Key Takeaways

• AI has drastically changed the demand for content, especially in video.
• Leveraging AI tools can lead to exponential growth in audience engagement.
• Video content is essential for building trust and driving conversions.
• Creating content across multiple platforms enhances visibility and reach.
• AI can help identify trending topics quickly and efficiently.
• Building a community around your content can lead to increased monetization opportunities.
• Automation can save significant time for content creators and marketers.
• Using AI for video production can streamline the content creation process.
• Understanding platform algorithms is crucial for maximizing content reach.
• Networking with other entrepreneurs can provide valuable insights and opportunities.

Chapters

00:00 Leveraging AI Tools for Content Creation

00:37 Transitioning from SEO to AI Content

04:45 Understanding AI's Impact on Viewership

08:56 The AI Profit Boardroom and Community Building

11:18 Foundational Steps for Modern SEO

12:42 The Power of Video in SEO Strategy

14:31 AI Tools for Video Production

18:04 Identifying Trending Topics with AI

21:08 Leveraging Video for E-commerce Success

22:28 Maximizing Content Distribution Across Platforms

25:02 Building Communities with School

26:15 Cultural Insights on Communication and Technology

Topics we discuss:

takeaways

• Customer Success is a powerful marketing tool.
• Kelsey has built the CS team over eight years.
• Identifying client success stories is crucial for marketing.
• Educational content is prioritized in their strategy.
• Patience is essential in content creation.
• Collaboration with technology partners enhances client success.
• Full screen promotions outperform traditional methods.
• CS leaders should embrace humor and authenticity.
• Measuring content success is vital for improvement.
• Building strong client relationships fosters trust and collaboration.

Takeaways

• E-commerce maturity checklist helps assess digital readiness.
• Manufacturers are increasingly seeking digital transformation.
• Retention marketing is crucial for B2B success.
• Leadership buy-in is essential for digital initiatives.
• Incremental changes can lead to significant improvements.
• Understanding customer behavior is key to e-commerce success.
• Industry 4.0 is reshaping manufacturing and distribution.
• Collaboration across departments enhances project outcomes.
• Ethan's book aims to guide manufacturers in e-commerce.
• Building relationships is vital for digital sales.

Chapters

00:00 Understanding E-commerce Maturity and Its Importance

01:43 The E-commerce Maturity Checklist Explained

04:12 Challenges in Digital Transformation for Manufacturers

06:58 Retention Marketing vs. Growth Marketing

09:21 Incremental Changes for Digital Success

11:48 The Role of Leadership in E-commerce Transformation

14:30 The Future of E-commerce and Industry 4.0

17:14 Ethan's Journey and Upcoming Book Release

Jordan Brannon from Coalition Technologies discusses the evolving landscape of AI marketing, particularly the integration of AI and the importance of marketplaces and zero party data. He emphasizes the value of quizzes and surveys in capturing customer insights, which can enhance marketing strategies and improve customer experiences. The discussion also covers the challenges of cart abandonment and the future of marketplaces as they adapt to AI-driven consumer behavior.

Takeaways:

-AI is transforming digital marketing into a marketplace.

-Quizzes and surveys provide valuable customer insights.

-Zero party data is essential for personalized marketing.

-Understanding customer feedback can enhance user experience.

-Cart abandonment is often due to poor checkout processes.

-AI can optimize marketing strategies effectively.

-The future of e-commerce will focus on loyalty and relationships.

-Shopify's integration with AI is a game changer.

-Consumer behavior insights drive marketing success.

-Effective marketing requires understanding and adapting to AI trends.

Chapters

00:56 The Value of Quizzes and Surveys

08:37 Leveraging Zero Party Data for Marketing

10:20 Unlocking Marketing Insights Through Data

11:02 The Power of Quizzes and Surveys

12:03 Leveraging AI for Content Creation

13:38 Zero-Party Data and AI Strategies

15:24 Optimizing Marketing Campaigns

17:04 Building Effective Surveys

19:08 Consumer Behavior and AI Insights

21:32 Understanding Cart Abandonment

24:08 Shopify's Role in E-commerce

25:29 The Future of Marketplaces and AI

29:37 Free Analytics Dashboard Offer

Takeaways

• Cart abandonment emails are a significant revenue source.
• Understanding customer behavior is key to effective marketing.
• New customer flows help build long-term relationships.
• Focus on customer experience to improve retention rates.
• Implementing basic email flows can drive immediate results.
• Testing and optimizing email strategies is crucial for success.
• Personalization in emails can enhance customer engagement.
• Utilizing pop-ups effectively can grow email lists.
• Start with the fundamentals before exploring advanced strategies.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background

04:16 Market Conditions and Email Marketing Trends

09:51 The Importance of Cart Abandonment Emails

15:48 Strategies for Effective Email Automation

20:48 The Importance of Value Exchange in Marketing

22:00 Understanding Client Needs and Unique Selling Points

24:24 Client Engagement and Building Client Intelligence

25:38 Email Automation Strategies for E-commerce

27:06 Growing Email Lists and Subscriber Engagement

31:12 Identifying High Intent Visitors for Better Conversion

34:29 The Significance of New Customer Flows

44:26 Final Thoughts on Implementation and Best Practices

Takeaways

• People are averse to pop-ups, affecting engagement rates.
• Long-term user experience should be prioritized over short-term metrics.
• E-commerce teams often lack focus on effective email pop-up usage.
• Traffic activation is crucial for conversion success.
• Agencies need streamlined operations to manage multiple clients.
• Modern Shopper aims to ease the burden on marketing teams.
• Trust and reliability are key in client relationships.
• Quality leads are more valuable than sheer quantity.
• User experience principles should guide marketing strategies.
• Market uncertainty requires brands to adapt their strategies.

Chapters

01:30 The Importance of User Experience in Growth Marketing

04:22 Identifying and Solving E-commerce Challenges

07:26 Leveraging Owned Media Channels for E-commerce Success

10:19 The Role of Lifecycle Teams in E-commerce

13:20 Understanding the Impact of Uncertainty in E-commerce

16:19 Optimizing Customer Retention Strategies

19:38 The Psychology of Consumer Engagement

22:29 Preparing for Seasonal Sales and Promotions

25:37 Maximizing Traffic and Conversion Rates

28:24 Visitor Identification and Its Implications

31:43 The Future of E-commerce Tools and Strategies

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

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

Enjoy the show!

Key Subjects:

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

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,...]]>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.

