads? To smart growth marketers - no. Yes, you're naturally swimming in a smaller pool when your TSR is on the lower end, but if the ad is backed up with strong CVR/CPA metrics, you know you've found the right place to swim. It's actually a blessing to score a low hook rate on an ultimately well-performing ad. It tells us that our angle is hitting - we've niched into a qualified audience - and gives us a clear metric to beat. In the example below, our winning ad is humming along at an objectively paltry 15% TSR. Unseasoned creative strategists might balk at this, but my team's not sweating it. Our remit? Stay on message, tinker with visual support. If we can expand our viewer pool without dropping CTR/CVR, we'll only keep winning. With Meta's ever-growing call for Creative Diversity, I believe it's critical for Growth Marketers and Creative Strategists to stay on course with how we measure and evolve our strategies. We'll be seeing a massive pendulum swing in upper funnel metrics as direct response ads feel more and more organic, thereby appealing to wider audiences that, ultimately, may not be qualified. Do not get lost in the vanity metric sauce: if it's not hitting CVR/CPA/ROAS/whatever you're actually measuring for revenue growth, it's just not it. And as always, thanks to Motion (Creative Analytics)for making it too easy to get on my get-over-thumbstop soapbox. ✨

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Bounce: From Court to Clicks—What It Really Means for Marketers vs. Normal People Check out my latest article, which breaks down what website bounce rate truly means in 2024/2025, clarifying its impact for digital marketing professionals and making it understandable for everyone. We delve into common causes of high bounce rates, how Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is shifting the focus to "Engagement Rate," and practical strategies to keep your website visitors from leaving too soon. Discover the myths and truths about this crucial metric and learn how to optimize your online presence for better user experience. Read more here: Link]https://lnkd.in/dR49wbJT #BounceRate #DigitalMarketing #WebsiteAnalytics #marymassoumi #GA4 #UserExperience #MarketingTips #WebDesign

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My last post sparked great conversations, but the comments made it clear people still aren't sure what BGM looks like in practice. Fair enough. Let me break down the actual playbook and dive into more of the distinction between BGM and ABM. Here's how BGM works when you're doing it right. The Foundation: - Develop your ICP and operationalize it across every system. Not just a pretty slide deck, but real criteria your tech stack recognizes and acts on. - Study your winning deals obsessively. Count responses, map stakeholders, track which content, programs and channels moved the needle. This becomes your blueprint for spotting future winners. The Operations: - Map buyer journey stages based on that winning deal anatomy, then operationalize those stages everywhere. Your systems, reporting, and sales handoffs all need to speak the same language. - Market to accounts differently based on their stage and what they need to progress. Need more buying group members engaged? Turn on content syndication or boost ad spend for that buying journey segment. Ready for sales but need that final push? Host field events in regions dense with pre-MQA accounts. Set up "always on" motions so most of this runs without you. The Handoff: - Deliver complete buying committees to sales, not random leads. Give them the full picture of engaged stakeholders plus the context they need to win. The goal here isn't ABM-level personalization. It's about four things: 1. Laser focus on your ICP for high retention 2. Supporting prospects through their actual buying process 3. Getting on their shortlist for purchase decisions 4. Handing sales teams buying groups that are ready to have a conversation So when is it actually ABM? Three things separate real ABM from BGM: - You develop a prioritized target account list that's a subset of your ICP, based on mutually agreed upon criteria such as account potential, strategic value, etc. Not all accounts are in your ABM programs but all accounts have buying groups. - You dive deep into each account's (1:1) and cluster’s (1:few) specific needs and create tailored campaigns, programs, and messaging for those exact accounts - You work hand-in-hand with sales throughout the entire buying journey, with laser focus on what each individual account. and cluster needs A simple distinction? BGM is marketing-led. ABM is a true marketing and sales partnership from day one. I've seen too many teams burn out trying to do "ABM" on thousands of accounts when what they really needed was solid BGM as their foundational demand generation strategy. What's your take on where that line gets drawn?

