Growing ecommerce businesses through CRO, UX research, and data analytics.

We're a conversion rate optimization agency for eCommerce brands looking to grow to the next level, but know they need to a better job converting traffic. 

We talk to your potential customers, find out why they're not buying, and fix those issues through a/b testing, personalization, and data-informed UX/UI design.

We help you grow by leveraging: 
-> Full-website conversion optimization
-> Landing page optimization
-> Personalization and segmentation
-> Conversion-focused web design
-> User experience research
-> Website analytics and reporting

We’ve worked with brands you know, like JensonUSA, Osprey, PENN Fishing, and The Shade Store. We’re also fired up about helping growing brands reach the next level. Some brands we've helped make this jump include Hydro Flask, Made In, Mizzen and Main, and Peak Design.

Brian Schmitt

If your work involves you on a screen with a keyboard

Then you need to read this: https://lnkd.in/eRDs5Va3

Then follow it with this:
https://lnkd.in/epK3rz6M

CEO at Surefoot.me | Driving growth in digital companies w/ CRO, Analytics, UX Research, and Site Design

Open article: Michael (@michael_chomsky) on X by x.com

Being brutally honest with someone is not about telling them how you see their reality. 

It's about honestly sharing your reality. Not taking about how great everything is when in reality you're struggling. 

The universe rewards being brutally honest about your struggles. 

One of those rewards is finding out how many people are rooting for you.

Sr. Software Product Manager, Gogo Business Aviation

Building New Standard Co. — World Class Email, SMS, & Retention Marketing for 8, 9, & 10-Figure DTC Brands.

A few of our current and past clients include:
- True Classic
- AG1
- Caraway
- BYLT Basics
- Cozy Earth
- dbrand
- Sand Cloud
- & more.

We're a high-powered boutique agency of eCommerce and retention specialists focused on elevating retention channels for the top DTC brands in the world.

I founded and scaled a brand from 0 to 8 figures in sales. During that journey, I hired and fired multiple Email & SMS agencies—so I decided to build something better.

Since launching our agency, we've partnered with some of the biggest and fastest-growing eCommerce brands in the world.

If you’re looking to elevate your Email, SMS, and Retention channels with the same tenacity as your paid media channels, send me an email here: feras@newstandardco.com

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Outside of my agency, I'm involved in several other fast-growing businesses. I’m fortunate to have thousands of incredible DTC founders and operators following and subscribing across my social channels and newsletter.

If you’re looking to reach my audience, contact me here: feras@newstandardco.com

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Additional Accomplishments:

- Launched and scaled a world-class retention agency to 7-figures in 6 months, working solely with 8, 9, and 10-figure DTC brands.
- Launched and scaled a DTC men's jewelry brand to 8-figures in 3 years.
- Built a personal newsletter with thousands of subscribers (and growing quickly) in just 90 days.
- Earned a Master's Degree in Mechanical Engineering from ASU and an MBA from USD.

You can reach me via email here: feras@newstandardco.com

Feras Khouri

Every time we hire someone who's only worked in-house versus someone with agency experience, the difference is obvious.

Brand-side people try to do everything, every week. They're slow, and in this business slow is expensive.

Agency people know how to cut the noise. They focus on what's actually going to move the needle and keep everything else moving at pace. That skill doesn't come from reading about prioritization. It comes from managing 4 clients at once and learning fast what matters and what doesn't.

Time and impact management are critical skills in this business. You don't learn them on the brand side.

Founder of an 8-Figure Brand + 7-Figure Agency | Driving World Class Email, SMS & Retention Marketing for 8, 9 & 10 figure DTC brands

Last week was my birthday.

I’m not really a big celebration guy, I mostly use it to reflect.

One question I ask myself every year: “If my 15 year old self could see me now, what would he say?”

Every year I can say I’m proud.

Not satisfied or done- my aspirations are still big.

But proud of who I am and that’s a powerful feeling.

Reminder to only compete with yourself.

This week was the first time in the agency’s two year history where I was fully away from my laptop at an event.

No checking in, constantly refreshing slack, no  "just making sure everything's good."

We made some big internal promotions recently and I trusted the team completely.

