About This Episode:

A lot of emotions are involved in exiting a business, and Ryan emphasizes the importance of legal advice and research along the way. 

In this episode, Jon and Ryan also talk about failing and growing throughout the experience and seeing everything as a learning experience. Every business exit is a little different, so there is no defined timeline for going through the process. Ryan advises that you should do it when it feels right, and the numbers will work themselves out. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why it’s important not to burn bridges and end things on a positive note 
2. How relationships with employees change 
3. Why doing more research is important 
4. Why you should invest in a good legal team 
5. What to look forward to after exiting an ecommerce business

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, hit us up on Twitter. We’re @jonmacdonald and @ryangarrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better eCommerce growth engine, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon:
All right, Ryan. I think you have some exciting news today based on the notes you shared with me and the updates I’ve been getting. So I’m really excited for you and I’m very excited to chat about this today, mainly because you’re doing something I haven’t done before and I would love to learn more about that.

Garrow:
It is exciting.

Jon:
The ups and downs that come with it and all of the fun. And in short, Ryan’s a billionaire now, so we’ll just leave it at that. We’ll just call him.

Garrow:
Yeah, don’t come ask for money.

Jon:
Ryan must be over here.

Garrow:
Yeah, it’s exciting. We exited Joyful Dirt. So something we started. Oh, man. I think the initial idea was 2015 in my break. I had a gap quarter between TQE and Logical position. And so I was like, “Well, there’s got to be a way to start some businesses.” So I think I started three and Joyful Dirt [inaudible 00:01:11] –

Jon:
And typical Ryan Fashion, can’t just do one thing. We got to do multiple things.

Garrow:
No, yeah. So we started selling forklifts online that failed quick. We had a lead generation for a mortgage business that lasted longer but didn’t do great. And then Joyful Dirt became an idea. We had the idea, we iterated on it for a while, me and my two partners. And then I think we started testing product and actual fertilizer logo naming and all of that in ’16, refined in ’17, started trying to sell in ’18. And then got on Amazon in ’19. Started scaling and then COVID took us to stratospheric levels very quickly.

Jon:
Sounds like a good time to exit. So tell me, how did this all come about? If we’re talking about exiting a business today, I want to know the story. What led to this?

Garrow:
Yeah, I wasn’t really thinking about exiting. So far, I haven’t gone into businesses with a plan that, all right, do it in this timeframe and then we’re going to get to this point. Then it’s an exit. Right or wrong, that’s just not been what I’ve done yet. And there be maybe some other times where it’s going into a business specifically to exit a certain point.

Jon:
But I’m also a fan of the philosophy that you should always be running your business as if you are going to sell it eventually, ’cause you just run a better business.

Garrow:
Agreed. There’s probably some things that would change historically on this one, and maybe we’ll talk about some of that as well. But in this one it was constant head down, what’s next? It was always about how do we grow it and get it to the next stage? And in Joyful Dirt, we were three partners and none of us were full-time in the business. We all had other businesses going while we were running this and had employees doing certain things and certain roles. And obviously, we mentioned COVID took it to a great level and opened up lots of great wholesale channels. People were opening up stores for plants. We got into Whole Foods. Just a lot of really cool stuff.
And then we entered another phase without even realizing it in ’22 when one of my business partners exited the business he was spending 90% of his time on. And he’s like, “Nah, I’m going to get involved in Joyful Dirt.” And I’m like, “Thank goodness. We’ve needed this person for a while.” And now because you have free time and you don’t need to make money at this point, you’re now our free CEO. This is great. In that process, the focus, rightly so, COVID slowed down, e-comm slows down less people taking care of plants, more people focusing on how to pay their normal bills, we did slow down slightly. And that change against, hey, push, push, push, push for marketing and growth, was more about how do we really look at this as a business? But how do we put processes and strategies in place for manufacturing, because none of us have [inaudible 00:03:49] in manufacturing. So it’s like, well, we make it as we need it, but how do we hold an inventory and how do we plan cash flow?
And all of these business processes we should have had a while ago, are now coming into place. And so really it came about because that business partner gets involved more and more and is like, “I want this to be my business, my baby, and what if we took your shares? We’re not doing as much marketing now, so you’re probably not as involved or excited. What do you think?” So my wife and I we’re like, “Well, let’s think about this.” And he’s becoming more passionate and we’re neither here nor there. We have a lot of other businesses we’re involved in as well. And we decided, Hey, we enjoy the growth phases of a business and there’s going to be another growth phase of Joyful Dirt coming for sure. But it’s like, Hey, for us, it’s a phase that we’re not going to be as involved or as excited. And if you put me in front of a P&L and you want me to help optimize all the lines in that, and I’m like, “My eyes cross.”

Jon:
Why does that A, not surprise me? But also, because I know you personally, but I bet people listening to this would think he’s in the numbers all the time. You probably love numbers, but I do think it’s different. Running a business, having to manage all the costs, do all of that stuff, it can get old pretty quick if you’re not really passionate about the business.

Garrow:
And I’m passionate about marketing, and that’s where I’m in the data and looking at numbers and analytics. But what are we paying for boxes? Let’s go optimize the box cost. Just no, they work. One of my good friends is a CFO of a pretty big organization here in Portland. He lives in P&L and just loves it. I’m on a text chain with a bunch of business owners in Portland. They’re talking about an issue within some of their finances. Can I put it together an Excel spreadsheet for you and help you forecast? I’ve got an hour this afternoon, I would just love to do it. And I’m like, “Well, we’ll pay.” He’s like, “No, I just want to play an Excel with that. That’d be great.” I’m like, “That does not sound like fun.” So in realizing that and the ebbs and flows of business, it’s just like, okay, this is a good time to exit. We’ve got an opportunity to offer on the table. Let’s go. Let’s see what this looks like.

Jon:
Yeah, all well. Always want to exit on the upswing, so it seems like a good time.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on eCommerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of the Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with eCommerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, the digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon:
Okay, so every exit’s a little different. So I’m interested, tell me some of the good things, the bad things about exiting, especially an eCommerce brand, because obviously that’s the majority of listeners here and where I play most of my time. So I’m interested to hear about this.

Garrow:
And I don’t know if there’s ever a perfect time to exit a business. If there is, it’s always in hindsight, I think it’s all about emotionally, is it time? And does that make sense? And the numbers will find a way to work itself out, because every opportunity you’re participating now means you’re probably not participating in another opportunity.

Jon:
Wait, you mean you sometimes say no?

Garrow:
Well, I got married, so I have tight strings attached, which is a very good thing for my personality, ’cause I’m like, “Ah, everything’s exciting and fun when it’s new and fresh and I get to come up with ideas and strategize on it.” But my wife gets to shoot those down and be like, “Nope, you’ve committed to these ones. These are your opportunities.” And so exiting one now says, “Hey, I do have a hole in my quiver now. What are we going to fill that with?”

Jon:
Can I make a suggestion?

Garrow:
No, not yet.

Jon:
All right. Nevermind. You didn’t need to pause. You weren’t even like, “Eh.” You’re just like, “No.”

Garrow:
No, my wife is like, “It’s not happening yet.” I don’t care what I … Somebody’s going to offer you a Ferrari for a dollar? Maybe, because you’re going to sell it immediately. But you’re not getting involved in another business yet until you take a break.

Jon:
This is a problem. We have too many good ideas.

Garrow:
I know. And that’s for me, I love the idea piece. So at least the fact that it’s a potential now means that my brain can start looking and thinking about things. I also have other business I’m involved in so they get more time. And so that is a good thing because one thing I have that’s limited is my time. I wish I had more, but so does every business owner. If you had more time or even parents … I have four kids, and so I need five times as much time for each kid. So the good thing for me is potential for new opportunities. I also learned a really valuable lesson for me personally. Lawyers are a good thing, and that’s also a bad thing. Lawyers, I hate paying for them out of default. So it’s just annoying that those bills come through because lawyers get phenomenally high hourly rates.

Jon:
Pretty quick. They should-

Garrow:
It adds up.

Jon:
Give you a return on that. But-

Garrow:
Yeah, they should be like, “Hey, how much more did I get?” Because I pay you an extra 10% if you get me an extra 30%. But the good thing I learned in this is no matter how amicable a exit is, there’s always emotions and challenges. And so in hindsight, if I had been negotiating face-to-face with the partners, that creates a lot of tension and emotions because there’s emotions on both sides, because they’re trying to negotiate low. You’re trying to negotiate high. So there’s always going to be that tension and emotions.
Where if you put lawyers in between and they’re the ones talking without emotion, things actually move much quicker. You don’t have the ability to just say something angry because they said this thing needs to happen. You’re like, “No, that’s terrible. You’re a horrible human.” But the lawyer’s like, “Okay, yes. They said that, but I think we’re going to do this and this.’ I’m like, “Oh, okay.” Lawyers are very helpful, especially if you have good ones. I assume there’s some bad ones out there that probably would not help things. But we both had phenomenal lawyers that really helped the process. I think go quicker and end on a positive note at the end of the day.

Jon:
Well, those relationships matter?

Garrow:
They do. You never want to … Especially a city the size of Portland, it’s technically a larger city. But you and I both know that it is a very small city when it comes to industry it feels like. If you’re going to know people, you’re going to come across people that you do business with again. So if you burn bridges, it’s just not going to be great. And so having the lawyers keep the emotions out of it and make sure that the relationship or what’s happening outside of just the transaction is positive. One thing I didn’t think through before an exit, is the relationships with employees. When there’s an exit, you don’t get to keep having those same relationships because most of your relationship was based around business conversations, which you no longer get to have because of wonderful agreements. That’s good.
But I didn’t expect like, “Oh, I can’t call person X, Y, Z or text them and just be like …”, because I’m not supposed to. But also because I also have a lot of businesses, and I have companies that interact with multiple businesses or individuals that we hire as contractors, default wording in exit contracts, would it put me out of compliance immediately if we didn’t think through that? ‘Cause I read it and the lawyer’s like, “Yeah, it looks good.” And I’m like, “Well, this particular contractor works for me personally and works for these other businesses of mine, and that’s okay in this, right?” He’s like, “Oh, if you had not brought that up, you would’ve been liable to be sued because you would be in breach of the contract.” So we had to put extra clauses in to make sure that I could still work with that contractor in other businesses, because what most businesses want to do is protect the business from a partner that exited, that they don’t want you to take the ideas or the contractors and compete with them again.

Jon:
Oh, the team is an asset?

Garrow:
Yep.

Jon:
And it’s part of the value. So definitely makes sense.

Garrow:
Yeah. So just the nuances and have, again, the lawyers, I can’t say enough about having quality lawyers, which five year ago Ryan would’ve been like, “No, let’s just do this ourselves. We don’t need lawyers. Let’s just save the money. We don’t need to pay thousands of dollars in legal fees.”

Jon:
Ryan has gone corporate, is what I’m saying.

Garrow:
There’s a lot of mistakes I can make if I don’t have somebody smarter than me checking it and checking my work.

Jon:
Always seek legal advice. I will second that for sure. Okay, so relationships matter. Definitely makes sense. Lawyers good and bad, but mostly good I’m hearing. Expensive is the negative, but on the positive, hopefully they’ve given you return. So if I’m doing my math right, it was about six years of your life, maybe seven? You said 15. So 20?

Garrow:
15 was the idea. So there’s some ideating and-

Jon:
Okay. So let’s say pushing seven, six.

Garrow:
Probably six. Yeah.

Jon:
Obviously, you have a lot of businesses, more than we talk about on this podcast. Obviously, there is a lot of time involved, a lot of missed stuff with family, et cetera to try to get this business. So there’s definitely some ups and some downs. What would you do different looking back on this?

Garrow:
I probably would not have started a manufacturing hard goods product as a side hustle, or I would have said, “We need to have somebody full-time owning this business from a responsibility perspective”, because when you have three business partners … We’re all really good in business, and we came together because we have very unique skill sets that I think together make a really solid business. But the problem is we all had other businesses that were making the money that funded this entity, and none of us necessarily owned everything within the business, like P&L, responsibility, employee, HR. And there was a lot of things going on on a business when you start having employees that I think had we taken the jump and just said, “Hey, we’re going to hire a business manager to run this full-time. It’s going to be their responsibility. We’ll be more of a board advising them and checking their work type thing”, I think it would’ve probably grown quicker, been more profitable and overall more successful.
And maybe we would’ve exited as a group years ago. Who knows? I think just the manufacturing complexity entails that it successfully long term can’t just be a side hustle, because we put somebody responsible for the business over the last few months, you really started to see the value of that inside the business and in the results. And so I think side hustles are more about service-based businesses or hobbies that maybe someday could go big, someday win maybe. That was a big learning I would’ve done.

Jon:
Or even as you did here, get it off the ground and then hand it off? That’s an option, always an option.

Garrow:
Yeah. If we just had that goal like, “Hey, we’re going to build it up and then just sell it early on”, and it’s a side hustle for us, not a major money maker.

Jon:
And you make your yearly salary up and it’s just a quick sale like that, so could be worth it.

Garrow:
Another thing I would’ve done different, I would’ve probably done more research into the fertilizer space on legal requirements, and all that goes into getting legally certified to self fertilizer in every state. And knowing that that is a very large expense, because the first couple of years we’re like, “La-la-la-la-la. This is so easy, so great.” California’s like, “Hey, are you registered?” “What do you mean?” Yeah.

Jon:
Another reason to have a business manager?

Garrow:
Yeah. I would’ve done more research going into it going, “Hey guys, we definitely should have a business manager”, because we have to fill out all these certifications in all 50 states because they’re all different. Oh, that would’ve been important.

Jon:
It’s interesting what product lines you don’t really think are as regulated as they end up being. And fertilizer’s one of those where you can do a lot of nefarious stuff with components of fertilizer. And so governments want to keep track of that stuff to some degree.

Garrow:
Yeah, and it does create a protection or moat against competition to a degree. But it also means that if there’s a high barrier to entry that we didn’t realize initially going in like, oh, there’s a lot of our profit that is going to go to just maintaining a legal business entity, in competing with the Miracle Grows and the Joe B’s and all those large brands that have obviously gone through what we went through, but have a lot of scale to make it that easy.

Jon:
I have a friend who only invests in highly regulated areas of business. And I think that’s an interesting approach because it is a huge moat. If you’re already in, then nobody’s going to do that as a side hustle, unless you’re-

Garrow:
No it’s true.

Jon:
Ryan Garrow.

Garrow:
Dumb enough to not know better.

Jon:
You have a dozen businesses and you’re like, “Let’s just try this one and then realize it later.” But most people aren’t going to even get that far, so that is a great moat to see. It increases value as well, especially if you do it right. Thank you for being open and sharing today, and I want to know what’s next for you. I have my hopes of what’s next for you. It involves you doubling down your wine business, but that’s a different story, maybe.

Garrow:
Well, we’re growing wine grapes. We’re buying another .., Oh gosh, I think we have 220 pinot grapes. We’re buying another two or 300 pinot grapes and another two, 300 Chardonnay grapes to plant out back. And then next year, we’re doing Merlot. So there will be wine that we’re growing, wine grapes, and we still do have the wine business. It’s private client stuff. But right now it is that free time to a degree. So I don’t have to … On the weekends, I’m not packing orders. I’m not thinking about what calls do I have next week to try to get into another retailer. So it is free time for kids. We just started club soccer, and if you play club soccer in third grade, there’s a lot of time. A lot of games on weekends and traveling. So that’s fun. And I do get to put some time into the other businesses that would’ve been going to the Joyful Dirt business.
And so I’ve already seen some fruit from that and had some doors open just locally with some really influential people within those spaces that has been like, “Wow, put those people into this business and help grow it.” And the other businesses, by the way, do have full-time managers on them, which is so helpful. So it’s not just me trying to grow. It’s me that I get to focus on connections and marketing and top line things. And I’m taking the family to Hawaii next month.

Jon:
Nice.

Garrow:
So when you’re flying six humans to Hawaii for a week, that’s fun. Also, chaotic.

Jon:
Yes.

Garrow:
On a plane.

Jon:
And expensive, Hawaii.

Garrow:
Expensive. Yep. Hey, there was an exit. We’re good.

Jon:
Yeah, there you go.

Garrow:
For this one. And my wife and I have been talking through what does the next step look like? Is it getting another e-com business? Is it buying e-com business? Is it help start another one? And I said, “Well, maybe it’s completely different.” And we look at … What if we get involved in a local business that doesn’t have an e-com component? Maybe we add one, but maybe it’s just local that we can have an impact in our community and the people right around us, which is something that since my wife’s store closed on our farm at the beginning of COVID, we haven’t had that. And so that’s something that we both are considering. What does that look like? And thinking through it.

Jon:
Okay. Well, that would be exciting. I think especially where you live on the outskirts of the city, there’s a lot of local stuff out there, and that’s a local economy that does well, and it’s always fun to see. And I’m partial, as I’ve already talked about, to all the vineyards that are right out where you live, but in terms of supporting local economy. But there’s a lot of great stuff out there, so it’s always good to see.

Garrow:
Yeah, so who knows? There’s a lot there. We are having a meeting in couple weeks that we’re going to talk to a family that started a 501(c)(3) to further some of their charitable stuff. And so we’ve thought about that because we’re attached to quite a few charities within the region that maybe there’s something that can tie them together within a family unit that we can all get behind. In fact, this last holiday season, my son, fourth grader, raised a bunch of money for Doernbecher and toys and took him ’em up there and delivered them.

Jon:
Awesome.

Garrow:
So he’s pretty passionate about that. So it’s like, “Okay, could we build the charity around that to help drive more value to locally to some of these businesses that are doing really cool things?”

Jon:
Yeah. That’s great. Well, that would be fun to see as well. There’s a business aspect to that that requires a lot of the same thinking and exercise that. But it ends up being for wider good than just your family. So that’s awesome. It’s a noble cause. I’m glad to hear you’re thinking about that. You’ve been really open and I really appreciate that. I’m excited for you. I think it’s a huge win. Something I haven’t been through personally. I have no intention of selling the Good at any point right now or any of the other things that I’m invested in. But I love when people do it and I get to see it, and especially when friends like yourself do it because they can cheer you on and it’s always good to learn about it. So congrats on that.

Garrow:
Yeah, thank you. And looking back, it’ll be like either it was a great idea or bad idea. But nonetheless, it was a for sure learning experience and going through it. And there’s plenty of other businesses to start and exit.

Jon:
There you go.

Garrow:
Fail and grow all the things. I’m definitely not done. So I’m sure we’ll have more of these conversations, and maybe somebody’s going to offer you enough zeros that the Good is like, “Ah, I’m done.”

Jon:
Well, one day it may happen. Who knows? But again, running a business as if you’re going to sell it makes sense. And when it happens, then you’re in a better position. So that’s great. Well, awesome. Thank you, Ryan. I appreciate you sharing today. Onto the next business so we have more examples of your stuff to share and talk about as we move on with the podcast.

Garrow:
Yeah. Thanks, Jon.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. Keep up to date with new episodes. You can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 078): Exiting an Online Business appeared first on The Good.

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About this episode:

What makes a company different from the rest? The core values at The Good reflect who we are and what’s important to us. In this special episode, Jon and Natalie return to discuss how they came up with our core values and why they’re critical in our day-to-day operations.

In this episode, you’ll learn things about: 

• What being a B Corp-certified company means for us 
• How The Good came up with our core values
• How our core values affect the direction of the company and its employees
• Why EOS was a good fit for us and how it helped us implement the core values 

Learn more about Jon and Natalie here

• Connect with Jon and Natalie on LinkedIn
• Follow Jon on Twitter
• Check out The Good’s blog 

Want to be a guest on our show? Have feedback or ideas for how we can improve? Send your thoughts over to podcast@thegood.com. We’ll be keeping an eye on that inbox.  

The Ecommerce Insights Show is brought to you by The Good, a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) consultancy specializing in helping ecommerce businesses accelerate their growth through better research, testing, and design. Learn more about our team, our work, and our services at www.thegood.com.

Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): So here’s the question. How can you, commerce leaders make sure that they are producing a great product, providing a world-class customer experience responsibly managing the finances and still reserve time, energy and resources for marketing their products. My name is James Sauers, and you’re listening to the e-commerce insight show.

[00:00:16] The podcast that gives you a specific, actionable advice for growing your e-commerce business. Every Monday, you’ll get a conversion rate optimization tactic that you can implement quickly to make your business 1% better. Every single. Every Thursday, we sit down with industry experts to go deep on a specific aspect of running a successful e-commerce business.

[00:00:34] It’s the perfect blend of learning and application, which means that you maximize the value of every single minute you spend with us. We’re just as committed to growing your business as you are. So if you’re looking for a partner to help you crush your revenue goals, you’ve come to the right place, roll up your sleeves and grab a notepad because it’s time to get to work.

James Sowers: Um, all right, so let’s just dive right in. I think the purpose of our conversation today is to talk about, you know, an exciting new change that we’ve had here at the good and rolling out some new core values.

And we’ve been talking for awhile about doing a little bit more content around, you know, our organizational culture and how we think, how we run our business, how we collaborate as a team now, a distributed team, which is a relatively recent development as well. So. Um, you know, a lot of good stuff we want to cover today, but maybe the best place to jump in is kind of like starting at the beginning.

Right? The origin story of the good. And I know one of the big things that we like to talk about and, um, promote is our status as a B corporation. I know that comes with a whole host of upsides, but also a whole host of maybe not obligations, but commitments, right. That we’ve made to, um, satisfy the requirements of being a certified B Corp.

So. I, I don’t know what your timeline is with the B Corp designation, uh, Natalie, but maybe I know John was there for it obviously. So how did that come to be? Like, when did we decide that we wanted to pursue becoming a certified or registered B corporation? And what was that decision making process like?

Jon MacDonald: Well, it was one of the things where we were already doing a lot of the tactics that get deployed for B corporation. And the more that. I looked around at, you know, it’s one thing for a company to say, we do all these great things and we care about the planet and our people more than profits essentially is what the sane is for B corporation.