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...]]>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...]]>43c3f073-e05a-4e5f-9d6d-2b43ab5f05a1Fri, 26 Jul 2024 12:00:00 -050033:38falsefull2727How Does Consumer Psychology Impact the Digital Experience? With Guest Jon MacDonaldIn 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...]]>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]]>61fc5c31-4998-471d-806a-f6364fddfc01Tue, 28 May 2024 12:00:00 -050043:46falsefull2626The Wild Ride of Retail: Adapting To A Changing Ecomm Landscape With California CowboyIn 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]]>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.

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...]]>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 -...]]>31ab021f-04d2-4e04-a759-103d802b503cWed, 29 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -050053:19falsefull2424The Foundation of Great Conversion Is Incredible Customer Experience With Guest Alex Courselle, Found & CEO at KARL MissionIn 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...]]>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]]>fb1e959a-8a02-4bc2-98ca-6609c85d1442Thu, 09 Nov 2023 12:00:00 -050038:24falsefull2323The Power of Direct Mail in E-commerce: An Overlooked Marketing Channel with Drew Sanocki, Founder of PostPilotIn this episode of "The Conversion Show," Erik Christiansen, CEO of Justuno, interviews Drew Sanocki, Founder of PostPilot. Drew has an extensive background in retail and shares his insights on how direct mail can be a game-changer for e-commerce businesses and explains the features of PostPilot, including segmentation, automation, remarketing, retargeting, and acquisition.

Erik and Drew discuss:

• The integration capabilities of Post Pilot with platforms like Shopify and Klaviyo.
• The concept of the discount ladder and the 30, 60, 90 plan.
• Optimizing retention, basket size, and conversion rates before focusing on customer acquisition. 
• The key to effective postcard designs is treating direct mail like a Facebook ad.
•  The shift in mindset regarding direct-to-consumer brands.

Watch the episode on The Conversion Show YouTube channel

Host: Erik Christiansen https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: Drew Sanocki https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanocki/

Justuno https://www.justuno.com/

PostPilot https://postpilot.com/

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 00:00:51

Welcome to the conversion show today. I'm really proud to have my guest, Drew Sanocki, who we go back ten-plus years and I encourage anyone listening if you're in front of a computer and type Drew Sanocki into LinkedIn and you're going to find a background that is is very well, what's the word? Diverse. 

Drew 00:01:17

Long and boring.

Erik 00:01:18

It's well-versed. KarmelLoop retailer he's been a retailer himself he is now CEO of Post Pilot a direct-to-consumer postcards highly segmented which is what we're going to get into today. Very exciting. So let's welcome to the show Drew.

Drew 00:01:37 

Thanks, Eric. It's good to see you again. As you said, we've known each other for ten-plus years. I remember when we took over Karmaloop you know, we got it out of bankruptcy. And one of the first things we did was put Justuno up. And that was probably 2014, 2015, just to reengineer the pop up. And they were amazed at how we went from, I don't know, we probably ten next to the opt-ins in a week back then.

Erik 00:02:02

Drew has always been a...]]>In this episode of "The Conversion Show," Erik Christiansen, CEO of Justuno, interviews Drew Sanocki, Founder of PostPilot. Drew has an extensive background in retail and shares his insights on how direct mail can be a game-changer for e-commerce businesses and explains the features of PostPilot, including segmentation, automation, remarketing, retargeting, and acquisition.

Erik and Drew discuss:

• The integration capabilities of Post Pilot with platforms like Shopify and Klaviyo.
• The concept of the discount ladder and the 30, 60, 90 plan.
• Optimizing retention, basket size, and conversion rates before focusing on customer acquisition. 
• The key to effective postcard designs is treating direct mail like a Facebook ad.
•  The shift in mindset regarding direct-to-consumer brands.

Watch the episode on The Conversion Show YouTube channel

Host: Erik Christiansen https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: Drew Sanocki https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanocki/

Justuno https://www.justuno.com/

PostPilot https://postpilot.com/

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 00:00:51

Welcome to the conversion show today. I'm really proud to have my guest, Drew Sanocki, who we go back ten-plus years and I encourage anyone listening if you're in front of a computer and type Drew Sanocki into LinkedIn and you're going to find a background that is is very well, what's the word? Diverse. 

Drew 00:01:17

Long and boring.

Erik 00:01:18

It's well-versed. KarmelLoop retailer he's been a retailer himself he is now CEO of Post Pilot a direct-to-consumer postcards highly segmented which is what we're going to get into today. Very exciting. So let's welcome to the show Drew.

Drew 00:01:37 

Thanks, Eric. It's good to see you again. As you said, we've known each other for ten-plus years. I remember when we took over Karmaloop you know, we got it out of bankruptcy. And one of the first things we did was put Justuno up. And that was probably 2014, 2015, just to reengineer the pop up. And they were amazed at how we went from, I don't know, we probably ten next to the opt-ins in a week back then.

Erik 00:02:02

Drew has always been a big supporter it’s very exciting. You turned that thing back around to 100 million, didn't you?

Drew 00:02:11

It was you know we got it cash flowing again and I think at its peak it was up around 100 million. But you know, for us, the big the big win was just to right the ship and then sell it to a strategic which we did.

Erik 00:02:28

So huge background and retail background and turning companies around Drew for years I was so always so impressed with he has this 30 60 90 day. What do you call it? Can you share with the crowd here 30, 60, 90 because this is always been ...

Drew 00:02:51 

That came from private equity. I think it was like whenever you buy a company or acquire a company, you, the investors, all the board wants the 30, 60, 90 plan. And it's like, you might have a five-year plan for how you're going to grow this thing, but you have to show the team that gave you the capital how you're going to make significant changes in the first 30, 60, 90 days.

Drew 00:03:19 

So everything sort of came from that. I mean it Carmelo up at auto anything we had these sort of well thought out strategic plans. But what the board really wanted and what what I have since learned they pitch their investors on or they have to update their investors on is like what what what are you going to do in the first 30 days?

Drew 00:03:38 

You know, how do you hit the ground running? How do you get this thing cash flowing quickly?

Erik 00:03:43 

It's the low-hanging fruit.

Drew 00:03:44 

Yeah, it's always it forces you to focus on the low-hanging fruit.

Erik 00:03:48

And in today's market, there is still so much low-hanging fruit. And, you know, Drew had that years ago. It was, if I recall, it was the email. So, you know, sending a 30, 60, 90 day email to those segments and you're early on and, you know, segmenting your audience, your own channels with email. And I think what we're going to talk about today is where are we in that today?

Erik 00:04:14 

And when we talk about customer lifetime value and we talk about other low-hanging fruit, Drew has uncovered a great one with Post pilot. And can you share the new way to do postcards and kind of your approach?

Drew 00:04:33 

Yeah it's just Post Pilot started with so we do direct mail for e-commerce businesses our goal is to help more businesses unlock this channel to become more resilient businesses, right to diversify their marketing, to do everything from retention to acquisition through direct mail. I got the idea because I've always used it. So I've been in e-commerce for 20 years and as you mentioned, in turnarounds, we'd acquire a property or we'd take over a property and very quickly have to look for what's the low-hanging fruit.