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Jeff Green: marketers should not reject complexity. Rather they should EMBRACE it. The reasoning being: when you don't educate yourself and embrace complexity, you allow your vendors (agencies, tech platforms, walled gardens, etc) to profit by obfuscating it. There's a tradeoff: a marketer's demand for simplicity can be someone else's arb. As you increase your knowledge, you close off opportunities for the ecosystem to sell you smoke and mirrors. #ANAMedia

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more in-the-weeds "how we're actually using AI" content comin' right up!!! here’s exactly where we utilized AI in our latest original research report creation process: ❌ Survey design We utilized our own UERC research team (shout out Austin Olea) to design the survey. I think AI *could* be used here if you didn’t have a good partner with years of survey design experience, but I’d caution that this part is too too too important to mess up. Bad survey = bad data = bad story = bad report ❌ Data analysis I’ve gotta be real: I tried to use ChatGPT on this step and failed MISERABLY. Wasted so many hours. It’s just not there yet (esp with models changing so frequently). We absolutely needed a human data analysis team to dig into the raw data, and draw out the key narratives with more nuance. ❌ Interviewing subject matter experts We prepped custom interview questions for each SME based on their expertise and the data we needed some backup narrative framing on. Broad questions = broad quotes. I needed laser focus here, and found that doing it ourselves was the best way to achieve that. ❌ Outlining the main narrative/data of the report Learned this the hard way enough times to not do it again here! The incredible Beam Content 💡 team helped us craft an incredibly thorough outline based on the data we had at hand. Coupling the data analysis + the POV we needed to get across + the insights from our SMEs required a ton of nuance and human brain power. I know THIS is why our report will feel different. It’s because hours and hours of meetings and Google Doc comments and analysis went into this crucial step. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. ✅ Finding the best SME quotes and insights Cannot recommend highly enough using the right tool for combing through interviews and transcripts for gold nuggets that frame the final narrative. We used a combo of Marvin (searchable transcripts) and ChatGPT (to summarize big takeaways) to find exactly what we needed in hours of recorded interviews and pages of written responses. ✅ Drafting a V1 of the report The only reason we were able to do this successfully was because: A) we were working from the most thorough outline and brief I’ve ever seen (that took easily 20+ hours of full human brain power to create), and B) we had last year’s report for the bot to draw inspo from regarding style, length, format, tone, etc. It took about 5 hours of prompting and additional organization of the existing briefs, but honestly…it was a shockingly good starting point for us to work from. ✅ Data presentation Claude was HUGE here. I would feed the cleaned data into it with the prompt: “I'm exploring the best way to present this data in a graphic format. What ideas do you have for me?” and it would give me 3-5 ideas that I could screenshot and put into the report copy for our design team to draw inspiration from. ❌ Designing the report pls leave this to the humans lol questions?! ready to share all the nitty gritty!

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If you're panicking about Black Friday creative right now... Stop. Here's what actually works: Your evergreen ads. The stuff that's been quietly performing all year? That's gonna crush harder than whatever "BLACK FRIDAY SALE!!!" creative you rushed out last week. We've been saying this for years... But brands still don't believe it until they see it. Everyone KNOWS it's a sale weekend. You don't need to scream it at them. What you need is creative that sells the PRODUCT. And if you're short on assets? Dig through your library. Pull your top performers from the last 90 days. Add some holiday copy. Point them at your sale page. Done. Or grab your best organic posts... The ones that got solid engagement on Instagram or Facebook... Pull those post IDs and run them as conversion ads. You can even take old UGC and re-edit it with holiday headlines. "Gift Guide" messaging works ALL the way through shipping cutoff. Here's the thing: Your backup campaigns should already be BUILT. Not "we'll deal with it if the main campaign dies." BUILT. Ready to flip on. Because if your main campaign stalls at 10 AM Friday... And you're sitting there waiting for new stuff to clear review... You already lost half the day. Work smarter. Not harder. Your creative library is full of winners. Go use them.

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