In this episode of The Conversion Show, Erik Christiansen interviews Adam Tuttle, who shares his extensive 13 year experience with ActiveCampaign, an email and marketing automation company. They discuss the evolution of ActiveCampaign, its market position, the impact of AI on sales operations, and the importance of building relationships in sales. Adam also reflects on his time in Australia, highlighting cultural differences in work-life balance and the growing tech scene. The conversation emphasizes the need for companies to adapt to changing market dynamics and the significance of human connection in sales.

In this conversation, Erik Christiansen and Larry Kim delve into the complexities of the website visitor identification industry, discussing its current state, the accuracy of data, and the implications of using such data in marketing strategies. They explore the differences between first-party and third-party data, the challenges of ensuring data accuracy, and the potential costs associated with using inaccurate data. The discussion emphasizes the need for transparency and understanding in the industry, highlighting the importance of accurate data for effective marketing.

Chapters

Understanding Website Visitor Identification Technology

Transparency and Accuracy in Visitor Identification

Challenges of Data Accuracy and Its Implications

Establishing a Baseline for Testing Accuracy

First-Party vs. Third-Party Data

The Importance of Accurate Data in Marketing

The Cost of Poor Data Quality

Match Rate vs. Accuracy in Visitor Identification

The Dangers of Relying on Inaccurate Data

Industry Reactions and Future Directions

Concluding Thoughts and Lessons Learned

Travis and I are joined by an expert in data and identity in advertising - Kyle Antoian - Founder of Zeke Strategy.

In this conversation, Kyle Antoian discusses the significant changes in marketing strategies due to Apple's App Tracking Transparency (ATT) and the evolving landscape of digital marketing. He emphasizes the importance of collecting customer data, building identity graphs, and adapting to the loss of third-party cookies. The discussion also covers the resurgence of direct mail and the need for marketers to leverage their own data to create effective lookalike audiences.

We covered powerful subjects relating to  Digital Advertising Post-ATT

• Impact of iOS 14.5 on Marketing Strategies
• The Cookie Conundrum and Alternative Solutions
• Future of Digital Marketing in a Privacy-Centric World
• The Importance of Post-Purchase Engagement
• Leveraging Zero-Party Data for Marketing
• Building Lookalike Audiences: Strategies and Insights
• The Role of Identity Graphs in Marketing
• Navigating Attribution Challenges in E-Commerce
• Understanding App vs. On-Site Experiences
• Lead Capture: The Foundation of Customer Engagement

In this episode I sit down with my Co-Founder and CTO, Travis Logan and we catch up on the weeks in's and out's of the business and SaaS/Ecommerce industry.

Enjoy the show!

1. Co-Founder Relationship & Trust
2. Industry Trends & Company Insights
3. Reporting in SaaS companies
4. Reporting Challenges & Enhancements 
5. Customer Requests for Advanced Analytics
6. Quizzes & Advanced Reporting Needs
7. E-commerce & MarTech Landscape
8. Shopify vs. BigCommerce
9. Klaviyo's CDP & Broader Industry Moves
10. Integration Updates & Expansions
11. Google AI & Future Implications
12. Investment in SaaS & AI
13. Entrepreneurial Edge
14. Car Shopping & Marketing Strategies
15. SMS Marketing & Lead Capture

In this episode of "The Conversion Show" podcast, Erik Christiansen welcomes guests John Gillie, Founder & CEO of TruckTractorTrailer.com (TTT), and Allan Anastacio, Head of Sales & Sales Operations at TTT. From traditional to digital, John and Allan take us into the world of conversion marketing within the trucking industry. They discuss the unique challenges and opportunities in modernizing the trucking industry by providing a digital marketplace for buying and selling trucks, along with various services like financing and insurance.

Erik, John, and Allan discuss:

• Modernizing the trucking industry to keep up with industry standards and meet customer expectations.
• Buyer-seller imbalance: attracting and retaining buyers and converting visitors to customers.
• The right tools and partnerships are crucial for their growth.
• Refining their website's user experience.
• Continuous improvement and adaptation are key to navigating a rapidly changing market and achieving long-term success. 

Host: Erik Christiansen, CEO of Justuno

Guest: John Gillie, Founder & CEO of TruckTractorTrailer.com

Guest: Allan Anastacio, Head of Sales & Sales Operations at TruckTractorTrailer.com

Transcript:

Erik 00:00:51

Welcome to the Conversion Show. Today we have our special guest, John Gill, along with him, his counterpart Allan Anastacio, who heads up sales operations, everything which we'll get into today because we'd love to find out how our retailers operate behind the walls. but special guest, because we have a guest, you know, customer here with hands-on experience.

Erik 00:01:18

And so in the retail world, truck, tractor trailer.com, hop on LinkedIn. You can find, both John and Allan on there and check out their backgrounds. But, welcome to the show, gentlemen.

John 00:01:31

Thank you. Eric.

Erik 00:01:33

So we are just wrapping about this industry of truck tractor trailer. and how to engage you are with your own audience. and customers, leveraging your email list 250,000 is share out, not just sale stuff, but more of your podcast and content. today, looking at what you are, what campaigns you're currently running, which is a lot of engagement with your visitors.

Erik 00:02:08

Allan, you mentioned earlier what brought you to Justuno? I'd love to hear a little bit more again of, you know what Initially you were hoping to achieve and most importantly, where are we today? but what goals and focus are you to working on to grow your business?

Allan 00:02:28

Yeah. that's a great question. Eric. And, you know, I think it's really important for, us to really, understand our platform, and understand really what our goal is on there. Well, we are a SaaS-based e-commerce platform, a marketplace for buyers and sellers. but we call ourselves more of a community.

Allan 00:02:50

and, you know, our main goal is really to connect those buyers and sellers, but, you know, as you were talking about, with that before, how there's a lot of new technology out in the marketplace. There's a lot of technology on it. There's a lot of data that you can, you know, you can you can put IoT, you know, you can get your data, you know, kind of, other data that's critical to running a fleet operation.

Allan 00:03:15

so there's a lot of tech out there, but I think there's one thing that has been missing, for the better part of trucking, the trucking industry is. And everyone know that, buying and selling a truck, it's still very archaic. And it and and and that's something in terms of the shift. we're heading towards an, you know, we have to give, you know, some credit, you know, due to some factors, just like the pandemic.

Allan 00:03:42

Right? You know, to be able to really kind of increase the adoption, of these because in automotive, it's pretty, you know, it's pretty common, you know, for us to go online through a channel to, website, it and buy, you know, 5 to $30,000, used car or new car but in the trucking industry, equipment a little bit more.

Allan 00:04:05

complex, right? In terms of, you know, the, the not only the value but also, certain operations in terms of the specification. so it was always, hey, I'm going to go to a dealership, you know, that my dealership I've been using for the past 30 years. and it's always face-to-face. Now, because how businesses run and then the shortage, you know, our platform really, help create that community where a buyer can come on to their understand they are within, a platform that provides them everything from the ability to finance, get it insured, get it inspected, paid for and delivered, wherever

Allan 00:04:45

they are. and for us, you know, for us to really, have those conversion happen, right, you know, on to type. it was all about how are we going to engage, the early adopter, you know, to be comfortable, to make offers on to our site or search our site.

Allan 00:05:08

Especially of course we were a new startup, right? And, you know, something like, trucktractortrailer.com is really at the forefront of pushing this type of equipment sales between buyers and sellers, all in one place, if that makes sense. So, you know it's all about wanting that initial let's start engaging our audience.

Allan 00:05:38

Let's start, you know, engaging and pushing them to the right sources, and kind of actions that we'd like for them to accomplish. in terms of understanding kind of what TTT  is. Fast forward to the day. You know we've had the web for, you know, a handful of years now.

Allan 00:06:01

So we've gotten and built, you know, that audience that thought it was mentioning, now, a lot of that is really refining our campaigns and adjusting to our different types of buyers, audiences. And also I've done, we have a lot of different new products featured on our platform, such as job, so our audience base is growing.

Allan 00:06:23

So that type of conversion engagement also needs to grow. So I hope that kind of gives you a little bit of, you know, clarity.

Erik 00:06:36

I have some great notes here.

John 00:06:40

Can I just, piggyback off on what Allan was saying?

Erik 00:06:43

Yeah. John.

John 00:06:44

We founded this in late 16, 2016. Took me about two years to raise money, build the product and, more importantly, than just build a product, but we took our time to build a platform and a product people wanted to use and then also wanted to use to help solve their problems, either on the south side by side.

John 00:07:12

And once we started to get close on a minimuml viable product, then we had to test that product. So what we learned is that it took quite a long time to crack the code on driving traffic into the product we built to properly test and validate, where we are today. here we are in, you know, 20, 24.

John 00:07:37

You know, we're moving really from startup mode to just scaling a rapid. We'll four time sales this year over the prior year. And we plan to 4x again next year and probably two and a half times x revenue in 25 to 26. So we're in scale mode right now. and as we got things right on the product, whether it's buy, sell or jobs or news, you know, now it's about conversion.

John 00:08:11

And this is where Justuno comes in and in our utilization of your service. Allan is correct. Allan brought it in four years ago. He said, listen, we have to have this. We have to have your service. Quite frankly, we didn't do a very good job utilizing it. but now that we're in scale mode, now that we have the traffic coming in, you know, we had to top grade our services and our partnerships to be able to really, engage those new visitors, those new registered users.

John 00:08:40

So, also to just to clarify what Allan was saying, he's right. Consumer trucking is about seven years behind consumer auto. Right? Consumer auto is about seven years ahead of commercial trucking, not only in, technology as far as clean fuels and, you know, automation. Our, you know, automated driving, autonomous, and also the conversion to electric or hydrogen or, any other clean, fuels.

John 00:09:15

but really in the buying and selling of, of used assets. So we, to be inspired by, the market, all we have to do simply is look at what carbon is doing.

Erik 00:09:27

And I've written Carvana down twice in my notes here.

John 00:09:30

Yeah. So. And people, people right away analogize and put us in the Carvana bucket, which is very flattering. we are the exception really, I think to Carvana, the number one that's consumer auto. but if you're listening, you know, Ernie Garcia, if you want to pay $100 million for us, I would crack that deal today.

John 00:09:53

and Ernie Garcia, junior and senior are both the founders and CEO. It's a public company today. But, you know, Ernie Garcia, junior is the CEO. So, Ernie, if you're listening, you know, we'll we'll accept your offer. but really, we don't we don't own the asset. Our sellers own the asset. We're brought in to facilitate that trade, whether it's them using our, our, self-service tools that we've built and, and, clearly, they can list their assets for sale.