Drew 00:05:10 

A lot of that was on retention. The brands were doing retention well enough. They weren't re-engaging past buyers. And when you looked at the data, most of those past buyers, there's a very rich audience. For any marketer, we're not subscribed to email. So they had either never subscribed or who had had unsubscribed. So there's really only one way to get a hold of them is direct mail.

Drew 00:05:34 

It's the only way you can get all your customers because the customers don't have to opt in. It was always very hard. The karma loop at auto anything, you know, you'd have to find a printer, you'd have to upload your designs. Attribution was a mess. Know there's a long lead time from when you decide to run the campaign to when you see the results.

Drew 00:05:53 

And I said like, why can't it be as easy, as easy as email? You know, I want it to be like Klaviyo or, or send Lane or Romney send where you just log in and send. So, I built Post Pilot to do that. I actually acquired it from the developer probably in 2018 and we spent about a year on the product turning it into something like Klaviyo for postcards.

Drew 00:06:17 

On the retention side, since then, the platforms evolved, so we've had to then remarketing retargeting and in our acquisition, you can do things like catalogs, you can do things like shared mailers to get the costs down. But it's all within the platform. And I think we timed it really well because in 2020, 2021, Apple comes out with iOS 14.

Drew 00:06:42 

This makes Facebook really hard for a lot of brands. So I think the last ten years made us lazy marketers where you'd throw money at that matter and it would work and all of a sudden it didn't in 2021. So brands started realizing that they had to be marketers again, that they needed to diversify, their revenue channels.

Drew 00:07:03 

And we were there in the Shopify App Store as the leading direct mail app. So it's just been a bit of a rocket ship since then.

Erik 00:07:13 

It's fun. Retention has been a major word with the customer acquisition costs, Facebook, everything. And so we actually, you know, we have been hearing about mailers becoming more popular again. What's new with postcards or catalogs? You know, as you go to post pilot, you're doing segmentation, personalized mailers, what's present, what's new, what's hot?

Drew 00:07:50 

What's new, I think, is the segmentation really it is it and automation. Maybe ten, 20 years ago, direct mail was you know, you you upload a C ISV to a printer and you send the same offer to everybody on that. CSP Well, now you can much, much like email. You can segment your customers based on what they purchased before and recency, frequency, and monetary spend, which is kind of how the catalog industry's always done it, but how recently somebody purchased the number of times they've purchased, the total amount they've spent.

Drew 00:08:30 

And you can just automate these campaigns such that as customers or people fall into the various segments, the system will print and send a card, even if it's one card a week, right? So you can have your abandoned cart campaign cloned into a postcard. You could have a handwritten note go out to VIP customers every time they reach a dollar threshold.

Drew 00:08:55 

You know, the total spend goes to a thousand. I want them to get the handwritten note, and then you can have your retention campaigns go to customers who haven't been around in a while that you want to pull back to buy again. So I think as a marketer, the possibilities are endless. It's all it's all within the app.

Drew 00:09:13 

You just want to be able to segment and target. I think stepping back a little bit, you always want that sort of holy grail of the of the right offer to be in front of the right customer at the right time. And it can be on it should that should be on site and this wasn't a lead in just you know but it should be you know.

Erik 00:09:33 

If someone wasn't paying attention, they would think they were you were talking, explaining the on-site experience of how it should be.

Drew 00:09:40 

Yeah. But it's it's sort of like if I'm in a certain segment, if I am somebody who bought once and hasn't been around for 60 days and I'm due to buy again, you want to give me an offer, You know, it might be a discount. I might be like, Hey, you might also like this to purchase. I should get that same offer when I open my email, when I look at my SMS, when I check the mailbox or when I go on the site, you know, it should just be consistent.

Erik 00:10:05 

Everything you just talked about, you know, you know, recency, frequency, monetization, you know, I laughed when you said, you know, the right offer at the right time to the right customer. Literally, my team, we wrote that down last week, you know, because people want they expect it to speak to them. And it's it's really refreshing to hear you talking about mailers the same way we're talking about the onsite experience here.

Erik 00:10:39 

It just, you know, and it goes into old-school retailing.

Drew 00:10:44 

Yeah, it goes back to really I mean, I learned it from Seth Godin, who wrote Permission Marketing, I don't know what, 25 years ago or something, but he just talks about the best marketing is personal and relevant. And if you increase that relevance, like what's going to increase the relevance, it's a personal offer that's like that's designed with you in mind.

Erik 00:11:06

So as we talk about the personal offering and it being relevant, we're talking about zero and first-party data. How are you as a company working with digital marketers, e-commerce managers to get that data into your system?

Drew 00:11:23

Well, on the retention side, I would say most of the brands have that data. You know, you've got the customer, you know, what he or she bought before and when, you know, in your transactional data, you know, his or her address, right? So it becomes very easy there to segment off of that stuff. You know, a customer bought this.

Drew 00:11:45:21 

They might also like this customer hasn't been around in a while. Let's send her this other offer.

Erik 00:11:51 

And so being in Shopify, that's you're obviously just connecting the app and you're able to access that data.

Drew 00:11:57 

Sure. If you're on Shopify, we could have a native integration. If you're on Klaviyo, we have an integration there. You know, you can pull that data from a number of different sources. So I think direct mail is very similar to email on the retention side, It's different from email on retargeting and on acquisition where it's more akin to Facebook because there you can look at your existing data, and generate a lookalike audience.

Drew 00:12:24 

So a brand new cold audience layer on top of it. Direct mail attributes, household spending has bought from a Walmart before and then you can get very targeted with your prospecting campaigns or your retargeting campaigns.

Erik 00:12:41 

Nate Attribution has been a big subject of conversation and debate this year, especially with SMS marketing. How do you approach attribution with mailers? Is it unique promotions, or unique URLs? How do, how do you communicate that back the ROI in value back to your clients?

Drew 00:13:05 

Yeah, this is something from, you know, you ask any CMO if you add up all the attributed revenue, this is typically like a ... If you add up all the attributed revenue from, you know, email, Facebook, Google, whatever, and it's like 300% of the actual revenue of the business.

Erik 00:13:21 

It's like, you go on LinkedIn and see all these different posts “like we increased case studies, we increased their ROI.”

Drew 00:13:28 

Yeah.

Erik 00:13:28 

So everybody by 130% and they're like tenable.

