How Newton Baby Successfully Launches New Products
March 23, 2022
In episode 103 of the Customers Who Click podcast with Aaron Zagha, the Chief Marketing Officer at Newton Baby, we'll be exploring how Newton Baby has shifted their focus away from Average Order Value and towards Customer Lifetime Value.
“We are currently running, or have tested pretty much every ecommerce channel there is”
With both a pretty niche audience, and incredibly low purchase frequency products, it’s of course important that Newton Baby test and test and test to make sure that not only are they getting in front of as much of that audience as possible, but that it’s also converting and performing.
Aaron is the Chief Marketing Officer at Newton Baby, a consumer goods company selling various sleep related products for babies. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or head over to https://www.newtonbaby.com/.
In episode 103 of the Customers Who Click podcast with Aaron Zagha, the Chief Marketing Officer at Newton Baby, we'll be exploring how Newton Baby has shifted their focus away from Average Order Value and towards Customer Lifetime Value.
“We are currently running, or have tested pretty much every ecommerce channel there is”
With both a pretty niche audience, and incredibly low purchase frequency products, it’s of course important that Newton Baby test and test and test to make sure that not only are they getting in front of as much of that audience as possible, but that it’s also converting and performing.
Aaron is the Chief Marketing Officer at Newton Baby, a consumer goods company selling various sleep related products for babies. You can connect with him on LinkedIn or head over to https://www.newtonbaby.com/.
Key highlights:
01:39 - 04:19 - Biggest Opportunities for D2C Growth - Being able to test almost every ecommerce channel available has definitely been important. In the US the audience size is roughly 3 million at any one time, so testing different channels, and making sure they’re in front of as much of that audience as possible is really important. Going forwards, new products will be key to growth. Once someone is in through a core product such as the baby mattress, selling them on to other baby related products will really grow the customer LTV.
04:30 - 07:59 - Newton Baby’s Surprise Acquisition Channel? - Tiktok has actually been working really well for them. There seems to be this idea that Tiktok is for the younger generations, but actually anyone can be on there enjoying content. Newton Baby got on there pretty early, before there were really any rules around how brands should approach Tiktok, they just gave it a go and have found a good channel that works for them.
08:18 - 11:48 - How have Newton Baby made the switch from AOV to LTV - Everyone focuses on AOV, everyone wants that basket to be higher, but with some products and offerings this is difficult. Yes they could improve AOV by offering waterproof mattresses, or cribs, but this is still all that 1 purchase. Aaron has changed their focus so they think more about the long term, and the different stages people go through. Whether this is getting a pet first as a ‘trial run’, or 12-24 months after the baby is born.
11:49 - 18:40 - How does Newton Baby identify new products to launch? - They approach this in both top down and bottom up ways. It could be an employee saying ‘hey i think theres a great opportunity to do this instead’, or ‘i think this is something I’d use for my baby’, or it could just be a case of looking at the market, seeing whats missing, or what Newton Baby could improve upon. Then of course they go into market research, do cost analysis etc to make sure they have a viable offering. The process they used came out of a failed product, a weighted blanket, because by the time they’d done all the research and gone through the manufacturing process, the average cost of a blanket fell from about $300 to less than $100, so it became a much more competitive space.
18:51 - 24:05 - How does Newton Baby soft launch a new product? - Soft launches are super important, especially as Amazon is a big channel for Newton Baby, so the reviews have to be fantastic. So they’ll launch the product on their website and just let people find it organically, then launch to their email list and really pro-actively seek out feedback on the products to make sure they’re right. If everything is going well they’ll wait to make sure the product has a 4-5 star rating on their own site before scaling up channels and then opening up places like Amazon.
24:08 - 31:53 - Newton Baby in the world of Amazon - You’ve got to be really careful incentivizing reviews on Amazon because if they find out, they’ll kick you off. You may pay a cut to Amazon, but its important to be where the customer is. If they’ve never heard of you and they start browsing Amazon for your product, you’ll miss out. You might also find that they just prefer shopping with Amazon, they feel safe about it, they know they’ll get their order on time.
39:04 - Aaron’s Dream Lunch Guest - The founder of Mud Water, its a mushroom based drink alternative to coffee. They’ve done a fantastic job with their marketing and their brand.
40:56 - Aaron’s Must-Have Ecommerce Tools:
- Helium 10 for working on Amazon
- Rockerbox for multi-touch attribution
If you’d like to hear more from Aaron, you can connect with him on LinkedIn or head over to https://www.newtonbaby.com/.