John 00:10:26

They can field their own, offers because our buyers are well-trained and well-versed to place offers on our site. And we built a negotiation tool to allow buyers and sellers to deal directly. Now we are observing this. We're facilitating it. some say we favor the buyers. Other people say we're in favor of the sellers. Quite honestly.

John 00:10:50

you know, the buyers and sellers, and 99.99% of the time arrive at a win-win. and we're just here trying to create, the platform for them to do that. So we don't own the asset. And that's one of the distinctive differences between us and Carvana. That said, everything else we can do.

Erik 00:11:11

So let's talk about sales. Yeah. Conversion. Where are we today with Justuno with conversion, as a whole, we've seen customer acquisition costs increase. we've seen finally a focus on the on-site experience as a key aspect of our business and sustainable growth and scaling. congratulations on driving the traffic.

Erik 00:11:41

That's huge. The, community aspect. I love, we built a, see our snowboard based off of a community of snowboarders, people who were passionate about something. the the questions, you know, keywords are being use audience, segment campaigns, buyers conversion. one analogy we're using right now is this concept of digital marketers have figured out the offsite marketing component.

Erik 00:12:17

We know how to build segments. We know how to build campaigns. We know how to build automation to drive those that speak to those segments with personalized messaging. We are now introducing that to the on-site experience. So is what I hear from you when you talk about your segments, coming to your website, it sounds like you have a buyer visitor, someone who's looking to sell.

Erik 00:12:45

Yeah. and someone's coming to do some research. Potentially. I have the new jobs section.

John 00:12:52

Well, when the job section, there might be, large carriers or fleets looking for new drivers, looking for technicians, looking for salespeople, and management. but on the other side, because our jobs portal is also two-sided, you have employers and you have job seekers, right? so but it's it's within the trucking community. Right. So, so we one good thing is we did was we focused on a segment of the trucking community.

John 00:13:30

Yeah. Tracking transportation, and logistics. That's a great thing to focus. The challenging thing is that it's transportation, trucking, and logistics. you know, that those SIC code, that industry code, that industry segment is 24% of the world's gross domestic product. So the market is absolutely enormous. So we are constantly struggling to filter and gate to get a manageable view within that enormous market, even a small percentage of that big number is still a big number, right?

John 00:14:13

So conversion and having automation and tools is not just, important. It's essential. Yeah. It's essential to us. If not, we as a 100% digital e-commerce platform, there's no way out. We can't survive, because the market size and the activity is so large, because what you're doing, you're taking a business that is traditional brick and mortar.

John 00:14:41

Been in business for over 100 years, one of the largest businesses in the United States. you know, the trucking industry, it's about one-tenth the size of the automotive consumer, automotive business, but still a very, very large, market addressable market. But it's tough because there's so much opportunity. So you have to narrow your focus down and pick partners, like, like you guys to help us, convert and and get to those ideal customers, buyers, or sellers.

Erik 00:15:18:15 - 00:15:39:21

So let's talk metrics. we'll, we'll get back to the personas because what I'm thinking is when someone comes to your site, I initially want to ask them the question, are you a buyer? Sellers, are interested in in jobs. And when they click that button, we can save that profile to the save that data, to the profile to that next time they visit.

Erik 00:15:39

Or you can then email them to certain segments, when you're doing that, we recognize that when it comes to email marketing and SMS marketing, and Klaviyo just announced their top four workflows that are most successful and number one being their cart abandonment workflow. Yeah, that's going to be more for more traditional retailers as years more of the SAS marketplace.

Erik 00:16:05

But the whole point of everything is that what's the 8020 rule? As you I'm sure you're well aware of, John. And businesses like where's the low-hanging fruit? When I'm looking at your domain, trucktractortrailer.com, TTT as you as you like to be called in the industry.

Erik 00:16:31

if we're going to get that 4x, where's the low-hanging fruit? what segments are those and are we talking to them when they arrive on the site?

John 00:16:45:00 - 00:16:50:16

Allan that's a great one for you because you handle our enterprise-level customers.

Allan 00:16:50

Yeah. I think, you know, for us our subscription and listings are up to our dealer. That's our bread and butter right there. That's our low-hanging fruit. you know, that's really where, a lot of the market, a lot of people know that the used trucking market is about 80, 60 to 70%, of, of the trucking market.

Allan 00:17:15

so a lot more used being told, than used being bought. you know, so, for us, it's all about getting our buyers, our audience through the website, and then converting them to either self-serve, and lift their unit, or speak with someone from the team to get them on a dealer description or, you know, depending on location, you know, a number of, a block, etc.

Erik  00:17:45

So if I go to buy and how to buy, is that what's been described to me?

Allan 00:17:54

If they had to sell.

Erik 00:17:56

If they had to sell. So 60 to 70% of your website traffic or business sales comes from dealers coming on to list their inventory. Did I understand correctly?

Allan 00:18:13

the 70% is saying that the used trucking market in terms of unit selling in terms of units selling is larger than the new truck market. So our platform, you know, as we were mentioning, is really to attract a lot of the individual owner-operators, the dealers to list their equipment, for sale.

John 00:18:40

And, Eric, I think that it's important to note that where we've been and where we are today is not where the market's going. So when we started TTT, built the platform, we thought there would be faster, quicker adoption. And this is like back in 2018, 2019 when we started. But we had to wait post-Covid for people to really embrace zoom, and doing business online, Amazon itself just, you know, doubled since, you know, before Covid.

John 00:19:25

I think a lot of your e-commerce platforms, while people were shopping online, they weren't buying online. We're starting to see the early green shoots of that conversion where people are actually coming in, making more offers, and doing business online. But full disclosure here, you know, there's a lot of, you know, we use our platform now to attract deals.

John 00:19:49:17 - 00:20:20:21

But a lot of those deals, I think to your point, earlier you said off-site, a lot of the deals are transacted off-site. Now in a future state, let's say two years, three years out with AI and ChatGPT, other conversion tools, and UX tools to heighten the buying, the buying and selling experience, and also market familiarity and comfort and doing business online for a used asset.

John 00:20:20

It's going to be a spike north. It's going to be a hockey stick growth we feel in conversion. But right now where we are, if we're asking your customer base, you're following in my following year to go visit trucktractortrailer.com. They may be underwhelmed with the user experience

John 00:20:45

in compared in comparison to let's say, others that are you know, available maybe on the Shopify platform or Amazon or Walmart.com or some of the the niche market sites, traditional retail. However, in the commercial trucking site, Allen said it earlier, we're pretty unique and special, so we're out ahead of it. But compared to the rest of the e-commerce market, an outsider coming in may feel like we are behind.

John 00:21:16

And in fact, they'd be right. So, you know, I don't want to mislead the viewer that we're so far ahead. We're really not, in the trucking world, we are, we're slightly ahead of the competition. But, we do feel things will start to accelerate this point forward.

In this episode of "The Conversion Show" podcast, Erik Christiansen welcomes back Jon MacDonald, President & Founder of The Good, and author of "Behind the Click".  Erik and Jon discuss digital experience optimization and e-commerce sales conversion strategies. They also highlight ethical marketing practices, understanding consumer psychology and behavior, and how staying attuned to consumer needs and preferences is essential for success. Jon also shares a discount code for his book "Behind the Click," plus a chance to get a signed hard copy.

Erik and Jon discuss:

• “What’s In It for Me?” consumers seek relevance and authenticity in return for their loyalty.
• Experience optimization vs. digital experience optimization.
• The magic of free shipping.
• Investing in customer experience beyond just conversion.
• Why do some shoppers abandon their carts? And what can you do about it?
• Test, test, test, learn, repeat.

Host: Erik Christiansen, CEO of Justuno

Guest: Jon MacDonald, President & Founder of the good

Get a copy of Jon’s book, Behind the Click, and use code “btcpodcast50”  for 50% off. Plus, get your hard copy of Behind the Click signed by Jon Macdonald send an email to ([email protected]) or message Jon or Erik on LinkedIn.

Transcript:

Erik  00:00:50

Welcome to the conversion show. Today we have our longstanding guest, Jon MacDonald from the good. Welcome, Jon.

Jon 00:00:58

Thanks for having me once again.

Erik 00:01:01

So Jon's just come in fresh off his his recent book tour. What is a digital book tour?

Jon 00:01:07

Yeah, right, have something printed in analog and then do all the promotions digitally. That's pretty much what I've done. Although I had I did get one speaking engagement out of it, that I did in person. that specifically approached because of the book. So, yeah, that was in person. That was analog. And yeah, really excited about how how the launch has gone.

Erik 00:01:30

It's really the podcast tour these days.

Jon 00:01:33

More than anything. and it's so easy, right, to to just hop on for a half hour, an hour, have a great conversation and reach hundreds of people. it's it's hard to do that from the convenience of of your office on a daily basis.

Erik 00:01:48

So anyone that doesn't know, Jon, look em up on LinkedIn. Jon McDonald. We'll drop a link here. Jon is one of our closest conversion allies here in the in the industry. Jon is is out there, building programs, working with working with clients to ensure they optimize their digital experiences to convert. I was catching up on the good.

Erik 00:02:14

I notice you have the digital experience optimization program, which as I run through it, it's, you know, if I was running, a retail business, any sort of business with a website, you would be the first person I call.

Jon 00:02:31

I hear that sounds a lot coming from you.

Erik 00:02:33

Yeah. Well, so, we'll drop the link to this, too, and we'll actually going to touch on some of this stuff today for the audience. What we're talking about today. What is it? July 17th, 2024 is really, you know, Jon and I catch up every quarter. And today we're going to be talking about what's top of mind inside the walls at Justuno,

Erik 00:02:54

and also what Jon’s seen with his clients at the Good. You know, today my focus with my team is on sales conversion. At Justuno we we have two main core areas lead capture, sales conversion and as we look at the sales conversion side Jon I want to bring up three segments that we as a company have drilled in on and are really focusing on what digital experience that visitor has when they come into Justuno, or a client of Justuno, so they are three the first one and these are low hanging fruit quick wins with high conversion rates.

Erik 00:03:40

It is the visitor who has an item to their cart. Well on the site and then exit. So the cart abatement. The second is that visitor who has abandoned a cart and left the site returns to the site. And what what experience do they have that return visitor that abandoned a cart. We are achieving up to 30% sales conversion rate with that visitor segment.

Jon 00:04:12

That's great.

Erik 00:04:13

And then you have the third bucket, which is a general exiting visitor. This can be, someone that has looked at a product page or just has not looked at anything. You can separate those two if you want. If you want to ab test and go deeper. Obviously some of these look at a product page has more intent than someone that is just gone to the home page and abandoned.

