Mutesix helps D2C e-commerce brands drive paid media performance to grow and scale. We are pioneers in digital marketing, and employ a comprehensive cross-channel approach where our brands spend over $500 million annually. 

While the retail landscape has adapted over the years to meet the rise of digital, a global pandemic fast-tracked the shift towards e-commerce and away from brick-and-mortar. Shoppers are continuing to stay home in record numbers, but consumer spending online is trending upward. 

E-commerce is booming like never before, and we are the experts when it comes to navigating the digital economy. Our strategy team updates this page on a weekly basis with relevant and timely data to help our community stay informed. 

No Spin, No Misinformation. Just Real Market Data.

MuteSix.com  |  [email protected] 

OUR PARTNERS

Our key partners are here to help during this crisis. 
Click the icons below for a direct introduction. 

With ShipBob's fulfillment center network, brands can take advantage of the proven leader in DTC logistics by distributing inventory across multiple states and closer to customers.

Postscript powers SMS for thousands of Shopify stores. E-commerce businesses can use the platform for free for 30 days. During their free trial, Postscript sees brands earn 5 digits in attributed revenue.

Shopify allows new and established businesses alike to create ecommerce websites backed by powerful tools that help you find customers, drive sales, and manage your day-to-day.

The #1 help desk for e-commerce merchants, Gorgias supports brands' customer service efforts by centralizing interactions and automating responses to repetitive questions. Through this service, support agents become sales associates who spend more time on meaningful, profitable interactions with customers.

ShipStation helps online sellers scale their businesses and deliver exceptional customer experiences. The multi-channel and multi-carrier platform offers the most integrations of any e-commerce solution, with more than 300 partnerships with leading shopping carts, marketplaces, carriers and fulfillment services.

Okendo enables merchants to build a community by capturing powerful customer content including product ratings and reviews, customer photos, videos, questions & answers and comments.

Afterpay provides customers flexible payment options that do not rely on high-interest credit lines. It allows customers to spread their cart purchase into four equal installments with 0% interest and no impact on credit scores.

Paid Media Insights From D2C E-Commerce Brands 

Installment payments give shoppers the freedom to spread their cost interest-free over time. Klarna provides online financial services such as payments for digital storefronts, direct payments, post purchase payments and more.

Loop allows businesses to save time, retain more customers, and increase revenue by providing a simple automated return and exchange process.

Klaviyo helps businesses own their marketing. By storing all of your customer data, it allows you to build experiences across email and owned channels and measure the results in revenue — not just opens or clicks.

• SBA Loans - Disaster Assistance
• Facebook Business Hub
• Shopify COVID-19 Response
• ShipStation COVID-19

HELPFUL RESOURCES

• Klaviyo Marketing Amidst COVID-19
• The Big Commerce Blog
• Google for Small Businesses
• Google Coronavirus Search Trends

Brex is the corporate card and cash management account for growing businesses. Brex’s corporate card offers higher credit limits and industry-leading rewards without personal guarantees, and it’s completely free to use.

Yotpo helps thousands of forward-thinking brands accelerate direct-to-consumer growth. Yotpo’s single-platform approach integrates data-driven solutions for reviews, visual UGC, loyalty and referrals, SMS marketing, and more, empowering brands to create smarter, higher-converting experiences that spark and sustain customer relationships.

Justuno is the #1 CRO tool to keep your e-commerce site thriving. From growing your email list, collecting numbers for SMS messaging, or showing smart product recommendations, Justuno helps brands convert visits to sales.

Using real-time behavioral data, Attentive automatically sends engaging text messages to individual subscribers at every step of the customer lifecycle— whether it’s a cart reminder, an invite to an exclusive sale, or a new product launch announcement.

We aggregate data in the following ways: 

• All Vertical Spend and CPM Trends

• Spend Against Benchmarks

• Spend and Conversion Rate Trends

The data is then broken up into the following verticals:

• Health & Wellness

• Home Fitness

• Supplements

• Beauty & Skincare

• Fashion & Apparel

• Food & Beverage

• Home Goods

It’s That Simple. 

