In partnership with
Advertise to 40,048 E-Commerce Businesses
Promote your tool, service or upcoming event - Reach Founders
Good morning!
In today’s newsletter,
A free newsletter with the marketing ideas you need
The fulfillment metric killing your repeat rate
Mobile traffic is 73% of your audience—here’s why it’s converting poorly
How to ensure your brand shows up in ChatGPT’s shopping queries
The future of AI in marketing
This issue takes 3 minutes to read.
Check out our DTC tool stack here
Let’s dive into it👇
The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it.
That’s what this newsletter delivers.
The Marketing Millennials is a look inside what’s working right now for other marketers. No theory. No fluff. Just real insights and ideas you can actually use—from marketers who’ve been there, done that, and are sharing the playbook.
Every newsletter is written by Daniel Murray, a marketer obsessed with what goes into great marketing. Expect fresh takes, hot topics, and the kind of stuff you’ll want to steal for your next campaign.
Because marketing shouldn’t feel like guesswork. And you shouldn’t have to dig for the good stuff.
Fulfillment Friday
The fulfillment metric killing your repeat rate
74% of shoppers say their view of a brand permanently worsens when a delivery misses the promised window.
Most DTC brands obsess over ad ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) and email open rates. Almost none track the metric that determines whether a first-time buyer comes back.
It's called DIFOT — Delivery in Full, On Time.
What DIFOT measures
DIFOT scores the percentage of orders that arrive both complete and on schedule.
You promise 3 items by Thursday. You deliver 2 items on Thursday — fail. You deliver all 3 on Friday — fail. Only orders that are complete AND on time count as a win.
This all-or-nothing rule exists because that's how customers actually experience it. They don't grade you on a curve.
What a good score looks like
Industry leaders run at 95%+ DIFOT. That means for every 100 orders, at most 5 have something go wrong.
Most DTC brands have no idea what their number is.
If you've never pulled this metric, assume it's lower than you think. Stockouts, carrier delays, picking errors, and split shipments all quietly chip away at it and none of them show up in your dashboard unless you're looking.
How to calculate yours
Pull your last 30 days of orders. For each one, ask two questions:
Did every item in the order ship? (No backorders, no substitutions, no splits.)
Did it arrive within the delivery window you promised at checkout?
Count the orders where both answers are yes. Divide by total orders. That's your DIFOT.
The three things that kill DIFOT
Most DIFOT problems come from three places:
Stockouts — you sold something you didn't have. The order splits or delays while you wait for replenishment.
Carrier failures — the order shipped on time but arrived late. You're being scored for your carrier's miss.
Pick errors — wrong item, wrong size, wrong quantity. Customer gets the box, opens it, and something's off.
Each one has a different fix. Stockouts are an inventory planning problem. Carrier failures are a carrier mix and SLA (Service Level Agreement.) monitoring problem. Pick errors are a warehouse process problem.
Fix the biggest one first. Don't try to solve all three at once.
Action Summary:
Pull your last 30 days of orders and calculate DIFOT: (complete + on-time orders) / total orders
If you're below 95%, identify whether the failures are stockouts, carrier delays, or pick errors
For stockouts: set reorder points based on lead time, not gut feel
For carrier misses: check if your 3PL is tracking carrier SLA compliance — if they're not, ask why
Source: ShipBob
Ask An Expert
What’s the biggest challenge in your business right now?
Let us know by simply replying to this email, and we’ll have an expert reach out to you and answer that, and you can also expect to receive some helpful resources.
Pssst…by upgrading to AI Launch Codes, you can unlock $195 worth of Magicals for free
North Star
Mobile traffic is 73% of your audience—here’s why it’s converting poorly
Most founders check their overall conversion rate(CVR), compare it to some rough benchmark, and move on.
The number you should actually be looking at is your mobile CVR.
According to Triple Whale's 2025 benchmarks across Shopify stores:
Desktop converts at 3.9%
Mobile converts at 1.8%
Mobile accounts for 73% of all traffic
Do the math. Nearly three-quarters of your visitors are landing on a version of your store that converts at less than half the rate of desktop. And most founders aren't optimizing for it separately.
Why mobile converts so poorly
Mobile users aren't less likely to buy. They're running into more friction.
Three places it breaks:
Load time - Every additional second of load time increases abandonment by 32%. Mobile connections are slower. Images sized for desktop drag on mobile. If your product page takes more than 3 seconds to load on a phone, you've already lost a third of your visitors.
Forms - Checkout on mobile is genuinely painful. Tiny fields, auto-zoom on inputs, addresses that won't autofill.
Payment options - Desktop users will type a credit card number. Mobile users won't. If you're not offering Shop Pay, Apple Pay, or Google Pay at checkout, you're asking people to do something they hate.
What good looks like
Top 10% of Shopify stores convert at 4.7%+ overall. If you're hitting 1.8% on mobile, you're not there.
Pull your mobile CVR in Shopify Analytics right now.
Segment by device.
If mobile is below 1.5%, your checkout is broken. Between 1.5-2% is average. Above 2.5% on mobile means your experience is genuinely good.
Action Summary:
Open Shopify Analytics, filter by device to see mobile vs desktop CVR separately
If mobile is below 1.5%, audit your checkout: load speed, form fields, payment options
Enable Shop Pay, Apple Pay, or Google Pay if not already on
Use Google PageSpeed Insights (mobile mode) to find your biggest load-time drag
Scale & Reach
How to ensure your brand shows up in ChatGPT’s shopping queries
This past Black Friday, a new type of customer showed up in ecommerce for the first time at scale.
They didn't Google "best skincare gift set." They asked ChatGPT.
Profound, a marketing platform that tracks AI shopping behaviour, analysed which brands appeared most frequently when shoppers queried ChatGPT for holiday deals. They called it the Black Friday Index.
In the beauty category, Ulta showed up in 85.9% of relevant AI answers. Sephora showed up in 45%.
Ulta and Sephora sell the same brands. Ulta didn't win because of better products.
What this means for a DTC brand
You don't need a 85% AI visibility score to benefit from this. You need to be findable at the moment a shopper asks ChatGPT "what's the best [your category] for [your customer's problem]."
The brands getting cited are the ones with:
Product content published before the shopping moment (not just your own site)
Press mentions and third-party reviews that AI can reference
Clear deal/offer pages that answer specific shopping queries
The brands getting ignored are the ones whose only content lives behind a Shopify storefront that AI can't read.
Action Summary:
Ask ChatGPT: "What's the best [your product category] for [your customer]?" See if you appear
If you don't, publish one piece of content on a third-party site (a guest post, a press mention, a review roundup) that mentions your brand and product by name
Create a dedicated page on your site for your core use case (not just "shop all") — AI reads pages, not categories
Repeat the ChatGPT test monthly to track if visibility changes
The Future of AI in Marketing. Your Shortcut to Smarter, Faster Marketing.
This guide distills 10 AI strategies from industry leaders that are transforming marketing.
Learn how HubSpot's engineering team achieved 15-20% productivity gains with AI
Learn how AI-driven emails achieved 94% higher conversion rates
Discover 7 ways to enhance your marketing strategy with AI.