Erik 00:04:35

But if we look at those three buckets and what we've really drilled into is talking about our visitors as segments. So these three segments are the are I targeting them and separating them and speaking to them, creating an experience for when they're either exiting or arriving on the site through either a modal, banner or an embedded widget.

Erik 00:05:04

We are able to show immediate, value to leveraging our own platform, right? How does that resonate with you?

Jon 00:05:14

well, I think you've hit on the three points, that people would potentially exit the, you know, the, the challenging thing is a lot of people attack all of this through one way, and that's an exit intent banner. And that's like, the only way they attack this is they're just waiting for people's mouse to move off the browser, and then they throw a pop up.

Jon 00:05:34

And honestly, it doesn't work extremely well. it can work. But, you know, it's a it's feels like a last ditch effort and it really kind of is. Right. I think the being able to send an email to somebody who has abandoned cart and bring them back into that purchase flow, it's going to be a pretty high opportunity area, especially if you can start a conversation with those people.

Jon 00:06:01

Right. Was there something holding you up from buying? Get started chat right now with our customer service team, right? Push people into having a conversation to explain why they didn't buy so that you can help them through that challenge. I think that's that's where the money is hidden in a lot of these cases.

Erik 00:06:21

So you mentioned the the cart abandonment email. That is something I've really come to recognize in the email marketing and SMS space is they've been able to attribute revenue, so clearly to their customers because they say, look, we sent this cart abandonment email and they checked out, what I've recognized with the on site experience is let's, let's leverage that same experience, that segment of cart abandonment that you're sending an email to.

Erik 00:06:59

Well, let's talk about them before they even leave the website. Let's also talk about them when they return to the website. Right. Let's identify them and take them from I mentioned up to 30%. You know, I have one one chart from a client here that has a 23.64, conversion rate with, exiting visitors. yeah. They have an item in the cart, but when we, we, we do send them the last ditch effort, effort, card abandonment, promotion.

Erik 00:07:34

They have a 29.41.

Jon 00:07:36

So what are you doing that's a little different there. Explain that for everybody because I think, you know, honestly the the typical as I mentioned is just to send them an email. But it sounds like you're customizing the site, personalizing the site when they return in some manner.

Erik 00:07:51

Yes. So we build a segment, a visitor segment, just like you build the cart abandonment email segment, but you have that same same segment on the for the website visitor so that in the instance you're bringing up, when a visitor returns, the website we have, we know who they are. They're in that segment. And we we, we show them a promotion right away saying, welcome back.

Erik 00:08:15

You left this item in your cart. Are you ready to checkout?

Jon 00:08:20

Right? Right. That's amazing because most people well, I think there's there's two thoughts that I have a lot of things I'm thinking about right now. The, the you're sparking a lot of great ideas here. But I think the first thing is that too many consumers have been trained to abandon cart to get a better deal. So before they abandoned cart, being able to tell them, hey, if you wait, you're not going to get a better deal.

Jon 00:08:47

This is our best deal. And making that very clear before they abandon. You have a you have a point on that?

Erik 00:08:57

No, no. I'm saying thumbs up yes.

Jon 00:08:59

So I have seen that perform extremely well because, I mean, it was hilarious last week on, LinkedIn. I'm active on LinkedIn to the point where it might be annoying for people, but I will say that the reality is there's a couple of posts that really blew up last week, not of my own, but of peers that I saw.

Jon 00:09:18

And one of them was the, it said, you know, consumers in 2020 would abandon cart and then get an email with the discount would be like, okay. Yes. And then it's marketers in 2024. I know they go add to cart immediately close, and then wait 24 hours for that email because they all know it's coming. Consumers.

Jon 00:09:42

It was like new to them during Covid. Everybody started deploying this. And now what we're seeing and it happened before Covid people were doing it. But people really caught on. The more that they ordered. And, people were deploying during Covid. As sales ramped up online very quickly, they were all deploying the same tactics and doing it honestly kind of in a messy manner, right to the point where they were all sending the same emails because it was klaviyo flows that were diverse, set up easily.

Jon 00:10:11

Right.

Erik 00:10:13

And that gets into the how do you what's the best practices you set up the foundational best practices for, a retailer when it comes to the email marketing and SMS world? but I was touching on is that they figured that game out. They said, look, let's just make sure make sure we set up this cart abandonment email and all the other workflows and automations.

Erik 00:10:39

They're great. you know, but if we really want to show that we're we have revenue attribution, let's make sure we're sending a cart abandonment email. Yeah. So let's look at how do we translate that to the on site experience. And what I'm saying is it's if you want to show that you can increase sales for a client or yourself, you need to set up a cart abandonment, promotion, and most importantly, a return visitor, promotion, you know, messaging however you want to do it.

Erik 00:11:17

Banner slide out, embedded that says welcome back, making it easy.

Jon 00:11:23

At that point it's a convenience boost more than anything else, right? So you don't have to offer discount at that point. The person came back to your site. So don't degrade your brand. Don't chew away your margin. Instead, at that point, hey, we've made it easy for you to checkout right now.

Erik 00:11:43

That's right. And that is that second segment. You do that you can take someone, you can increase their sales conversion rate by, you know, five, 10% like that.

Jon 00:11:53

Which is huge, right? I mean, you think about that, that you've gotten a massive return on investment from a tool like yours that can do that.

Erik 00:12:02

So that's that's really what's top of mind that I've been focusing on. You mentioned the you know, the games. Right. That's totally a game. You know, add it to the cart, leave, wait for an email. Be sure you give them your email so you can get that card of an email. The. And when we talk about how do you provide value.

Erik 00:12:20

And you know we've talked about in the past consumer psychology and understanding their needs. And that's where Amazon has nailed it. and understanding is customer centric. Understand their needs. How do we replicate that experience as one aspect. The my main point is retailers, do they accept and understand present day that people will shop their website, but will very much the same as they used to search for coupon codes or add their email to get that coupon.

Erik 00:12:55

They will go to Amazon to see if it's available on Amazon and if they can get Prime free shipping and get it the next day. And if returns are a pain in the butt, not a concern because they know Amazon's returns.

Jon 00:13:08

Well, look, I, I literally went to Apple's website and I was going to buy these because my wife has been working from home and I could literally she's not in the room today right now, thank God. But I could literally like high five her right here. And we both can't be on a call at the same time. And she's a very loud zoom talker.

Jon 00:13:27

so it's one of those things where I needed noise canceling headphones and the AirPods weren't getting it done, so I was going to order these, but then did a yesterday and today is Prime Day, and I went on Amazon just because I was like, oh, whatever. And I saw they had them for like $150 off. I could get them delivered overnight.

Jon 00:13:48

They literally showed up like three in the morning. my doorbell went off. I was like, what's going on? and yeah, I was just shocked. I was like, okay, so I can save 150 bucks and have it tomorrow. Why would I buy it from Apple? It didn't make sense. Right? So it's happening even at that massive brand scale.

Jon 00:14:06

It's definitely happening at a smaller scale brand too.

Erik 00:14:09

And I think people trust larger brands less than smaller brands or, you know, DTC brands, because the bigger brands just they don't they're too big. They don't get, they're not going to get it to you the next day. Yeah. and you know, we talk about what message do you communicate on that cart abandoned or that is exiting your website?

Erik 00:14:31

That's where you come in. That's where we want experts like you testing the message, you know. So let's have five different variations of this exiting message saying, hey, get it. You're leaving. If you check out in the next five minutes, you will get this, you know, at this date. You know, speak the Amazon language to these consumers that are leaving your website and test which message... Like we have an exit one we're testing right now systemwide which has four general messages at the bottom like shipping returns.

Erik 00:15:09

You know that can direct them to answer the top. You know, five core consumer need needs. but why not A/B test. Like, I love how you’re A/B testing all of the, you know, the experiences on site, the buttons, the language, the location, the spacing. What I'm excited about is testing this experience of messaging in these visitor segments.

Jon 00:15:36

Yeah. And I think message tests are a they're fairly easy to run, right? And B, they can be really impactful. So, you know, if you look at that quadrant and you want impactful and easy like that, there's messaging almost always fits in there. The hard part of messaging is coming up with variants that actually move the needle. Right.

Jon 00:16:01

Because you really need to put some effort into that. And I think a lot of folks just test whatever they think of first and that always, you know, normally is not the best way to handle it. But, you know, I mean, I think really it this phase. Right? This is what I would call the decision making and conversion phase of a buyer's journey.

Jon 00:16:21

They're really asking themselves a handful of questions, and you need to be able to answer those. And if you haven't already, and they left, you still could answer those in a cart abandonment email, right? You could try to answer them when they come back to the site. but really, at this point, if people are deserting, it's because they don't have the information they need or they've just decided that it's not a good fit.

Jon 00:16:45

And if it's not a good fit, you're not going be able to convince them otherwise. that's why I would just let those go. Quite honestly. I would focus my effort and tailor the messaging here to answering the questions for people who are missing those pieces of information. So those might be questions like, what's in it for me?

Jon 00:17:08

Right. So they could be like, okay, well it's Prime Day. What's in it for me? I'm saving $150. It could be I get it overnight. It could be, hey, there's a free gift with purchase right now. It could be, well, I'm going to be joining, this group of like minded individuals, and, it's going to say something about me.

Jon 00:17:33

there's a lot of tangible and intangible things that that a consumer is thinking about here. and, you know, they're also saying, hey, maybe it's super easy for me to purchase, maybe it's not right. Maybe they got to your page and they couldn't search for what they wanted. They just couldn't find the product. So they didn't even get to a cart to abandon.

Jon 00:17:55

Right? They just abandoned because they were on your PDP, and it was just too difficult to figure out what they needed or, you know, the last thing consumers want to do is reach out to customer support, okay? If they have taken that step, they likely are going to buy. If you can answer that question in advanced. So one thing to do is talk to your customer service teams and say what are the questions people are asking you.

Jon 00:18:22

And if you can...

In this episode of "The Conversion Show" podcast, Erik Christiansen welcomes back Jon MacDonald, President & Founder of the good, and author of "Behind the Click".  Erik and Jon delve into consumer psychology and the psychological principles that shape our online decisions and how they impact a company's digital presence. They also discuss the digital customer journey and the importance of understanding customer needs and decision-making processes to improve conversion rates, retention, and trust. Jon also offered a discount code for the e-book version of "Behind The Click," and shares key takeaways for busy readers. 

Erik an Jon discuss:

• Understanding the customer's mindset at each phase of the buying life cycle.
• Decision fatigue and the critical role of simplifying the purchasing process.
• Building trust and ensuring customer retention through the post-purchase experience.
• Challenges of personalization and the power of segmentation and automation.