But it’s one thing to have that verified by an independent third. And to get that certification. So as we’re interviewing more people, the, in looking to grow our team, the more I realized that they’re hearing the same things from all these companies. And I was looking at how do we, how do I, can I go to somebody, look them in the eye and.

This is, this is real, like it’s been verified by a third party and we’re held to these standards and they’re going to check in on us every couple of years to make sure that we’re improving that we’re not just saying this is what it is, and we’re never going to touch it again. So you have to live it.

And that’s what I really liked about B corporation, um, being in Portland, of course, um, it’s, it’s, you know, fits really well with the Portland culture overall and they have a very big, uh, B corporation. User group here, if you will. And that was something that, you know, I knew a handful of people in that group and, you know, I started talking to them about what we could do and how that worked, and then, you know, ended up going to get certified.

Now that process took us nine to 12 months just to get certified. The process is pretty deep. You have to go through a massive question. Several it’s like a hundred and some questions, and then you have to provide proof for each of your answers. And then they have an audit where they randomly you seemingly randomly anyways, pick out some questions that you answered and ask you to further verify that, or they’ll verify it with third parties.

So it’s not something that you can easily. And it’s something that you do have to live. And that was what we really liked about it at the time. Um, and you have to consistently recertify every two years, I believe two to three years. And, um, they want you to improve your score every single time. So not only do you get certified, but you get scored and you earn points for a whole bunch of different categories.

And so they really want you every time you recertify, you have to add additional points. 

James Sowers: Interesting. Uh, anything to add on there finally from, again, I don’t know when you came in, if we were already kind of firmly established and certified and evaluated at that point, or if you were part of the, kind of the decision making process, um, what was it like from your perspective?

Yeah. 

Natalie Thomas: When I joined the good four years ago, we were already a certified B Corp. And I asked the same question that I now get asked in interviews all the time, which is what does it mean to you to be a B Corp? And for me it means, you know, we actually have made commitments and we stand by those and we continue to live by them.

Um, and actually if you go to the good.com you can see in the footer around our B Corp certification. Um, we get scored in certain areas and we score really high on kind of the quality of life stuff for our employees. So things like offering maternity, um, paying a living wage, having benefits, things like that.

Um, as well as, you know, just little things that we do around the office. So, you know, we have a recycling bin that seems like really small, but it’s a commitment. Other people haven’t made. We haven’t. For trash, we don’t have staplers in the office. So there’s all these little things that kind of stack up.

And what I love about being a B Corp is that like attracts, like it really attracts, um, mission driven companies and mission driven individuals to us. And I hear all the time kind of on the same topic in, um, you know, everything from cover letters, to interviews with potential candidates that they’re attracted to our B Corp status and they’re attracted to our core values.

So I think it really helps us be. You know, surrounded by people that we want to surround ourselves with and work with the kind of clients really appreciate not just what we do, but our approach. 

James Sowers: Awesome. Uh, yeah, I can say as somebody who just did the hiring for a new marketing coordinator or a marketing manager that was universally among candidates, one of the first things they called out is I, you know, why you’re interested in the position I saw, you’re a B Corp.

That means a lot to me. Um, and some of them have wants so far as to look us up at the school. The scores are publicly available and you can see like where somebody is at and maybe, uh, even historically like where they’ve been in the past few years. So candidates right now on the, in the talent pool are doing their homework.

And, um, this is something. Uh, I hate the term moves the needle, but this does make an impact on their decision making process. And it can be the difference if you have two equal opportunities, um, maybe the B Corp status could be something that pushes somebody over the edge to accept your offer. So, and that works with clients too.

I’m sure we have clients come through the door who will also be corporations or just mission-focused organizations. Uh, the commitments that we made resonate with them. So, um, really cool. And, you know, I, the first time I remember hearing about a B corporation was on pat Flynn, smart, passive income podcast, and I had to be on how old the B Corp thing is, but it was a few years ago, at least.

And, um, he was interviewing somebody who was basically one of the first, like few dozen B corporations to be certified and was very, uh, early to that trend. And I just remember thinking this is so cool, right? Like it’s different from being a nonprofit. It’s more like a for-profit organization with a social mission.

And that’s really cool. And someday I’d love to work for one of these companies. And then you fast forward, like six or seven years and get to interview at the good and like, it was a big part of my decision making process too. So, um, really cool part of our history. And I think that’s like the broader mission.

And I don’t know the sequence of events if like we already had core values established before we became a B Corp or vice versa. But I think where that ties into our conversation today. Okay. That’s one aspect of how we want to do good in the world. Um, another aspect of how we kind of. Put these things into practice is through the core values that we have at the organization.

And I know recently, um, we rolled out a new set of core values, but we did have some that served as a foundation for let’s call it like the first chapter of the goods life cycle. Right. Um, so I’m curious, like John, going back to that day where we came up with that original set of core values, what was that experience like?

Um, you know, maybe what precipitated the need for core values. You hear about it a lot in business school. If you went to business school or case studies or something like that, like. Um, but it seems kind of like lip service in a lot of ways. And I’m sure that, you know, we had a different approach to it.

So if you go back to that day, we were setting up that first set of core values who was involved, you know, why did we feel the need to put these things on paper? And then how did you kind of come up with that first handful of, of, uh, you know, ideas that we really aligned with and want to embody? 

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, this is a great question because.

One of the joys over the past year has been working on these new core values. It was really enlightening. Um, and it really did help think about where we want to be moving forward and who do we want to attract and even more. So who do we want to repel and, you know, start looking at who’s applying and do they align with these core values or do they resonate in the same way?

We have folks who are applying and are mentioning the B Corp status. One of the things that we always look for is do they mention the core values? Did they do their homework? We put them up on our website publicly. Are they interested in those core values at all? Do they resonate? And you know, a lot of our questions that we asked during interviews along the way are framed around the core values.

And so that’s something that, that is become a valuable. I don’t know. I don’t know a gate for us, if you will, was hiring. When we originally did them, uh, it was years ago now probably a decade ago, sat down and said, okay, where do we want to go? Who do we want to have on our team? And what are some things that we want to make sure resonate with the team moving forward?

And one of the things was we really want folks who are going to. Think bigger, but we didn’t want to say something like think big. It was really around, um, finding opportunities in all of these challenges that come up every day and work situations and then taking actions to make those better. And so the more we looked at that, the more we decided on, on be a force for change as one of our core values.

And so the process was really more. What are the sentences that we want to imbibe, you know, to have, uh, our team and body. And, you know, we thought about each of these. And then we came up with the term or the slogan that goes around with that. And we wanted to keep it to three or four most because the challenge is that so many people have these little quippy.

Core values that nobody remembers or, you know, I’ve known and businesses that, that have 10 of them and they stand up a daily huddle and make people recite all 10, or they just do like pop quizzes on it. And it’s like, you know what? That’s all BS. And the reality is if you don’t, well, if your team can’t remember, then you have too many or they just aren’t meaningful.

And. Really wanted to keep it to a handful. Um, so our old ones were be a force for change, make improvements, not excuses and inspire by example. And these were all things that, you know, we had, um, really wanted to, as a leadership team at the time, made sure that the team that builds up around us, uh, you know, it could be an example.

James Sowers: Yeah. Um, I love that. And I’m glad you pointed out because I’ve been in organizations where they literally make somebody like recite a core value or something like that. Part of the mission statement at the beginning of the meeting, or cite an example or something like that. And it’s like, yeah, I can see how that feels like a tangible representation of, of culture.

But ideally I think the more important point is you use them as kind of that gate or that filtering system during the hiring process. And you find the goal is to find folks who naturally embody these core values who already have that ingrained in their DNA. And then when they come inside the organization, Presumably they operate that way naturally.

And then, um, to steal a phrase from a little bit later in this episode, maybe you hire fire promote based on kind of those principles, right? The ones that really stand out, um, are more likely to be elevated into a higher position, get a raise, get more responsibility, whatever the incentive is there, the, the reward system.

But, um, yeah, I think it’s less about like, can we all hold hands and recite the core values together and more about like, Are we the type of people who already embody this and are we holding each other accountable to doing that day in and day out? Because it’s easy to kind of lose your way when life gets busy or hectic, or you have a tough day, like, um, can we, can we help each other out through that?

Um, Natalie, where did you come in in terms of the, I know you were here for the first set of core values, obviously. Cause those just recently changed, but like how much exposure did you have to those and were they part of, um, you making the decision to join the team? Cause it was sometime after those were established, you came on and then, um, started full-time here.

So what was your exposure to that first set? That’s a good 

Natalie Thomas: question. I don’t know if I, if I was one of those people that mentioned them in my application or cover letter. Um, but they definitely made an impact when I first started. And, um, I think, you know, there’s something that we have on posters all over the office that we really embodied.

Yeah. We mentioned, um, at meetings and, you know, it’s like an opportunity to bring them up any opportunity to bring them up in, uh, a client meeting. We do, um, because you know, if we get feedback, that’s really hard to hear. Um, Hey, one of our core values is making improvements, not excuses. So we’re able to really quickly say like, you know, there’s a checklist for how we should handle things.

And we’re always kind of checking against that. Like, does this match our core values? What is the way. Best way we should respond. So we had them created, um, they were created before I got here, but we had them, um, kind of succinctly shared in physical paper and we would just move those around our desks. I think everybody had it on their desk or taped above their desk or floating around somewhere.

We also have posters in the office and. I’ve heard this rumor. I don’t know if this is true. That means vendor row used to have his simplicity mantras, like somewhere around the studio and he would move this one poster here or there. So you never got used to it being in the same place. We kind of have the opposite where they had been on one wall since we got into the new office.

And I think it was just really comforting to kind of walk by those every day and be constantly reminded and, um, just have them right up on the wall. Like we’re not trying to hide them from anyone. We all have agreed to kind of live by the standard. 

James Sowers: Yeah, really cool. So if we, if we fast forward a little bit, well, not really a little bit a decade, right?

We’re we’re here sitting here in the last, uh, maybe six to nine months and we’ve kind of hit. Um, turning point, maybe this kind of evolutionary step milestone in the, in the business where, you know, we want to raise the bar, um, grow in a lot of ways, right? Uh, maybe that involves head count revenue number of clients we serve impact in the world, whatever, uh, you know, toward that B Corp mission, we kind of realize it sounds like that, um, where we want to go and where we’re at today, like what got us here will not get us there.

Right. And so there are a bunch of conversations that happen. Um, one is around kind of like managing the organization and the team here and breaking down our goals into bite-size steps that we can achieve. But part of that was kind of like, Hmm, maybe we take another look at these core values. Right. And, um, is there.

A similar evolution that needs to happen with these because, uh, as you change kind of the, the goal or the objective, there might be different people that you need on the team to get you there or different types of people or people with different types of predispositions. So, um, my recollection is. Uh, we first realized that in order to get where we want to be, we’re going to need some kind of structure and operating system, um, around making that happen.

And, um, we fell into one that had kind of this core values review built into it. So, um, I know I kinda came in midstream to that process. It seemed like it was kind of already underway. So maybe John enlighten us in terms of like how we got involved with, um, w with Ellie, if we want to give her a name and everything and the, the EOS system, and then how that led to revisiting the courses.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. So one of the things I’ve been really conscious of as we’ve continued to scale and grow and move very, very fast is to, um, have some organization to that. And one thing that can kill a business fast-growing business very quickly is to, um, a run out of cash because you’re moving so fast. You’re not keeping tabs on things and you’re, over-investing.

And B it’s just how, you know, I always tell the team here, if there’s one constant, if the good it’s change and the problem with that can be that it can overwhelm some folks when you change things so quickly. So wanted to make sure we had some organization and structure for that change and that we were doing it intentionally.

It wasn’t just a, Hey, look, this week, this is not working out. So we’ve got to make some changes here. I really wanted to have some structure to that and. Well before the pandemic. So we hit this at a perfect time. Um, you know, we came in and was okay, but there was a bunch of different systems out there.

I’ve used scaling up in the past, but I, you know, in talking to a bunch of folks, um, through different business communities, EOS or entrepreneur operating system is, is really the way to go. And, um, it really brings scaling up down to earth if you will, right. Scaling up is great for corporations. VC backed, you know, with a hundred folks maybe are bigger, uh, EOS is better for, for service businesses for smaller companies.

And it really seemed like a good fit for us. So, uh, you know, went out and I hired Ellie, um, who is our implementer for EOS and kind of coaching us through that process. Uh, had a lot of, uh, history with Ellie over the years through EO, which is another. Same letters almost but different it’s entrepreneurs organization, which is a, a business group.

So both Natalie and I knew Ellie through that and had been coached by Ellie through different training, et cetera in EO. Um, so after we met with her and she was like, look, I’m not going to be the person who is like, you have to check every box with us. We’re going to check the boxes that make sense for you.

And we’re going to mold it into what, what makes sense for your business and what you, where you want to go. And so we went through that process, uh, part of that initial process of her six months or so of, of onboarding EOS is to take another look at your core values. After you’ve done a lot of the upfront work of defining where you want to go.

And we, as a leadership team, the three of us sat down and said is our current core values going to get us where we want to go? Or is it time to refresh those? And. In my opinion, you know, were they good core values? Yes. Um, where are they going to get us? You know, everybody be bought into them and get us where we need to go, maybe not.

And so, uh, it was a really interesting process of us all sitting down with LD coaching and, um, and I really tried to take a back seat and just listen to what everybody else’s opinion was there. So, uh, because I knew what I wanted, but I wanted to make sure it was, uh, uh, Something that that involved everybody and that everybody was.

James Sowers: Um, Natalie, did you have any reservations or any thoughts in the back of your mind? When we first sat down and said like, okay, we’re going to take a look at the core values that you’ve known for four years and are well-established and people are naturally, like, parenting’s not the right term, but they’re, they’re saying them in meetings naturally.

Right. Because it’s been kind of ingrained in us and even just the idea of kind of like potentially wiping those out, replacing them with something totally new. That’s not what Ellie was suggesting, but that’s a feasible outcome. Right. You could end up with something totally different. Um, you’re out the organization much longer than I was when we started having that conversation.

So did you have any like gut reaction, you know, that before you kind of filter it for political correctness or try to like adjust it for the audience, which you need jerk reaction? Like, no, don’t touch them. They’re so good. Like, my team loves them or like, was it the opposite? Was it like, oh, this is such a needed change or was it somewhere in the middle, right.

Natalie Thomas: Yeah, I think you’ve probably heard a mix of both from me and those meetings and our facilitator, I will say to her credit early bird, like she. Came, she, she brought us into that room with an understanding that like, these don’t have to change. We’re just going to evaluate what’s on the table today and take a look at whether or not these even need to change.

And I think there have been exercises in the password. John has asked the team to revisit those when they weren’t changed. And so we knew that these, you know, they are working for us, but when I really thought about it, I thought. I realized that make improvements, not excuses was the biggest thing that people reference on a regular basis.

Um, and I think the process of looking at them and evaluating our core values was really intuitive to me. And it was basically for better or worse. Like you look at some of the qualities that your team embodies that, um, you know, are helping them do their best work. Like what about them is. Making sure that they can just leverage their skills to the best of their ability.

And they really fit in here and they produce an amazing quality of work. And, you know, we brought in elements from our team that we love so much and looked at them. Skills distilled them or qualities, if you will distill them down to a really small list and then compare those to our core values. And we felt like there were some things missing.

And I will say, like, there was definitely some consternation, it feels like kind of, I didn’t want the team to get the sense that they were having the rug pulled out from under them. But when we really looked at it, we said, look, these are aspirational core values. The core values. Crafted at the end of that experience, weren’t things that we wanted to live up to.

They were things that we were already doing it. And so I felt like it was a really great practice to just explore. What about our culture and what about our community ethic? Good. Do we really value? And we want to help raise up and say, this is our standard. Um, so. I definitely had reservations, but at the end I feel like we came up with something really strong, um, that really speaks to where we came from as well.

We didn’t lose a lot of the elements that we loved from the previous core values, but the current ones, I think just have a little more specificity to them. And, um, they ring true in the Workday, Dan and yeah. 

James Sowers: Yeah, I think it’s worth noting that we kind of ran the same process with every aspect of the business.

It’s like you have an arbitrary revenue goal. Okay. Where did that come from? Is that even the right target or is that too ambitious or not ambitious enough? Right. So we’d looked at that and then we look at it. Right. We look at our ideal client profile and like, we think we know, right. But do we actually know, let’s talk it out.

And like, your interpretation is different from mine. And like, maybe we need to come to the middle or maybe I realize I’m wrong and you were right. And let’s get that on paper. So we’re all on the same page. Like lots of healthy debate around various aspects of the business and core values was just one of them.

Um, I think one thing we knew if nothing else, right. We knew that going to a distributed team probably required a little bit of a refinement of the core values, just because you’re going to have to, it just layering in an element. Independence ownership, autonomy. Like I don’t know that that was necessarily in the first set is probably really important to have in the next set.

Um, you know, a lot of organizations are going remote right now. And so I would say like, if they don’t have that aspect, they may want to consider it because it is something that, like I said before, you can hire based on to find the right person. Um, and I think that’s part of the exercise is like who’s already on the team.

That’s an A-player, who’s crushing it. And what are some of their characteristics activities that they do? What makes them stand out? That we like and want to embody, like, how do we find more of that? And then who are the team members that contractors full-time, whatever that didn’t work out. And what are some of the personality traits?

What are some of the decision-making aspects? What are some of the things that like made that negative outcome happen and how do we filter for that? How do we avoid that happening again? And you kind of put those two things together and that’s, that’s kind of the recipe, uh, for coming up with some core values that hopefully, um, do the right thing, but.

Your point is very astute in that, like it’s easy for the team to say we’re getting new core values. That means like, what if I don’t like them? Like, what if I don’t align with them? And it’s like, well, if you start from first principles and you say like, what are the best reflections of the team we already have and what makes us great then it’s very unlikely that that’s going to happen unless somebody has like, perhaps an inaccurate interpretation of themselves or something.

I don’t know. I don’t know how that works out. Um, but let me think about this. So w what I remember from the process was basically, um, we had the past core values. In the back of our minds, obviously, but from what I remember, it was like, we were almost encouraged to start with a blank page and just start to kind of like brain dump.

All right. Let’s all take 30 minutes to ourselves. Go off into a room and brain dump. All the things that we think are values that we have that we like in the workplace, what our coworkers, I think we even put names to coworkers in the past. Right. And like what made them a great coworker and what made these people over here?

A not so great coworker or manager. Let’s just dump all those on the page. Then let’s put those things together in one Google doc, let’s see which one gets mentioned the most let’s keep that or whatever. Like, let’s see which one’s an edge case. Maybe that’s just a John experience or a James experience or Natalie experience.

And then we kind of see some trends and then we try to start to bucket those things together and topical area, I mean, is that you guys remember Glenn? I think it was kind of like a step-by-step process, right? It was like word vomit and then filter into categories and then kind of refine that until you get to a manageable set of just a handful of Corvette.

Yeah, that’s 

Natalie Thomas: what I remember. And I love taking a really messy list of things and then categorizing them and then forming neat and sentences about them. I would say that like, if you had to define strategy by just one practice, that would be it. So this was an exercise that I really enjoyed. I think it would probably make it.

Other people uncomfortable, but for me, yeah, it was just, um, really intuitive to go through the process of creating a list of, you know, desirable and undesirable activities or traits you could have, um, in a colleague and putting those all out on paper and defining like what we do and don’t want. And as we went through the process, again, our facilitator was so great.

She said, yeah, Um, she really guided us into understanding like that we were unique and that we were defining what was unique about us. Cause I felt like, oh, well, if anyone goes through this process, they’re going to put the same things on the good and bad list that I would. And that’s of course going to turn into really similar core values between our company and another.

And she said, that is absolutely not true. And that every industry and business has unique challenges. And a unique culture and that’s why these never turn out the same. And I was pleasantly surprised at how, yeah. These didn’t stack up. Um, you know, one for one compared to some of the other, uh, examples that we looked at as part of our

James Sowers: John, you have anything to add to kind of that. I dunno, making the pottery, you kind of thing. You put the clay on the thing, you spin it around, you kind of shape it until it turns into something usable. Right. That’s how I describe the experience. It’s more like a 

Natalie Thomas: 3d printer. Ceramicist 

Jon MacDonald: it’s just every time somebody describes making the pottery like that, I just think it ghost that movie.

Um, so yeah, I’ll do John’s. Yeah. So I think it was a good opportunity for us to. Work in a fourth one, which we did, which was impact over income. And the goal there was, if we’re really living these values around B corporation, et cetera, kind of tie that together. We need, we need to mention it somehow on our core values.

Um, and so we came up with, uh, impact over income and our company exists to eliminate bad online experiences, not just to make a profit. Our success allows us to invest in people and communities. And so I think that that’s something where if you. Want to be part of a greater good than that. You’re going to resonate with that.

If you are all about yourself and you’re working here just for the money, then likely not gonna resonate. Um, and that doesn’t mean that, you know, again, part of that is we invest in our people. So, you know, taking some of that profit and making sure that it goes back to having the team who’s the right team.

Okay. Well, and, and able to invest in their lives otherwise outside of work, too. And so I think there’s a lot of ways to look at this, but I do believe that it was key that we, I found this fourth one and ended up here and that, um, we were able to identify this hole in our prior quarter. 

James Sowers: Yeah, I think one element of that particular core value that stands out to me is the part, the sub component, basically where we say we’re advocates for people who aren’t in the room.

And I I’m always reminded of, I think it was Jeff Bezos at Amazon who always has like an empty chair in the meeting and that’s supposed to represent the customer. And so like the customers in all these conversations and part of this decision making process, I think we have some element of that where like our, our role working with our clients is to kind of be the advocate for the customer, the end user of the site, and maybe steer away from.

Strictly financially motivated things like maybe it does make more money, but maybe it’s a very poor user experience or something like that. And, and try to be an advocate for the customer in that regard, but even outside of the workplace, like being advocates for underserved communities, um, and demographics that maybe don’t have as much opportunity or access as others can we do well in our role at work so that we can do good in the community, both in the Portland area and anywhere else that our team members get involved.

