Edition 43. This week, a longtime and frequent customer of Spoken Flames filled out our post-purchase survey. Their comment stopped me in my tracks: “I have supported this business consistently and get no discount as a frequent buyer. What can be offered?” Oof. They weren’t wrong. I love and appreciate every customer. And I operate my e-commerce brand like Cheers 📺— Everybody knows our customers’ names. I pride myself on building a brand culture that values its customers. Yet here was one of...
13 days ago • 3 min read
Edition 42. Valentine’s Day has come and gone—now it’s time to show your website some love. These few quick updates can mean more sales and sign-ups 💌 5 bytes to elevate, optimize and inspire your brand’s website this week: P.S. I’d love to feature *your* brand on The Bloc. Interested? Peep the poll at the end. Here we go... Speed wins sales – A mere one-second delay in load time can drop conversions by 7%. So aim to optimize images, enable caching, and use a fast hosting provider. There are...
20 days ago • 2 min read
Edition 41. I noticed a unique change to my Instagram feed this week, and you may have, too. Gone are the simpler days with chronological feeds and pictures of our friends’ avocado toast breakfasts. These days, a feature like “Chat with AI characters” is now seamlessly integrated into our newsfeeds: Credit: Meta Here’s what you need to know and how it could benefit your brand. 5+ bytes on algorithms and AI agents P.S. Welcome to all new subscribers! 😃 Here we go... What is Chat with AI?...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Edition 40. Happy New Year! Have you updated the date in your website footer to 2025 yet? ;-) 5 news bytes to elevate, inform, or inspire your brand this week: P.S. Poll results from last week show everyone loved this new, brief, but topic-abundant format, so it’s a keeper! Here we go... Product pricing: Science says to nix the cents. Thinking about pricing a new product or service this year? Well, keep it simple and round to the whole dollar. This study reports that adding numbers like .97...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Edition 39. ’Tis the season for end-of-year wraps, recaps, and future-minded trend reports. Here are a few ✨ stand-out stats ✨ for your brand into the New Year. Plus, this week—a new format. Less lengthy, personal anecdotes with a singular weekly focus. More broad and bite-sized brand news to help inform, inspire, and elevate your brand. Let me know what you think! I’ll leave a poll at the end. STAT SEASON While Spotify’s Wrapped fizzled out this year, trend reports are soothing my soul....
2 months ago • 2 min read
How my brand’s dream come true has invited me to dream BIGGER. Welcome back to The Brand Bloc, your digital resource for building, automating, and elevating your brand on the Web and beyond. Nordstrom 🤝 Spoken Flames. The dream retail partnership is live on the Internet as of this month 🤯 But the Nordstrom logo has been on my vision board for over a year. It’s one of two dream retailers for my candle brand, Spoken Flames. And it feels surreal that the dream is no longer a dream. It’s real....
3 months ago • 2 min read
Go big, or go back to FB ads: 5 things I’m learning from my truck ad in New York City Welcome back to The Brand Bloc, your free resource for building, automating, and elevating your brand on the Web and beyond. Double tap, scroll, swipe, swipe, like. No matter the social or digital platform, the actions (and the dopamine hits) are the same. Digital fatigue is real. Data shows that people spend nearly seven hours a day looking at screens. 📺💻🤳 And about 70% of people report experiencing burnout...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Do we haaave to offer crazy high discounts for Black Friday? Welcome back to The Brand Bloc, your free resource to help you build, automate & elevate your brand on the Web. Today’s edition—sponsored by Spoken Flames—explores why (and if) Black Friday & Cyber Week discounts matter for your brand—with an example of a successful brand that (surprisingly) does not participate in the discount frenzy. Enjoy! Brand builders like you and I experience Black Friday differently. While most are on the...
3 months ago • 3 min read
Instagram’s recent announcement might (or might not) surprise you... They save the best video quality for the most popular content. It’s like high school all over again. The cool kids get all the cool things. And the IG algorithm is now the arbiter of cool. To be fair, the head of Instagram also justified that your video may render low-quality for end users with a slower internet connection. That’s reasonable. For a user with a weak connection, loading a low-quality video is a better user...
4 months ago • 2 min read