Host: Erik Christiansen, CEO of Justuno

Guest: Jon MacDonald, President & Founder of the good

Transcript

Erik 00:00:51 

We're going to kick off the conversion show today with Jon MacDonald, a former guest. And I'm really happy to have Jon today because, wanted to celebrate his new book, Behind the Click. I read his last one, opt in in the Optimizing Optimization. also founder of the good. And today we are talking about consumer psychology. and so welcome, Jon, to the show.

Jon 00:01:18

Hey, thanks for having me again. Great to be back.

Erik 00:01:20

I was excited to talk about consumer psychology because it's what we've been talking about a lot lately. would you like to share? Let's hear about the book real quick. Let's hear about why you wrote it and what you're covering in it.

Jon 00:01:36

Well, Behind the Click is about the psychological principles, behind the shortcuts that our brains take to make decisions every day. And how the different elements of your company's digital experience either guide customers towards that purchase, or sends them running to a competitor. And so understanding all of these, I think, you know, what has happened is I've been in the CRO industry for 15 years now.

Jon 00:02:04

You know, the good just turned 15 in April and, you know, the more work that we've done to optimize conversion rates, the more we've realized that to make real, lasting gains, you have to pull way further back on the customer experience than just conversion. And that was kind of a light bulb moment for this book, right? So many factors affect your conversions.

Jon 00:02:29

and it starts way before a customer even begins to start thinking about purchasing from you. Right? As they're doing their research, they have a need. So every element of your website tells the customers something about what they do or do not want with or to buy from you, right? It's one of those things where if you have to understand in order to be effective, what's going on in the minds of your site, visitors.

Erik 00:02:58

The you know, I often refer to the Amazon experience. And you know why? Why do I refer to the Amazon experience. It's because they've been customer centric from day one. Yeah. And that they truly understood the needs of their consumers. And I've delivered. And so as we kind of step back and I know I love whenever I see Jon post stuff on LinkedIn, you know, it's always I always like bashing pop ups and or and there's a good reason for it is because digital marketers still don't understand how to don't understand consumer needs.

Jon 00:03:40

Erik 00:03:41

Consumer psychology. And that's what we're going to talk about today. Let's talk about when someone arrives on your website. What are their needs. How do you with behind the click. How do you approach introducing this concept of you know understanding your customers?

Jon 00:04:00

Well I think the, the first thing is that you really need to understand that there are four key phases to that buying lifecycle. And if you can understand what's going on in each of those four phases, then you will be able to convert at a much higher level. When the consumer gets there, you're in really need to be thinking about it as the discovery phase, right?

Jon 00:04:26

This is where customers are going to form that initial impression, just based on whether your company understands their problem and has a potential solution to that, right. I've said this a lot. Consumers are only at your site for two reasons. It's to understand if you can help solve their pain or need, and if you can, to convert as quickly and easily as possible.

Jon 00:04:48

And so really, this discovery is that first step. Do they think is there a central, do they think that you can help them to solve that pain or need. They may not be sure. They haven't decided if you can, but is there some hint there that they think they can? You know, and that's that's really the first step is understanding what's going through somebody's mind at that stage.

Erik 00:05:12

You know what we've been really working through these last few years. And you know congratulations on 15 years by the way. Yeah, that's you know, thought God, 14 years would just, you know, and you know, and you're saying, Jon and I have been fighting this good fight for Virgin for, for combined nearly 30 years. And, you know, as I reflect back these last couple of years, I feel like there's been a moment and momentum shift of sorts, you know, with customer acquisition costs increasing.

Erik 00:05:40

You know, we're seeing, we're seeing marketers focus on the website experience. You know, we're we're hearing Shopify talk about the highest converting checkout as well, are recognizing that, you know, it's harder to get traffic to their site. It's more expensive than focus on retention or lifecycle marketing. You know, as we talk about these phases and we talk about discovery current, I still I feel like we're in the infancy of understanding the customer experience on site.

Erik 00:06:10

the consumer psychology and their needs. Presently and historically, pop ups have been used to give a discount. Yeah. I mean, arrives on your website and you give them a discount. What I'd like to talk today about today is alternatives, which is you know what we're you know, the view now is let's we understand lead capture is critical to the funnel along with, first party data.

Erik 00:06:37

The, lead capture and sales is two buckets. I like to put kind of look at it as. Yeah, focus on the lead, capture your. You know, you're looking to capture an email, whatever. But when that visitor returns a second time, a third time, the fourth time, understanding that time to purchase, why they not purchasing that aspect is where Amazon has nailed it with, you know, why do people abandon carts?

Erik 00:07:06

It's still because of shipping. why else do people not make purchases, you know, is it communicated? Returns? You know, understanding why why people, believe a website to go to Amazon. That's the other I don't know if you do. You've covered that at all is like understanding why people will leave your website.

Jon 00:07:28

Right at each step. Right. And each of these four steps, there are reasons why people would desert and it all really again comes back to psychology. It comes back to needing to understand what's going on through and through their heads at each step. So yeah.

Erik 00:07:46

Okay. So how how do they do that? Is it the four steps?

Jon 00:07:49

Well, I think the four steps is the first thing to be keeping in mind here is that if you look at it like a funnel, right. Each of these steps helps people get further down that funnel. Okay. And so while somebody in that discovery phase might just be forming an initial impression, the next phase is that information gathering phase.

Jon 00:08:09

This is the point of that digital journey where customers move beyond thinking. While they might this might be what I'm looking for. They might be able to help me to really kind of digging into the details. Right. This is where they're going to move beyond that casual window shopping and start really moving into a purchasing decision. Yeah. So again, moving further down the funnel, and if you understand what people are going through at each step here, you can help them guide further down the funnel.

Jon 00:08:39

Okay. So traditional conversion optimization will focus on different steps of that journey. But typically what they're thinking about is how do I get somebody to take an action. Not the flip side of that, which is what are they thinking and how do I serve that? Right. So if you're thinking about pop ups, which you're right, it's a soap box I start on all the time.

Jon 00:09:05

and sadly kind of become known for that. But it is true that, you know, you are interrupting somebodies process when you throw a pop up in front of them, and it's disruptive. Instead of guiding folks or helping them through that journey, through the discovery into the information gathering, then moving into that decision making and conversion phase, which is the third one.

Erik 00:09:33

It will, you know, pausing there entirely. you know, again, it's this evolution of the pop up and a community where you now they're out of the box, simple out of the box that, you know, I klaviyo and ISPs, but if you I like, translate it to real world brick and mortar people really appreciate when, you walk into a store and a customer has merch service, agent walks up you and says, how can I help you today?

Erik 00:10:03

Oh, you're looking for baseball mitts. Oh, those are in the back corner over here. Can I answer any questions for you? Oh, it's you know that that type of engagement to a visitor is really appreciated. Yes. You know, how do we evolve the simple, dumb pop up to a tool that engages and converts?

Jon 00:10:25

Well, I think you you have said it really well, which is been helpful, right? And their understanding of consumers coming in to the store, they want to leave that store and get on with their lives. So I'm going to help them get to the right department and show them where the things are and answer any questions that they have, as opposed to, you know, playing off of this, this brick and mortar, analogy.

Jon 00:10:50

If you if I walk into a store and someone throws a clipboard in front of me and says, give me your email address, I'm not, that's not helpful, right? I'm like, I don't even know if you have what I need. it's very annoying. First of all, it's disruptive. I'm going to turn around and leave, so that's the difference.

Erik 00:11:10

Well, and how how worse is it is if you walk in and give them your email and then you walk out and then the next day you walk back and they say, can we have your email again? Okay, wait, I already don't even know who I am. I was just here. Which gets into the how do you be helpful?

Erik 00:11:29

And you know, it's it's that personally personalization component.

Jon 00:11:35

Well I think there's personalization at play for sure. but I also think personalization is I like to call it like a graduate level course. And so many brands haven't gone through high school or even college to get to that course. Right? So they really try to think, what? How can I personalize my site as opposed to, well, let's just serve the mass amount of visitors with the correct navigation right of 90% of people are coming, and they're trying to follow some user journey, just allow them to take that user journey.

Jon 00:12:09

Right. And that is the big issue where folks want to jump to personalize and try to do a 1 to 1 with their website when they don't have the data to do it, they don't have a customer understanding, they haven't done their user testing, user research, and they certainly aren't considering what's happening in the heads of those consumers as they're coming to the site.

Erik 00:12:32

So we often look at trying to solve understand what problems we're trying. We're solving as a business. And you hit the nail on the head there with personalization has not been achievable. It hasn't been well for the average user because it's and just if we can solve that, it's going to enhance everyone's customer experience. Right. So you know, at Justuno the way we're approaching it is we're looking at similar industries.

Erik 00:13:08

So email marketing. 10 - 15 years ago you were not able to send one off emails to everyone that were personalize. So they built segmentation and automation. That is the future of the on site experience. You know figuring out who these who you're in, what segment you want to target, building that journey or then and then let it let it flow.

Jon 00:13:34

Well, we talked a little bit, start talking a little bit about that decision making phase. Right. And I think there's a couple of things to be thinking about. The decision fatigue is real, right? You've got people who you know, the more decisions that we make in a day, the more mentally drained we feel. And you've got people coming to your site that have lives.

Jon 00:13:59

They've been making decisions all day, and you're asking them to come in to make more decisions. I think what happens in those cases is people desert, right? They just stop making decisions altogether because they just like, I can't I'll have to come back to this tomorrow. And they they don't come back.

Erik 00:14:18

So you here it is again going back to the Amazon experience. They understand that. They understand you want to buy with one click. you know as we look at your work that Shopify is doing with their shop here. They're trying to replicate that. they have that new and I'm you know mentioned Shopify. Obviously there's other solutions.

Erik 00:14:41

But the they now have the shipping validation where you have a badge that you know, so they're they're starting to understand trying to give tools to their retailers to replicate what's been so successful at Amazon. Right. So that when you but now it gets into how do you communicate that dude landing on your website, which with all the other competing information you have on your website.

Jon 00:15:13

Well, there are two different key customer types that you need to really understand. And those are what we call the maximizer and the satis fires. So the maximizers they're really looking to understand every nuance, every available option in order to make the best decision possible. These are the folks who, you know, if they're looking for a product, they've got like 20 tabs open and they're looking on Amazon and the retailer and they're trying to compare notes and they're saying, well, this retailer has really good product descriptions and videos.

Jon 00:15:47

They probably don't have a bunch of A+ content on Amazon, but it's cheaper and I can get it next day. Right.

Erik 00:15:54

And it'll return.

Jon 00:15:55

And it's easy to return. They know you know, they know the check out. They know the process. They trust that have some trust with Amazon. So you know those folks really the key there is to provide better content than Amazon can and keep people on your site. And that's where personalization, segmentation etc. can come in to some degree.