So that, that kind of sub-component of impact over income was really important. Uh, to me personally, I’m glad it made it through to the, to the final version because, um, I do think it is something that’s like, it doesn’t all have to be about work, right? It’s about who you are as a person and what you stand for and what you identify with, and that makes you more effective at work, right?

Like that’s, that’s something you can draw from when, uh, like I said, maybe you’re having a bad day or you’re just not feeling super inspired. It’s like, okay, well, at the end of the day, I get to make somebody’s life a little bit better because of what I’m doing here today. So, um, that’s all you need to kind of like put on a happy face and keep moving.

Right. Um, I don’t have anything to add. I know this is a very impactful core value from the final four, which I’ve never called it, that it sounds kind of cheesy, but, uh, the final four that we came up with, uh, anything on impact over income you want to add, and then maybe we’ll just go through the other three and we can, we can close it out there after reviewing the.

Natalie Thomas: Yeah. And kinda over impact over income. Let me start that over. Yeah. Impact over income. My gosh, I can I say it right? Obviously we need to remember our core values in order to be able to talk about them. Um, impact over income to me is really about that, that person who’s not in the room, right. I think, you know, we’re all coming up in the age of user centered design and the experience economy.

And this really just speaks to making sure that we’re not designing deceptive user experiences or dark UX as it’s called. And it’s funny that you mentioned the Amazon example because I think they are a great example of, you know, that they got sued. I think for they’re like a nine step cancellation process that has a lot of.

Different kinds of buttons that might confuse you along the way. Um, and it probably does make them more money, but you know, it’s not something we would advocate for us though. We’re always trying to find the outcome that, you know, treats users with dignity and respect and that I would want my mom to use while she’s on the internet, you know, and she’s the person who doesn’t feel comfortable in a lot of online spaces.

And so for me, that empty chair is my mom and, um, a lot of other people and that impact over income. Just really drives home that, um, there are people who need support from people like us and tech. Isn’t just about getting the users and keeping them engaged and then, you know, squeezing every last drop out of them that you can, it’s really about making sure that we’re approaching this, um, in a way that matches our value.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, that’s a great point. One thing that’s not really said explicitly in this core value, but I think is there is conversion optimization could be used for evil in a sense that, you know, you could really have a view. Um, optimize site by making it a pain to unsubscribe, like you mentioned, right. Or, you know, having all of these, um, I guess we’ll call them like black cat techniques that you could use.

Right. And I think that, uh, one thing I love about this core value is it, if we’re living this core value, we’ll never go to those tactics. And that’s a, I think that’s a nice safeguard. 

James Sowers: Yep. Totally agree. Okay. Let’s go. Let’s go through the other three that we came up with. Current day version of our core values.

And, um, if you have anything to share, feel free to jump in, but, uh, the first one would be around owning your experience. And, um, to me, the most impactful statement under this one is, is, um, we all carry our own weight and we seek to inspire others by example. Right. Um, I think that kind of touches on the earlier point I made about if we’re going to be a truly distributed workforce, we’re going to have contractors and full-time employees spread all around the world.

Um, we’re going to have to have some. Ingrained, you know, sense of autonomy and ownership over the overall success of the business, or at least our area, our team, wherever we, wherever we live day to day between nine and five. And part of that is like, you need people who naturally want to take ownership over kind of their focus area.

And, you know, when they see something that could be improved, Take action and improve it. They don’t necessarily need like permission within reason, you know? And, and so, um, I think at the end of the day, it’s like, Hey, if you want to have professional development work, if you want to make a big impact in the work that we do, if you want to serve clients, um, to the best of your ability, like the person ultimately who owns that outcome is is you.

And so, um, that, that’s what jumps out at me about this one. I don’t know if you guys have a different perspective or, um, if you kind of want to take a different angle on it, but that’s the one I think is most impactful for me here and own your expense. 

Natalie Thomas: Yeah, I can jump in on that one. I think the most interesting and important thing to me about the own, your experience core value is that we find opportunity in every challenge.

And I think as a team, we seek out others who. Look at look for problems, but then approach them with a solution oriented mindset. We just got feedback today from a client that said really appreciate your solution oriented approach. And I think what that means is we don’t really invite people into the room just to call out the negative or bad experiences or the holes and the flaws and the way we do things, we invite that kind of criticism.

For sure. But the essential aspect of own your experience to me is that we look for opportunities, not just issues. 

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. I’ll add to that, that, you know, it’s really about taking ownership when, when there’s a challenge and if, you know, you see there’s a problem to fix it and that’s where it’s, you know, carry your own weight.

Right. It’s if, you know, You know, if you see a leaky faucet, fix the faucet, don’t let it drip. Right? Like you’re there just take the extra two minutes and turn it off. Right. Um, and I think that it’s, it’s one of those things where it’s really easy to. Have team members who are just there and are, are following everybody else and are doing a great job at their, at their role and what they should be doing on a day to day.

But they’re not taking that extra step to make things better. And. To me, this is all about if you’re having a challenge, find a way to, to, to, you know, raise the issue, but raise the issue with, Hey, here’s some ways I think this could be resolved or if you don’t know how to fix it, raise the issues of this is the outcome I’d like to see.

I would like, you know, to change it in this way. Um, and then the team can gather around and help you figure out how to get from, from a to B. But it’s really about that taking ownership and, uh, making sure that people are taking steps to, to positively influence that. 

Natalie Thomas: Yeah. And I think that just shows how much we respect our employees.

They rarely ask for permission, but regularly asked for strategic feedback and folks are really willing here to take problems into their own hands. And we really value peer review. So we’ll bounce ideas off of each other left and right. But ultimately nobody really needs to ask permission to make a decision here.

There are a lot of, um, uh, really smart people in the room and. Love when they can use that to the best of their advantage and make decisions that positively impact others without needing to stop and wait. 

James Sowers: Yeah. And I think that the best people know where their scope of competency is. Right. And they know when they’re like comfortably outside of that, like they’re stretching and they know when like, okay, if I make a wrong call here or I experiment too much here.

That could potentially result in a negative outcome and they know to reach for help. Right. That’s, that’s kind of this, um, humble kind of personality that I think a lot of us bring to the table naturally at this team, at least I’ve always referred to the good as the quiet professionals. I mean, I’ve only been here for nine months now or whatever, but like that’s, that’s kind of the, the character that I picture in my head is like, that’s the mantra of the Navy seals too.

Like, you don’t really see too many of those guys on TV doing a bunch of interviews. In movies, whatever. Um, they’re just kind of going about their business and, you know, they’re really good at it because everybody in the world talks about them. Right. But they’re not necessarily out there talking about themselves.

I think the best team members that embody this kind of like, um, you know, own your experience aspect are people who are extremely talented. No, where they’re extremely talented. No one they can stretch comfortably, but also know when to ask for help or when to get a second opinion or when to seek out more information.

If they don’t have access. To that end. I think that’s why this became a core value because we want to hire more folks like that. We want to hire more folks that can be autonomous, but within safe guard rails so that they don’t compromise the experience for our clients or their end users, I guess, is how, how I would describe.

Um, maybe the next one I’ll kick over to you, Natalie. Cause I know you said it was tossed about most often in, um, like team meetings and you have the biggest team of here inside of the organization. So we carried over pretty much, um, almost word for word, make improvements, not excuses. And you know, I think there’s the one aspect of that that I’ll call out is this 1% better everyday concept because we liked it so much.

We put it on a t-shirt. Um, but I do think it is. It is a really strong kind of like sound bite. Um, that kind of embodies what we’re going for here is like, let’s just get a little better every day and let’s help our clients do the same, but what’s your personal interpretation of make improvements, not excuses and, and how it’s been, um, you know, displayed by the team throughout the years and how we hope to see it continue to be displayed, like going.

Natalie Thomas: Yeah, well, we have a few favorites sayings here at the good and one of them is it could be further optimized. So I think part of that is just, again, looking for opportunities. We look at mistakes, not away from them and look for opportunity to improve. I think, um, You know, that’s the nature. And the spirit of optimization is that our eyes are really open to opportunities to prove ourselves wrong.

And so I really value working on a team that feels like it’s okay to say, I don’t know, but let me find out. And I can’t tell you how many rules. I’ve been in, whether that’s a college classroom or a meeting, and someone says, some says an answer to something that feels a little off the cuff and maybe not right.

It just to close the issue down. Um, we don’t do that here. You know, we’re always looking to find kind of that, that next truth that helps us open up our perspective and improve on the work we’re doing. And we stay really curious, which is what I think this is about.

James Sowers: Anything to add to that, John? 

Jon MacDonald: Well, for me, the biggest part of this is, uh, that we hold each other accountable to grow through practice, not to perfection. And this really does go hand in hand with that 1% better every day. Right? And if you’re not familiar with, with that, uh, looking to James clear and atomic habits, great book, um, great principle there.

And we did put it on a t-shirt. So if you’d like a t-shirt let, let James know and we’ll get, but the reality, they are very soft. Yes. Uh, the reality is that it’s really easy to be a perfectionist. Um, it’s draining on everybody around you, but it’s easy for. Me as the leader of a company to, to manage perfection and people idolize that Steve jobs type of asshole leadership, I don’t have it or put it, uh, it can get things done, but then everybody is afraid of you or, you know, are they really getting things done because they think that’s the right way or it’s just what you told them to do.

I would rather the team here be. Uh, non, uh, autonomous in, in getting their jobs done. And what I mean by that is that, you know, I want to hire the, you know, the best person for the role and let them do the best work of their career and not get in their way. I don’t want to be like, Hey, here’s exactly what you need to do every minute of the day.

And when, what that means is people are going to mess up. There’s going to be issues, and we’re going to have challenges around that. As long as people are looking to make improvements and not excuses. I’m good with that. If somebody messes up and then they say, you know what, that did not work out how I wanted it to work out, but I now learn something from that.

And I think this goes back to the culture of optimization in general. There’s really no loser test. Every test that happens that that doesn’t meet the metrics that you were hoping to out of that test or that optimization, you still learn something. And you learn, you know, to go down a different path at the very least.

Um, but there’s always, uh, a lot more takeaways there. And so I think it’s the same thing for, for the culture here, which is just hold, hold, people accountable to growing and outside of that, um, know that things aren’t going to be perfect. People are going to mess up and that’s okay. Things aren’t gonna go to the way we thought they’d go.

Uh, and we just need to roll with it and improve it. So it does it better now. 

James Sowers: Yep. One of the points you just said there, that, that jumps out at me is. Getting better through practice, not perfection. I think like part of the exercise we did here was I think we self evaluated, um, against these values and we’re like, okay, how would we score it?

Right. Did we end up in the right place? Uh, and one of the things that I know I need to work on is that perfectionism almost where it’s like, I don’t want to put anything out into the world until I think it’s like polished and pretty and sparkling. And I know that. People in this conversation and outside of this conversation, I’ve said like, James is good enough, right?

Like ship it. We have, we have like the ship at pear emoji in the slack channel. It’s like ship it, man. It’s good enough. Let the world see it. And you can continue to get better, but it doesn’t have to be perfect right out of the gate. So, um, I just say that to say, like, if anybody’s listening to this and they’re like, okay, if you don’t satisfy all four of these requirements, you can’t be hired here.

Like that’s not necessarily how it works. It’s, it’s a spectrum. Right. And even me sitting here looking in the mirror, I’m like, yeah, I don’t really check the box for that one yet. But the point is. That’s why you have people around you, right. Who are good in that better in that area than you are to help you improve.

And then there’s somewhere else that somebody else is struggling that maybe I can bring some experience to the table and help them improve. Um, so I just caught that from what you said there, and just wanted to call that out. Cause like, yeah, it’s not, it’s not about, um, a hundred percent checking the box when you’re hiring or trying to find a new team member or anything like that.

It’s more about. Do we did we cover most of the bases here. Right. And, um, in general, are we the type of person that will contribute to the mission and be a positive addition to the team and not a distraction or, um, you know, a drain on the energy or anything like that? Um, yeah, so they’re 

Jon MacDonald: not looking for perfection, right?

Right. We’re not looking for somebody who’s perfect in all four of these that’s, that’s unattainable, not realistic, but we’re looking for somebody who strives. No, and I think that’s really the thing. 

James Sowers: Yeah. Um, your team me up there. So we’ll get into the last one here. Strive for clarity, right? Keywords strive, strive.

We’re just going to transition right into this one. Um, admittedly, when I was going through the process, this one was the messiest one for me. Cause I interpreted it a bunch of different ways. I was like, okay. Is it strive for clarity amongst team members? Right. And is this like a communication thing or is this strive for clarity in terms of understanding a problem before you recommend a solution or some kind of an approach?

Maybe it’s a blend of the two. Right? Um, but, but I really like this one at the end of the day. Mainly for this phrase, like we’re not afraid to say, I don’t know, but let me find out. And that’s kind of, Natalie touched on that a little bit. Like you have somebody who answers a question in class and like, they just kinda want to sound smart or they’re afraid of like, not answering the question, thinking people will think they’re dumb, but really like the mature person says, you know, I’m not well-read enough on this subject.

I haven’t done my research. I don’t have an informed opinion. So I can’t really share anything with you right now, but I’ll get into it. I’ll ask my friends, I’ll ask my coworkers and I’ll get back to you. Um, that’s just one aspect of this, but that’s the one that jumps out at me as like being humble enough to say.

I don’t have an answer for you now, but I know where to find one and I’ll bring it back to you as soon as I can. Okay. 

Natalie Thomas: Yeah, I agree. I think, 

Jon MacDonald: go ahead, John. Well, I was gonna say one thing that, that you brought into this, Natalie, um, was that we have strong opinions, loosely held and. That is something that I see, uh, our team act on every day.

It’s, you know, especially an optimization, you may have a, uh, a variant that you’re cheering for, but it’s probably not going to win. I mean, I think that’s, you know, the reality, uh, that you don’t determine what wins in a scientific process. Um, you know, the data does, sorry to cut you off, Natalie, what were you, what were you going to add?

I 

Natalie Thomas: think it answered a meeting. Can you. No. Okay. Um, what was I going to say about this? I think strive for clarity as a core value really feeds into everything else we do. It’s hard to make improvements without being really clear about what went wrong the first time you did it, or what needs to improve.

And so really just that mindset about being proactive rather than reactive and looking for ways to get ahead of issues before they become one. Um, again, it’s just super gratifying and liberating. To be among a group of people who say, I don’t know, but let me find out. And that strong opinions, loosely held bit is really enables us to defer to the expert in the room.

All of us come from really different backgrounds from, you know, teaching to marketing and human computer interaction and user experience research. We have someone from an applied clinical research background. There’s always someone in the room who might know a little bit more on a subject. That’s not your area of expertise.

So we have those strong opinions, but we defer to the experts when appropriate. And in order to do that, we have to be really clear about what we’re seeking. So I think it’s that strive for clarity bit really empowers us to do the rest of them. Great. 

James Sowers: Awesome. Uh, totally agree. Um, maybe, maybe, uh, kind of wrap things up and put a bow.

And, um, we went through the four new core values. Um, Give me a two minute overview here, John, of like, or Natalie, if you want to chime in how, how are we going to continue to like walk the walks in terms of not just these core values, but our B corporate commitments and stuff. We’ve done a lot, uh, to date over the last decade, but now that we’ve kind of made this step forward and we’re ready to pursue those big lofty goals, how do we embody these values?

How do we incorporate them in the day to day operations here at the good, how we’re using them to, um, evaluate new team members and performance of current team members? What do you take into your teams as you, as you go back and leave here today and implement these things? 

Jon MacDonald: I think just to start with the simple stuff I’m having new posters made with all of these, um, to, to have them up in our office space, um, and be able to, to share them in a graphical format, not only on our website and, uh, do some more t-shirts perhaps things of that sort.

So that’s the easy part. Um, one thing is we’ve also, um, continued to work on our hiring process and ask questions that are, that are based around these so that, you know, we’re always improving that and always refining it and making sure we’re finding people who match and align with these. And, uh, we also do something here called the good cop.

And this is a quarterly award that the team votes on each other and they nominate a peer. And when they nominate a peer, they have to nominate them, uh, with examples of how they’ve lived, the Corvette. And each quarter that person gets to, um, hold on to the cup, if you will, it’s an actual trophy and their name gets engraved on the, on the trophy.

So eventually we’ll, we’ll have a Stanley cup looking trophy here. And then in addition to that, um, you know, they get, uh, $500 in cash. And so it’s just a nice little extra bonus, but the goal here is so that the team. Recognizes when others are living the core values and that kind of helps bring it through every quarter and bring it back up.

Oh yeah. You know, I have to nominate somebody or I want to nominate somebody. I’m trying to think about what happened to her last quarter. That was my team members and my teammates that, uh, would really make a lot of sense to, to be nominated. 

Natalie Thomas: John. I know you got to go. I can add to that in the two minutes after.

James Sowers: Yeah, go ahead. And, and then I can do like a wrap up, like voiceover later. Yep. 

Jon MacDonald: All right. Awesome. Thank you both. Yep.

James Sowers: What are we doing to get shirts, but you know, we’ll do whatever we can do. 

Natalie Thomas: Uh, we need that empty chair in 

James Sowers: the room. I know. Yeah, we do. 

Natalie Thomas: Um, okay. What are we doing to continue to square valleys? Um, we’re making a series of commitments. So, um, we’re looking at the commitments we have made and how we’re trying to improve our processes.

I think, you know, one of those big things is removing bias from the hiring process by using these core values as a rubric. Um, we’re also involved with Portland means progress, which has asked businesses to make a series of commitments to racial equity in the workplace. And, um, I think, you know, just looking back.

The Ms. Van der Rohe example, like finding little ways to interject these in areas that surprise people, um, and kind of break them out of their element and remind them in maybe a new context is a way that you can bring core values into the workplace in a way that’s really creative, strong, interesting, and makes people kind of think about them differently and push the boundaries there.

So always looking for opportunities to inject these into the regular work. 

James Sowers: Awesome. Um, you know, I think in my seat and marketing director, I’m going to try to also get them out into the world in some ways. And so taking some of these key messages that we believe in, and we, we try to embody and, and putting them into our marketing messages or landing page, copy our ads, whatever we’re going to do, and maybe start to communicate some of our products and services in a way that’s like, Hey, let us help you get 1% better every day.

You don’t have to be perfect tomorrow. Let’s just get a little bit better every day or, um, Posting something on social media that kind of debunks, one of those dark patterns and says, Hey, you don’t have to have a discount. Pop-up just because they work. Right. Like they do work, but you can still win in in other ways and grow your list this way.

That’s more, um, morally sound, maybe right. Or a better end user experience and kind of respects the customer instead of just holding their attention for ransom for a 10% discount coupon or something like that. So, um, doing the best we can over here, but, but we’ll see, we’ll see, um, I’m excited to see where it goes and.

Yeah, I guess I’ll do the voice over wrap up at the end, but thanks for, thanks for taking the time out of your data to record this. And I appreciate your thoughts and perspectives.

James: Hey everybody, this is James again. And before you go, I just wanted to invite you to join one of the coolest things I get to work on. As director of marketing here at the good it’s called the e-commerce insiders list.
And it’s a private version of this podcast feed that gets you access to tons of additional bonus content, like extra interviews, Q and a sessions, website, tear downs, and anything else we can dream up. It doesn’t cost you anything but your email address. And we promise to always respect. This is just our way of forming strong relationships with our listeners and making sure that we produce content that is actually valuable to you and to your business.
If you’re interested, you can join the rest of the e-commerce insiders by going to the good.com/podcast and dropping your email into the form at the top of the page, we’ll follow up with directions for how to access the private feed and you’ll be off and running. Like I said, this is one of my favorite things that I get the opportunity to work on because it lets me interact directly with e-commerce founders and leaders just like.
If you’re interested, I’d love to see your name pop up in my notifications until then keep an eye out for the next episode of the e-commerce insight show. And we’ll talk to you soon.

The post Revisiting and Refreshing Our Company Values with Jon MacDonald and Natalie Thomas appeared first on The Good.

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About this episode:

Why is it essential to set up automated flows for your email marketing? This is what Lexie Bennet, an independent email marketing consultant, talks about in this week’s episode. She also shares her latest passion: pop-up and post-flow quizzes that greatly impact personalizing your brand’s email content. 

We also discuss flows versus broadcast emails, Lexie’s tips on copywriting, different types of email flow you can focus on, and the importance of personalization. 

In this episode, you’ll also learn: 

• How post-flow and pop-up quizzes help with personalization and shipping concerns 
• Why audits are important in correcting and optimizing automated flows and triggers
• Why you need to dedicate time and effort to set up your automated flows
• How to do pop-ups correctly so they’re helpful instead of annoying 

 Learn more about Lexie and her resources here

• Connect with Lexie on LinkedIn
• Follow Lexie on Twitter
• Say hello and reach out through her email  

Want to be a guest on our show? Have feedback or ideas for how we can improve? Send your thoughts over to podcast@thegood.com. We’ll be keeping an eye on that inbox.  

The Ecommerce Insights Show is brought to you by The Good, a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) consultancy specializing in helping ecommerce businesses accelerate their growth through better research, testing, and design. Learn more about our team, our work, and our services at www.thegood.com.

Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] James Sowers (The Good): So here’s the question. How can e-commerce leaders make sure that they’re producing a great product, providing a world class customer experience responsibly managing their finances and still reserve time, energy, and resources for marketing their products? My name is James Sas, and you are listening to the e-Commerce Insight Show, the podcast that gives you specific actionable advice for growing your e-commerce business.

[00:00:20] Every Monday you’ll get a conversion rate optimization tactic that you can implement quickly to make your business 1% better every single. Every Thursday we sit down with industry experts to go deep on a specific aspect of running a successful e-commerce business. It’s the perfect blend of learning and application, which means that you maximize the value of every single minute you spend with us.