Drew 00:13:31 

Obviously every service provider out there is going to try to lay claim to as much revenue as they can. And PostPilot is no different, you know, but I would say realistically, as a CMO or CEO, there's an upper and lower bound in direct mail. You see the group that received your marketing campaign and then you see what they did on the site afterward so you can calculate a lift or on the more conservative side, you can measure things like coupon redemption.

Erik 00:14:09 

Control groups.

Drew 00:14:09

Control groups, that's probably the gold standard is like, okay if you know you're somewhere between the customer ROAS and the coupon ROAS, like a holdout group, we’ll tell you exactly the impact of any promotion.

Erik 00:14:24 

We were talking about control groups last week in terms of even looking at pricing differently, how to structure, how do you show the value of your own SAS company to your clients. That's a whole nother subject. But it's important for digital marketers to be able to report back to their team, their bosses, you know, and report to their CMO.

Erik 00:14:45

Hey look, here's some attributable revenue for real. And because we did a control group.

Drew 00:14:52

Right and I think really every service provider probably could do control groups, but they don't because the results won't be as strong as the ROI they claim to produce.

Erik 00:15:09

Different subject. Can I challenge you on something? 

Drew 00:15:14

Yeah, go for it

Erik 00:15:15

Having studied environmental design and being a homeowner now and going to the mailbox and getting all the mailers, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt here not only because I see you do some sustainable work with planting trees and using good paper.

Erik 00:15:34 

I'm all about getting less paper used. Now, if you can tell me, we send less because they're more effective because they're highly segmented, I'll help build your case.

Drew 00:15:50 

Okay, That's interesting. From the get-go, we realize that direct mail uses paper. Right. It's and we've had some customers who are sensitive to that. You know, we try to offset it as much as we can. But it's it's the nature of the category. I think that you're printed on paper.

Drew 00:16:14

But to your point, you know, if you did a highly targeted mailing of our catalog alternative, it's called a catalog versus a 90 page catalog or whatever you're going to save paper. So yeah, if you're already using direct mail and using a catalog, we could save you paper.

Erik 00:16:36 

Do you print on rice paper?

Drew 00:16:39 

I don't know. I don't think so. There are some alternatives, like hemp paper. Rice paper, and we have explored some of those.

Erik 00:16:48 

Well, you know, with consumer goods people talk about consumer responsibility. People do shop based off of environmental consciousness, Shopping Gives is another example. People want to shop with brands that support causes. I'm just curious, your approach your company's approach to that it sounds like not doing the big catalogs, it's as minimal as possible.

Drew 00:17:23

Yeah, recyclable paper offset the print jobs we do have and, you know, I would say by nature in our industry of e-comm, there's a lot of trees being cut down, you know, not just for the direct mail portion, but the cardboard for the shipping packaging.

Erik 00:17:51 

Fair enough. Speaking of the postcards and designs, as I'm going through it, the designs themselves and the personalization, what is effective these days?]]>d7a3772e-ccdf-42c8-9316-5d0274e9d473Wed, 06 Sep 2023 09:00:00 -050038:22falsefull2222Everything You Wanted to Know About the Shopify App Ecosystem with Blair Beckwith, head of Ecommerce at Tidio and Founder at RailspurIn this episode of "The Conversion Show" podcast, Erik Christiansen interviews Blair Beckwith, head of E-commerce at Tidio and Founder at Railspur.

Erik and Blair, with their combined experience of 20 years in the Shopify ecosystem, discuss their experiences and reflect on the changes in the Shopify app store over the past 10 years and what's yet to come in the next few.

Erik and Blair discuss:

• The need for businesses to diversify platforms to truly thrive.
• Brands aren't doing product-led growth correctly.
• Anxiety and concern among app partners regarding competition from Shopify
• Experimentation and impeccable products are key in today's dynamic ecosystem.
• Is "freemium" still a sexy term?
• Product-led growth, pricing models, and the challenges faced by developers.

Host: Erik Christiansen

Guest: Blair Beckwith

Sponsored by: 38 Proven Email Pop Up designs by Justuno

Tidio

Railspur

Transcript:

Erik 00:51

All right, folks. Today is a special day for the conversion show because one of the top questions I get asked personally is having been in the shop ecosystem for ten plus years, one of the first questions I always get asked is, hey, what's what's the check? What's the deal with the Shopify App Store? And you know, anyone who's in this world today is the show for you because you have combined 20 years exactly of Shopify App Store experience between Blair and I. I just looked it up March 19, 2013, Blair and I first emailed each other. So today's show, you saw the title, you know who's on here, Blair Beckwith, welcome to the show.

Blair 01:44

Thanks for having me. Eric, I was looking today, too, and I was I mean, I was thinking back, I think that we met in person maybe that summer in San Francisco. It was one of my first trips as a Shopify employee. Shopify was so small back then, I barely had a budget for a hotel. I remember staying in the Tenderloin and meeting up with you for lunch. You had a little office, and I think I want to call like the financial district. Was that what that area was called?

Erik 02:15

Yeah, we moved offices every year for a while and, we were probably on 2nd and Mission.

Blair 02:26

It was a little bit more like a corporate building. It was a little bit more modern. It was on a nonground floor. I remember taking an elevator. I remember walking with you to go get sandwiches down by the water.

Erik 02:28

I was trying to impress you, huh?

Blair 02:39

Yeah. Yeah, it was, man, it was a long time ago.

Erik 02:43

I do have to correct you because you said you were. It was early days as an employee, but technically, weren't you an intern?

Blair 02:53

By that point, I had graduated to full-time employment status. No. Yeah, I started. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we can get into all that we can get into. Well, for sure.

Erik 03:03

It's funny. Like, I'm trying to remember back the earliest memory, and in talking about budgets, you know, Shopify. I didn't have the budget for a hotel for you. We've always just seen as always...]]>In this episode of "The Conversion Show" podcast, Erik Christiansen interviews Blair Beckwith, head of E-commerce at Tidio and Founder at Railspur.

Erik and Blair, with their combined experience of 20 years in the Shopify ecosystem, discuss their experiences and reflect on the changes in the Shopify app store over the past 10 years and what's yet to come in the next few.

Erik and Blair discuss:

• The need for businesses to diversify platforms to truly thrive.
• Brands aren't doing product-led growth correctly.
• Anxiety and concern among app partners regarding competition from Shopify
• Experimentation and impeccable products are key in today's dynamic ecosystem.
• Is "freemium" still a sexy term?
• Product-led growth, pricing models, and the challenges faced by developers.