Jon 00:16:18

but on the flip of that you have the satis fires. And these folks are just customers who are intent to find a really good solution to their problem, and they don't need to continue their search. They're like, you know what this product is? You know, I'm looking for a great backpack. This backpack is meets all my needs.

Jon 00:16:35

I'm good. I'm just going to buy it. It's not worth my time to find one that's $5 cheaper or whatever that might be thinking. Right. So you need to understand that if you do nothing else of personalization, just start with those two personas, right? And how can you make it very quick and easy for the folks who just want to get a purchase and move on and provide all the information that's necessary for the folks who really want to dive in deeper.

Jon 00:17:04

And it's harder than it sounds, but Amazon does a really good job at that by two things. One is, as you said, one click shopping for those people who just want to get it done and they do a really good job of not overwhelming you with too much information. now you can have a plus pages and really add a bunch of content if you want, or you get to that sales level where they let you have a plus.

Jon 00:17:26

Pages. I should say. But also they they meet the needs of the maximizers by having selection. Right? They know that they need to have a thousand different backpacks up there because somebody might want one in pink, someone might want one a black who knows. Right. And that's how they do it is by having selection not necessarily content. And so that's where brands can really compete is is having much better content.

Jon 00:17:55

and that hasn't changed. But you need to make sure that content is in a manner that's not overwhelming.

Erik 00:18:02

So if you win them with the content okay, how do you keep them? What further information is critical, like you say, quick and easy

In this episode of "The Conversion Show" podcast, Erik Christiansen interviews Drew Clark CEO, Founder, and Director at California Cowboy. Drew opened up about the rollercoaster ride of running a retail business, especially with the crumbling of the digital and seismic shifts in e-commerce. From website redesigns, site speed, and content creation to the return of physical stores; Erik and Drew cover the essential tweaks that can skyrocket your conversion rates.

Erik and Drew discuss:

• From fires to covid, how California Cowboy bounced back in the face of unpredictable challenges.
• The digital shift and its impact on marketing.
• Product features and design elements of California Cowboy apparel.
• The highs and lows of return on ad spend.
• Website redesign + speed, growth trajectory, and conversion rates.
• Community, cost-saving, and creating a collective experience through sharing retail space with local brands.

Host: Erik Christiansen, CEO of Justuno

Guest: Drew Clark, Drew Clark, CEO, Founder, & Director at California Cowboy

Transcript:

Intro 00:00:05

Welcome to the Conversion Show, a podcast that's all about. You guessed it, conversions, everything that gets you to your goal, whether that's purchase, lead capture app, install content downloads, chat engagement, or demo requests. We're talking conversions hosted by Erik Christiansen, CEO and co-founder of the leading conversion optimization platform, Justuno. On the conversion show, Erik sits down with industry-leading marketers, e-commerce growth experts, founders, and entrepreneurs to chat all things conversion marketing. Be sure to follow the conversion show podcast to be notified when a new episode goes live. Like what you hear? Leave us some love with a review. And now here's your host, Eric Christiansen.

Erik 00:00:50

Welcome to the conversion show. Today is a special day. It's our first in-person interview. Here I am joined by Drew Clark, CEO and founder of California Cowboy. California Cowboy, Do you want to share a little bit about California Cowboy? Sure. You guys are done?

Drew 00:01:09

Yeah, We make after sport apparel that's kind of designed to help you enjoy life offline as all of our product kind of has designed features that enable you to put your phone away. There's a dry pocket on the back of most of our products and it come with conversation cards. They're really fun. It can help you start or stop conversations, subtle reminders that it's so fun to talk to people in real life instead of just sliding into their dance.

Drew 00:01:36

And then there's also bottle pockets of package our shirts and robes.

Erik 00:01:39

You can lock your phone?

Drew 00:01:41

We do make a product at all, and we call it the pocket pouch that actually prevents electromagnetic signals from getting to your phone. So this is very dark edge technology fabric that you slide your filter to the pouch and you kind of put it down, and it's just committing to yourself and your loved ones and your friends that you're not going to look at your phone while you're trying to enjoy life with them. So we're kind of all about celebrating the outdoors, celebrating each other and togetherness. And you know, we know our way around a few beers.

Erik 00:02:12

So originally based out of San Francisco, you're here we're in now a popup store in Fairfax. Shopify.

Drew 00:02:22

We are on Shopify.

Erik  00:02:23

Shopify POS, I was in their store in Fairfax. Anyone in the area, go check it out. Shopify POS, klaviyo, really nice. We're talking about tech stack here, so I went into Drew's shop last week. I wrote that up and thank you. I use it every day in the shammy on the inside. Perfect. I don't need a towel anymore.

Erik 00:02:51

I walked in there and we started chatting about the last two years of business. And so for today, at any retailer that has experienced the third-party cookie demise and what it's done to your business, we're here through story. We're the last couple of years and then where we are today and how we're moving forward and being successful and run our retail businesses.

Erik 00:03:16:09 - 00:03:23:12

So with that said, you shared with me your ten x A6'S so let's start there.

Drew 00:03:23

Sure. So a lot of trolley here, but so that we've been around for quite for a kind of a while. We got pretty good at e-commerce in 2019.

Erik 00:03:35

Frame founded in 2000.

Drew 00:03:37

2016 and hit the market in 2017. Had a big bump on the road because our store where we were keeping all of our inventory was basically on fire. So we actually literally lost all of our inventory to fire it in the first year of business, which is pretty tough, but kind of recovered in 2018. And then really the end and e-com in 2019 and got pretty proficient with them kind of in the fall of 2019 and then in 2020 were really soft races.

Drew 00:04:14

Now COVID obviously happened, but we make product that's kind of designed to be outside. And so that was timed pretty and pretty well for us that COVID caused a significant number of problems for our supply chain. But, you know, e-commerce was get so our numbers were so good, in fact, that, you know, we make really unique and distinctive products.

Drew 00:04:36

And we were you know, we were working with a great agency that was really able to do a couple of different things for us.

Erik 00:04:43

Your price points a little higher.

Drew 00:04:44

The range. Yeah, we're premium slash luxury price points. So our shirts, you know, were a little bit less expensive. But you know, we've had to increase the price because raw materials and labor costs. But you know so right now our our shirts range from around 125 to 170.

Erik 00:05:03

I think.

Drew 00:05:03

Shirt that's kind of short Jacket.

Erik 00:05:04

Yeah. And I know Nicki's had her her robe for like about on the pulp street store years ago so. We're talking six-seven years. I don't know.

Drew 00:05:17

The durable great products so you know we make really great fun product. We're kind of unique in that our brand is seen it positioned as an outdoor brand. But there's there's a and there's a fun element to it. So you know most outdoor brands are that fun. Most luxury brands aren't that fun. We're one of the few kind of outdoor to like luxury premium luxury brands that actually takes our product development and our execution very seriously.

Drew 00:05:44

But we don't take ourselves too seriously. And you know, there's beer pockets at a lot of our stores. So you can imagine, you know, the way that we think about. 

Erik 00:05:52

Well, it comes with the Koozie.

Drew 00:05:53

Yeah, yeah.

Erik 00:05:54

I'm like with me, right? Or those watching the YouTubers here's accused there comes with every.

Drew 00:06:02

So yeah I know this is new found product.

Erik 00:06:07

Is this is this Cowboy?

Drew 00:06:08:28 - 00:06:30:17

It’s one of our older shirts so you know we make great product and it is really it works pretty well for online advertising and we got really good at selling it in store at retail, which is what my background is. But we got pretty good at selling kind of it, putting our value proposition together with, you know, creative ads.

Drew 00:06:30

And when we started, we've been on Shopify by the whole time, but we launched our agency, the guy who is kind of the head of the agency was like, Your guys' product is awesome, your brand is awesome. We're driving qualified traffic to your site and is just not converting. So he's like, we have to redesign said we basically took two months off from driving and traffic invested in redeveloping and redesigning the website both for a better brand and customer experience customer journey and brought a new team in to Shopify that was more effective.

Drew 00:07:06

And we then started traffic again after this. This guy had kind of done all this work with his team and our numbers just went the rest away. So we were kind of, you know, burning cash on it first. And then all of a sudden we went from like, you know, boss back day ads on social media, Facebook, most primarily Facebook and Instagram are better now, but we were you know, we were kind of getting like a one or two before the site redesign.

Drew 00:07:37

And that after we did the site redesign and tweaked our creatives a bit, we in many cases we are between a six and a 1314 return on that done. So that is basically printing money.

Erik 00:07:49

I'm like jaw dropping, like I'd never want to get back to hear what those things were that.

Drew 00:07:56

Yeah, I can talk about that too. But you know, we were kind of novices when we started and now I know you converse well.

Erik 00:08:04

Which is standard. I think that e-commerce like it's very much learning as you go for so many successful people.

Drew 00:08:12

Yeah, So that was great. We, you know, our numbers were so good that we, you know, we had been kind of pitching investors on our brand and our business for for a while. But it was in kind of 2020 when we started just absolutely crushing it, that people started to really take notice. We're growing pretty quickly and we actually were able to raise a couple of bucks institutional funding, and that was great.

Drew 00:08:42

So that enabled us to invest in inventory. You know, our team out a little bit, professionalize a few things that you're right scrappy and and also do so work to counter refine and brand positioning.

Erik 00:08:58

Do you think that getting that funding a lot of are you happy you took that money in terms of did that allow you to do to grow more fuel on the fire, so to speak?

Drew 00:09:09

It's certainly been the first year here. What at the time the strategy was very much like the strategy for, you know, literally hundreds of other track in Sumer apparel, CPG, you know, anyway in making consumer products which was throughout grow and razor seed or series or series B then eventually exit. So we kind of raised our round tail or market and if we'd done it a year or two ahead of what we did would have been different story.

Drew 00:09:46

But as I'll explain right now, you know, tell you go at it. So basically back in in 2020 and just lighting it up first few months of 2021, we were just absolutely crushing to iOS 14 apples. You know, kind of privacy rollout started to take its impact to late February, March, still doing pretty well kind of through the spring by the tail end of kind of like April.

Drew 00:10:16

And then when we started to get into it, we started to see with the advent of iOS 14 and, you know, most our customers, you know, what I saw most of our customers, how iPhones, we saw, you know, pretty good product. So that's that's who our users are. The message if not most, it had a significant portion of our our traffic was beta from mobile.

Drew 00:10:41

You know we saw it as that adoption kind of start-up. It went from you know five or 10% of Apple users to a 60 to 70% of Apple users. We just saw our driver that's not restricted to Apple. So we kind of initially said we are June is our biggest fear. So basically spent a ton of money you know trial by the revenue forecasted by our efficiency was dropping at an alarming rate and we probably should've made some other pivots and what we did, but it basically cost us a lot of money to kind of take the numbers of one.