[00:00:41] We’re just as committed to growing your business as you are, So if you’re looking for a partner to help you crush your revenue goals, you’ve come to the right place, roll up your sleeves and grab a notepad because it’s time to get to. Hey Lexi, thanks so much for taking time out of your day to join me and come on the show.

[00:00:56] Really excited to get into all things email marketing. I know before I joined the Goodest Director of marketing and started wearing like a dozen different hats. Email was my sweet spot. It’s where I love to play. I think it’s still a huge opportunity for a lot of brands, so I’m excited to get into the more technical aspects of what you do.

[00:01:11] But maybe to kick things off, just give us a couple of sentences about who you are and what kind of clients you serve right now, and maybe a project or an activity that gets you excited to fire up your laptop in the. Yeah, thanks 

[00:01:21] you. 

[00:01:21] Lexie Bennett (Email Marketing Consultant): I’m so excited. So my name is Lexi Bennett. I’m a Clavio email marketer for DDC Brands using Kon, Shopify.

[00:01:29] And I focus on, or specialize in setting up like branded custom email flows, all those like automated journey, like customer journey messages you get. And what I’m really excited to be working on right now is I’m helping a brand set up their post quiz flow with like all of the. Custom data that they entered into the quiz and like setting up something that’s really personalized and useful and helpful.

[00:01:54] So that’s what I’m like psyched about right now. That’s 

[00:01:57] James Sowers (The Good): awesome. I’m really excited to get into the relationship between quizzes and the emails that come behind those results because I think that’s a relatively new development. I would say there’s a big player in the space, Octane AI that really kind of shook things up, at least from my perspective.

[00:02:09] Can’t wait to get into the technical details there, but I saw in my research, because I’m a great podcast host and I do that kind of thing. Two things I wanted to point out. Lexi Bennett, fantastic name makes me think like you should be sitting behind a news desk somewhere and like, just like telling us the hot stories of the day.

[00:02:24] Hopefully that’s not offensive to you, but I was like, Oh, Lexi Bennett. That’s like, that’s like a newscaster from teenage Mu Mutant Ninja Turtles or something. Very, very good name, very strong. But I also noticed they have a passion for travel and I’m curious like. Professional life if people who love to travel have really had a, a rough couple of years, so to speak.

[00:02:39] With all the restrictions like you’ve been to, sounds like 20 countries counting, what have the last couple years been like for you and, and how has that affected you? How have you kind of molded your life in work around that change? Yeah. 

[00:02:49] Lexie Bennett (Email Marketing Consultant): I love travel. My whole family’s like really big on traveling and I spent.

[00:02:53] So I tried to like ride out at least some of the pandemic abroad . So I escaped. I actually moved to the country Georgia last year. It’s like between Turkey and Russia. And I spent a couple months there and then I also spent a couple months with my parents. They live in Abu Dhabi, so I spent the last year abroad.

[00:03:11] I actually like just got back to the states and I’m like buying furniture and getting settled and settling in. So I didn’t like explore and like get to know the country super well. It was really just, Just writing out the pandemic there. So I went like hiking and, you know, worked on email and it’s a really like nomad friendly country, so they like let you set up a visa and like just work there and it’s super easy to live there.

[00:03:35] So love to travel, love to live abroad. 

[00:03:38] James Sowers (The Good): Wow. Is someone who’s barely left the continental us. I, I’m a little overwhelmed. It kind of makes me anxious to hear how far and how often other people travel, but that’s a really cool story. Especially like you’re gonna visit your parents in, in that area. Like, uh, Abu Dhabi, I think you said.

[00:03:51] Not everybody can say that, so it’s just an interesting bloodline that you’re coming from there. So that’s really, that’s really cool. Awesome. Well, that, that’s kind of you as a person a little bit. Let’s get into more about your work. You said you have a recent client project that’s like post quiz email experience.

[00:04:05] Tell me a little bit more about that. Like is that kind of reflective of a typical engagement for you or is that more of a special project that, uh, is outside of like your wheelhouse, so to speak, or something new? You’re dabbling. Yeah, 

[00:04:14] Lexie Bennett (Email Marketing Consultant): I’ve worked with octane quizzes and post quiz flows before, but they just updated that now you can like dynamically populate like the products that are on the results page, where before it like just linked the results page.

[00:04:27] So every time like a product went out of stock, which was very often the last. Two years with all the like, crazy shipping delays and like pandemic issues. I’d have to like go update the flow and we had a bunch of emails in this flow, so it was like just not realistic. So now that it like dynamically populates, it just makes everything easier and more flexible.

[00:04:46] So I’m going in and like cleaning that all up and resetting everything up. And, uh, that flow for this client is their second highest performing flow in terms of revenue. And that’s like before any of the cool stuff is set up, like before all the personalization and like, here are your custom results and here’s like a nice message about like why we gave you this.

[00:05:08] So I just feel like it’s the tip of the iceberg for them right now and I’m, I’m really excited about that. 

[00:05:14] James Sowers (The Good): Yeah, there’s always energy around when you have something that’s working well already and for whatever reason you see even more opportunity. On top of that, there’s probably. Balance of like I’m a little scared to touch it cuz it’s working so well right now, but also like I feel pretty confident we can make this thing even better.

[00:05:29] So did you have any of those feelings? Did you have any of those? Like, do I really wanna dive in here or do I wanna maybe test quizzes on a different flow or something like that? Or with a different client and then bring it back here? Cuz I don’t wanna break something that’s working. 

[00:05:40] Lexie Bennett (Email Marketing Consultant): Yeah. Well they’ve, I worked with them for a while.

[00:05:42] They have like a lot. The foundations just set up and like buttoned up really nicely. So we’re at the stage where we can kind of get into the more nitty gritty, like get into the weeds and do more technical stuff. But like the focus is definitely on, like making sure you have all of like the core emails going out and then you can kind of like just it up and make it more fun.

[00:06:02] But I’m excited for this opportunity cuz I like selling in a way that’s really helpful and like solves people’s problems. And I just experienced this, I’m gonna give you an example. I, so I just moved into this apartment. I have no furniture cause I’ve been living abroad the last year. So I’ve needed like, Everything.

[00:06:18] Like I just showed up with clothes, books basically. So I went shopping and I got a new couch and in the store it was like a really good experience. They were so helpful and like I showed them my mood board. I’m like, I want something that looks like this. This is my budget. And they helped me pick something out and then they’re like, You know, we’ve got a rug that goes really well with this.

[00:06:38] Here’s a chair. And I like ended up leaving the store with like half my living room. And I was really happy about that because like the sales associate even helped me find a discount code I could use. Like I left feeling really good and having way more of my problem solved than I was expecting to get solved.

[00:06:55] And then of course, as soon as I placed my order, I just got bombarded with like these awful emails, , that were like, buy this, like baking sheet that had nothing to do with like what I needed. , like just salesy, like, you know, like really catalog e kind of emails. And I unsubscribe like as soon as all of my furniture arrived.

[00:07:16] And it just made me think like, I think emails can be more like in person sales associate, like where someone’s helping you out, like guiding you through what to get, what’s helpful. They’re finding discount codes for you, like you feel like an insider. You feel like, like you came and you got a lot more than you even expected.

[00:07:35] Like really helpful. And that’s what I see for these kind of post quiz flows where someone’s already there, they’re giving you information, they’re showing you a problem that they want help with, but now you have the time to go say, Okay, here’s all the information you gave me. Here’s what can help you also, this works great too.

[00:07:53] And you can solve like more than just one little problem for them. So that’s like the attitude that I’m going into and I’m setting up post quiz flows or just all the flows in general, is how would I talk to someone and treat someone in person rather than like these kind of annoying sleazy sales emails where you just like blast someone with a discount code and there’s no personal 

[00:08:16] James Sowers (The Good): connection.

[00:08:17] Yeah, I love that because we talk about on the convers rate optimization side, like the golden rule of e-commerce, right? Treat others the way you would want to be treated. And a lot of times that comes from our retail brick and mortar in-store type of experiences. And when they go really well, they’re notable, right?

[00:08:31] Because so many of them are poor. Like you don’t get an associate, they’re too busy to help you and you’re just kind of wandering the store trying to find what you want. Or maybe they’re not as knowledgeable as you’d like or something like that, or, Listen to your needs. They offer you the baking sheet when you clearly came looking for a couch or whatever.

[00:08:44] Like when those things happen in real life, we, we roll our eyes, we leave, we we abandon cart. Basically we leave without purchasing, right? So how do we take those and bring them into a digital environment in an e-commerce setting? Quizzes are one of the great ways to do that. And as a recent development, or at least Octane made it popular, put it on my radar like I love them, especially for certain brands and product lines.

[00:09:02] It’s like when it needs to be personalized based on needs or use cases or sizes or something like that, like a quiz is a great way. Collect that data and then pipe it into your tool of choice, Clavio, and that’s where you get into segmentation and personalization. So definitely wanna get into those cuz those, I think those are more like advanced level tactics.

[00:09:19] But first I wanna get into this, this blocking and tackling as I call it, like the fundamentals. You’re like, quizzes are great. I love working on that. That’s kind of a new and exciting thing for me. But like so many brands could probably just benefit from a basic audit and um, kind of an inventory of like what you’ve already, what boxes you’ve already checked and where the opportunities.

[00:09:35] And let’s just get those to like minimum viable effectiveness, right? And then from there we can continue to iterate and improve over time. So maybe describe that in the, in the sense of like, I know you offer some audits, I know you do like some strategy work outside of just quizzes. So what does that look like and like what are some of the common oversights or misconceptions you see when BRA that brands have related to email marketing?

[00:09:54] I’m a freelancer. 

[00:09:55] Lexie Bennett (Email Marketing Consultant): I work with two brands consistently, like month over month. But then I. Cycle out like a third brand where I just do their flow setups, like total done for you. And that starts with an audit. And by far, the most common thing that I see in audits that I perform is not having all of the flow trigger set up correctly.

[00:10:15] So people could be going through multiple flows at once, like especially the welcome flow and abandoned cart flow. Shopify and Clavia just updated a few months ago where if someone abandoned carts but they check that box, like Send me newsletter. That puts them in the abandoned cart and the welcome flow at the same time.

[00:10:32] So you could be getting two emails in one day, or you could get an offer here and an offer there that are different, like that’s very annoying and confusing for a customer and like an easy mistake for a brand to make. So yeah, number one issue I see when I’m performing audits is just all the flow triggers, if they have their flow set up are like overlapping or they’re forgetting to exclude past customers or, you know, just simple things like that.

[00:10:55] So just cleaning that up is just like an easy low hanging fruit. And the easiest way to do that, if you’re like not super familiar with it, is literally to draw it out on paper, like draw out a little map of like all the flows and all the triggers, and then you can see like, oh, these two overlap. Or someone is like not getting an email for three months and then they’re getting 10 emails in this wind backflow, like all of a sudden out of nowhere.

[00:11:22] So yeah, 

[00:11:23] James Sowers (The Good): draw it. , right. For anybody watching the video, I have a six foot whiteboard peeking in over here on my right hand side, and I have for our agency, filled that up with flows for all the different, like they hit a, a blog post, they download a PDF report or white paper or something. Then do we drop them right onto our newsletter?

[00:11:41] I don’t know. Or do we wanna like nurture them a little bit and potentially try to sell our book or whatever And there’s this escalating like product here. I think the same thing is true of eCommerce. It. Be mindful of the entry point, but also like where that entry point drops them in. And you don’t want them going through two or three different flows at the same time because that’s gonna overwhelm them.

[00:11:58] It’s gonna lack relevancy, it’s gonna lack timeliness. And then what do they do? They click the unsubscribe button. And if that’s not set up properly, there’s no way for them to say, I just don’t want this type of email. You know, they just completely, universally unsubscribe and you’ve lost that lead forever unless you find a way to creatively like recapture them later.

[00:12:15] Right. 

[00:12:16] Lexie Bennett (Email Marketing Consultant): Yeah, that would suck. So just cleaning that up I think does a lot for the customer side. Like the experience is just so much nicer. And then when I start building out emails and flows, I focus on the high traffic emails the most, or like the first impression emails because you can like study all these like subject line hacks or like this cool idea or that cool idea, but at the end of the day, , your emails are like built on trust with your customer.

[00:12:43] If they know you and they trust you, like they’re excited to get content from you, they’re excited to see what’s new. They’re excited to open your emails, and that trust is really established, like in the first. Few emails really sets the bar and they’re like, Oh, this is really helpful. This is worth my time.

[00:13:00] This is worth opening. Or like, Oh, this is just random crap. I don’t need to open. So I know it’s exciting to get like, Oh, I’m gonna build this super complex birthday flow, let no like go back to. The most trafficked emails, like the first welcome email, the first abandoned car email, the first post-purchase email, and really perfect those and set the standard of like, this is the kind of content you can expect to get in your inbox from me.

[00:13:28] This is gonna be worth your time. And if you set that up, like really are thoughtful and useful and helpful and like couch sales associate lady like, like get on her level. If you’re like that, then you’ll see overall. The tide kind of rise across all of your email marketing when that trust is established?

[00:13:46] James Sowers (The Good): Yeah. When I see email marketing consultants, freelancers, agencies, when I see them talking about like AB testing, subject lines, I start to think that like, That that account is at risk, because at that point, you’re trying to eek out the last 1% of potential, right? Presumably, you’ve already worked through it.

[00:14:01] There’s so much more on the front end, blocking and tackling basics like email structure, post purchase emails, delivery, timing, like personalization, segmentation, like all that stuff comes before subject line because I, I, I just think it can be way more impactful. To your point, you’re building a relationship with somebody and so if you haven’t checked that box, the subject line doesn’t matter, right?

[00:14:18] You, you have to have that fundamental. It’s just like any other interpersonal relationship, like there’s this basic level of trust and interest and affinity that has to happen, and then everything else can come after that. But until you solve that, you gotta keep working. Right. I wanna get into the high traffic areas.

[00:14:33] You, you listed a few, and maybe we have some specific advice around each of those, but before I do that, we’ve talked a lot about how you focus on flows versus what I would call broadcast or more one off emails like we’re having a sale, we launched a new product. You’re focused on kind of that customer life cycle stuff.

[00:14:47] There’s some kind of triggering event or activity that a customer took, and then there’s an automated, presumably series of emails that comes out after that with certain logic and stuff behind it. Why did you decide to focus there versus a lot of practitioners? They do both, right? Or maybe they just do the broadcast emails, the sales emails, the promo emails.

[00:15:05] They’re happening all the time, right? And so you can get a client locked into like a recurring kind of engagement that way. Why did you choose 

[00:15:11] Lexie Bennett (Email Marketing Consultant): flows? Brand owners have like a million things going on, and everything is urgent it feels like. And flows just always get put off, like optimizing them or just setting them up or double checking that they’re correct or improving them like that, just as like as important as that is and as fundamental as that.

[00:15:32] That’s always like on tomorrow’s to-do list and then tomorrow’s and then tomorrow’s and tomorrow’s. It’s like never today. So I do those cuz like that’s what I focus on and I have a lot of fun with it. And I love like creating all the maps. Like I love mapping all of that out and thinking like, how can we both be most helpful?

[00:15:50] And I love designing emails, like, that’s really fun for me and that’s what I can thrive and be good. But it’s the thing that like brand overs want to do. But they’re like, Oh, but first I need to fix this how you Shopify bug. And then this TikTok went viral and now I need to like help ship orders till two in the morning.

[00:16:06] Like there’s just so many more urgent things. So I build flows because it just gets put off . 

[00:16:14] James Sowers (The Good): Yeah, I think that’s really smart. And the reason I ask that question without leading is like, that’s where I used to focus. That’s where I would focus if I did it again, primarily for the point that you cited, but also because you build it once and it sells for you forever, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, and you don’t really have to pay it anymore than whatever your Clavio bill is, right?

[00:16:30] So if you can get it nailed down, I think it’s one of the high impact areas compared to broadcast emails where like, that’s kinda like a hamster wheel. Like every week I gotta figure out, It might be easier, like less cognitively demanding to figure out what’s the subject line, what’s the offer, what’s the product, what’s the product image, you know, template, whatever.

[00:16:44] Like there’s six things you have to have, but you could probably solve that in an hour, right? But to build a highly sophisticated welcome flow, like that takes time. And so I think people just gravitate toward the quick win versus like the heady kinda, I gotta close the room, get on my whiteboard and figure these things.

[00:17:00] And if they never make time for it, it’s smart to hire someone like you to take care of it for ’em. So I think that’s a very astute decision on your part to, to focus in that area. Now when you’re rewriting, uh, those emails, You, Where do you start? So you listed a few, uh, it’s probably post-purchase, abandon and cart.

[00:17:14] Welcome sequence. I’m probably missing a couple, but like if we were to click down into one of those, I think most people are aware of abandoned cart, even though it might be neglected, right? They know they need it, but maybe a welcome flow or post-purchase flow is talked about a little less frequently.

[00:17:27] So do you have any advice for somebody and like one of those other like less highlighted welcome sequences or automated. Before 

[00:17:33] Lexie Bennett (Email Marketing Consultant): I start anything, love to talk with the customer service team or whoever runs social media and checks the dms. They know all the T, like they know , what the questions are asked.

[00:17:42] They know like what customers are struggling with or where they get lost or what they want next. So just kind of like gather what people need to hear and then welcome flow and post purchase flow. Most of the time, like people just set up like one email in there or very standard typical emails and there’s a lot more that you can do with that.

[00:18:02] When someone just joins your mail, mail list or they just purchase, you know exactly like where their head space is at, and you can talk to them where they’re at, as if they were a person like actually coming into your store. You know so much about them just from like their recent behavior. And I think of a post purchase flow, like a second version of a welcome flow.

[00:18:21] So I do a lot of like brand introduction content, like story behind the scenes, um, tutorials on how to use your products. Images from other customers giving advice or tips. So not just like, Thank you for your order. Like that’s great, like make sure you have that too. But you can go, like most of my post purchase emails flows are like six to eight emails long, even rather than just like one or two because there’s so much you can talk about also, like right when someone purchases and they don’t have their product yet.

[00:18:54] You have their undivided attention. They are like waiting on their order. So that’s your chance to like really win them over and teach them that email is a good channel to have a relationship on. Uh, so yeah, welcome flow, post purchase flow, really like building those out, telling your full story, providing a lot of value, and going above and beyond there will set everything up really well.

[00:19:17] James Sowers (The Good): The worst customer experience for me is when I buy something and I literally don’t hear from them until it shows up at my door. Like there’s just radio silence, especially if it’s something that requires a little bit of education or like, you know, it’s a tool or something, or like a skincare product, like you’ve never used it before and you wanna make sure that you’re doing it right or fitting it into your routine, applying it at the right time of day, whatever it takes, and like to have silence in that.

[00:19:38] That key period just feels like a massive oversight for any brand and inside of. You almost always get like purchase confirmation, shipping confirmation, like these transactional emails. And so many of those are just the default template Shopify or whatever platform they’re on. It’s like this very bare bones, Here’s your order number, here are the products that you ordered.

[00:19:55] Here’s your subtotal, here’s tax, here’s your total. And it’s like, Man, put some personality in there, right? Like, I don’t know if you do that, but I always think like, this is such a huge, what’s the open rate on this? It’s gotta be like at least 70%, right? Like people wanna see that they got the coupon, they claimed, or they just wanna check like when the delivery date is so they know if they’re gonna be home or they’re gonna be at the lake house or whatever.

[00:20:14] Like to leave those as these sanitized, like very sterile templates just feels like something that is super common. And I’m always surprised when I. Yeah, though it’s 

[00:20:23] Lexie Bennett (Email Marketing Consultant): good to like have those up, but you can do a lot more with them, I think. Um, Mud Water does a really good job in their post purchase, like transactional emails especially.

[00:20:33] They have a lot of personality and like helpful information and like, like. FYI’s about like the product. So yeah, I love personalizing transactional emails and just making them more branded, more helpful. You know, putting something in there just makes you like, Oh, I’m really excited to get this product.

[00:20:50] Or like, this is the most frequently asked question that we get, so here’s . Let’s just answer it right out of the gate, you know? So definitely, yeah. I’m working on personalizing that for a acne care brand that I’m working with right now and their. Requires a lot of educational content. So we plugged in a bunch of tutorial videos and links to like helpful content so that they are using the product correctly.

[00:21:15] They get the best results out of it, and that also sets expectations of when they can see results. Because I, I can’t remember where I read this, so I’m just gonna like wing it, but I saw somewhere that brands customers that develop connections with brands like Sincere Connections have. A way higher lifetime value than even someone that just had a positive experience.

[00:21:40] So you can deliver on a product like your, your product can solve their problem, but if you’re not developing a connection where they feel like valued or helped out, then. They can also just go find something else to solve that problem, . So you can really stand out by developing connections with people.

[00:22:00] And I think you can do that in a transactional email. You can do that in your post purchase flow where you’re sending them stuff that’s just above and beyond and showing that you really care. That like. They’ve traded money for this. Like you really care that they have a good experience, they get what they wanted.

[00:22:16] And uh, yeah, just back to the golden rule, like treat people like you would when they walk into the door. Like that’s the mentality you need to have when you set up emails and the rest just kind of comes naturally and from like practicing it a lot and like learning what works and what doesn. 

[00:22:31] James Sowers (The Good): Yeah, I think like, you know, if you walk into a retail store and an associate comes up, they’re probably not going to throw an offer in your face right away, right?

[00:22:39] If they’re any good at their job, they’re not gonna be like, We got 20% off today and it’s on women’s wear or whatever, and like, Here you go, here’s your coupon. Like sometimes that happens and usually when it happens, it’s like not the best experience, right? Like, I don’t even know what I’m looking for.

[00:22:51] But the best sales people, I think, come up and say, Hey, what can I help you find today? And then there are like three more questions after. What’s going on in your life? Oh, that’s unfortunate. Like, tell me more about that. How does that feel? Or like what’s your timeline for making this decision? Do you have a budget?