Host: Erik Christiansen

Guest: Blair Beckwith

Sponsored by: 38 Proven Email Pop Up designs by Justuno

Tidio

Railspur

Transcript:

Erik 00:51

All right, folks. Today is a special day for the conversion show because one of the top questions I get asked personally is having been in the shop ecosystem for ten plus years, one of the first questions I always get asked is, hey, what's what's the check? What's the deal with the Shopify App Store? And you know, anyone who's in this world today is the show for you because you have combined 20 years exactly of Shopify App Store experience between Blair and I. I just looked it up March 19, 2013, Blair and I first emailed each other. So today's show, you saw the title, you know who's on here, Blair Beckwith, welcome to the show.

Blair 01:44

Thanks for having me. Eric, I was looking today, too, and I was I mean, I was thinking back, I think that we met in person maybe that summer in San Francisco. It was one of my first trips as a Shopify employee. Shopify was so small back then, I barely had a budget for a hotel. I remember staying in the Tenderloin and meeting up with you for lunch. You had a little office, and I think I want to call like the financial district. Was that what that area was called?

Erik 02:15

Yeah, we moved offices every year for a while and, we were probably on 2nd and Mission.

Blair 02:26

It was a little bit more like a corporate building. It was a little bit more modern. It was on a nonground floor. I remember taking an elevator. I remember walking with you to go get sandwiches down by the water.

Erik 02:28

I was trying to impress you, huh?

Blair 02:39

Yeah. Yeah, it was, man, it was a long time ago.

Erik 02:43

I do have to correct you because you said you were. It was early days as an employee, but technically, weren't you an intern?

Blair 02:53

By that point, I had graduated to full-time employment status. No. Yeah, I started. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we can get into all that we can get into. Well, for sure.

Erik 03:03

It's funny. Like, I'm trying to remember back the earliest memory, and in talking about budgets, you know, Shopify. I didn't have the budget for a hotel for you. We've always just seen as always been that way if I remember correctly, in Chicago Shopify didn't have a booth forever, and same with us. You know, people ask how did you grow Justuno early on? It's like, I would get an Expo Pass under Travis’s Ecomm store, Social Skateboarding for $70. And I would hit up every single technology partner’s booth.

Blair 03:44

Yup.

Erik 03:45

And meet with the, back then it was “biz-dev” people that was the title, to try to get into their app stores.

Blair 03:52

Yep.

Erik 03:53

That was the entire game.

Blair 03:55

That is such a that's still like the greatest hack that exists. If you've got friends or anybody who run a store that will let you buy a pass under their name for some of these events, it's like, Hey, do you want to spend 50 bucks to come as a brand or do you want to spend two grand to come as a vendor? It still works.

Erik 04:15

And then you invest. You invest in stickers and you put the sticker over the badge. So we're talking about growth hacking. Let's talk about the years of growth hacking in the Shopify App Store.

Blair 04:31

Things have changed. Yeah, for sure. You mean growth hacking for apps like just, you know. Yeah. In general. Yeah. I mean.

Erik 04:37

Well, it's obviously it's different now, but, you know, I felt so bad for you for long for so many years because I knew the politics you were dealing with. You know, it's like as soon as you start hitting a certain level, it's that there's this the politics are huge. So, yeah, go back to the days when everyone was hounding you for featured positioning, how did you deal with that?

Blair 05:10

I mean, there's probably like a lot to unpack there and I should probably talk to like my therapist instead of you. Right? It's it was finally it was there were parts of it that were fun. There were parts of it that weren't as you say, kind of eventually, as a company grows, you end up in more of a political realm naturally.

Blair 05:23

And I don't mean that in a bad way. I don't think politics are inherently bad. I think they're just part of part of work as a business grows. But pre-politics, it was a lot of just flying by the seat of your pants and making sort of gut instinctual decisions. And I think that has probably bled into who I am today even, I often laugh when I talk to people and say that I'm not the most data-driven person in the world.

Blair 06:02

I sort of came up in a world of limited data In the App Store, we didn't have a data analyst that was helping me make decisions. I had access to shared data analysts, and I was the bottom priority for any reports that needed to get made because the App Store didn't make any money. Right.

Blair 06:21

But it was when I was making decisions about who was getting featured and who wasn't and who should be in the App Store and who wasn't. It was a lot of like more instinctual. Okay, Do I think that this is going to be good for brands? Is this going to be better than the solutions that already exist?

Blair 06:41

Is this like attacking the problem in a new and novel way? Right. I think that's so much a part of working at a startup and Shopify was a startup at the time, right? Is just like, how do you operate in a world with limited data? Because the data is so rarely there.

Erik 06:58

You know, let's go back to 2013 and you know, for for listeners that aren't aware, pull up LinkedIn, Blair, back with you. You'll see that you know, Shopify wasn't always what Shopify is today and what was the environment, you know, what was the team structure, how big do you recall how big Shopify was back in 2013.

Blair 07:46

And 2013? I would guess it was probably about like 150 to 200. I joined in early. I joined in early 2012. So when I joined, they had just closed on the acquisition of an agency that was like 20 people and that got us up to 100 people. So when I joined we were between 80 and 100. And at that point, we were at least doubling headcount every year.

Blair 07:54

So jumping from 2012 to 2013 to hundreds, probably reasonable. I don't know if you can hear my cat in the background. I'm sorry about that. If that's a thing, maybe we can cut that in post.

Erik 08:13

I literally just hit mute on my because I've got two dogs here and our dog walker just showed up. 

Blair 08:23

And it was I mean, it was a massively different environment, You know, I think even like even like how I got started at Shopify, it was just like a thing that wouldn't be possible in later years. Right. Like, you made a comment about me being an intern but yeah, I, I became an intern before there was like a formal intern program. I became an intern because I emailed Toby and said, Hey, I hate I hate school. I want a job. Can you give me a job? I'll work for free, you know? And that was like that worked in 2012. I don't know if that would work. And like any year after that.

Erik 08:56

That's something I always respected about you when I first met you because you were still an intern status, I believe. Yeah, I could be wrong, but I myself, learned more in college through my internships than I did in college. And in 1998, I interned at Left Field, one of the first online interactive agencies. We’re taking Hotmail banners …. But everyone around me was one was a history major. Dylan, you know, the Eric like not no one studied what they were doing knowledge. And when I asked what should I do? the advice was do web design, it’s the future.

Blair 09:44

Yeah yeah.

Erik 09:54

It changes your perspective and gives you access to people. A company like Toby Jeremiah, they want to help you grow.

Blair 09:53

Yep.

Erik 09:54

Big learning lesson I think there.

Blair 09:57

Yeah. No, for sure. I'm like, you know I've got a I've got a two and a half-year-old now. I've got a I mean, I shouldn't say this because like, half my family doesn't know. A lot of my friends don't know, but I got another one on the way.

Erik 10:09

Oh, is this big announcement.

Blair 10:11

Big announcement. Please hold off. Please hold off releasing this until like at least a week after we record. So the chance to tell people in case I was listening.

