#5 - The art (& science) of new customer acquisition with BYLT Basics

Welcome back to Don’t V*LOOKUP ☄️, where we explore how top commerce operators and practitioners leverage data to make critical business decisions.

In the latest episode of Don’t V*LOOKUP, we spoke with Kyle Turadek, the Director of Growth at BYLT Basics.

We're especially grateful to Kyle for taking the time just ahead of this year's BFCM, which (since we're past BFCM as of writing this post) turned out to be a record year for the DTC space.

🎯 The TL;DR on what you’ll learn in this post 🎯

1. Why the stakes are higher for a pure DTC business like BYLT.

2. How to acquire customers profitably as you scale.

3. Kyle's Northstar KPI and go-to tools to lower the barriers to data-driven decision-making.

For more insights from Kyle, check out our full-length interview above.

» How his background at Rip Curl and Travis Matthews shaped his eComm and paid acquisition experience.
» What Rob Gronkowski ("Gronk"), Joe Rogan, Bill Nye, and Travis Rice have in common.
» BYLT's extension to women's basics during BFCM.
» How Multi-touch Attribution (MTA) has become the most transformational method for allocating media mix.

💭 Behind Kyle’s philosophy on paid acquisition 💭

Kyle cut his teeth out of college as a jack-of-all-trades marketer for a popular surf brand Rip Curl, where he covered all digital touchpoints across a lean team. Travis Matthew, Calloway Golf’s apparel arm, was his first glimpse into large budget acquisition.

However, both these brands had something in common. Only ~20-30% of their sales came from eComm, while the rest came from offline channels like retail and wholesale.

In contrast, BYLT Basics is a pure-play DTC business, which immediately raises the stakes for the growth team.

"Without offline channels, you don't have full business MER support, and the performance is all on you which creates pressure off the bat."

To put it further into context, as a strictly DTC business, BYLT:

• Does not benefit from halo brand impacts from offline channels like retail.

• Does not have another stream of revenue to ease pressure off the online growth team.

• Is heavily dependent on new acquisition through a more limited set of at-scale marketing channels like Meta, Google, and CTV.

💸 The importance of first-time MER in acquiring customers 💸

The benefit of having a mature brand like BYLT is having a deep understanding of the customer type, particularly their behavior and retention profile.

“Once you become a BYLT man, you’re hooked.” Kyle notes.

This allows Kyle and the team to focus on impressions and acquisition, specifically on first-time MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio) calculated as Total Revenue / Paid Spend over the same period. This has become a popular metric to track blended performance in the post-privacy world.

 🥇 Acquisition tactics for first-time purchase 🥇 

🔊 Mega influencers for brand awareness and conversion

BYLT has leaned into Mega Influencers, such as a recent deal with Rob Gronkowski ("Gronk") or music artists like ZHU.

• With most influencers, they have whitelisting BCA partnerships where BYLT can run ads through influencers' accounts and look at campaign ROAS

• The team consistently tracks first-time MER, CAC, and predicted LTV (30, 60, 90 days) as campaigns scale.

🎩 Experiment with top-of-funnel impression channels

When Kyle started at BYLT, 100% of spend had been on Meta.

• He’s shifted the budget to more upper-funnel channels such as CTV (Connected TV), Youtube, Google Non-Branded Search, and TikTok.

• Scale is still rooted in first-time and blended MER targets, and supported by multi-touch attribution (MTA) and recently adopted incrementality testing.

@byltbasics

This partnership with @gronk is HAWT 🥵😏 #byltxgronk

🎁 Product line expansion and gift with purchase

BYLT expanded its product line to include women's basics with gift with purchase deals oriented towards women during the holiday period as their typical 70/30 men to women buyer split flips completely during this time.

** Post BFCM update → BYLT was able to increase the recently launched women’s lineup to ~8% of total revenues (up from 2%)!

🛒 Omni-channel expansion

As we also learned from Hans Harris @ Brumate, all DTC brands face a stage where online marketing channels have been tapped out, and offline traffic becomes a bigger focus.

• BYLT opened up their first retail storefront in SoCal to attract more eyeballs.

—

With all these tactics, Kyle also credits his mindset shift ingrained from learning about 'fractional attribution' impacts through multi-touch attribution.

It's critical to understand purchase cycles (time for consideration, seasonality, and sale periods), which he leverages post-purchase surveys to shed light on.

🔎 Main takeaway 🔎

A deep understanding of post-purchase repeat customer behavior allows for a hyper-focus on acquisition.

And similar to our conversation with Hans Harris @ Brumate, Kyle highlights the growing importance of top-of-funnel brand marketing and tracking blended performance metrics to scale conversion efforts.

⭐️ North star metric & key data tools ⭐️ 

North Star Metric:

• First-time MER (Marketing Efficiency Ratio)

Calculated as Total Revenue / Paid Spend over the same period.

Key Data Tools:

• Northbeam - for multi-touch attribution, aka MTA (first-time MER, ROAS, LTV).

• Measured - for controlled incrementality testing (especially as MTA becomes more challenged post iOS 14/17 privacy changes). Kyle also recommends running your own geo-lift incrementality tests similar to Hans Harris @ Brumate.

• KnoCommerce - post-purchase surveys to help understand purchase consideration cycles.

**For more insights into acquisition strategies leveraging incrementality testing, tune into our session with Hans Harris @ Brumate.