Drew 00:11:20

So by the time we got to kind of the end of 2021, we were trying to go out and raise our series A, we saw pretty significant difference in the capacity were able to deliver just for efficiency perspective.

Erik 00:11:35

And hearing you speak to each individual month. I mean, I can barely recall what I did two months ago and you have this each month. How's it feel talking about it today? You know, that was two years ago. Yeah. It seems like it's fresh in your mind.

Drew 00:11:53

Yeah, it is a kind of a traumatic experience because things were going so well for, you know, for a really critical period and kind of scaling of business. Yeah. And it it's, it still remains. It's fresh. And I think it's kind of the trajectory of it and how it impacted me.

Erik 00:12:13

But I mean, you're not alone in this. You have a group of other retailers you kind of…

Drew 00:12:20

Yeah.

Drew 00:12:22

You know, the direct to consumer businesses have all struggle either to kind of keep their businesses afloat and in many cases they've had to downsize, which is certainly been the case with us, you know, really painful not to take some of the steps that we both for me personally, you know, my team and our customers. But yeah, there's things that had to happen that were were really tough and including, you know, what what you've seen happen now is that all of these businesses that Yeah.

Drew 00:12:58

Said they would never up in a store like guess what we have to open a retail store because the cost of acquisition online became so inefficient that it actually started to come into parity with the customer, you know, walking it straight to a retail unit operator, retail store. And people also started to other sales channels like wholesale to not only try to get out of this discounting factor, but to find other ways to lower, you know, the acquisition cost, which was, you know, once very, very efficient.

Drew 00:13:31

And any business it's operating now pretty much just have about strategy. You can't just be this digitally native brand, the tidal wave of sort of consumer use of e-commerce. It happened kind of threw out of it. It's you know, it accelerated by now. So that wave really crashed and then roll back in a way that I think very few people predicted kind of across industries.

Erik 00:13:57

I mean, pre pre-COVID, you know, we were always saying, look, online retails only it's still single digits percent of of global retail. And then you know Harley until seen he spoke a lot about this during COVID of how you know we've seen in you know what was supposed to happen over ten years happened in one year in terms of the shift online.

Erik 00:14:21

They rode that tidal wave as he spoke of and it was exciting about the time, you know, as GCs were emerging, as having been a retailer, the ability to so efficiently get to a customer and it cuts out so much red tape with distributors and that entire world. What so as you are trying to manage this, it sounds like present day, it's about, you know, we can kind of skip maybe forward a little in terms of because we don't need to rehash those memories.

Erik 00:14:53

And a lot of our listeners have lived through that. And for the last two years you've been living through this. So over these last we'll go through these last two years adapting and then present day. So adapting, it sounds like, okay, you have a brick and mortar store now. You had the one on pulp though. Was that dirt, what year.

Drew 00:15:14

20 2017. Yeah, it is 25. Yeah. Yeah.

Erik 00:15:20

So in the how is it for you, you have a background of retail so you know, but now you're in spring, now you have to like plug in distribution or like now you're managing a brick and mortar. Now you are, are you doing wholesale. A little, little bit.

Drew 00:15:36

So very, very constrained, which is kind of the opposite problem that many retailers have had. We we've never had a problem with demand for our product. We had it had two layers. But yeah, initially kind of the beginning of the supply chain kind of getting cut up and then see, you know, flashing forward. We had to shrink that business aggressively to kind of get off of the ground at any cost.

Drew 00:16:02

Yeah. Hamster wheel in which the market is boarded up through the middle of 2012, like into we're actually not going to try to grow out. We're going to try to pivot to profitability, which they started to reward that that philosophy, that perspective.

Erik 00:16:21

The technology world is not much different.

Drew 00:16:23

Or quite like. So that was a very, very painful decision that we had to make.

Erik 00:16:32

What are you know wholesales.

Drew 00:16:34

We tried shrinking the business.

Erik 00:16:35

Yeah I mean wholesale is a different business to run and I know Shopify and BigCommerce have been working to build that into their software to take it on. Have you seen other DTC brands like successfully adapt and understand that market.

Drew 00:16:55:28 - 00:17:39:13

I think a lot of people are and everyone kind of has their own niche. You know as far as Shopify goes, Shopify has tried to, I think, get themselves into the wholesale business better. It's the the economics are particularly favorable for brands like it really makes sense. You had a DTC business, but the way that they of charge for wholesale is astronomical really at least looked at it and we just connected we can describe it like what it is we're going to be paying them a ton of money or very little functionality, despite the fact that would make things a little bit easier.

In this episode of "The Conversion Show," Erik Christiansen, CEO of Justuno, is joined by Travis Logan, Co-Founder & CTO of Justuno, and this week's guest Brian Peters, Head of Platform Partnerships at Shopify. The conversation kicks off by looking at the most talked about statistic from Brain's presentation at the Shopify Enterprise Partner Summit 2023, 35% of Shopify Plus merchants have seen smaller cart sizes and 50% are seeing less site traffic and lower conversion rates. Brian breaks down what this means for merchants and what the future looks like for E-commerce. 

Erik, Travis, and Brian discuss:

• Finding the right product-market fit.
• Brand identity online.
• Influencer marketing
• Marketing is brand experience.
• Does high customization equal high converting?
• To survive as a brand you have to convert at checkout.
• Zero-party data expands beyond your email list.
• Why Shopify is the number one converting checkout in the world.

Host: Erik Christiansen, CEO of Justuno

Guest: Travis Logan, CTO at Justuno

Guest: Brian Peters, Head of Platform Partnerships at Shopify

Transcript:

Erik 00:00:50 - 00:01:22

Welcome to the show today. I'm very excited because I have two guests. And so this is going to be a jam-packed episode where we're going to gain some insights into Shopify like never before. We're going to learn what that the leadership, what's top of mind with the Shopify leadership along with just, you know, leadership. Because today I have my my co-founder, Travis Logan, CTO of just, you know, on the show and Brian Peters, head of platform partnerships at Shopify.

Erik 00:01:22 - 00:01:33

So hang on, today is going to be a very insightful show. So we're going to jump into it. And the reason I have Brian on the show today. Welcome, Brian. Well, thank you.

Brian 00:01:33 - 00:01:34

Thank you. Good to be here.

Erik 00:01:34 - 00:02:06

I have Brian on here because I was down at the Shopify Enterprise event down in L.A., right by where that I-10 fire was, what, two days ago? I'm not surprised because that, you know, no Shopify, they like to select very colorful neighborhoods to have events like this colorful, really cool spot in the heart of downtown L.A. Brian got on stage and gave a presentation and he had a slide that stood out to me.

Erik 00:02:06 - 00:02:45

And that's what we're talking about today. The quotes from the slide were, according to a survey of Shopify Plus merchants, 35% have seen smaller cart sizes and 50% are seeing less site traffic and lower conversion rates. Now, we also the second reason we're here is Travis and I were at the Google next event in San Francisco wandering the expo and we stumbled upon a Shopify booth at Google Nexus conference.

Erik 00:02:46 - 00:03:16

Which one was surprising? And two, the big letters across it were the number one converting checkout in the world. So today we are going to talk about Shopify and conversions and no, no one better than Brian Peters to join us and no one better than Travis who's working to build into Shopify Viser API server pixel event publishing segment extensions, everything we're building into right now.

Erik 00:03:16 - 00:03:45

So that's setting the stage for what you'll hear today. So Brian, thanks for joining us for taking the time. Brian Brian has been a Shopify for just about five years now. We've been working together for years and watched Brian grow up in Shopify as well. Congratulations on Running and heading the partnerships and the ecosystem that slide you shared.

Erik 00:03:45 - 00:03:56

Let's start there. Where did those data points come from? how did you come to present that slide?

Brian 00:03:56 - 00:04:23

It's kind of funny. That was probably the most asked-about slide in many of the presentations that happened at the summit. And it was I don't think I realized at the time when I put the deck together that that was going to be such a controversial slide. I was like, wow, I should have put that in there because it kind of freaked people out a little bit, to be honest with you.

Brian 00:04:23 - 00:04:50

The data came from a survey that we ran with a lot of our Shopify Plus merchants and here's a little bit of juxtaposition here where if you look at Shopify this quarter, their earnings call and just like DTC in general, like Commerce continues to grow online, commerce continues to grow. Shopify merchants are kicking ass. Honestly, quarter over quarter, more people are becoming entrepreneurs than ever before.

Brian 00:04:50 - 00:05:13

Our brands are growing, larger brands are joining Shopify. So on one hand, you have this incredible growth in the ecommerce space. On the other hand, you have this kind of looming like, wow, marketing. Marketing is hard. And I think that even when I first joined Shopify, when I joined Shopify five years ago, I was hired to basically run the marketing technology vertical.

Brian 00:05:13 - 00:05:42:04

which I love because every single quarter we would run a merchant survey and the number one challenge is like, okay, what is your biggest challenge about running the Adidas E-Store online store? Every single time and I'm pretty sure that data holds. Today is like marketing. Marketing is by far the hardest thing I do. I've actually talked to we have some really great or we did at one point, like entrepreneurs and residents where they have like a full-time Shopify job, but they were kind of running stores on the side.

Brian 00:05:42 - 00:06:06

And I would talk to these people and they'd be like, You know when I first started a brand, I was like, I thought the hardest thing would be like finding the products or like, you know, like packaging them or shipping them. But like really what you are as an entrepreneur is like you're a marketer and then like, you run this like clothing or jewelry or whatever business on the side because you can't get people to come to your website, then you're you're just not going to survive.

Brian 00:06:06 - 00:06:29

I think what we're seeing is like the top of the funnel stuff is, is people are getting better and better at and like things like Facebook ads have made that like great. But it almost seems now and the reason I showed that slide to kind of close the thought here is like it's more like first-party data and converting the sort of like competition's fierce, right?

Brian 00:06:29 - 00:06:48

So like converting the most amount of people you possibly can on your website is the absolute most important thing you can do when you're thinking about building your site. And so that's that. That side sort of reflection is like new paradigm of marketing that we're in, which is like a major focus on conversion, not just top of the funnel.

Erik 00:06:48 - 00:07:15

The that paradigm shift, you know, with costs across the board rising everywhere, it's harder to get that get those visitors to the site. It's it's really trying to figure out the word conversion. You know, Shopify is never use the word conversion before. And that's why I'm so happy to see Harley out there talking about how important conversion is, how checkout so important.