That's the milestone I'm most proud of. Not a revenue number or a single client win. The moment I stopped being the bottleneck.

6 common things 8 figure DTC brands do in retention  marketing:

1.  They set retention specific goals. Not just revenue targets.
2.  They understand layer 2 metrics. Repurchase timing. Cohorts. LTV by       window.
3.  They look beyond Email and SMS. CX. Inserts. App. Support.
4.  They use retention channels as an acquisition tool.
5.  They build internal feedback loops. Marketing talks to CX. CX talks to product.
6.  They test fast. Technology. Messaging. Structure. etc.

Most brands don’t need a new tactic. They need to execute the fundamentals like a machine.

One of my favorite podcasts to date. Always a fun and insightful time chopping it up with the great Jimmy Kim Lot's of strong retention insights in this one for brands of any size.

Sharing 18+ years of Marketing knowledge. 4x Founder. Former DTC/Retailer & SaaS Founder. Newsletter. Podcast. Commerce Roundtable.

Hey Feras Khouri .. what's six things 8, 9 and 10 figure brands do to have a successful retention program?

On this week's Send It! Podcast, we bring New Standard's co-founder Feras Khouri  on to chat about the 6 common things he sees for successful retention program.

Starting with simply having a great product... we dive deep into the 6..

1. Set retention specific goals
2. Understand their layer 2 metrics
3. Look beyond Email & SMS for retention
4. Use retention for acquisition
5. Create an internal feedback loop
6. Rapidly test technology

Tune in and listen, cause there's a ton of golden nuggets.

Tune in here: https://lnkd.in/gn2vcWGY

Big thank you to Omnisend and Inboox.ai for the partnership to making this pod happen!

If your team can’t clearly answer: “What behavior are we trying to drive this month?”

Then you’re not doing lifecycle marketing. You’re just scheduling sends.

Yes, open rates and click rates need to be monitored, but what changed in customer behavior?

Are they buying faster or more often?

Are they upgrading?

If you can’t articulate the behavior shift you’re just sending emails.

Had a multi 9-figure brand leave us for a cheaper agency.

Then come back.

The cheaper agency had one strategy: high deliverables, low price. It looked great in a pitch deck, but it didn't survive the scrutiny of a brand doing several hundred of millions.

I say this because it’s not the first time it’s happened. The brands that come back always say the same thing: They didn't realize how much thinking was underneath the execution until the thinking was gone.

Retention teams are quietly impacting acquisition at the best DTC brands.

Walk through the actual work happening inside a top 50 DTC brand right now and you'll see retention marketers making decisions about pop-up logic, opt-in software, landing page offers, and traffic-source targeting.

That used to be exclusively growth's or paid's job.

It's changing because the math changed. The brands that figured out retention could subsidize acquisition costs started winning more in paid channels. Not because their ads got better but because their post-click infrastructure got better.

So now everyone wants that. And a lot of the people who know how to build it sit in retention.

Revenue hides bad retention for a long time, especially when acquisition is cheap.

You can outspend the problem but you can mask it with volume.

Once CAC creeps up, everyone notices that profitability tanks.

This did not happen overnight, the retention leak was always there.

Acquisition just stopped covering it up.

What gets you from 0 to 1 will not get you from 1 to 2.

We’ve seen brands go from 6 to 7 figures and outgrow their agency.

7 to 8 figures, and 8 to 9 figures- same thing.

Deeper problems. Different level of thinking.

More complexity. More risk. More scrutiny.

We only focus on 8, 9, and 10 figure brands for a reason.

World class DTC brands operate differently.

And if you’re trying to scale, you better start thinking like the next level before you get there.

If you 2x’d tomorrow… what breaks?

I've watched brands spend months and real budget obsessing over landing page headline tests and then completely neglect their list growth and Welcome Flow.

The welcome is often the highest-revenue generating automation in the entire program. It's hitting someone at peak interest and peak intent, right after they've raised their hand and said "I want to hear from you." That moment is worth more than almost any other touchpoint in the customer journey.

And most brands treat it like a box to check.