Erik 10:19

You heard it here first.

Blair 10:24

I mean I can tell you right now it's going to be a boy.

Erik 10:29

As my friends call it. It's like the lottery.

Blair 10:32

Yeah. One and one. You know, it's it is nice to get the full spectrum there, but no, anyways, like we're talking about like, you know, saving up for school, like, that's a thing that you do as a young parent. You put aside some money for your kids so that they can go to school. And I mean, we're putting aside money for but I don't know what that money is going to be spent on.

Blair 10:53

Right. Whether that's university or like a coding boot camp or by then who even knows, maybe there's gonna be like prompt engineering boot camp so that she can, like, wrangle A.I. to do her bidding. Right? Like, who knows? We don't know how that money's going to be spent, but I think it's almost like it's almost a certainty that it's not going to be spent on something like a traditional college or university degree.

Blair 11:14

You know, it's cause I do think, yeah, just the spectrum of experiences now that you can gain outside of that environment is just like so incredibly wide compared to even really just like, yeah, like ten years ago when I went through.

Erik 11:27

Yeah. Experiential education is invaluable. You know, we're starting to see that, that shift here too, in terms of like vocational like, yeah, skill set. Just as Shopify announced I saw Good Morning America, They really kind of did the first interview I’ve watched about that, you know more than two people in a meeting. he was speaking about look it's all about building a company and to build it you have to be building, you know, building a house.

Erik 11:50

You need to be putting up walls, putting in wiring. You can't be meeting half the day about doing this work. And that's where meetings kind of have gotten in the way. It's an interesting time we're in right now today, and you know, what is it, August 2nd, 2023, is that we're just in ourselves as we look at the Shopify App Store and generating leads and, you know, we ourselves are have really pared down and gone back to the basics.

Erik 12:05

And it's been really interesting looking at our own business and top of the funnel and product-led growth. And for Travis and I to still be in the driver's seat. Yeah and actually kind of a fun six months getting back to the basics of what got us here and so yeah I mean talking about and you know even you know our goal today is talk you know old school Shopify App store.

Erik 12:51

But you know, can you just share real quickly where you are today? Because I was checking out your site and I do at some point want to talk product-led growth and freemium and pricing because that is critical to the Shopify App Store.

Blair 13:03

For sure. I think we can I think we can talk a lot about history. I think we can talk a lot about a lot about growth in the ecosystem today. And that's sort of the lens that I have today is sort of growth in the ecosystem. I mean, really short version of what I did post Shopify was like consulting and startups, right?

Blair 13:33

I did like a lot of consulting with SaaS vendors in the space, investors in the space, and then did a couple sort of tours of duty full-time at startups. Today I am head of eCommerce at a company called Tidio, we are a customer experience platform for SNBs. I would guess that we actually have a very similar story to Justuno, we launched in Shopify around the same time maybe a year later or so, I think it was like 2014.

Blair 13:57

We are cross-platform. We've got an absolute monster of a user base, but we are a little bit below the radar, like we're not necessarily focused on the sexiest direct consumer brands out there. Our core is just like real, meaningful businesses no matter where they are, whether that's Shopify or elsewhere. I mean, e-commerce is really big for us, but we do more than e-commerce.

Blair 14:28

We do like real estate agents, we do like regional telcos through Europe. We have a huge range of customers, but sort of as head of e-commerce, I focus largely on Shopify and I work across our marketing team, our product team, our support team as like, I mean, I'm driving some initiatives forward, but I'm also just like the voice Shopify sort of actually in a lot of these conversations and helping the product kind of on.

Erik 14:59

The Voice of Shopify.

Blair 15:00

The Voice of Shopify.

Erik 15:02

That will be the title.

Blair 14:22

Oh, no, don't do that to me. Don't do that to me. So yeah.

Erik 14:31

You know, it's crazy. Being in this ecosystem for so long. When we started, how many, how many, what? 100? 200, 300, How many were in the App Store in 2013?

Blair 14:44

But in 2012 it was like 60. So it was like 60. It was a it was a very different time.

Erik 14:52

What is the number now? Do we even know?

Blair 14:54

I think we're up nearing 10,000. If not over 10,000. And that's after a lot of pruning, right, Like Shopify has been fairly aggressive in and getting rid of apps over the years.

Erik 15:05

Let's dig into that because it's…

Blair 15:08

A spicy topic to start.

Erik 15:10

Out of respect for Blair, I held back a lot and in reaching out and anyone who runs any app store, I feel for you. But you know, us being Justuno the first on the market and watching companies just straight rip off our product. which is more of the Magento world yet a lot of overseas brands and you know I respect that we invested in a Shopify because there was that care of Blair in there to curate and make sure.

Blair 15:46

As well as I could.

Erik 15:49:17

As well as you could, you can’t do it perfectly. So in my time, I think maybe two brands I've seen publicly kicked out of the App Store. We've got reviews just like Amazon critical to how you get displayed.

Blair 16:11

Yep yep based.

Erik 16:14

How you see, what were you aware of at the time and what did you struggle with?

Blair 16:23

When it comes to sort of the curation angle specifically.

Erik 16:26

And will people.

Blair 16:27

Yeah. Cheating and people.

Erik 16:30

You know people do you tell me privy has that many reviews.

Blair 16:34

Well, it's funny, right? There's like and I will say I'm, you know, very good friends with some of the privacy folks. I do look at Ben's awesome. Ben's awesome. There's like a whole spectrum, right, when it comes to cheating versus not right. And you mentioned privilege. There's no way they got all those reviews. Standards have changed. What is cheating and what isn't cheating is sort of increasingly less black and white, if I recall correctly.

Blair 17:04

Pervy was one who collected a lot of reviews through their onboarding process. Right? This is a very common thing to do at one point when a merchant installs app, helped them get set up, ask them for a review, sometimes even word it in such a way that it was implied that leaving a review was part of the onboarding process and they could not proceed with leaving a review.

Blair 17:31

Right. This was a thing that happened for a long time. It's obviously not the best user experience. I think we struggled for a long time to figure out how to make rules that were understandable or like make rules that covered cases like that, right? It's very easy to make a rule that says you cannot buy reviews.

Blair 17:55

It gets murkier when people say, What does that mean? What does it mean? I can't buy reviews. That's like not as simple a question as it seems at first glance, right? There are situations that everybody would agree with. Like if I go on Fiverr and there's a listing that says 100 reviews for $300, that is, I think everybody agrees buying reviews.

Blair 18:20

If I offer an example. Yeah, yeah. Like if I offer a $20 Starbucks gift card to every customer that leaves a review, is that buying a review? I think like most people would agree that that is buying a review. If I, if I say leave a review in the app Store will have a link back to your store which will give you SEO benefits.

