How I'd grow Nooks

Nooks is a men’s underwear brand… or at least that’s what they say, because when I landed on their website from my phone all I could see was (half) an eggplant.

I get the humor, but on an eCommerce homepage I want to see the product (optimized for mobile).

I also don’t see a clear value proposition. Natural men’s underwear? That’s a feature. But what’s the benefit?

When someone lands on your website you need to immediately answer their implicit question: “What’s in for me?”

The trickiest part? You have to pick the right benefit.

Apparently, Nooks is going with “comfortable” as their USP. But is discomfort a pain point strong enough to make customers spend $23 for a pair?

Nailing positioning is the most important thing a new product needs to do, so it’d be wise to explore other benefits too.

Driving traffic is also going to be a challenge. How do you do content marketing for an underwear brand?

Overall, I think they’re on the right track.

Their blog - The Debrief - covers men’s health and lifestyle topics in a conversational and humorous tone.

Some of these posts got serious traction in relevant communities. But only a minimum translated to sales.

Nooks’ goal should be collecting visitors’ email addresses, nurturing them with content, and slowly introducing products.

What’s the most effective way to do that? Right now, user experience is being disrupted by an annoying popup. Most people will just close it, finish reading and go away.

With an easy fix, Nooks could easily double their signups: convert it into an exit intent popup.

I’d also put more effort into optimizing their content marketing for SEO following the best practices.

Right now they’re stuffing as many keywords as they can in their page titles. This is not only unnecessary, but can also be detrimental - a bad page title will hurt their CTR.

Any website that wants to get serious rankings should look at their Google PageSpeed Insight score.

In this case, I can see that there is some work to do, especially for the mobile version.

Speed is an important SEO ranking factor, and it’s vital for a good user experience.

The majority of new direct-to-consumer brands acquire new customers through paid ads, especially FB and IG.

But FB and IG ads haven’t moved the needle for Nooks so far. I think one of the main causes is that their creatives could be improved.

With paid social ads, a great creative is what makes the difference. But all the ads Nooks are using look the same.

You can’t really succeed on FB ads without testing different types of creatives: not only single photo ads, but also user-generated content, videos, etc.

Plus, their ads keep getting disapproved and their ad account suspended because the FB advertising policies have very specific rules in place.

They’re probably violating the excessive skin rule. They need to find balance between showing the product and staying compliant.

More social proof in their ads would help. People trust ads with lots of reactions, comments and shares.

So they should first run their ad with the engagement objective. When it gets enough reactions, they should run the ad with the conversion objective.

Nooks could raise their average order value through upsell at checkout. These people already decided to spend money with Nooks.

E.g. They could say: ”You’re buying 1 pair, but if you buy 2, we’ll give you a discount, and if you buy 3 we’ll give you an even bigger discount.”

I’d also try to leverage free shipping more effectively.

People hate to do the math. Their products are all priced the same, so instead of using numeric values, they could just propose a bundle instead.

I bet a lot of shoppers that were going to buy a single pair would buy 2.

In the future, I’d also consider a membership reserved to their most loyal customers (get x pairs every x months).

With discounted prices for members and a stable source of monthly recurring income for Nooks, this could be a win-win.

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