[00:23:03] Like they’re asking all these question. And it’s, it’s very heavily like focused on learning, right? Versus presenting. And then at the right time, they introduce a couple of solutions or whatever to pick from. I think like when it comes to email, a lot of times someone’s first experience, it’s just getting blasted in the face with like all these different offers and products and it’s like, well, how do I know that you even understand my problem, right?

[00:23:22] Or, or what I’m trying to solve here? Or the ideal outcome that I have, Like you haven’t asked any of that about me and considered that before presenting a product or a solution. That feels like something like if you can replicate that in-store experience that positive in-store experience online, you’re gonna be head and shoulders above your peers, I would think.

[00:23:39] And you know, I wanna get into some ways to do that. I think personalization is, is one of those segmentation kind of goes hand in hand with that, I would say. But before you get into that, I don’t wanna gloss, gloss over a great point that you made about talking to the customer support team, talking to the social media team, if they have a sales team.

[00:23:52] Talking to the sales team. I’m curious like. That’s my favorite place to find after talking to actual customers. That’s my favorite place to find like copy for the actual emails. So I’m curious, when you get those folks on the phone, what kind of questions do you ask them? The team members that interface with customers most frequently?

[00:24:07] Like how are you dragging that information out of them? Right. Yeah. I love 

[00:24:11] Lexie Bennett (Email Marketing Consultant): to ask for what are the 10 most frequently asked questions that you get? And they can usually like list those right off the top of their head. Like, Oh yes, I get a billion dms about. So what are like the 10 most common questions?

[00:24:22] Like what do super fans say? Like why are they excited about something? And then what are the most common complaints? So just kind of getting the spectrum of like FAQs and then what’s good and what’s bad, and learning to answer that in emails. So you set expectations like with this acne product. If you tell people that it’ll solve your acne in seven days, like they’re gonna be really upset because it doesn’t, it takes 60 full days.

[00:24:48] So walking through expectations with someone being like, Here’s what you can expect to see by this day. You know, here’s how to make sure you turn it into a habit. Here’s three tips for turning a routine into a habit. Like set an alarm, like tie it to brushing your teeth. So it’s like habit stacking, you know, like giving.

[00:25:06] Practical advice, I get those ideas from talking to the customer service team or talking to customers or reading all of these reviews and just seeing like once this product enters their life, like how does that practically, Like what does that practically look like? And speaking on that level. Another thing for connecting with customers, especially in a post purchase flow, a lot of times brands center all, all the messaging around themselves, like that’s really easy to do and that’s.

[00:25:35] The default and copywriting is so hard, , but I’m learning more and more like what works and what doesn’t. And it helps most of the time when I just like turn off my marketing brain and just like think about like one friend to another. Like what would I text them if they were asking me about this product?

[00:25:51] Like that helps. , but we’ve been switching a lot of post-purchase copy to be about the customer. Like, Hey, you just purchased this item that tells us that you’re this type of person, you like to do this. You believe in these values rather than like, as a brand, these are our brand values. You know, it’s the same.

[00:26:10] Message is just a different angle. And Pete, like you were saying earlier, like people wanna feel seen, not just sold to, and switching your copy to be like, This is who you are, right? Like this is what you believe in. Oh, like we do that too. Like we’re with you as opposed to You’re with us. US has really helped people like stay engaged in post purchase emails and build that customer.

[00:26:35] James Sowers (The Good): Yeah, totally agree. I think that too many brands, it’s important for the people and the story and the personality of the brand to come through in any kind of customer touchpoint. But I always say like, you can’t be the hero of the story. The customer is the hero of the story. So you are trying to.

[00:26:51] Convince them or, Or just help them be confident in the fact that like if they wanna get from where they are today to somewhere in the future with some ideal outcome, they’re the ones that are gonna make that happen. And you’re just here to support them. So like it could be as simple as instead of your immediate post purchase email being like the founder’s story, say like, Hey, if you’re getting this email, you’re probably struggling with X, Y, and Z.

[00:27:13] And then after that say, I was too. And that’s why I started this brand. Like just a little tweak like that starts with it. It. Lowers everyone’s guard because you get them nodding, right? It’s these little micro commitments. Yes, I am struggling with dry skin. Yes, I do have blemishes. Yes, I am getting rid cued at school or whatever the case may be.

[00:27:29] Oh, you were struggling with that too. Like there’s the affinity and there it’s like I don’t just wanna buy from whatever this acne brand is like. I wanna be friends with the founder who’s telling me that she was in the same place as me 10 years ago, and she solved her problem with her own product. I think just that that little switch can make all the difference in, you know, I’m not a copyrighting expert, but like you only get that by talking to the customer support team, by talking to the social media team and having that be a two-way street.

[00:27:53] It’s not just like, Hey, we have this new product here. All the specs, here’s the best customer for it. So when you talk to somebody, make sure you present it to them. If they fit these criteria, it needs to come back too. Like what are you hearing on the street? What’s changing? Because customer preferences always change and that can bring up all kinds of things.

[00:28:09] Not just email marketing, but new product ideas. Um, different experiences and so very astute observation by you. Uh, that’s my long-winded way of saying like, I love what you’re doing there, and I think other folks should replicate that, whether they’re gonna do it in house or work with a provider like you.

[00:28:22] One other way to build affinity with a customer is personalization. And I know you’ve talked about kind of collecting this data with a front end quiz, so maybe we can start with that as the example, but like, Okay. I think a lot of brands are figuring out how to set up those quizzes and how to filter customers down into the right product or products for them.

[00:28:39] But how do you transfer that data into an email marketing experience? 

[00:28:43] Lexie Bennett (Email Marketing Consultant): Yeah. There’s a couple different ways to collect zero party data. Like Octane AI quizzes are my favorite cuz there’s just so much that you can get out of that that I think it provides the most value for your customer. But also in the Clavio popup, you can ask a little question that like a multiple choice they can select from.

[00:29:00] So like for the acne brand, I have the. Are you a teen struggling with acne? Are you a parent buying for their child or are you an adult struggling with acne and in the welcome flow, there’s just a different way to, like, we spoke with estheticians and like people that sell this product in real life, and they’re like, Oh yeah, parents have these type of questions, and teenagers have these type of questions, and then adults want to know this type of stuff.

[00:29:22] So instead of like one welcome flow where everyone gets the same content, Now we have three different paths that they can go to where the base content is the same, but instead I’m like, Hey, parents, you know, like, here’s why your teen has acne. Here’s how this like product solves it. Here’s like three tips to help them.

[00:29:39] Just changing the language a little bit. And that’s not even like from a quiz. That’s from a one single question on a pop. That you can set up within Clavio. So that’s an easy way to just start personalizing your emails. You can also like ask them questions in an email and then set it up in, in Clavio that it tags what button they click, and then you can segment based off of that.

[00:30:02] But yeah, quizzes are my favorite because you get the most data and you can ask all the good questions. I’d love to ask like especially what’s your concern? What’s your hesitation, what’s your problem? And then, Walking back from there and teaching them how this product helps them solve their problem. So brands like skincare brands, I work a lot with skincare brands, , they’re my favorite to work with because they have so many products uses and different products are appropriate for different skin concerns.

[00:30:33] So setting up a quiz flow that like, okay, you are struggling right now with oily. This ingredient from this product does this exactly like this will solve that for you. And like, here’s why your skin is this way. Here’s how to help it long term. Like it’s more than just like, Here’s a product. Let me just like slap this on an email and send it to you.

[00:30:54] It’s educating them so that they feel like. , they’re really clever. They’re really smart. Like they solved a problem I think in June. The nail polish brand does a good job of this. They teach you like how to paint your nails, so it looks like you just came out of a salon and like, I’ll watch those videos and then have like wonderful nails afterwards and I have to like take pictures and send all my friends like, Look what I just did.

[00:31:16] Like wow, Like you, you know, like I feel like the hero of my story there and I’m a huge fan of all the June for that. So yeah, using personalization. Here’s exactly your problem and here’s how you can solve it and here’s like how it works. That I think is just really fun. 

[00:31:34] James Sowers (The Good): Yeah. It keeps your job interesting, right?

[00:31:36] And, and if a brand tries, it’s in house. Like there’s never a boring day when you’re trying to, Again, I need a six foot whiteboard for a reason, right? As soon as you start talking about personalization, you get multiple variants and it’s like, yeah, this email sequence is probably 60 to 70% the exact same content, but that remaining 30 to 40%, that’s been person.

[00:31:52] Is critically important to get right. You don’t wanna mess up the logic, You don’t wanna send oily skin recommendations to somebody who has dry skin because somewhere along the way you botched it. So that’s why, again, you map it out, but when you get it right, it’s incredibly powerful just for that, making somebody feel like the hero of their story.

[00:32:08] And, and, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s intuitive when you think about it. Like, if I’m buying this for myself, I’m a teen and I’ve got an acne, acne problem, I want a solution right now. Like, I want my acne gone today. But if I’m a parent buying for my student, knowing that. That’s not realistic. Like it’s not gonna go away tomorrow.

[00:32:25] So like maybe equip me with some talking points about how like, Hey, I got this to help you out. I just want you to know it’s probably gonna take a couple of months for it to really go away, but if I’ll help you, stick with it and we’ll get through this together and then I think you’ll be in a better place.

[00:32:37] Like that little bit of like support and resource allocation to that parent like means the world. And if another brand’s not doing that, I think that gets you the sale. But it comes from personalization and knowing who you’re talking. The way that you do that is you collect it through quizzes. So I think like if somebody’s sitting here and they’re overwhelmed, they’re like, Wait, I gotta do multiple variants and I gotta do personalization and, and I gotta segment my emails and only send ’em to certain people.

[00:32:59] Like, yeah, it can make your, your head spin a little bit, but that’s why, like, taking it slow, getting that blocking and tackling, right, Getting the fundamental, you know, workflows set up with just the essentials and then continuing to improve over time, maybe with the help of someone like you. I think that’s the right approach.

[00:33:14] Don’t try to be perfect right outta the. Like, let’s just do the fundamentals and get those right, And then do more advanced tactics, like layer those on top as we learn more about our customers. You know, I wanna do like a little bit of an awkward transition into like, you know, one way to collect that data is through quizzes, and sometimes it’s introduced through popups.

[00:33:30] So I know like, and, and that’s also just a list building. Like how do you get people into these experiences, Right? We talk a lot about popups from a conversion rate optimization perspective. It’s like back to that in-store experience. If somebody just shoves a clipboard with a survey in front of you and says, I got a 20% off coupon, if you fill this out.

[00:33:44] Nobody likes those, right? Or if you do, I don’t know. I don’t, I don’t understand your perspective on the world if you like that, but I try to avoid those folks, right? So when I hit a site and within five seconds I see a popup with a discount asking for my email, like, I don’t even know anything about the brand yet.

[00:33:57] I don’t know anything about your product. I don’t know if you can help me. Like, it’s just too early. And I’m not against popups, I’m against popups that are implemented in a poor way. So I think I saw through my research, like you explicitly helped design, uh, an effective popup. Pair as well with the email experience that you’ve designed.

[00:34:12] So I’m curious how you think about those and doing those in a way that’s like respectful for the customer, but also serves the business goals of like growing their audience, right, and getting people into the sales 

[00:34:20] Lexie Bennett (Email Marketing Consultant): funnel. Yeah. A popup is an interruption, so you wanna make sure it’s, you’re interrupting them in a way that’s very helpful, like you would if you were in a store and someone came up to you mid browsing.

[00:34:32] It should be relevant and it should be useful and it should help you at where you’re at. So delaying your popup or maybe only having it show up on product pages, so they would have at least like scanned through the homepage first helps like make sure like people are like actually entering it and interested and they want the content, like they want the value that you’re promising them.

[00:34:54] If you give them their email. So I always put a delay on popups and then I love to ask a question. People like to tell you about themselves. Like people love to take quizzes about themselves. And so like the acne question, just one question increased our conversion rate on that popup, I think from like an 8% to an 11% just in a week that we added that one question on there.

[00:35:16] And the design was the same. Everything else, it was just like, if, are you parent, teen, you know? So asking a question really helps or maybe telling them exactly what they’re gonna get if they sign up for emails. So sign up for emails and then we’re gonna give you a tutorial on how to use this, or we’re going to give you a recommendation on what we think your style would match if you select that you like, have a minimal style versus colorful.

[00:35:41] So, yeah, I quick win that I always do with popups is just like adding a, a proper delay. So the interruption comes more at an appropriate time and then asking a question and then delivering on that question. When you send them their first welcome email. And like you were saying earlier, like it’s really easy to get overwhelmed with like all the different options that you can do, but once you’ve like set up those foundational emails, like the high traffic email, , you have a welcome flow going out.

[00:36:08] That’s when you can say, Okay, if I have one question to my popup, I can just do, you know, the base content is 70 to 80% the same. We just changed the wording a little bit or a couple of the images and set two different welcome flow pathways from one question and a popup. So yeah, that’s my popup philosophy.

[00:36:25] James Sowers (The Good): Yeah, it’s an iterative approach, right? Because it’s like to your hearkening back to your story earlier about buying a couch. Somebody introduced a, a coupon to you near the point of sale, right? You had already gone through all that exploratory conversation, the product recommendations, you’re like, Yeah, I’m in on that.

[00:36:42] I, I’ll take that one too. This is starting to look to good together as an assembly, and then they’re like, By the way, would you like 20% off of your purchase today because you’re over a certain amount or whatever, And it’s like, Yeah, I would like, I’m already this far in the process. But if they would’ve done that outta the gate, Be like, this is my first time in the store.

[00:36:56] Like, I’ve been living internationally. I don’t even know, like I haven’t been to a Pottery Barn in forever, Right. Since I was a kid. So like, let me figure things out first. You know? So it’s all about the offer first and foremost. But then second to that, I would say probably the timing and the way that it’s presented and being respectful and, and having some, uh, some clarity around like, when is the right time to introduce your offer, right?

[00:37:16] Based on customer. Yeah, 

[00:37:18] Lexie Bennett (Email Marketing Consultant): and people ask me like, Should I put the code in there or should they have to open the email to get the code? And I understand like thinking behind that, but to me, like the ultimate goal is the sale, not that they open the first welcome emails . So I always put the code in the popup itself so that can shop directly from there.

[00:37:36] And they don’t have to like leave the screen, like they can continue in the window shopping and then include the code in the welcome email as well if they haven’t yet purchased by the time they get it. That post purchase flow is also a welcome flow in and of itself. So sometimes brands will message me and they’re like, Oh no, we have to like hide the code in the email so that they have to engage on email.

[00:37:59] I’m like, Okay. But the point is they purchase not, The point is that they open an email . So yeah, I know there’s like no right answers. Like there’s lots of different ways that you can do things. But like personally, that’s what I’ve found most successful is just including the code and the success message of the popup, and then building that, like nurturing that relationship in the post purchase 

[00:38:21] James Sowers (The Good): sequence.

[00:38:22] Okay. So a question for you. The clients that you typically work with based at the size that they’re at, what does their marketing team usually look like? Are they hiring you because the, the founder’s still doing everything? Are they hiring you? They’ve got one marketing person who’s already wrapped up in broadcast emails, sms, social media, probably the little customer support, like all kinds of stuff or like, um, what does that team look like and how do you fit into that?

[00:38:43] Yeah. I usually 

[00:38:44] Lexie Bennett (Email Marketing Consultant): work with brands doing like two to 3 million a year in sales, and so they have a bit of a marketing team set up. And everyone there usually feels like there’s so much to do. , which I relate to. I worked in house for a startup for a year and I loved it, but also like you learn a lot really fast because there is just.

[00:39:05] An overwhelming amount of work to do. So usually there’s a social media manager, there’s some sort of marketing director, cmo, and then there’s the brand owner. So there’s usually like a few people. And so sometimes there’s some clavio content that’s set up, but they’re not really taking full advantage of it.

[00:39:22] Um, they’re definitely running paid ads, but maybe they don’t have a proper like abandoned cart flow set up. So they’re kind of like a leaking ship. So I work with brands that. things are rolling. Customers are happy. There’s like a lot that’s growing and going well, and they’re at the point where they want to like really solidify customer journeys.

[00:39:42] On your whiteboard, like they want to tidy those up and make sure that they’re like the best possible experience for customers to go through. Cause customers are, you know, they can be really forgiving. You can send them content and especially when you’re a small brand, I feel like you can get away with making a lot of mistakes cuz they really see you as like another human.

[00:39:59] But especially as brands like Start to Grow, they want to make sure they have those like personal connections that you could have done maybe back, way back in the day when you were like on Etsy where you could. Personally message someone, but now that’s just like not possible and you still want that type of messaging.

[00:40:16] You can set all of that up through these like triggers and flows and clavio. So yeah, that’s the kind of teams that I work with. There’s a few people, everyone’s super busy and email always gets pushed off, or they have maybe some clavio default flows, but it just kind of looks. Not as nice as their super fancy website that they just rebranded with

[00:40:36] So I get emails like on par with their website and on par with like, the way they wanna treat their customers and the quality of their product. 

[00:40:45] James Sowers (The Good): Got it. Awesome. Thank you for that. I just wanna validate my assumption because I’m guessing if you, uh, it is basically, it’s nobody’s dedicated job to be thinking about the email marketing experience all the time.

[00:40:54] It’s, it’s fractional. So the divided attention, I’ve got other things on my. And they’ve hit this kind of like milestone or this decision point where like, okay, we need to take email marketing seriously and more specifically like the evergreen kind of automated workflow type of emails. And that’s when they engage someone like you.

[00:41:10] So let’s say, uh, those people are sitting in a room right now and they’re listening to this and they’re going, Yeah, this is great, but I don’t have a whiteboard big enough to cover all the different flows and stuff and personalization and segments and all these different journeys that you’ve talked about today.

[00:41:23] So how do we like get started? How do we take one step forward? How do we just get a little bit better? Where would you recommend that that team focus their attention? Maybe it starts with an audit or maybe there’s a specific workflow that pretty much everybody can make improvements on. Like what advice do you have for that?

[00:41:37] Buy 

[00:41:37] Lexie Bennett (Email Marketing Consultant): your product, purchase it, and then as a customer, like with a different email like that you don’t have associated with your brand already, buy your product and then see what it feels like. So sign up for the newsletter purchase after a couple days and see like what do you get? What feels odd? Oh wow.

[00:41:55] I get two 15% offers like back to back. That do, they’re totally different, you know. So just experience it as a customer. Like you would like a hot jar map on a website. So just watch it and you’ll start to like take notes really fast of things that you wanna change or update or improve on. And, um, yeah, focus on the high traffic emails the most, and it’s, it would be really fun to like develop like a 16 email flow, post purchase cert like sequence.

[00:42:24] And that’s great. You should do that down the line. But just focus on the ones that get the most traffic first. Build that trust and then. Just do like one or two a week, like adding an email in here and there, seeing what performs and in an audit. Yeah. The thing to look at the most are definitely all the triggers.

[00:42:43] Clavio support is also really helpful. Um, cuz sometimes like the, if then statements are like kind of confusing or don’t come naturally to people, just message them and be like, just to make. non-customers are, are receiving this flow, right? Like customers are not this, this is correctly segmented out. And then once you’ve like set up a few, like you get the hang of the language of it.

[00:43:05] But yeah, just double check your triggers, see who’s getting what, and then focus mostly on your high traffic. Emails is what I’d advise. 

[00:43:14] James Sowers (The Good): Awesome. I love that advice for buy your own product or, Or even like have somebody in your family buy it and just look over their shoulder and wait for them to get the confirmation email and see what it looks like in their browser.

[00:43:22] Right. Cause even your unique experience, like you might have a cookie in your browser or something from working on the admin side of things that. That compromises the actual like organic experience of a nu to file customer. My reminder to go check the stuff for this podcast cuz a little behind the scenes, we had some issues getting connected here today because one of the URLs for the recording studio was apparently locked up for some reason.

[00:43:40] So I need to go through my own, like what does my intake form look like? What does my confirmation email look like? What are the calendar events getting set up properly? Like that? That’s my reminder that it’s not just applicable to e-commerce brands, it’s applicable to me as well and, and other business types.

[00:43:53] You know, I think we’ll wrap it up there. Lexi, thank you so much for sharing all this knowledge. I think folks have plenty of notes to go off and take action on. Before I let you go, I’ll give you the soapbox for a second. Is there anywhere where somebody can go to follow your journey, follow your work, maybe get in touch about working with you?

[00:44:07] Now we’re in the future. Where would you like to send folks to after, before we let go? Today? 

[00:44:11] Lexie Bennett (Email Marketing Consultant): Online, I’m in two different places. On Twitter, I’m kind of like in the weeds asking questions like interacting in people’s threads, like trying to figure out how to do my job better. And then on Instagram I post, um, on stories almost every day.

[00:44:25] Like I usually post literal screen recordings of me designing emails or setting flows up. So if you wanna basically like watch behind my shoulder, build emails, you can follow me on Instagram. And on both channels. I’m the Lexi Bennett, so that’s where you could find me. And if you wanna work with me, there’s links on my bios for everything for how to 

[00:44:44] James Sowers (The Good): do that.

[00:44:45] Cool. Yeah, I’m definitely gonna, uh, follow you on Instagram. I’ve been trying to avoid it because it’s not nearly as like, filtered as my Twitter experience to productive content. It’s more like guilty pleasure, like. Cat pictures or whatever, and it’s because I can’t find a whole bunch of business folks on there that I can actually learn from.

[00:45:00] Uh, so I’m gonna go check out those Instagram stories. Thanks for sharing that, and thanks for taking time outta your day to join us here and really appreciated, um, all of your insights and, and had a great conversation. So thanks so much. We’ll look forward to having you back on the show sometime soon.

[00:45:12] Lexie Bennett (Email Marketing Consultant): Thank you. Thank you so much. 

[00:45:14] James Sowers (The Good): Hey everybody, this is James again, and before you go, I just wanted to invite you to join one of the coolest things I get to work on as director of marketing here at the Good. It’s called the E-Commerce Insiders List, and it’s a private version of this podcast feed that gets you access to tons of additional bonus content, like extra interviews, q and a Sessions, website, teardowns, and anything else we can dream up.