Blair 18:49

Is that buying a review? You're sort of like you're not even offering something, you're just telling them that there's a benefit to them leaving a review. I think that's the type of situation where you get like incredibly murky and it is like very hard to come up with rules that have very clear lines. You know.

Erik 19:08

One, as we fast forward to the present day when there's a sea]]>1fca17f9-58f1-433c-8109-e001557a489bThu, 17 Aug 2023 09:00:00 -050001:15:31falsefull2121How to Create a Customer-Centric Fully Omnichannel Brand from Online to In-store - with Kyle Brucculeri VP of E-commerce at GorjanaIn this episode of "The Conversion Show" podcast, Erik Christiansen interviews Kyle Brucculeri VP of E-commerce at Gorjana.

Kyle highlighted the need for businesses to own their first-party data, moving away from reliance on third-party pixels like Facebook. Kyle also emphasizes the importance of understanding user needs and providing clarity in the value exchange between customers and omnichannel brands.

Kyle and Erik discuss:

• How changes in first-party and zero-party data are reshaping the way businesses interact with their customers.
• Bridging the gap between online and offline experience.
• Reliance on discounts and sales isn't necessary to maintain brand value.
• The value of retail stores in enhancing the customer experience and building trust.
• Owning first-party data and moving away from relying on third-party pixels.
• Importance of understanding visitor identities for personalization and conversion optimization.
• Creative alternatives for engaging visitors and capturing data.

Host: Erik Christiansen

Guest: Kyle Brucculeri

Justuno

Gorjana

Matthew shares his approach to building a strategy, which involves starting from the top with company goals and working his way down to specific tactics, always keeping ROI in mind. The episode provides insights into the MarTech stack and customer retention strategies of a successful e-commerce brand.

Erik and Matthew dive into:

• Apps used by Pretty Litter and their cart technology
• Incentivizing First-Time Customers
• Pretty Litter's referral program
• The Realities of Being a Digital Marketer
• Migrating SMS providers
• Expanding to international markets
• How digital marketers are always hungry for more information

Host: Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: Matthew Seifert - https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewseifert/

Justuno - https://www.justuno.com/

Pretty Litter - https://www.prettylitter.com/

Mona shares her insights on conversion marketing, focusing on return on ad spend (ROAS) and analyzing sales conversions, as well as the importance of leveraging technology to improve efficiency and the overall customer experience.

Mona and Erik discuss:

• the role of AI tools and automation in reducing bounce rates
• improving relevancy for the consumer
• the challenges of managing paid media and digital marketing for multiple brands
• leveraging influencer marketing and user-generated content to drive traffic and sales
• how to provide a better customer experience
• the importance of customer data and segmentation for personalization at scale
• overcoming challenges with the right tech stack

Host: Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: Mona Sutherland - https://www.linkedin.com/in/monasutherland/

Justuno - https://www.justuno.com/

Grendene Global Brands (Melissa) - https://www.shopmelissa.com/

Rita and Erik talk through:

• The importance of using data effectively, not just collecting it.
• Providing true value to customers
• Mobile-first customer experience’s & the role of mobile apps
• Channel diversification & segmentation for prioritization and acquisition
• New mediums like YouTube shorts & the importance of staying up-to-date on emerging technologies to elevate your brand

Host: Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: Rita Zahir - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ritazahir

Justuno - https://www.justuno.com/

Awe Inspired - https://aweinspired.com/

Erik and John talk through:

• the importance of storytelling and investing in brand, particularly for mission-driven brands
• analyzing a brand's mission and story, and how to calibrate the mission to the product
• investing in brand and customer feedback to build a community and create word-of-mouth supporters
• leveraging user-generated content (UGC) to improve brand awareness
• building touch points to give customers a better experience with the brand
• the potential of subscription services as a marketing strategy
• the importance of a holistic approach to marketing

Host: Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: John Gross - https://www.linkedin.com/in/johntgross/

Justuno: https://www.justuno.com/

Fat Earth Media: https://www.fat-earth.com/

Erik & Allen talk discuss the importance of understanding the audience and their emotional and logical decision-making processes, as well as the need for brands to focus on Conversion Rate Optimization in order to improve profitability and scale revenue. The episode emphasizes the need for brands to focus on customer-centricity and building sustainable businesses by capturing customer data and owning their channels.

Key topics discussed:

• The Hangover Stage that most DTC brands are in right now
• Understanding consumer psychology and empathy
• The "three Ps" framework for logical selling
• Reducing perceived risk for customers
• Building trust early in the customer journey
• Improving profitability and scaling revenue with CRO
• Challenges of capturing zero party data
• Understanding customer friction points

Host: Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: Allen Burt - https://www.linkedin.com/in/allenburt/

Justuno: https://www.justuno.com/

Blue Stout: https://bluestout.com/

The conversation revolves around the role of digital marketers and e-commerce managers in driving the success of a business, and Will's recipe for scalable growth with a small marketing team.

Key topics discussed:

• Challenges of building a DTC retail side of the business from scratch
• The importance of tracking and optimizing your digital marketing strategy
• Making the checkout process as frictionless as possible.
• The impact of the iOS update on retargeting and audience building strategies
• Managing a tech stack - and the many struggles that come with this
• Discovering new apps and learning from other retailers
• The future of influencer marketing

Host: Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: Will Griffin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/will-griffin-63b64527/

Justuno: https://www.justuno.com/

Sophistiplate: https://www.sophistiplate.com/

Show Me Your Tech Stack: https://youtu.be/lgYx6U17bfI

Sully shares his insights on engaging with customers through email, micro-launches, and private Facebook groups.

Sully and Erik talk through:

• the benefits of self-funding and investing in the right areas for long-term sustainability
• the importance of simplicity, authenticity, and copywriting in building a successful e-commerce brand
• various e-commerce tools and marketing strategies
• the importance of building customer-centric businesses - online and offline
• using Email for product innovation
• simplifying product offerings for increased conversion
• how offending some of your audience can be healthy for ads
• the importance of building trust with customers through messaging and guarantees

Host: Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: Tyler "Sully" Sullivan - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-sully-sullivan/

Justuno: https://www.justuno.com/

BombTech Golf: https://www.bombtechgolf.com/

Ecomgrowers: https://www.ecomgrowers.com/

SullyTyler.com: Shopify Marketing Expert

They discuss various e-commerce tools, marketing strategies, and the importance of building customer-centric businesses - online and offline.