Erik 00:07:15 - 00:07:41

The it's never been used, but, but people need to now because it's so expensive to get these visitors. Harley when he was on stage speaking, I forget his name the guy from Nike, you know they talked about, you know, with enterprise commerce, the focus there of the brand experience and understanding the consumer demands. And he talked about in order to do that, you have to have that first-party data, zero-party data on the customer.

Erik 00:07:41 - 00:08:12

I thought that was really interesting. You know, hearing Shopify is trying to understand Shopify as perspective of how do you influence conversion rates? And it's really coming down to this identity, to personalization, to segmenting your visitors so you can target them with the right message at the right time with the right customer. The you know, I think it might be good to just pause right now and thank our sponsor better than Audi Components.

Travis 00:08:12 - 00:08:38

So I employees I have a little side shop my side shop better than Dutch shop where I sell these Audi digital gauge displays that I built for myself and gathered, you know, a following of people who wanted them. I was like, okay, I could build some more, I suppose. And it actually has been a fun side hobby of mine.

Brian 00:08:38:24 - 00:08:46:09

So do you agree with the statement of conversion is more important than ever, but yours is well, interesting because you have such a loyal following to start.

Travis 00:08:46 - 00:09:03

That's my mind's a very Yeah. Mind is not your typical DTC at all. And by the way, I don't know if it was mentioned, but it's on Shopify of course, and I hope so. And I was going to say as well, like you were just speaking earlier about marketing, of course being the hardest thing. Of course, I totally agree.

Travis 00:09:03 - 00:09:39

But I think Shopify is just done such an amazing job at making every other part of it so dang easy that it has shine a light on how much, how hard the marketing aspect of it is left to do. Because I know, like you mentioned, you know, product designing, shipping and overall like site functions, I don't have to think about, you know, my site going down on or how am I going to add another product or how am I going to offer international, you know, UPS or international DHL or whatever.

Travis 00:09:39 - 00:10:05

It's just it's all how to take credit cards, PayPal, all that fun stuff. It's just like all out of the box experience with Shopify and it's been on was amazing. I knew that, of course, upfront and that's why I chose it. But yeah, as far as my experience on that site, it's very different because I, my, my market, my possible market is 3 to 4000 people strong, I think because you have to have this special component for your car for mine to work with.

Travis 00:10:06- 00:10:28

So literally it's just all my marketing is on Facebook, it's Facebook and word of mouth people, people will have my thing, they go to shows and they this their favorite upgrade they done on the car. So they tell everybody about it. But I don't bother, you know, doing Google advertising or anything or even Facebook advertising like that because I just joined the Audi groups and I post it and everybody allows me to post it because everybody loves it.

Travis 00:10:28 - 00:10:35

So I have it now front. But the same time, my expansion capability is really is really limited.

Erik 00:10:35 - 00:11:00

Paris is being very modest here. And his what he's done well, I love it for two reasons. One, you know, it's so fantastic that Travis himself is a Shopify retailer. Our CTO is like when he has like he's breaking things on both sides to make both. He understands Shopify so deep now and with our product. That just is a perfect recipe for anyone I know.

Erik 00:11:00 - 00:11:41

Like a lot of other like I remember, you know, like with Tobi still runs his shop and everyone still runs their shops. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know Shopify encourages employees to do it, but what he's not telling you is it's the classic DTC DTC product where if you have a great product, it potentially can sell itself because it makes marketing so much easier when you have a product that people are willing to write to create their own YouTube videos and post it, or they're so excited about their product, they're doing a video and posting to social channels is getting all this viral marketing, which you don't hear that word viral marketing anymore.

Erik 00:11:41:13 - 00:11:44:11

Really. It's maybe it's just it's you.

Travis 00:11:44 - 00:11:48

It's really only, you know, if the Kardashians post something like that's about it.

Erik 00:11:48 - 00:12:10

It's influencer marketing, but that's what drives Travis's business and he doesn't spend a dollar on marketing. Those are the ones we love or it's like incredible products. You just have to and make sure that brand experience carries through which Travis is talking about The basic things that chef has simplified. They follow through with it because, you know, we talk about retention.

Erik 00:12:10 - 00:12:34

If someone buys something from Travis, they got to have a great experience. They got to it's got to be shipped to them on time. You got to communicate shipping, you know, the whole shipping world on the product page. And part of the experience, which I think is critical and makes marketers' jobs easier if they're second third touches are positive ones versus negative ones, right, with customers?

Brian 00:12:34 - 00:12:51

Well, that's what I think about a lot too, because like, not everybody is like I feel like there's probably more brands out there that have a great product that people don't know about that the brands like, I feel like we get to see. I mean, why there's 3 million businesses on Shopify. Like, how do you get to the Travis point, right?

Brian 00:12:51 - 00:13:13

Which is like, I have a like a super loyal following of ten, 20,000 people buying my products and talk about my products. I think the interesting thing is, is like that's why conversion so important because a lot of these entrepreneurs are starting out new and they may not have that like product market fit and immediately or like Travis, it sounds like your product is like pretty niche, which actually like is the best.

Brian 00:13:13 - 00:13:33

Probably one of the best parts about it is it's quality, its niche and the experience is good. Like a lot of these, you know, a lot of these people, right? A lot of people like starting in a space is pretty crowded, you know? And like if you get ten visits, ten visitors, your website in the first week, like how do you I mean, and that's like and you're right, Travis, I think you made a good point, right?

Brian 00:13:33 - 00:13:53

Like if all the toil, if you will toil is a word we like to use now, trough by like if all the toil of starting a business is gone and the only thing left to do is market. And you have a million people like, wow, Shopify made starting a business super easy. Now everybody's competing over who's better at marketing.

Brian 00:13:53 - 00:14:14

it's tough. And then so like every single visitor matters, whereas before it's like the people are winning. Like we're really good at Facebook ads or like, yeah, they had custom-built websites like no one else can do. But like now all that those tools like in your hands. So then it does become like it almost becomes like a marketing function and then it becomes the experience function on top of that.

Erik 00:14:14:21 - 00:14:42:09

That's what marketing is. It's brand experience, right? To have a positive experience. It's when you're on the site and then once you engage and purchase for that, for the secondary purchase or if they land on the site as a first-time visitor, you're building that trust. You're providing the information that they need to take that next step and that or.

Brian 00:14:42 - 00:14:53

In addition to building trust too, which is what I think Justuno does great, is like they may not be ready to buy. Right? And so, like, trust could be a lot.

Brian 00:14:54 - 00:15:28

Of different things, you know, And that's what I think that a lot of people are talking about like zero party data now is like zero party data is like expands away from just people who have signed up to your email list. And I know that in the early days Justuno you like were the most powerful email converter on a website now it's expanded, now we're an identity tool and I feel like Eric you were saying this you right like this term identity is like very it's been around forever but no one's really talked about it because it was always like kind of a negative connotation, right?

Brian 00:15:28 - 00:15:52

Like, oh my gosh, date is going to be used to like creep on Instagram and then they're going to target me. I think what people are realizing is that they actually like, like personalize ads and they just didn't know it yet, you know? But they want to have agency over the brands that show that to them. And so I think people are willing to give up data to brands they trust, and then brands have like the power to use that in a responsible way.

Brian 00:15:52 - 00:15:54

So I would say we're not.

Travis 00:15:54 - 00:16:10

You know, going to see that business one way or another. It's whether or not the advertisements are at all meaningful to you. So I totally agree. People do, whether they admit it or not. I think, generally speaking, people do like the personalized identified experience.

Erik 00:16:11 - 00:16:33

Well, and that's where retail has shifted, is that now the consumer is in charge of how they want to purchase where they want to, how they want to and when. And that's what retailers are trying to figure out is, okay, well, each customer has different needs. We can't just hit them with a 10% off coupon lead capture anymore.

Erik 00:16:33 - 00:16:42

We need to really engage them in a meaningful way. And there's so many creative, cool ways that that you can engage with users now.

Brian 00:16:42 - 00:16:43

Yeah.

Travis 00:16:43 -...

In this episode of "The Conversion Show," Erik Christiansen, CEO of Justuno, interviews Alex Courselle, Founder and CEO of KARL Mission a conversion rate optimization (CRO) agency. With over a decade of experience in CRO, Alex shared some invaluable insights that are relevant as we approach the holiday season. Alex discusses the science behind unlocking successful conversions, the art of building trust with customers, and the rising trend of focusing on SEO due to increasing costs.

Erik and Alex discuss:

• The significance of analyzing mobile and desktop traffic
• The tactful application of product recommendations and upsells
• The need for engaging content
• The DNA of successful CRO clients
• Where businesses fall short in understanding client personas

Host: Erik Christiansen, CEO of Justuno

Guest: Alex Courselle, Founder & CEO of KARL Mission

Transcript:

Erik 00:00:50

Welcome back to the Conversion Show. Today I have a special guest that I think anyone going into this holiday season is going to be very excited about. With me today is Alex Courselle, who has ten-plus years in CRO and is founder CEO of KARL Mission. So if you are in front of a computer, check out karlmission.com You'll get the whole breakdown.

Erik 00:01:14

But welcome to the show Alex.

Alex 00:01:17

Thank you so much for having me. That's pretty cool.

Erik 00:01:20

So for today's show, it is November 6th. And everyone's gearing up. You know they've hit play. Everyone's already started their cyber sales. because you know it's not just one day anymore. We're all getting the emails. But there's still more to be done. Every website can always be optimized. Campaigns can always be updated. So today what we're going to do for our listeners is really hear, you know, with Alex's experience, what's trending, what is top of mind with CRO today. And see if we can't get some insights that maybe you can still apply to your sites for this holiday season. So with that, I'm putting you on the spot right off the bat, Alex. But before we do that, let's set the stage for your background. Ten years in CRO, it's very rare for us to come across talent and experience like yours.

Erik 00:02:20

So could you just share with the crowd, what you're doing at KARL Mission and how you got there?

Alex 00:02:27

Yeah. For sure. So. Basically, I started in design and I went into SEO. I stayed in that cluster of digital marketing kind of roles, up to that time I was production director. And then our company, I started being bought by a prospect, and then the option was open to do whatever. So I just decided to start into CRO. It was back in Paris and a prospect and very interesting because at the time there were no merch products and people didn't understand it as well. So it needs to be, you know, easy to understand for everyone. So I had to create the packages and everything. So I really started from scratch. My whole experience didn't really have much guidance or anything. So it was really it was a bit the Western at the time. I felt like the field was empty, the street was empty, no building, nothing.