[00:45:32] It doesn’t cost you anything but your email address, and we promise to always respect your inbox. This is just our way of forming stronger relationships with our listeners and making sure that we produce content that is actually valuable to. And to your business. If you’re interested, you can join the rest of the e-commerce insiders by going to the good.com/podcast and dropping your email into the form at the top of the page.

[00:45:53] We’ll follow up with directions for how to access the private feed, and you’ll be off and running. Like I said, this is one of my favorite things that I get the opportunity to work on because it lets me interact directly with e-commerce founders and leaders just like you. If you’re interested, I’d love to see your name pop up in my notifi.

[00:46:07] Until then, keep an eye out for the next episode of the E-Commerce Insight Show and we’ll talk to you soon.

The post The Power of Email Automation (And Personalization) with Lexie Bennet appeared first on The Good.

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About this episode:

In this special edition episode, we’re joined for a Q&A by The Good’s very own Jon MacDonald and Natalie Thomas. Our questions have been sent in by some of our followers, and we’re taking time to sit down and answer them. 

We discuss the latest news and trends in ecommerce and CRO, what’s been working for us at The Good, and what the shift to working remotely has been like for us. This week’s episode also covers a lot about our experience over the years, the changes we’ve gone through and the leadership style at the company. 

In this episode, you’ll learn things about: 

• What the current state of ecommerce looks like after the pandemic
• How remote work is working for us   
• What automations have helped in improving our workflows
• What marketing secrets are helping our blog rank well on Google

Learn more about Jon and Natalie here

• Connect with Jon and Natalie on LinkedIn
• Follow Jon on Twitter
• Check out The Good’s blog 

Want to be a guest on our show? Have feedback or ideas for how we can improve? Send your thoughts over to podcast@thegood.com. We’ll be keeping an eye on that inbox.  

The Ecommerce Insights Show is brought to you by The Good, a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) consultancy specializing in helping ecommerce businesses accelerate their growth through better research, testing, and design. Learn more about our team, our work, and our services at www.thegood.com.

Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): So here’s the question. How can you, commerce leaders make sure that they are producing a great product, providing a world-class customer experience responsibly managing the finances and still reserve time, energy and resources for marketing their products. My name is James Sauers, and you’re listening to the e-commerce insight show.

[00:00:16] The podcast that gives you a specific, actionable advice for growing your e-commerce business. Every Monday, you’ll get a conversion rate optimization tactic that you can implement quickly to make your business 1% better. Every single. Every Thursday, we sit down with industry experts to go deep on a specific aspect of running a successful e-commerce business.

[00:00:34] It’s the perfect blend of learning and application, which means that you maximize the value of every single minute you spend with us. We’re just as committed to growing your business as you are. So if you’re looking for a partner to help you crush your revenue goals, you’ve come to the right place, roll up your sleeves and grab a notepad because it’s time to get to.

[00:00:52] John, Natalie. Thanks so much for joining me today for this harebrained idea that I have one of many I’m sure to do kind of a quarterly Q and a with the leadership team here at the. I think the context here is really just, we crowdsourced some questions that folks have about how we run the agency. Maybe about conversion rate optimization, e-commerce growth, anything related to, uh, you know, the world that the three of us live in day to day.

[00:01:15] And, uh, I just thought it was an interesting opportunity for us to be. Transparent about what we’re working on, how we think about things, how we solve problems and that kind of thing. And, you know, people like reality TV. So this is kind of in the same vein, just in an audio format primarily. So yeah, maybe a quick introduction from the two of you, for anybody who doesn’t know, they know me as the host of the show.

[00:01:34] So James director marketing here, but John let’s start with you and then we’ll go over to. 

[00:01:37] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): Founder and CEO, the old school here. 

[00:01:41] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): My name is Natalie I’m, director of conversion rate optimization strategy here at the good then creating my own problems and then solving those problems here for the last 

[00:01:50] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): four years.

[00:01:50] That’s my preferred strategy is just to keep creating problems, just job security, right? There’s something else that needs to be handled. And John doesn’t want to do it. So that keeps us. 

[00:01:58] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): As long as the two of you solve the problems. I’m good with that. Yeah. Yeah, that 

[00:02:01] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): sounds good. Cool. So let’s just jump into some questions here.

[00:02:05] There’s no real rhyme or reason to it. Again, they were crowdsourced primarily from Twitter, but also some slack DMS. And, uh, I guess I’ll be the facilitator or the host here. And some of these questions feel more appropriate for certain participants than others. So we’ll start by directing one that John, this question was basically around what’s the current state of things with e-commerce, as it pertains to the global pandemic and some of the.

[00:02:24] Economic shifts that we’ve seen in the last year or so, are you still seeing strong demand for e-commerce brands? And I think where this question is coming from is basically as the sales leader at the organization, having most of the conversations with those decision makers at bigger brands, how are their businesses doing?

[00:02:39] What are they worried about? What are they coming to us with? And, uh, do you think, like going forward, we’re in a strong position to sustain some of the growth that we’ve seen or, um, is there maybe some cause for concern on the horizon? 

[00:02:49] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): I think it’s. Up in the air at the moment, I can tell you I’m hearing day to day.

[00:02:56] Demand is not waning e-commerce is here to stay in terms of the boom that happened, right. It was here to say before the pandemic, but during the pandemic, it really took off. It had a lot of demographics who weren’t used to buying, or weren’t as sure about buying on e-com and they jumped right in. And that demand was only tapered really by supply chain issues.

[00:03:17] And those are starting to lose. Uh, there’s still a massive line at the port and Los Angeles here in the United States and a few other places around the world. But I will say in terms of Yukon business, I’m hearing that, that everybody had a great holiday, uh, for the most part. And it’s still super expensive to advertise.

[00:03:37] And for us, that’s actually a benefit, sad to say, but it’s true that when costs CPCs go way up. And people need to get more return on that ad spend optimization is one of the best tools that they can deploy. And that’s where we can come in. I’m also hearing though on the flip side of that, you know, everyone’s concerned a little bit about the economy right now this week at the beginning of the year has just been kind of trashed for the markets.

[00:04:04] But the reality is that I don’t think the day-to-day person is feeling. Beyond inflation. So I think inflation is hitting the day-to-day person. Right? Gas costs, more groceries, cost more. But outside of that from a business standpoint, I don’t think it’s hitting most businesses just yet. 

[00:04:22] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): How does that compare to what you may be hearing from clients who are already working with Natalie?

[00:04:25] You’re hearing some of the same things or are they really focused in, on kind of the work we’re doing for them in the projects and tests we have. 

[00:04:31] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): The clients that I think are fairing the best are the ones that are pretty diversified. So if we’re still hearing about supply chain issues, it’s from folks who can’t get a certain kind of metal that they need in order to produce their product.

[00:04:42] And they’re really only living in one vertical. So those folks are having to be extremely creative about how to both bring folks in fulfill, and then make sure that they’re driving traffic to the products that are in stock rather than products that are out of stock or, um, on, you 

[00:04:57] know, 

[00:04:57] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): shipping. Yeah, that’s kind of aligns with what I’m hearing marketing conversations that I have.

[00:05:02] Most people are generally optimistic and if they have a supply chain issue, it’s like I have more demand and I can’t get the supply fast enough. So there’s trying to get creative and do pre-sales and stuff like that. Or sell gift cards instead or something. Capture that demand while it’s there and just help with the supply chain catches up.

[00:05:17] So it sounds like generally we’re still on that upward and to the right trajectory. So we’ll look forward to seeing that continue for the rest of the year and keep a close eye on it. Let’s see. So the next few questions are more about agency life, and then we’ll come back to the e-commerce industry and what we do specifically.

[00:05:33] The next one again is for John. What’s your best list? So we got hindsight is 2020, right. And so what’s your best advice for someone who’s either just starting an agency today or maybe somewhere in that first year? Like I know the good is over 12 years old now if I’m remembering correctly. So yeah.

[00:05:47] Didn’t always look like it does today, but I’m sure you’ve learned a lot over that time. So what advice do you have for the future? Jon MacDonald is sitting out there. Well, I think 

[00:05:54] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): the first thing you need to do is it all starts with positioning and you have to have a niche focus and become experts in that focus.

[00:06:03] And if I tell the story all the time that it took us about 18 months, almost two years to really. Like go all in on optimization. And we were an e-commerce development firm when we first started, that was kind of the game. And we did optimization and I realized it was a commodity because it really, it just is.

[00:06:24] Unfortunately now there’s other stuff you can add onto it. You could be the best at it, whatever, but all those are really fringe and really hard to prove. So in a lot of clients aren’t going to buy just because of that. Right. So it’s interesting. I think that the first. But an agency should do starting out is narrow that focus and have really good positioning where they do specific X thing for specific Y market.

[00:06:51] And if we had went all in from the get-go on optimization for e-commerce. I think we’d be two years ahead. So that’s the biggest kind of regret from that. If I had any, although I learned a lot going through what I did with the commodity market, I know not to go back there. I’m always saying no about expansion opportunities and things that clients ask us to do for them.

[00:07:14] And I’m like, we’re not a good fit for that because I know it’s a commodity or it’s just not as easy as it sounds or the client might think. So I think having positioning is the first key and that’s where. Agency starting out fail because they just, they start by an ex subject matter expert coming in, who can do the work quite well and is tired of doing it for somebody else and not reaping the rewards.

[00:07:39] And so they go and they start doing the work again, and they basically have started themselves. Instead of a business and they end up really just focusing on getting more billable hours or things of that sort instead of the high overarching strategy, which really began to a 

[00:07:59] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): positioning. Yeah. And I think, you know, from the outside looking in, I don’t do any of the client work here, but some of what I see being communicated from Natalie and her team, we do a lot of that on behalf of our clients.

[00:08:09] And we advocate for them to have stronger positioning. Right. And you can’t be a solution for everybody in your market. If you’re running a test, if it’s a headline or something like that, tailor that to the specific audience, try to talk to one person, not a hundred different people, right? Um, maybe a mis-characterizing that?

[00:08:22] What do you think, Natalie? Is that what you’re seeing? 

[00:08:24] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): I would agree. I think that there is a really strong relationship between the product that we’re delivering and how we’re trying to explain what that is. Being able to say, I have a really good understanding of who this strategy is for. That’s one of those personas, maybe an e-commerce operator, and maybe they’re really own the data.

[00:08:46] And they’re really excited by numbers and they want to get a little more context around one part of that. I think being able to communicate to a person with a really strong need and having a really specific way that that’s fulfilled and an angle, a perspective on that. I mean, anybody can do what we do, but are they going to do it in the way that we do it?

[00:09:04] We don’t believe in dark patterns or deceptive user experience design, we would never create a cancellation flow. That’s so confusing that you might get sued like Amazon has. So I feel like our perspective is another added part of how we approach things in that positioning. And we’re always trying to communicate that through our marketing efforts.

[00:09:25] Yeah. 

[00:09:26] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): I love that. Love that perspective. We’re talking about something that we’ve learned over the last decade or so. I think it’d be a good point to introduce something we’re still learning, which is transferring or transitioning into more of a remote setup. I know historically the good has had a footprint there in Portland and pretty much a hundred close enough to a hundred percent of the folks were coming in there into the office and working together.

[00:09:45] We always had contractors and stuff like that, supporting us, but. More recently, the world has kind of forced us to like a lot of folks to go more into a hybrid model. So we still have a lot of folks there locally located in Portland. We still have an office space, but we’re kind of in this transitory phase where I’m sitting here in Cleveland, Ohio, we’ve got folks in Lima, Peru.

[00:10:00] We’ve had folks in Chicago and that’s only going to continue to be more diverse as we continue to grow the team. So we haven’t always been remote friendly, so to speak in the definition that most people use it today. But at the same time, like that’s the direction we’re heading. I guess the question here from the audience is like, how are we taking something that has been traditionally a brick and mortar kind of establishment and bringing it into more of a hybrid or a remote friendly workplace.

[00:10:25] And just making sure that those relationships are still strong, everybody’s still feels heard and appreciated. And the fact of the matter is we still need to get the work done. So what have been the challenges? Are there learnings there alone? You should direct that a specific person that host, I don’t know, I’ll say Natalie, you have the biggest team, right?

[00:10:39] Technically John sits on top of the entire company so that you could argue that point, but I would say like you have the biggest team and it’s still largely locally based. So as you have new team members come in from the marketing team, or otherwise that are remote, like what has been something you’ve learned or something that you think would be helpful to the audience?

[00:10:57] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): Yeah, well, let’s take a step back and just understand that I think we’re still a Portland business and that has always been part of our positioning that we’re in the community. We’re a B Corp we’re dedicated to. Doing good as if you will. You know, when we have volunteer events there for businesses and communities 5 0 1 C3 or small nonprofits that are really important to our team and are really close to our heart.

[00:11:21] And those usually happen to be Portland establishments like Portland backpacks. I will say though, that having a remote team has made us get really creative in terms of how we’re continuing to. Think about being Portland based. I think making sure everyone feels really included in those volunteer events specifically, but as well as during the onboarding process has been really important to us.

[00:11:46] We had a really good foundation that set us up really well for remote work. We were already on zoom. We were already on slack and we already had a process in place for. Well, how do we make someone feel included when they’re in their first day, 10 days, 30, 90 days of working at the good. So we have things like an onboarding buddy, someone that you can just go to and be like, Hey, I actually don’t really know how to use the espresso machine.

[00:12:09] No one ever taught me on my first day or, Hey, is it cool if I post this in this channel in slack? Or is that for a different kind of channel? And it’s kind of about making someone feel like there are no unwritten rules. We want to have everything really above board and. Making sure that people know both, you know, the snacks are for them.

[00:12:27] If they’re in the office and that they can ask this kind of question in this kind of channel just helps that sense of inclusive. So I think it’s definitely challenging. I mean, it takes a lot of creativity. Like I said, to get that whole team to feel included and to still feel really like we are Portland based, but we find ways to make 

[00:12:46] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): it work.

[00:12:47] How about you, John? You’ve been here for the entire ride. I know. Made the decision or were forced to make the decision to go more remote or more distributed. So how has that experience been for you so far? 

[00:12:56] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): Well, I’ll say first of all, it’s been lonely in the office. I’m the only one here and in a large headquartered office all by myself every day.

[00:13:04] But I will say we’ve always been remote from. We haven’t been remote first, but we’ve been remote friendly. And I say that because a we’ve never had a butts in seats culture. We don’t track time. Right. We’re not checking in on people. We hire adults and we help them do the best work of their careers. And.

[00:13:25] I expect that when we bring people in, they’re going to want to be part of the team and contribute, and they’re not going to take advantage of it. And in fact, the peers on the team will not let you take advantage of it because that’s going to fall back on them. And so we kind of have had a culture. It doesn’t matter when or where you work, as long as you’re getting your stuff done, nobody cares.

[00:13:47] So that transition was not really an issue now. Yes. We have a headquarters here in Portland. It has a physical office. How long we have this? I don’t know. I mean, we have a lease, but I mean, after that is a question, I don’t know the answer to, I will say. That I think that won’t replace us, always getting together over a couple of times a year is a bigger team.

[00:14:08] I think that those in-person interactions are still important and we’ll find a way the budget that we spent on this office every month will likely go to flying everybody someplace and putting them up for a few days, a couple of times a year. So. That’s likely what it’s going to transition to, but regardless, I also think, you know, we’ve for 99% of our clients, we’ve never met them face to face.

[00:14:32] And that was true before the pandemic. So our clients don’t care. We never skipped a beat with the clients. They had no idea. And again, I think that all goes back to our positioning. We’ve been, so well-defined in what we do and what. Experts in that because we see the same problems over and over and over, because we’re focused on this industry and this challenge that clients come to us for that they don’t come to us to have buddies.

[00:14:58] They’re not looking to be friends with us and like want to hang out and go get drinks. They’re looking because they have a serious pain point and they know we can S we can solve that for them. I would say remote friendly has always been part of it. Remote first has not been, and that’s been the change and I’m kind of happy with how the team has handled it because we’ve hired adults.

[00:15:18] Everybody’s done extremely good job with it. Yeah. I 

[00:15:21] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): think that’s the biggest learning point for me or the biggest observation I’ve had. I mean, we have these touch points that. Uh, keep the conversations flowing and, and keep, uh, break down the silos, so to speak. So we have a tool called 15 five. That is kind of like a weekly pulse check.

[00:15:34] We still have a huddle. Every Friday. We have coffee chat every Wednesday, which is like a no agenda. We can’t even talk about work. That’s the rule, right? Come in and talk about anything but work. So there’s like little micro touch points that I think a lot of businesses are doing. The biggest learning for me is actually on the front end and in hiring and onboarding.

[00:15:50] It’s like all of a sudden you have to, if you’re going to have a specific position that is remote first, that’s maybe a different kind of person that really embraces kind of like autonomy and independence. And a lot of people say that they’re okay with that. But if they’ve never actually. Worked remotely full time.

[00:16:07] It can be hard to really know if it’s a good fit for you. Like I like to be alone. I like isolation and to sit on the couch and read or whatever, but like, that doesn’t mean I want to be single. Like if I had to live by myself 24 hours a day, every day, eventually, yeah. I would get lonely. Right. So there are different, there’s a spectrum of like independence and autonomous.

[00:16:24] And some people may say, yeah, I can operate fine in this 12 by 12 office from home all the time with nobody to interact with. But then when you get in there month, one is fine. Month, two is fine all the way up to nine or 10, but then somewhere along the way, it’s like, man, this really, for whatever reason, doesn’t feel fulfilling.

[00:16:40] And I, so, so I think there’s like something on the front end in the hiring where like ideally experience in a remote setting is kind of the best indicator. But one of the things I really loved is when I came on, John asked me to fill out basically like how to work with James document. Right. And there wasn’t really an official template, but yeah.

[00:16:55] Here are my preferences. Like here’s how I look at the world. Here’s how I manage my schedule. Ideally, day-to-day, here’s how I like to communicate asynchronously. Here’s how I like to receive feedback. And you put that stuff on paper and it’s not like here’s the way I do things. So now John, you have to bend yourself in half to accommodate that.

[00:17:11] Or vice versa. It’s more like let’s independently read this about one another and figure out where we already kind of align. And then where we don’t align, let’s work out some kind of common ground. Right. And I think that went a long way. That’s something I asked Caroline to do when she joined the team and I would make it a permanent state front end, new member is basically like, what’s your ideal day look like?

[00:17:29] What is your ideal work-style look like, how can I be a good manager to you? And here’s how I like to manage a team and let’s figure out how that works. Not just in a remote setting. Overall, like, how do you like to, how are you most effective and how can I play a role in supporting that and sustaining that feel free to re react to that if you want, or I’ll look for the next question out of the group here.

[00:17:47] That seems to make sense. Well, I mean, I, 

[00:17:49] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): I shared a how to work with John document too, and I think that’s been really helpful. And I just wrote down a note to share that with everybody who joins the team moving forward, because I think it’s important to, you know, Everybody to know, you know, Hey, if I don’t respond to you right away, that doesn’t mean I don’t like you.

[00:18:07] Right. I mean, I think that there’s, it’s helpful to set that ground up front. Right. And I think that it’s important. You again, as adults, we all have preferences. We all know how we work best. And so it’s great to communicate that upfront. And that was why I asked you to put that document together, knowing that you were one of the first on the leadership team to be remote.

[00:18:30] And I wanted to make sure that. So I’ve really deep into that immediately. And that seemed like one of the best ways to do that for me. 

[00:18:38] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): Okay, cool. So one more about kind of agency life, and then we’ll transition over into e-commerce or CRO specific type of questions. This one’s all about EOS or the entrepreneurial operating system.

[00:18:48] We could have an entire episode just on our experience through that, but I get this question so much. I want to at least touch on. Today. So I think that basically the question here is like us is getting popular or was already popular and we jumped on the bandwagon. I’m seeing it all over Twitter, you know, should we implement this at our e-commerce brand or whatever the business model is?

[00:19:06] And I’m like, yeah, we went through it. It would take me 10,000 words to tell you everything I know about EOS. Or it would be like a 30 minute video and nobody wants to watch that, but maybe in a nutshell, like we’re coming up. I think we just had our one-year anniversary of officially like kicking it off, starting with the leadership team and then starting to introduce it to the rest of the company.

[00:19:24] So maybe from your perspective, let’s jump over to Natalie. Since we just had a big response from John, like I know EOS was new to you and we were lucky enough to work with a great facilitator to kind of start that process. I had been through it before, so I think it’d be great to get a fresh perspective from you as like just initial reactions, checking in.

[00:19:42] Yeah, I would say the 

[00:19:43] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): most valuable thing that, well, maybe there’s two things that are the most valuable that have come out of EOS. For me, one is the idea that I think we already had a culture of this internally, but just putting it down on paper and saying it out loud has been really helpful that the leadership team, we go into a room, we argue it out and we come out aligned.

[00:20:03] And I think that’s really what. Clear what our goals are. Whenever we go into a strategy session and coming out with a really clear vision that’s well articulated and painted super clearly. And that we’re all agreed on has been really a great driving force in the last year. I think the other thing. I really appreciate about just having gone through EOS.

[00:20:29] You know, part of the process is just identifying, discussing, and solving problems and you have a whole dedicated meeting to that once a week, once every other week, just with your working. And for me, that solving piece is really crucial. I think we have a really strong culture of the good at the good of improvement.

[00:20:49] And so identifying and discussing problems was never an issue for us. We were always good at it and we. Try to look at our issues and not away from them. I think we’re all really good at admitting when we could do something better. And that’s part of that, like culture of optimization kind of bleeds throughout the company, both to what we do for our clients and internally, but in terms of handling our own issues, We have a lot more traction for how to solve those and accountability than we’ve ever had.

[00:21:20] And I think that’s come from those bi-weekly or weekly. Check-ins just saying, what are we working on right now? What’s that stuff in that important, but not necessarily urgent category that we really need to be dedicating time to. So for me, that’s the best thing I’ve gotten out of it. I mean, the process itself, you know, you can read a book.