I've seen the revenue attribution inside programs at brands doing nine figures. The welcome flow punches above everything else when it's actually built and tested with intention. Offer architecture, sequencing, SMS coordination, timing logic, etc.

The gap between a welcome flow that was written in an afternoon and one that was actually engineered is enormous. And most brands are sitting on the wrong side of that gap.

Does your subscription brand have a churn problem or an onboarding problem?

Month 1 decides almost everything.

The habit needs to be built, the product understood, and the “why” reinforced.

Nothing you send in month 4 is saving that relationship.

You don’t just fix churn at the cancellation page. You fix it the week after the first purchase.

For a long time, CAC and Retention were separate conversations in separate meetings with separate budgets.

CAC lived with the paid team. Retention lived somewhere else, usually underfunded, usually measured on email attributed revenue or list growth. The two rarely talked to each other in any meaningful way.

Those barriers have broken down at the best brands.

The brands that built serious retention infrastructure started noticing their CAC was dropping. Not because their ads improved, but because their post-purchase experience was good enough that word of mouth and repeat purchase velocity changed the underlying unit economics.

So now the smart CMOs and CFOs are funding retention differently. Not as a cost center keeping existing customers happy, but as an acquisition lever that makes paid channels more efficient.

The brands that figured this out 18 months ago are now acquiring customers at costs their competitors can't. And their competitors are spending more on creative testing wondering why nothing is working.

It's not the ads.

Personalization is king. I hear this constantly.

Yes, every brand would benefit from a highly personalized retention program. But most brands don't have the data infrastructure or backend setup to pull it off.

So what happens? A ton of unnecessary work to tell your CEO you "personalized" something. Meanwhile a simpler, cleaner approach would have driven more revenue with less effort.

Stop chasing personalization. Start executing the fundamentals really well.

Brands hire agencies to close gaps until they can build internally.

This is the wrong approach.

The best brands we work with, some doing $500M or more, still use us. Not because they can't hire. Because an agency brings something an internal hire never can. Perspective across dozens of programs, partnerships with the best tech in the space, and pattern recognition you only get from seeing what actually works at scale.

An internal hire knows your brand. We know your brand and fifty others.

The pendulum is swinging hard toward AI and I’m all for it.

We use it daily.

But I am NOT for inauthenticity.

The more automated everything gets, the more obvious it is when something feels fake.

Authenticity is going to compound and disingenuous brands will get filtered out.

AI is a tool, but the product or service needs to feel human.

Don’t lose that.

AI is going to wipe out execution-only agencies. Not eventually, it's happening right now.

The agencies that survive are the ones who adopt it fast enough that it elevates their business model instead of replacing it.

The problem is, most agency models are easily replaceable. Only a few are doing great work.

High deliverables, low strategy was already a losing model. AI just accelerates the death of it.

Most brands hiring a retention agency think they're buying email and SMS execution.

They're not (or they shouldn't be).

The agencies worth working with aren't selling sends and flows. They're selling a perspective on your revenue. How your list grows, how your onboarding experience is engineered, how your abandonment architecture is sequenced, how your offer strategy evolves over 12 months without training your customers to wait for a discount.

That's a fundamentally different thing to buy. And most brands don't realize the difference until they've spent 18 months with an agency that was very good at executing and very bad at thinking.

Brands need a real conversation about their unit economics, acquisition costs, customer lifetime value by cohort, subscription metrics, etc.

Execution is a commodity now. Any competent team can build a decent Klaviyo flow. The question is whether the people you're paying actually understand why one retention strategy works for a $40 average order value supplement brand and a completely different one works for a $700 OTP cookware brand. Those are not the same program.

Most agencies won't tell you that. It's easier to sell a template.

We see CLV be inversely related to the depth of the first purchase discount. Especially in subscriptions.

Give someone 70% off to acquire them and their second rebill feels like a scam. You didn't build a customer, you built a price-sensitive trial.

The discount that wins you the customer is often the same discount that loses you the relationship. Offer testing is key, but not just for CVR%, for CLV too.

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Brian Schmitt

Feras Khouri

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taplio

The Battle

Brian Schmitt

Feras Khouri

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Brian Schmitt's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreBrian Schmitt's LinkedIn Performance