CJ and Erik discuss:

• store locator software
• subscription models vs getrepeat.io
• the challenges of reporting and troubleshooting
• first party data and identity resolution
• the impact of iOS changes on marketing tools
• Conversion Optimization and Reporting
• CJ's philosophy on productivity
• the underused potential of Shopify Flow

Host: Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: CJ DeGuara - https://www.linkedin.com/in/cjdeguara/

Justuno: https://www.justuno.com/

EBOOST: https://levitatefoundry.com/

They cover various topics, including sustainability and eco-friendly initiatives in e-commerce, customer experience, optimization of the checkout stage, personalization, and search optimization.

Erik and Ashley discuss:

• creating memorable website experiences
• current trends in conversion marketing
• the need for: clear communication, proactive customer service, and easy returns to build trust and retain customers
• working through friction points with customer returns
• ensuring website accessibility and compliance
• search optimization for e-commerce sites with a large inventory
• rising costs of traditional digital advertising channels
• putting customers first in all aspects of the business

Host: Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: Ashley Scorpio - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleyscorpio/

Justuno: https://www.justuno.com/

Levitate Foundry: https://levitatefoundry.com/

Erik and John explore:

• different strategies for improving the customer experience and increasing sales
• John's experience with BattlBox, a subscription service that sends customers a box of outdoor and survival gear every month
• how to prioritize acquiring, converting, and retaining customers
• shipping, engaging with current customers, and building a loyal customer base through retention strategies
• the importance of the product page in the customer journey
• testing alternative language to improve the customer experience

Host: Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: John Roman - https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-roman/

Justuno: https://www.justuno.com/

BattlBox: https://www.battlbox.com/

According to Frank, it all comes down to creating a positive customer experience and building genuine connections with customers. This means using humor and puns in their branding, personalized promotions, and surprise-and-delight tactics to make customers feel special.

Key topics discussed:

• The importance of humor and personalization in marketing
• Challenges of scaling genuine connections with customers
• Strategies for increasing website traffic and customer retention
• Experiences with influencer marketing
• Being frugal with marketing budgets
• Benefits of focusing on website conversion optimization

Host: Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: Frank Dorval - https://www.linkedin.com/in/frankdorval

Justuno: https://www.justuno.com/

Sheets & Giggles: https://sheetsgiggles.com/

Show Me Your Tech Stack: https://youtu.be/lgYx6U17bfI

Erik and Ashland talk about:

• Ashland's experience as an entrepreneur
• the challenges of managing inventory in retail and its impact on e-commerce conversion rates
• the importance of personalization in e-commerce
• how to use customer data to create a connected journey across different channels
• optimizing the product page for conversion
• managing inventory in retail
• creating a connected journey for customers across all channels
• how merchants increase conversion rates through dynamic website content
• the need to emphasize the brand story to build social trust

Host: Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: Ashland Stansbury - https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashland-stansbury-7b0a64b0/

Justuno: https://www.justuno.com/

Because: https://www.trybecause.com/

Andrew emphasizes the importance of retention in generating profit for brands and discusses various strategies for creating a positive customer experiences that encourage loyalty.

Andrew and Erik talk through:

• What exactly is "lifecycle marketing"?!
• How Email and SMS remain the top acquisition and retention channels
• Why retention is key to profit
• Maximizing what's right in front of you
• The importance of social proof, risk reversal, and conversion optimization
• Utilizing testing and optimizing strategies to improve conversion and retention rates
• Aligning leadership with agencies to improve customer retention

Host: Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: Andrew Christison - https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewchristison/

Justuno: https://www.justuno.com/

Retencity: https://www.retencity.com/

Jon and Erik talk through:

• The laws of conversion optimization
• Why it's so hard to optimize your own site
• How to avoid disruptive website experiences
• Treating website visitors like the humans they are
• The art of retail
• The importance of identifying your ICP (ideal customer profile)
• Leveraging your customers' pain points in your optimization
• What's missing from analytics
• Adding value to drive conversions
• Why e-commerce brands focus too much on driving traffic - and not enough on converting it

Host: Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: Jon MacDonald - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonnymac/

Justuno: https://www.justuno.com/

The Good: https://thegood.com/

This episode is jam-packed with real-life examples and advice to optimize your website visitor experience and conversion optimization.

Zach and Erik talk all things conversion optimization, including:

• Persuasive messaging
• Customer obsession
• Leveraging popups for more than just coupon codes and sales
• Applying your email strategy to your onsite strategy
• E-commerce success formulas
• Identifying and amplifying your impact and brand story
• How to reduce conversion friction on your website
• Building trust through a better onsite customer experience
• Sharing the information your customers want
• How to leverage shopping psychology and FOMO

Host: Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: Zach Bailey - https://www.linkedin.com/in/zach-bailey-85193067/

Justuno: https://www.justuno.com/

In this episode, Derric and Erik talk through:

• How E-Commerce merchants can evaluate and select the best e-commerce tech stack for their brand and goals
• The pillars of your MarTech stack
• Email & SMS are a must for all ecomm brands
• How best to leverage customer reviews
• Improving the return experience
• Examples of ecommerce brands doing customer experience right

Host: Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: Derric Haynie - https://www.linkedin.com/in/derrichaynie/

EcommerceTech: https://ecommercetech.io/

Get in the mind of your customer and you'll create emails, popups, website copy that converts.

Sarah shares a download on Conversion Copy, including:

• Her copy makeover for Canada's weighted blanket; preview - "scrolling when you wish you were sleeping?"
• Why you can only talk to one person at a time
• How to channel your inner Glinda the good witch to solve your customer's problem
• A live teardown of a retail website
• What questions to ask when writing your marketing copy
• How to place your customer back in the moment that they experienced the problem
• Opportunities to improve your onsite copy and shopping experience
• Why "buy now" buttons might not work

Host: Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: Sarah Stockdale - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahstockdale/

Growclass: https://www.growclass.co/

How to replicate the Amazon experience for e-commerce success:

• Communication is key - over-communication FTW
• Focus on an easy shopping, checkout, delivery, and return experience
• 3 things your customers love that won't change (per Jeff Bezos): Low prices, fast delivery, great customer experience
• ^^ How to achieve all 3 of these
• The importance of walking through your own brand's purchase - and post-purchase - experience

Host: Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Guest: Virgil Ghik - https://www.linkedin.com/in/virgilghic/

WeSupplyLabs - https://wesupplylabs.com/

Together, they cover:

• The intricacies of selling cross-border
• Internationalization, Transactions regulations, Retail Margins
• Various barriers merchants face (customs, tariffs, payment options, shipping rates)
• Website personalization and geographic location
• How website and checkout internationalization can improve website conversions
• Improving the overall customer experience on your e-commerce site
• Driving cross-border conversions in a cost-effective manner

Erik Christiansen - https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikc/

Matthew Cannon - https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-cannon-b7835510/

Justuno: https://www.justuno.com/

Reach: https://www.withreach.com/