If you have questions about the below data or are interested in working with us, feel free to drop us a line at [email protected] For up-to-the minute insights, sign up for our newsletter here.

CHANNEL UPDATES

BigCommerce is a leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) e-commerce platform that empowers merchants of all sizes to build, innovate and grow their businesses online. BigCommerce provides merchants sophisticated enterprise-grade functionality, customization and performance with simplicity and ease-of-use. 

GRIN is the only influencer marketing software built for e-commerce. From discovery & outreach to relationship management & campaigns, product seeding, discount codes & affiliate links, content & rights management, sales tracking & deep analytics - GRIN software helps you do it all.

Clearbanc is the fastest, most affordable way for founders to fund their business. They invest $10K - $10M in 2,800+ companies using data science to identify high-growth funding opportunities in less than 24 hours.

Octane allows brands to create a personalized customer experience through its ‘AI's Shop Quiz’ tool. Through this offering, brands can build an engaging, full-page quiz on their website that helps match customers with the products and sales copy that's right for them. 

ReCharge makes selling subscription products easy. It's the leading subscriptions payments platform designed for merchants to set up and manage recurring billing across web and mobile.

PAID SEARCH INSIGHTS

Paid Social Download:

Paid Social conversion rates were down week over week, we typically see this the week after a big promotional period (Valentine’s Day & Presidents Day). Verticals such as Health & Wellness, Home Fitness, and Supplements are starting to increase spend which should result in a positive uptick in conversion rate in the coming weeks. CPMs trended down week over week allowing brands an advantage of higher impression shares and opportunities to meet consumer demand while scaling spend.

PAID SOCIAL INSIGHTS

Paid Search Download:

Last week, Paid Search paced behind the previous week in average conversion rates. Similar to Paid Social, this is expected after a week of Valentines and Presidents Day promotions. While conversion volume has not yet been realized in the Health & Wellness, Supplements, Beauty & Skincare, and Home Goods verticals, increased media investment should lead to a spike in sales.

FACEBOOK / INSTAGRAM
by Josh & Moody

• CPM’s across the board are at record highs as advertisers deal with the effects of the election and the move from retail into E-commerce. In response MuteSix is focusing on developing compelling creative to drive up CTR’s and funnel optimization to increase conversion rates. 

• Fall products are in full swing with significant increases in categories such as pants, jackets & sweats and movements away from shorts, swimwear and more summer orientated products. 

• With the constant uncertainty around consumer privacy and browser changes we are recommending clients to implement the conversions API with Facebook. For vendors on Shopify there will be an easy 2 step integration that will be rolled out within the next few weeks. From October 5th Facebook will be removing the 28-day click attribution window and instead defaulting to 7-day click attribution. This is a big change especially for higher ticket items and brands that have a higher consideration phase. We are being advised that the conversions API will still allow advertisers to view performance from a 28-day click perspective.

CHANNEL UPDATES

GOOGLE / YOUTUBE
by Harrison and Elmar

Google Search / Shopping

• CPCs seem relatively stable. As we go into the Q4 holiday period, we can expect most ecommerce verticals to rise 20% - 30%.

• Promotional pushes across search & shopping will include countdown ads, promotion extensions and Merchant Center promotions.

• We are seeing much more value in organic clicks across the shopping tab since Google changed to a free modal. We are putting more emphasis on setting up your product titles, descriptions and images according to best practice and tracking organic clicks from Shopping in Google Analytics.

YouTube

• We are seeing a lot more success with TV4A formats as CPVs have remained relatively stable this quarter. We have put an increased emphasis on distinguishing YouTube creative from that that runs on Social channels, hitting on key value differentiators like sound, production quality, and direct to camera content.

• We are testing into the new Trueview For Action betas to see if we have better engagement at lower CPCs.

Display/Gmail

• We are putting a bigger emphasis on new product releases combined with promotion across all visual products, which has been a huge success.