[00:21:37] I don’t need to explain it to anybody. If you’re really interested, you can look into how it’s done, but that’s what I’ve gotten on. 

[00:21:43] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): Yeah. How about you, John? I think you brought it to the table originally through a EO or some other referral source and said games you’ve been through this. What was your reaction and that kind of thing.

[00:21:51] So, yeah, as the champion of the effort, what was your. 

[00:21:54] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): Well, we’ve done a competing type of system called scaling up or used to be called Gazelles when we did it years ago. And I found it really helpful at the time, because at the time we were growing really quickly and we wanted some structure. But I also quickly found that it was formulated for companies doing like tens to hundreds of millions and bigger, and it left out a lot of the stuff that a essentially a smaller company needed.

[00:22:25] And so. That was always my complaint with it and why we stopped doing it because it was just putting processes in place that the team was like, I could just go talk to them and be done with it. And I’m like, yeah, that’s true. Why are we having a meeting about this and why? You know, so it was adding complexity.

[00:22:40] EOS, I feel like, is much more about. Getting shit done quite honestly. And that’s where IDs comes in. As Natalie said, that’s where it’s just facilitating communication in a way that’s not really getting in the way, but a lot of the concepts are actually straight up stolen from Gazelles and scaling up quite honestly.

[00:23:00] And I actually saw Verne Harnish, who is the founder of Gazelles and scaling up, wrote the book, Rockefeller habits, et cetera, all where all that stuff. And he spoke to my master’s course at EO, where everybody was talking about EOS is like the new thing they should all be doing. And Verne Harnish came in and kind of let a three hour talk.

[00:23:23] That was amazing. He’s a very, very good speaker, lots of great insights, but he straight up, somebody asked him, well, what do you think about EOS? He’s like why I told the guy who started EOS. Just if you’re going to steal my program and just, just say it’s a derivative of my program. He’s like you straight up stole like half of the IP and turned it into something else.

[00:23:44] And I actually, that intrigued me because I was like, yeah, I loved half of that, but I hated the other half. So I’m going to look into this. And so that’s really where it came from, was looking into it. And I don’t think Vern’s upset by any means. He realized this there’s a gap in that lower SMB marketplace, if you will, outside of the larger corporations, which he’s really going after with his program.

[00:24:08] So I don’t think he’s upset. I think he’s more said that in jest, but at the same time, It’s true. And I think it’s been really helpful for a company of our size. 

[00:24:17] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): Yeah, I think so too. I, I always like in ELs too, like having a personal trainer, it’s like, yeah, a lot of people know they need to eat right. And exercise.

[00:24:25] But if you just go into the gym and workout, whatever muscle groups you think is right. Or you do whatever cardio you think is, right. Or you do you meal plan, like it’s much better to have a system and a process and an experts based system. Here’s your workout plan for the next three months, right. And here are the days broken out exercises, sets, reps, weights, everything based on your goals.

[00:24:43] Right? And so the meal plan is the same thing. Like you have this nutritional goal, I already did all the work for you. You just need to follow the program. And trust me in 90 days, we’ll have made progress. Right. So that’s how I describe it. It’s like it’s structure. And for me really, I love the forcing function that comes along with it.

[00:24:58] It’s like you can have three to five rocks in any given quarter and that’s it. And so like, it’s really easy if you. Follow EOS or you don’t commit to following EOS or some similar system to say, well, at the beginning of the quarter, we thought these three to five things were important, but this thing popped up midway.

[00:25:12] And so we swapped one out and then you just kind of like lose your way over time. Right. You start to wander away from the path. But EOS to me is like, you’re falling, you’re tracking this data. You’re commit to doing these three to five things in your area of expertise over the next quarter. You know, we don’t deviate from that.

[00:25:25] And if something. Support that, and it’s still not done. That gives you kind of like this justification to say, no, that’s a distraction for me right now that doesn’t align with my rocks. We’ll table it for next quarter, or we’ll find the right time for it. But right now I got to focus on what I got to focus on it.

[00:25:39] And as somebody who is subject to shiny object syndrome, that really helped me out. Cause I’m definitely more prone to saying yes, So if I can have a system of Elena and be like, Nope, doesn’t fit in with my rocks. You know, then that makes it, it makes me feel less guilt about shutting 

[00:25:50] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): something down.

[00:25:51] Right? Yeah. I was just going to bring that up and say, that’s been, I think one of the biggest, helpful things is it’ll helps eliminate shiny object syndrome as much as possible. And James even had some comments when we first started it like, well, what if things change in the middle of the quarter? And it’s like, Well, that’s, you’re getting pulled in that direction from shiny object syndrome, less about actually needing to change in most cases.

[00:26:12] And I’m that same way. And I think Natalie balanced as you and I out in a really great way when it comes to that always saying, Hey, is that really what we need to focus on and, and questioning that. So EOS definitely provides a space. For Natalie to be able to do that, which is really helpful from my point of view for you and I, so, yeah, 

[00:26:31] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): totally agree.

[00:26:32] Okay. Let’s talk about e-commerce industry at large, a little bit like most industries it’s subject to these hype cycles where you’ll see the hot new thing come in and either quickly burn out or stick around and really take off. I would say fast was what, an example of that, right? Fast kinda like burned, hot and heavy for awhile and then physical.

[00:26:47] So, what are you seeing out in the market now that for better or for worse might be one of those impending hype cycles. Maybe we’re in the early stages of it. And you’re just hearing a lot of buzz and a lot of energy around it. That could be a technology, uh, that could be a new app or extension for a marketplace.

[00:27:02] It could be a strategy that people are using to grow their business. I guess I’ll turn this one back to you, John, from the sales perspective, and then Natalie, we’ll go to you. If we’re hearing anything from clients, things are experimenting with their successes. They’ve had, 

[00:27:12] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): I’m not hearing about it in.

[00:27:14] Sales conversations yet, but I see it all over. Social and that’s e-commerce brands wanting to get into NFTs and I just don’t get it. It makes no sense to me. Here’s the thing. Maybe I’m just old and a curmudgeon or, or whatever. I’m all for web three in general. Like, I don’t have an issue with that, but as an e-commerce brand who, you know, you really are dividing your focus away from selling a really good product to trying to chase that quick money of doing an FTE release and.

[00:27:48] Shopify has had to respond to that and support it on their platform. So they’re coming, rolling out support for entities because they keep getting asked about it. I think that’s the new thing. That’s like, Hey, you know, it could be cool for a larger brand to do a little bit of NFTE stuff and just, you know, be a participant in that.

[00:28:06] Is it going to deliver real value? Probably not for 99.9% of the brands. It’s not, you’re not Nike. Right? You can’t release NFTs with all of your sponsor athletes and do some big things and then go spend, uh, several hundred million dollars to go buy a company that’s going to help you release all this stuff.

[00:28:25] So. I think that’s the biggest challenge that we’ll see. And I also second to that, I think is this whole metaverse with, you know, we’ve seen Walmart do where they put a whole bunch of patents on shopping in the matter of furs where you can literally put on your helmet and go shopping in a Walmart store and pick things up off the shelf and buy them.

[00:28:47] Sounds pretty cool. How reasonable is that going to be? I don’t know who, I mean, the whole point of going online is it’s quicker and easier than going shopping. If I want that experience, I’m going to go to a retail store. So I don’t know how much that’s going to play out over time. Again. Maybe I’m just not forward thinking enough.

[00:29:04] Oculus is an amazing thing. I’ve had a lot of fun playing with them, but do I want to go shopping in a Walmart virtually? Not at all. I don’t even want to go shopping at a Walmart to begin with, why am I going to do it virtually? So I don’t know. I think those two issues right now and FTS and, uh, and shopping in the metaverse are the two 

[00:29:22] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): biggest.

[00:29:23] Yeah, I think about NFTs and Twitter and Twitter is like, we just want to be able to edit tweets and mark RDMS is unread and Twitter’s like, here, you can have NFT profile pictures and look, they’re hexagons with rounded corners and everybody’s like, we just want these features over here. Please. Can you just give us what we’re asking for?

[00:29:39] And I think sometimes. Maybe it’s encompassing some of the distraction element that you described there, which is like, you’re great at selling apparel or whatever you’re selling. And, uh, to deviate from that kind of feels a little bit like that shiny object syndrome we talked about earlier, Natalie, anything from clients that you’re seeing that might, uh, be in support of the NFT.

[00:29:56] Cause the John just put out there anything totally different. I dunno. 

[00:29:58] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): I feel like I’m back down on earth and John’s telling me what’s cool in space. 

[00:30:06] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): Yeah. 

[00:30:07] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): Um, in terms of hype cycles, I mean, I hear a lot of our clients and potential clients talking about personalizations, and I think it’s really exciting to think about treating your customers like individuals and having worked in customer service and specialty coffee and fine dining for so long.

[00:30:25] I think the idea of making sure that that experience on the web and shopping on the web feels as personalized as in real life is extremely appealing. But in general, the folks that I’m hearing it from are usually a pretty far ways off from actually being at the level of wanting and needing to make those personalizations.

[00:30:43] Usually there’s a lot of optimization that can happen before that point. And when you get to the point of personalization, that’s because you have a robust testing program it’s because your site is really highly optimized. You have everything kind of in line with at least where close to where you think it could be.

[00:30:59] Personalizations or that next level where you’re customizing the content in a way that I think is just a little more advanced than the folks who are really biting onto them. Another thing that I’m hearing from sort of bigger ships, if you will, the cruise ships of e-commerce is just that they need insights faster, which is why we’re doing a lot of rapid testing on.

[00:31:22] Clients’ sites and with their customers, we’re trying to find ways to make the research and validation process a lot more agile and work in smaller cycles. Then AB testing can sometimes allow. And I think that. Is it a problem of sometimes the politics or the limited resources or the bureaucracy of what it actually takes to get an AB or multi-variate tests live with such a large organization.

[00:31:50] They’re trying to find ways to kind of circumvent the, um, order of operations there and get insights faster. So we’re learning to be extremely lean with some of our research and validation process. 

[00:32:02] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): Yeah, I’m really excited about where rapid testing could go. And, um, if anybody’s curious, John, on one of our other podcasts drive and convert, John did a summary kind of, of where we’re at in our thinking around that driving convert.com/ 47.

[00:32:15] We’ll get you there for a little bit more context about what not always just talking about. The one I’ve seen is his video. And I don’t know how it’s going to shake out, but I’ve seen a lot of tools and agencies now kind of offering video right there in the purchasing process. So you could have two examples that I’ve seen.

[00:32:29] One is customer support via video. So you can query somebody about a product right there, and theoretically they’re calling in from their apartment or from the office or whatever. And they’re basically FaceTiming you and say, Uh, which one are you looking at? Okay. You’re looking at the red top. Let me hold that up for you.

[00:32:44] Let me get some light on it. You can see exactly what shade it is. Let me stretch it out. You can see how it’s going to fit. I’ll show you the texture of the material up close to the camera, and basically like serving a sales function there and I’m helping somebody make a decision. I think that could be super powerful as a brick and mortar tends to be trailing downward and more people are shopping online.

[00:33:01] The one thing they miss is that physical ability to touch and feel a product, especially something that they’re going to be wearing or ingesting or something like that. So I think that’s cool. The other thing I saw recently was like right there on the PDP, you can basically click play on a social media asset that was produced by like an influencer or a user generated content.

[00:33:18] And they’re physically wearing the sunglasses right there on the PDP. And you know, some of these things like that, I’ve seen it Warby Parker or whatever. They basically take a cutout, a transparent cut-out of the glasses and put it over your face. Like you can turn your camera on or whatever. I’m like, yeah, that’s great.

[00:33:31] But it’s like imperfect that doesn’t it usually it’s not reality. The scale is off or whatever, but to watch a 32nd video of the same pair of glasses and the same finish physically on somebody’s face, they’re turning their head. They’re acting naturally. Like that gives me a much better sense of how that fits into my life and what I’m expecting to get out of it.

[00:33:47] So, yeah. I’m excited about the prospects of video as kind of a, something to test for the conversion funnel. They’re specifically at the point of sale. So, all right. Uh, let’s jump back over. I think the one thing I wanted to make sure we get into, I thought this was kind of a fun question. We’ll go back to Natalie here for this one.

[00:34:02] What is one common mistake or misconception around your line of work? That if you could wave a magic wand and erase it from the world would make your life better. 

[00:34:09] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): So a lot of brands who come to us come to us because they are conversion rates, not that high, or they just feel. This is something that they know they need to invest in.

[00:34:21] Right. They have some optimizations that they need help with, but they look at us and they think that it’s just us making some small tweaks to the site and it’s best practices that are all out of articles that they’ve read online. And so a lot of the misconceptions I hear as part of having a lot of those sales conversations from folks that come in.

[00:34:42] Is that what we’re going to do. And they’re always blown away by the amount of research that we do that we diagnose before we prescribe. And I think that that’s a misconception around conversion optimization in general, from a large portion of e-commerce brands. It really, I keep hearing this over and over.

[00:35:02] It’s like, well, what are you going to do? You’re just gonna make a few tweaks to our site. It’s something we can do overnight. And they’re not basing any of those thoughts on actual. They’re just saying why, you know, why wouldn’t I just go follow all the tips you put up on your site? And I was like, well, you don’t, you should consider those, but you should test them.

[00:35:21] And that usually is a turning point in the conversation. So I think the biggest misconception, if I could summarize is just that what we do is just make some initial tweaks to the site and then they’re done the reality of what we do is. Deep dive into the data, tracking every click and movement that’s happening on their site and helping them to use that data, to understand how to improve the customer expects.

[00:35:44] Which in turn leads to better conversion rates and 

[00:35:48] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): et cetera. Yeah. It’s not a checklist, right? There is no one size fits all playbook for optimizing your site. And it’s, we’ve tried to form that 

[00:35:55] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): checklist for how many years now. I mean, when Allie came in four years ago, I was like, okay, I want your fresh perspective on what this checklist could be.

[00:36:03] It seems like. So what, there’s no checklist. I’m like there has to be, we’ve got a system monetize this, we got to have a checklist and it’s like, no, every time we do commercial growth program, it’s customized for the site. We’re doing it for now. We have a process that we follow. We have some guideposts that we know, and we have things that ways that we do things that really accelerate the success and the results, but what tests we’re going to run, that’s going to be based on the data specifically from the client.

[00:36:34] Not from what we’ve learned with other people. Yeah. 

[00:36:37] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): And what that brings back to me is that, that personal trainer example, which is like, you can work with a firm that says they’ll run hundreds of micro tests. Right. And yeah, sure. You might get results or they might say, yeah, we have a standard process.

[00:36:49] We run all our clients. We get grades results from sure. Go ahead and try that. But would you rather like wing it in the, in the weight room or whatever you’re trying to pursue, right. Or would you rather have a coach? Whether you’re trying to learn how to sing or play piano or paint or get fit? Like you want some, an expert that is going to come in and first do a diagnostic.

[00:37:03] That’s the important part is where are you at today? And what are your goals and how far are we apart from those and then maybe what assets or resources do you have at your disposal. And then how can we put a plan together that realistically gets you closer to your end goal? But the phrase we always use is like, you’re always optimizing, never optimized, right?

[00:37:21] And so I think that’s kind of the mentality here, or the misconception is like, you’re never really done. You might achieve your goal and then set a new milestone, but you’re always experimenting. You’re always running new tests. You always have new information or customer preferences change. So. It’s kind of, uh, you know, it’s, the beauty of our work is like been back to job security.

[00:37:37] Like there’s always something to work on. You never really have everything done, but at the same time, like if you come in thinking that you can just pull a few levers and get more money out of the money machine, like it doesn’t always work that way. Not only do you have a perspective on this, I’m sure this ties into your line of work.

[00:37:49] So yeah, I think 

[00:37:50] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): the way I would respond to that is that one of our favorite phrases here at the good is it can always be further optimized. So as we’re looking at a website, it’s not that it’s bad. It could be further optimized. And I think some of the best clients that we work with are the folks who are always looking to get 1% better.

[00:38:12] And the misconception comes from folks who say, aren’t we done? Aren’t we done testing? Isn’t this like, good enough. It could always be further optimized. And that happens because user convention or web conventions change, user mental models, change trends, change the market changes. The quality of your product might change.

[00:38:35] Your competitors might change. Your competition might change. So there are so many factors going into how we might want to describe display a product that we really need to stay. On top of our game, in terms of how our understanding, how to optimize a site, there’s no one answer. It could always be further optimized and that’s that spirit of getting 1% better every day, or trying to make these tweaks over time.

[00:39:01] And it’s not to get to that one solution. It’s because we’re really hungry for what’s the best right now. Version of this site. 

[00:39:09] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): Yeah. You know, it starts to sound like hotel California. At some point it’s like, people work with us and they can never leave. Right. Because it’s never done, but I don’t think that’s really the angle, like clients part ways with us, for all kinds of reasons.

[00:39:19] Like they shift to retail. Right. And they don’t want to prioritize e-commerce anymore. Or there are a number of reasons why they, they bring it in-house and they’ve learned enough from us to hire an expert and maybe we help with some of the training and they hand off there. But the fact of the matter is like, Once you’re done with high school or even all the way up to a PhD, like you’re not done learning.

[00:39:35] There’s so much more, even, even PhD is a big part of what they do is research and continuing to learn even more to expand kind of the universal, shared knowledge around their area of expertise. So that’s the same mentality I think with CRO is like, there are always ways that you can be improved and then that 1% better.

[00:39:49] It’s always out there as something you can chase. So maybe a couple more questions here to wrap things up. One that I kind of liked that I think we might have conflicting opinions that we’ll have to work out here is where do you think brands and marketers should go for inspiration, direct competitors, indirect competitors, or people totally outside of their industry.

[00:40:07] I know that in the book. Putting your blinders on that’s. Why race horses have blinders. Cause you’re not supposed to look to your left and right. A house, somebody else’s running the race, you’re supposed to follow your own program and kind of look internally for that kind of thing. But at the same time, I’ve read books where they say, copy your competitors, because if they are already established and you’re just starting out, it can help you close that gap really quickly and get on par.

[00:40:27] And that’s the point at which you can start to innovate and start to run your own race. Maybe I’ll throw this one over to John first. Do you have a perspective on where marketing leaders and e-commerce leaders can go to look for inspiration? Should it be competitors or should it be more of a holistic approach?

[00:40:40] I think 

[00:40:40] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): that you should look at your customer base and the challenges that they’re having first and foremost and solve for that. And secondly, I think that if you do look at competitors, I’m not suggesting you ignore the competitive landscape. I’m just saying you don’t blanket copy them. And so maybe you look at that and it becomes something that you decide you want to test with your customer base, if, and when it makes sense to do so.

[00:41:09] The challenge with the statement is, and the reason that we talk a lot about the race horses wear blinders for reason is that if you start looking left and right at your competitors, and that’s all you’re doing, you’re not going to run straight ahead and you’re going to lose the race. And so I’m a firm believer that you should pay attention to your customer base and do your thing and do it extremely well.

[00:41:31] Run as fast as you can, straight ahead at your consumers. Now, if you’re going to run at your competitors, then you’re always going to be chasing the competitors and you’re never going to get. So what’s the point. 

[00:41:42] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): Yeah. You’ll always be a step behind, right. I try not to overuse the sports analogies, but even like you’re playing basketball or football.

[00:41:48] Like those guys always glance over their shoulder when they’re making a big play to see if there’s somebody coming up from behind them or from the side. And they’re going to take a big hit or there’s somebody going to block their shot or whatever, they steal a glance, but then they look back at the target ultimate.

[00:42:00] And they’re still trying to get done what they were looking to achieve in the first place. So maybe that is a good representation of what you’re saying is like, it’s good to be aware of competition and make note of what they’re doing, but if you let it dictate your own strategy for too long, then you’re always a separate tube behind.

[00:42:14] You’re never really creating separation. Not only anything 

[00:42:16] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): to add there. Yeah. I would just say, I totally agree with John, like everything should come from the angle of understanding what your customers need, what they’re looking at. If we do look at competitors, it’s more. Non-standard verticals. So I really like taking ideas and inspiration for what to test from industries totally outside of your own.

[00:42:36] And that’s because it helps you tap into what your customers or your users might be seeing in other places, whether that’s on the web or in person. I mean, we get inspiration from just walking on the sidewalk and picking up a penny. It doesn’t have to be from a website, right. We’re always looking for that next idea.

[00:42:52] That’s gonna win another million dollars. And so those can come from anywhere, but I think it’s most inspiring when they come from something completely outside of your industry. And it’s not just reinventing the wheel. It’s really looking for. Another way to align to user expectations, but add that surprise 

[00:43:10] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): and delight.

[00:43:11] Yeah. I love that point about getting totally outside of your industry, customers, competitors, whatever. A lot of people advocate for positioning like John did at the beginning of the conversation. And I fully support that specifically in my world, in the marketing world. Like I’ve always benefited from being a generalist or having like a diverse set of interests because I’ve worked on.

[00:43:28] Software products I’ve worked on educational or informational products. I’ve worked in e-commerce. And I like to pull lessons from each of those and apply them to a different context. And sometimes that’s where the true innovation comes from is like, wow, software is light years ahead of e-commerce in terms of customer onboarding.

[00:43:42] So like, it won’t look the same, but can we take some. Nuances and touch points. And can we repackage them into kind of your conventional e-commerce checkout experience with post-purchase experience and like, how can we replicate the success that they’ve already had? That’s not really a competitor. That’s drawing inspiration from another area and applying it to your area of expertise.

[00:44:01] So I love that you called that out because yeah. And then there are tiers to it, right? So like, I would always. A piece of data from a customer who’s openly paying me money or opening their wallet to contribute to my mission over a competitor or overcome some kind of like generalists or so that’s just me.

[00:44:15] I, I guess you guys would probably tend to agree with that, but I’ll let you to speak for yourself. 