Alex 00:03:24

You know, we just had like optimizely as a tool, a bit of a b testing started to show up at that time, but it was like, you know, click their Crazy Egg, Hotjar that was the tools was already there. You know, since that time, and I worked in agencies for like my whole life, my whole career. So it came to a point that I was like, okay, I'm going to I'm going to open my own business. We're going to do many because that's the product that I care the most with SEO, but because both of them clash, and that happens quite a lot in agencies. So it's quite it's quite interesting. We can talk about it a bit later, but it clashed between the two units quite often. And, and then yeah, my emergency and the value that we wanted is to really be genuine and work with people that have genuine products, genuine services, genuine businesses. And we wanted to not be rich, but just, you know, like change a bit the face of the word when it comes to CRM.

Alex 00:04:21

I explained to the newbies that you have powers. You can decide to use them for the good or the bad and decide for what you want to use your skills, your craft. You know at the end of your career what will stand out, you know, is it helping some non-profit organization or anything? Yeah. So that's where that's where we went. And since then we've been really meeting the right genuine people that we can work on. In the long run. That's what is good as well. To work with genuine people is we have where longer contracts, where longer commitments. Our Agency has no contracts. So people can actually stop when they want. It's plug-and-play. No, no, no knife under the throat with a two month, 2 or 3 months notice or anything. We just keep it casual and we just make it as genuine as possible.

Erik 00:05:11

The you mentioned who you work with is critical. And you know, what is the the DNA of the successful clients you work with that understand the value that CRO is bringing to them.

Alex 00:05:27

I think it's, it's to start with, the clients are quite aware of what CRO is. So people that have like that education, the other thing is I feel like there's two things happening on the market. There are some people who just learn about CRO and learn how to use it. Some people think it's just like, tips and tricks around there. Some understand that there's a science behind it. So people that understand the science behind those guys are going to win because they're going to cover all the basics, which is quite important. You know, they're going to have a real tracking plan. They're going to really track that data. They have real numbers that they can improve. That's the first step. And when it comes to the second step I feel like they actually care. They care about making the customer experience better. And you know what was customer service 20 years ago. And now it's user experience. That's a bit how I would do an analogy about it is like if you don't invest in your user experience, you know, you're going to have more to pay on your customer service.

Alex 00:06:34

We have airline companies that ask us to do CRO for them to decrease the number of calls on their call center. And that makes sense because we actually, you know, we just look at like the top 20 top 50 queries that we're getting from the call centers, and we put them on the FAQs. Right. Like very simple type of process. But it saves a lot of time to everyone, especially to the users that can find these answers really quickly.

Erik 00:06:59

Our belief is that the foundation of great conversion is incredible customer experience. So, you know, it's it's often working with brands that that are customer centric in the end or you're the results are going to fall out from trying to figure out how to create incredible experience. Like you mentioned, it's those little low-hanging fruits.

Alex 00:07:20

Yeah. For sure for us as well. Like one of the things that I focus the most on, and some people will find it quite annoying when I say that, but I really focus above the full strategy.

Alex 00:07:34

I really focus above the fold strategy. Like what people can see, I can, I can see. So far, attention span on desktop is like 3 to 5 seconds. On mobile, I can even be less if you don't have a strategy above the fold and people don't understand what you're doing, what you're about, you know, you trust. And so how are you going to tell your stories? And you didn't have like a proper thinking about how you're going to roll it out, then you're going to miss out. So if you're lucky and you've been spending some ads at the same time, it's it's really too bad.

Erik 00:08:05

So between science and care, the care is the clear obvious. One of you have to be customer-centric and just constantly thinking about how to make the customer experience better. So to make that happen, you have to have a science behind it. Can you share more of like of, you know, your your model with the science side of it?

Alex 00:08:28

Yeah for sure.

Alex 00:08:29

So when it comes to the science, I'm very old school. So like everyone in the team knows, you know, like I've been training everyone for quite a while. Mike been in the business with me for eight years and she's she's my number two there. And basically what is interesting is I ask them to always cover the basics. So always to go to Google Analytics, you know, to check the data. For me, it's very important that I know the numbers better than my clients know their numbers, because then we can have real conversations, because now we on the same standing point where I understand your product, I understand your problems.

Erik 00:09:07

 What numbers do you start with? What are your foundational numbers?

Alex 00:09:12

it's quite interesting. Yeah, I were really deep in on what type of website. So if it's like an e-commerce, it would be, I don't know, bounce rate I would look at. But now I've been straight disappeared because now we're on GeForce. I will be on government, I guess.

Alex 00:09:27

we I would look at, you know, the price like the average basket. I would look at the number of like conversions for sure. So conversion rates I would look at the overall traffic. But what I'm curious about is like, you know, the first thing that I always look at is the linking fruit, as you said. So for me, the bounce rate and people that don't engage, I always try to understand why they don't engage. And if I can solve that issue, if you have an 80% conversion rate, new product page, you reduce it to 40. For sure. You get a massive impact on your sales and you didn't do much. You just make sure that people engage with the page more. Um, so that's that's the first numbers that I would look at. I like to look as well at the demographics and coming back to like the, you know, where is the gap between desktop and mobile. Do I have like a massive gap between people that order on mobile and desktop? That means that maybe the experience on mobile needs to be improved because it's it's like -50% compared to desktop these days.

Alex 00:10:30

A lot of things like that can come up. So I like to open Google Analytics and tell the story and go through it. But one of the other things that I do at the back of my head as well, is to make sure that when the client persona is, is unclear or they have none, then I actually come up with a clear picture of like, this is where your persona are right now. This is the edge they have. This is who they are. This is what type of jobs they do. Like. Persona is one of the basics that companies now let go. Sometimes I feel that I'm quite sorry.

Erik 00:11:04

Which who do they let go first?

Alex 00:11:07

The persona, the persona. Creating the persona. Creating the right audience for your business.

Erik 00:11:11

Persona?

Alex (00:11:12

Yeah.

Erik 00:11:12

Your conversion journey that you speak of. Exactly.

Alex 00:11:15

Exactly like that's the people we talk to. So if we don't know them, how can we talk to them the right way?

Erik 00:11:22

1,000%. And that is, you know, that's the type of thing that.

Erik 00:11:28

When it comes to audiences, Shopify is launching their visitor API. They're doing a lot with segments like everyone's trying to understand who the actual website visitor is and then speak to them with relevant content. That's what personalization is. And digital marketers have nailed that with off-site, with marketing, with email paid. But we're just now getting into the on-site experience with with users.

Alex 00:11:57

It's interesting because, you know, we have we work with very big companies and some of them have no personnel or they have half of it, or they did it like five years ago and they never updated it. Like, I'm not saying you need to spend every day of the week on your personnel. I'm just saying they just need to be solid enough that you know who you talk to. Like, what are they looking for? What will make them stay on the website or click somewhere?

Erik 00:12:24

You know, when you're talking about whether it's lead capture, AOF, sales, conversion. I think one of the biggest personas overlooked is new visitors versus repeat visitors.

Erik 00:12:39

And that repeat visitor is either a repeat non-customer or customer. Those three buckets, if you focus on those, it'll tell you you can really start digging in and making a big impact.

Alex 00:12:52

I wonder if we can still do that now with D4. I wonder because now the new visitors, we don't keep the IP for too long, so they consider new visitors, even if they're not after a while. So that's something that might change now with Dh4. I'm curious to see how it's going to go. We still we still like debating with the team. How are we going to go through those reports with Dh4 now that we have well as data and before.

Erik 00:13:20

I'll be an interesting one to track how they change that, because, you know, with CRMs and everything, how we're building our own own profiles and and filling them that. What can you speak further on that?

Alex 00:13:35

when it comes to CRM, we we've been working a lot with like the major tools on the market. And it's been it's been very interesting because each its business is different.

Alex 00:13:47

So depending on what the catch and where the catch is, we've been able to do some really, really like, you know, I would say good magic on that because like was linking the marketing with the CRM team and making sure that we actually understand who they are. We understand one of the main thing that we figured is when we make sure that the storytelling is at the right time, at the right pace, with the right information, to not overload people. Because when you product is complicated, like CRM, or when your product is complicated like a car, it's really easy to get people lost into like so many choices and so many messages, but it doesn't bring them like anywhere. So it's to like breakdown this information and slice it to the like to basically give it the right time on the right triggers.

Erik 00:14:37

Speaking of the right time, right customer, it's definitely we're hearing that a lot in conversations. You mentioned desktop and mobile. I'm I'd love to hear more about how you're approaching that because, you know, we're seeing you know, some you know, some clients with 70% of their traffic's mobile.

Erik 00:14:55

Obviously, conversion rates differs between desktop and mobile. But even myself I found I found myself making you know, I made some big purchases this past weekend just while still in bed, you know, a matter of few clicks. And I finally got some things done that I wanted to without ever getting out of bed. 100% mobile. What? What are you seeing with clients? And is there anything that the audience should be looking at when it comes to their mobile specifically?

Alex 00:15:29

I would go to Aja and I wouldn't go. I would go on Ojai. I would go on analytics, and I would look at the gap between mobile and desktop. And I would try to understand, like one, where is the average field? And, you know, and where people stop scrolling because on the job would have that, for example, or Java and any other tool. We use the glass box a lot as well. Um, and, and basically, yeah, I would look at what's the customer journey look like, you know, where do they stop and where do they like attention stop as well to understand where they drop off.

Alex 00:16:03

And from there, it's interesting to see as well. Like, you know, we have some clients where the messaging again I will come back to that strategy is like we should have strategies that are based on attention span because attention span is the big is the big end break that that we have. You know, it's like it doesn't matter how beautiful your website is, if no one goes past the fold, you're just doing your website for maybe like 20% of the of the users that will land on it. So it's awesome. But it's maybe not what we want to do. So I don't want to overcrowd as well that space. But having a strategy above the fold is is the most important thing that I would recommend.

Erik 00:16:44

Attention span I like I like that view on it because everyone is all over the place, and that's where even conversion comes in. It's so critical. I was having a conversation recently with a Shopify team. No, no it was. Um, with Alan Burt from Blue Stout about product recommendation and product upsell and whether or not.

Erik 00:17:08

Offering an upsell might distract your visitor to the point where they don't check out. So where is the diminishing returns of trying to increase AOF with a product recommendation or upsell? Because if you say, hey, would you also like this, you then are sending them down a further conversion journey versus getting them to check out. Have you experienced that? Have you looked at that?

Alex 00:17:32

Yeah for sure. We experience it all the time for those. And it's quite interesting because I think if you buy wallpaper, you want to buy the glue that goes over there or like you maybe want to buy the table or you want to buy like, you know, the brush that you're going to need to put the glue on the back of the wallpaper. But if you buy a TV, you might not need to buy a chair. And that's where it needs to be a bit smart. And so far, to be honest, you know, there's a lot of things that comes from good feelings, but the