STUDIOSIX Bespoke Creative Production
by David

• Current growth in the ecommerce space means that creative production is more important than ever. It’s time to start thinking proactively about q4 and q1. With increase in productions and needs with clients, the sooner you can start thinking about what your marketing calendar needs creatively, the easier it will be to make sure things are trafficking on time.

• When it comes to holiday, think evergreen in your content, specific in your messaging. It’s always important to have creative to address specific sales and promotions like bf/cm, but creative production is expensive. Instead of going out and producing full content productions for promotions, think modularly, either using small portions of evergreen productions to address sales and events, and/or using post production to make it pertinent in messaging. Take a look at our Creative Capabilities.

STUDIOSIX Content Creation
by Stacey

• Organic looking content works!  If you feel stuck, lean into user generated video and photos from the people who enjoy your product the most.

• Cellphone footage feels native to the feed.  High production value can oftentimes let a viewer know the video is an ad too quickly.  Cellphone content feels organic to the platform and has a higher chance of getting viewers attention

• This user generated content also has built in social proof. If you can get a real person in their real home, selfie-style filming while talking about why they love your product, the production quality won’t matter!

EMAIL / SMS
by Sammy & Chanel

• Email is playing an even more important role in customer engagement and overall revenue as paid CPMs are on the rise in this competitive holiday season/election climate. Leveraging your current list as much as possible is crucial right now.

• SMS is on the rise to be the most important channel, allowing you direct access to your customers, especially during competitive holiday times. Brands are seeing at least a 5x ROI on SMS. Start collecting opt-ins ASAP so you have a healthy list to send to for your holiday promos.

INFLUENCER
by Sarah

• Influencers will be the equivalent of "holiday window shopping". 

• Now that most retail stores will be taking their BFCM deals 100% online, influencers should be the ones to promote the deals and get the hype started.

PROGRAMMATIC
by Camille and Matt

• eCPMs for Programmatic Display advertisers have increased by an average 7% since the beginning of September. This trend towards increased eCPMs is especially marked in Southern states, as a result of lower Summer eCPMs which are now normalizing.

• While overall media consumption is down from its COVID peak in late April, Smartphone use within both mobile web & app is up significantly vs this time last year (+37%).

• Connected TV adoption has plateaued since its explosive growth in February and March, however, CTV viewership & adoption remains at an all-time high and ad-supported CTV use has continued to grow through Summer 2020.

AMAZON
by Aaron

• Prime Day officially announced for October 13-14 which will allow consumers to explore up to 48 hours of exclusive deals. While the window for Prime Day specific deals has closed, brands are still encouraged to run coupons for increased traffic and conversion on their focus products.

• Amazon Advertising will allow dynamic Call to Actions for Sponsored Brands campaigns which speak to Savings and Deals. This allows brands to still use an on-brand headline while having Amazon establish Savings and Deals messaging as supplemental copy.

• FBA shipments using less established Seller Central accounts are being limited to 200 units per SKU as of September. Scanning inventory remains inconsistent, taking between 1-3 weeks depending

TIKTOK / PINTEREST / SNAPCHAT
by Sarah & Josh

TikTok

• As of September 28, 2020, no US TikTok ban will occur (source). 

• TikTok bans ads for fasting apps and restricts those promoting 'negative body image' (source).

Snapchat

• Snapchat continues to impress from a return and revenue perspective and is gradually taking up larger amounts of the media spend across clients and verticals.

• With CPM’s anywhere between the $2-$3 range, Snapchat is a perfect compliment to Facebook and Instagram where CPM’s are at all time highs.

• The investment in technology and platform optimizations have really paid off for Snapchat over the last 12 months.

• Dynamic Ads for prospecting is proving effective at acquiring new customers at great cost per acquisition.

Note that the insights for today’s page are comparing how we are pacing this week compared to the same timeframe last week and also the average over the last 30 days; charts are updated daily.

Note that the insights for today’s page are comparing how we are pacing this week compared to the same timeframe last week and also the average over the last 30 days; charts are updated daily.