[00:44:20] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): So chances are, most of us aren’t doing something so unique that no one’s ever had to solve a similar problem. Which is why going into other verticals can be inspiring. I mean, if you’re an auction site and you’re having a hard time getting your customers to add their credit card to their account so that they can actually make a valid bid on a product, think about who else has had a similar problem.

[00:44:42] I mean, the banking industry has dealt with that forever. Sure. You can create an account, but putting in that $200 to activate it is a hump that. Single bank has had to get over. So in terms of putting your blinders on, yeah. Great. Put your blinders on, but also know that you’re not the first person to solve this problem ever.

[00:44:59] And so there are places you can look for inspiration. 

[00:45:01] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): Yeah, totally agree. Okay. Uh, maybe we’ll bring it home with one last question. I think this one’s stemming from the fact that when I asked for questions, I included that we almost doubled revenue this year. And so it was a really good growth year.

[00:45:10] There was a lot of stretching happening in a lot of different ways. So I think somebody posed the question, looking back over the last year. What was your biggest success? And also, what was your biggest challenge? I thought it’d be fun for us to answer this individually, Natalie. I know you’ve got notes in here and I’ve got some notes, so I’m open to whoever wants to start.

[00:45:25] Maybe we’ll give John some time to think about it and we’ll come around to him last. I 

[00:45:28] Natalie Thomas (Director of Client Services): think my biggest challenge remains the same, which is getting the right people in the right seat or. Concerned with our team and making sure that they’re kind of doing their best work growing in their skill set, evolving, learning, growing.

[00:45:42] And so I need to go to the team thoughtfully, but I also need to put people’s skillsets to use in ways that are nourishing and interesting to them. And in ways that support our clients. So it’s always a balance. Plugging those pieces into the right spot. And if I solve this, I’m going to package it up and sell it because I assume a lot of other folks are having the same challenges in growing a 

[00:46:03] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): team.

[00:46:04] Totally agree from my seat. I think my biggest success here, they kind of go hand in hand, but, um, you know, historically we’ve been very focused on content marketing and attracting traffic through written material in the last year or so we’ve added audio and video onto that. Uh, people are experiencing that right now.

[00:46:18] And, um, we’re also doing. Guest events and things like that. So the diversity of traffic generation or traffic acquisition channels has really expanded. Uh, but we only added one new person to the marketing team and we’re leaning on a lot of contractors support there. So kind of casting a wider net, so to speak with, uh, effectively the same amount of resources or very close has been a good win for the marketing team here.

[00:46:39] And then the biggest challenge I’m going to call out this maker versus manager identity crisis. As I call it. As you, as you started to get a team, like when you’re a marketing team of one with some support from everybody else inside, it’s easy. You’re just, you have to be a maker. Right. But as you start to grow a team behind you, um, there is that manager time that creeps in.

[00:46:56] And I always identify as a maker if I’m not in there, like creating landing pages or writing emails or reviewing blog posts and publishing them or recording podcasts episodes, like I feel like I’m not contributing to the overall mission of the company. There’s equal importance on mentorship, professional development, more project management or reporting and strategy work.

[00:47:14] Like that’s all valuable too. And so I can’t be the only one out there who is struggling a little bit with letting go of that worker bee mentality and going into more of a strategic advisor kind of role. So that’s mine. How about you, John? From the, uh, the head honcho? How are things looking? Oof. Well, 

[00:47:28] Jon MacDonald (Founder/CEO): I would say the biggest success over the past year has definitely been when we’ve grown as fast as we have been able to, you know, predicting revenue and having goals around revenue is, you know, you’re, it’s a crap shoot.

[00:47:42] You’re just guessing in a lot of cases because you’re just, you’re like, Hey, providing this train and, and we’re going to slow it down if we feel like we need to or want to. Right. Because not all revenue is good revenue, but I would say that. Being within $13,000 of our goal this year was a really good success.

[00:48:00] It was heartbreaking in some ways, cause I was like, oh, we’re so close to hitting that goal. And then, you know, I think I had several people remind me, like you hit your goal, right? Like the reality is if you can guess within 13,000 at the scale that you guys are at, then that’s a hell of a win. So I would consider that a success.

[00:48:16] And the reality is this year we’ve been, we have a goal and it’s not to grow as fast it’s to grow more meaningful. And utilize the gains that we’ve had over the past year. I think the biggest challenge for me this year is more just around keeping the wheels on the bus as we go forward. There’s so many things that we could could be doing.

[00:48:38] And so many ways we could continue to grow. That if we did them all, then it would just overtax us and we’d collapse. So it’s figuring out what are the best opportunities and which ones do we want to go after? And where are we going to put our energy? Because when it comes down to it, work-life balance is a big thing for us.

[00:48:59] It’s a huge culture point for the good. And if we attacked every single opportunity that’s in front of us this year, We wouldn’t have any life in that work-life balance. So I’m a huge fan of us picking our battles and going after them. And I think that’s the challenge for me right now. It’s really? Which ones are we going to go after?

[00:49:20] Which. It’s actually a good thing. I think I like those types of challenges. 

[00:49:25] James Sowers (Director of Marketing): Yeah. It’s much better to live in a world of abundance and scarcity. Right. So if we have like a, what is it, uh, uh, riches of options or something like that, like, there’s probably some psychological term where like there’s so many opportunities and you’re always worried about the opportunity costs of going with one over another.

[00:49:38] Right. So just being very diligent and harking back to our conversation around dos, hopefully that’ll help us really focus in on the ones that are most important and kind of leave. The rest for next quarter and next year, whenever they fit in. All right. So I want to respect your time. We’ll wrap things up here.

[00:49:51] Thank you so much for joining me today. We didn’t get to everything. We’ve got a handful of questions that we didn’t have time to tackle. So we’ll save those for the next round. And if anybody listening has more, they want to add podcast@thegood.com is the place to drop those and we’ll make sure they get incorporated in the next one.

[00:50:05] If you have any parting words, I’d love to hear them, but otherwise, thanks so much for joining me today, John and Natalie, we’ll do another one real soon. Hey everybody, this is James again. And before you go, I just wanted to invite you to join one of the coolest things I get to work on. As director of marketing here at the good it’s called the e-commerce insiders list.

[00:50:21] And it’s a private version of this podcast feed that gets you access to tons of additional bonus content, like extra interviews, Q and a sessions, website, tear downs, and anything else we can dream up. It doesn’t cost you anything but your email address. And we promise to always respect. This is just our way of forming strong relationships with our listeners and making sure that we produce content that is actually valuable to you and to your business.

[00:50:42] If you’re interested, you can join the rest of the e-commerce insiders by going to the good.com/podcast and dropping your email into the form at the top of the page, we’ll follow up with directions for how to access the private feed and you’ll be off and running. Like I said, this is one of my favorite things that I get the opportunity to work on because it lets me interact directly with e-commerce founders and leaders just like.

[00:51:02] If you’re interested, I’d love to see your name pop up in my notifications until then keep an eye out for the next episode of the e-commerce insight show. And we’ll talk to you soon.

The post Creating a Work Environment for Success – Q&A with Jon MacDonald and Natalie Thomas appeared first on The Good.

But the big secret of writing effective website copy is that people really don’t care. Yes, even your current and prospective customers. Sounds a bit harsh, but it’s true. We live in a world where the human brain is bombarded with marketing constantly, and most of it sounds like a whole lot of chest-thumping and bragging.

Of course, that’s not what the people writing the messages mean to do. They’re simply proud of the company and its products and are excited to share that information with customers. While this urge is understandable, it is not going to help you sell more.

What will help you? If your copywriting focuses on making it all about the customer’s favorite person in the whole world: themself.

This is where the StoryBrand framework comes to the rescue. Donald Miller created it in his best-selling book Building a StoryBrand. And it has become the go-to for many business owners who want to write copy that sells.

In this article, we will break down exactly what you can learn from StoryBrand, and how to implement similar strategies for your own ecommerce store.

What is the StoryBrand Framework?

StoryBrand has an incredibly simple and wildly effective seven-step framework for developing your marketing plan or marketing message.

1. Begin with the hero of the story—your customer—and what they want. Keep it clear with a single thing customers want from your brand.
2. Define your customer’s problem—the problem you can solve for them. People are looking at what you offer because they have a pain point or an issue they need a solution for, and you need to understand it to sell them that solution.
3. Position yourself as the customer’s guide, not their hero. Don’t talk about what your business is trying to do, but do tell them how what you sell will help them win their next battle.
4. Give them a simple three-step roadmap for success. Your visitor probably isn’t ready to buy now, but you can show them how easy it will be to work with you when they’re ready for that step.
5. Call them to take an action, like buying now or signing up for a call from your sales team. Your CTA should be clear and prominent on your site so customers know exactly what you want them to do.
6. Tell them how you’ll help them avoid failure by painting a picture of what negative consequences they will face without you as their trusted guide. You need to tell them what’s at stake in this purchase decision.
7. Finally, show them what success looks like once they partner with you. This is where you paint them a picture with your website copy and images that show them what their life will look like when their problem is solved.

This is a broad overview of what the StoryBrand framework looks like in practice—for an in-depth discussion of everything that goes into those stages, check out the official StoryBrand website.

And we’ve got a breakdown of exactly what each of these steps looks like for an ecommerce company coming below.

Why the StoryBrand 7-Part Framework Works

Another simple way to break down the StoryBrand formula into a marketing strategy you can use is this three-step process.

You can see here that the path to writing great website copy begins by thinking about the customer’s needs. Who are they, what pain are they currently experiencing, and how do they dream it will be resolved?

This framing is effective because it focuses on the customer, not the business. If you want customers to listen to you, you need to talk about them (don’t we always love to hear people talk about us?)

And it’s not just about speaking to their ego—it also lets them know that you understand their internal problem and external problems, which builds trust. That’s why the StoryBrand approach works.

The Power of Stories

The other reason StoryBrand is such an effective way to look at your marketing copy is right in the name—it tells a good story. Humans are innately drawn to stories over a list of accolades, testimonials and facts.

That’s why we love movies like Gladiator. You probably can’t name many other Roman emperors or their successors, but the compelling world that the film creates around its historical characters make Ancient Rome come alive in a wholly memorable way—and so we can talk conversationally about Marcus Aurelius and his son Commodus.

This is the effect you want your website copy to have on your audience. They should feel connected to your story, see themselves in it, and want to learn more about what you can help them do.

Telling Your Story for Ecommerce Brands

StoryBrand is powerful, but it’s not a magic bullet—it is simply an easy-to-use framework that you can learn from when you’re writing your website copy.

And there are some differences that ecommerce brands need to know specifically. The StoryBrand framework is directed primarily at service-based businesses that provide a single service.

For ecommerce businesses that sell multiple products, you will need to adjust the classic framework to your particular circumstances.

Instead of working to keep your website visitors on your homepage, for example, you will want to write copy that encourages them to go to your product pages. Those product pages should each tell the story of a different problem, and how the product solves it.

You’ll also want to be sure you’re featuring the most exciting products on your home page to encourage users to go there right away. Don’t distract them with a lot of content about your business upfront. Show them the goods!

Ecommerce businesses will also need to focus on the complete customer journey in the website more than a business offering a single service. Since you want your visitors to click on multiple product pages and then check out, all of those pages must load super fast, or you risk losing potential buyers.

No matter how great your copy is, you will also need a great customer experience to increase conversion rates.

The StoryBrand BrandScript for Ecommerce

It’s all well and good to tell you about the StoryBrand marketing framework—but what does it really look like? Let’s take a look at a hypothetical company that sells designer shoes online.

First, they would go through the seven StoryBrand steps and answer the questions there. This can be done by talking with people across their organization as well as customers. Consequently, those conversations about customers’ problems become important data. They are how you get the most accurate view of what your company does for, and means to, customers.

Here’s what the results of those conversations look like in the StoryBrand framework:

1. The Hero: Their ideal customers are fashion-forward high-income young professionals. They want to stand out to their peers as the trendsetters they are through their footwear.
2. The Pain Point: Their problem is that in a world with lots of expensive shoes to buy, they have trouble finding the unusual, avant-garde ones. They are busy with their jobs and don’t have time to spend searching in lots of retailers to find the shoes they want—which is not what everyone else has.
3. The Guide: The designer or shoe retailer is their guide in this search, helping them stay on top of the latest international trends, all in one place with an exceptional customer experience.
4. The Plan: The retailer has a plan for enticing new customers, as shown by two placements on their homepage: a selection of the latest new products, and a one or two-line overview of their concierge service that helps users find their size or style if it’s out of stock.
5. The CTA: The call to action is that classic “Shop Now” button, floating prominently over a selection of the coolest shoe styles from around the world.
6. The Vision of Failure: If the shopper doesn’t purchase from this brand, the copy suggests, they’ll be doomed to a life of wearing the same shoes as every other colleague in their office.
7. The Picture of Success: Finish with images of delighted uber-trendy customers in their one-of-a-kind shoes strolling in their neighborhood on their way to some fabulous activity, and a brief tagline summarizing that feeling in words.

Once you’ve written out the answers to each of these steps, you have your BrandScript. It’s a concise way of describing how your business helps your customers live a better life. You can use it for your website copy or creating other marketing materials.

Of course, this is just a potential framework. You don’t need to follow every step to the letter. It’s an effective way of getting into the mindset of your potential customers when you write your website copy. You can still find ways to tell your brand story without hurting conversions—this is one way to do that.

StoryBrand Website Examples

Lund Leather’s website is a great StoryBrand ecommerce example. They use a clear CTA and minimalist but effective copywriting. Moreover, you’ll find great images of their products to draw in visitors and convert them to customers.

Umble Coffee also uses the StoryBrand guidelines for its website. It focuses the copy entirely on who the customer is and why this coffee is a solution to help them make their lives better.

Perfect Your Website Copy

The StoryBrand seven-step process helps business owners think through what their business provides for customers and helps them articulate that vision through their website copy.

Your website needs to talk about what matters to your customers in order to stand out from all the other marketing noise. If you can get that clear message right, you’re well on your way to increased conversions. This, in turn, means more successful ecommerce business.

The post Improve Your Website With The StoryBrand Framework & Other Copywriting Tactics appeared first on The Good.

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About this episode:

In this episode, we talk to Dave Rodenbaugh, the founder of Recapture.io, about the best practices when it comes to email marketing and how he has helped brands with abandoned cart recovery. Most merchants are worried that by using email marketing, they may annoy their customers rather than encourage them to buy products. Dave discusses some tips on how to create sophisticated and tasteful emails for your marketing strategy. 

In this episode, you’ll learn things about: 

• What has changed with email marketing throughout the years 
• The difference between building relationships with customers and spamming customers  
• How to apply the “Ladder of Emails” concepts to your marketing strategy
• What other brands are doing to innovate email marketing

Learn more about Dave and his resources here

• Connect with Dave on LinkedIn
• Follow Dave on Twitter
• Check out Dave’s blog 
• View a demo on Recapture

Want to be a guest on our show? Have feedback or ideas for how we can improve? Send your thoughts over to podcast@thegood.com. We’ll be keeping an eye on that inbox.

The Ecommerce Insights Show is brought to you by The Good, a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) consultancy specializing in helping ecommerce businesses accelerate their growth through better research, testing, and design. Learn more about our team, our work, and our services at www.thegood.com.

Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] James Sowers (The Good): So here’s the question. How can e-commerce leaders make sure that they’re producing a great product, providing a world class customer experience, responsibly managing their finances and still reserve time, energy, and resources for marketing their products? My name is James Sowers, and you are listening to the e-Commerce Insight Show, the podcast that gives you specific actionable advice for growing your e-commerce business.

[00:00:20] Every Monday you’ll get a conversion rate optimization tactic that you can implement quickly to make your business 1% better every single. Every Thursday we sit down with industry experts to go deep on a specific aspect of running a successful e-commerce business. It’s the perfect blend of learning and application, which means that you maximize the value of every single minute you spend with us.

[00:00:41] We’re just as committed to growing your business as you are, so if you’re looking for a partner to help you crush your revenue goals, you’ve come to the right place. Roll up your sleeves and grab a notepad because it’s time to get to work. Dave, welcome to the E-Commerce Insight Show. Super excited to have you on board today and talk all things email market.

[00:00:57] That’s something that in a previous life I was an email marketing consultant, so near and dear to my heart, especially automated sequences, life cycle, emails, trigger based stuff. So really interested to nerd out with that, uh, with you about that a little bit. But, um, before we get into that, maybe give us a couple sentences about who you are and what you’re working on these days and what kind of clients and customers you serve.

[00:01:15] Yeah, 

[00:01:15] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): sure, sure. So my name’s Dave Rodenbach. I am the founder of recapture.io. So we do email marketing for eCommerce and we support a variety of platforms, uh, WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, Magento, Easy Digital download, some other smaller ones. We’ve been around since 2015. I acquired the business in 2016 and kind of our sweet spot is in-house marketing teams who really crave.

[00:01:43] Simple tool that’s easy to use, quick to get stuff done, because a lot of in-house teams, they’re really busy with a lot of other promotional stuff, and so they want to have something that just makes their job easier, right? Pre-create content, uh, easy to use, editor, that kind of stuff. And, you know, maybe they don’t have a budget for agencies or to, you know, deal with a more expensive tool.

[00:02:04] So that’s kind of the brands and stores that we end up working with a. At Recapture here, we serve, you know, a wide variety of verticals here, fashion supplements, nutrition, clothing, outdoor equipment, all different kinds. I wouldn’t say that there’s any one that, uh, we do more than the others, 

[00:02:22] James Sowers (The Good): so, Yeah, that makes sense.

[00:02:24] And I imagine supporting a platform like Easy Digital Downloads, you get into some of those info product spaces too, where. Be something like courses or educational material, something like that as well. So truly the full breadth of what we would call e-commerce, not just physical goods, which is kind of where we play as an agency, but you’re covering the whole spectrum it sounds.

[00:02:41] Yep. There’s a lot 

[00:02:42] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): of folks on Easy digital downloads that are like selling their own WordPress plugins or themes or you know, whatever digital things. There’s, uh, memberships. We have some membership sites as well under Restrict Content Pro and paid Memberships Pro, so they do more course stuff around that.

[00:02:56] So yeah, kind of the whole gamut 

[00:02:57] James Sowers (The Good): really. So you’ve been working on this for a while now. I think you acquired the tool back in around 2016, you said It’s been in existence since 2015. So you’ve had it inside of your umbrella or your sphere for a while now. What is something that you’re like working on now that kind of has you excited, right?

[00:03:11] Like what do you, when you fire up your laptop in the morning, I’m guessing you’re probably not itching to answer some customer support tickets. It’s probably something else, bigger picture that you’re looking forward to. So what is that for you today? What’s your motivator? Well, uh, 

[00:03:21] you 

[00:03:22] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): know, this might sound a little weird.

[00:03:23] I actually do enjoy answering customer support tickets. Maybe it’s just me in particular, but as a founder, I really like connecting with customers. So like one of our missions here at Recapture, or one of the things that we say is like, you know, part of our mission statement is that we want to make.

[00:03:41] Merchants more successful. So when I log in every morning, you know, I wanna find out what merchants are doing and what they’re struggling with, and I wanna make it better for them because if it’s better for them, it’s probably better for a lot of other people in the platform. So, you know, that part always kinda jazzes me up a little bit.

[00:03:55] I don’t like dealing with grumpy customers, nobody ever does. But you know, I don’t really get a lot of those on recapture, which is kind of cool. But in terms of. Things that we’re working on right now. You know, we, we have a set of core values here and one of those core values is simplicity. And this is why we work with that specific set of in-house teams that are looking for simple tools as opposed to something that’s a more complex workflow based.

[00:04:17] You can trigger anything, You can make anything happen, but then you also have to spend a ton of time learning it. Right? So we recently tried to figure out, because we had a request from one customer that has a huge number of stores with us. They were like, We wanna do AB testing. And I, you know, my initial reaction was, Oh geez, AB testing, man, this is really hard, , this is gonna be a mess.

[00:04:38] And he’s like, This is really important to us. Can you figure out a way to do it? And I was, Yes, we’ll figure out something. I don’t know what that’s gonna look like, but we’re gonna figure it out. So I sat down with our, our development team, tech lead developer, qa, and we kind of hammered something out and figured out, you know, how we could come up with something that met his needs without being overly complicated or hard to use or something like that.

[00:05:01] So we’re just getting to a point where we’re just about ready to release that. So, uh, you know, that’s kind of exciting to put it in his hands. See how he uses that on. Uh, you know, several dozen stores and then release it to the larger customer base because I know this is something that some other customers have been asking for too.

[00:05:21] So, you know, finding that, that balance of how can I take this complicated feature and make it so simple to use that anybody can really engage with it, That’s something that kind of excites 

[00:05:30] James Sowers (The Good): me. Awesome. Yeah, I think that’s really smart because I mean, we use HubSpot as kind of our marketing hub here, and I, when I heard that, when I came on, I was like, Oh gosh, HubSpot can do anything you want, but it can do anything you want.

[00:05:42] Right? And, and sometimes figuring out exactly what you want it to do and what you need it to do. Out of this massive, you know, database of features and, and toolkits and things like that is hard. So I think there is beauty and simplicity in a lot of ways. So I think it’s really smart. And when you talk about AB testing, of course, as a CRO firm, like that’s music to my ears.

[00:06:01] That’s what we like to do on the optimization side of things. But what I’ve noticed, and maybe some unsolicited product ideation here, is that a lot of folks. Teach you how to do AB testing the right way. They just build the tool and they let you AB test, but then you have people trying to do a subject line and body copy at the same time, or subject line and a button CTA at the same time.

[00:06:19] And it’s like, well, those two things can nullify each other in terms of the validity, the outcome. So the simplicity maybe is like, if you wanna ab test subject lines, that’s all you can tweak in these two emails. We don’t even let you tweak the body copy, or we don’t even let you tweak the cta. We force you to just test one thing because that’s how you’re gonna get the most reliable result.

[00:06:36] Uh, I don’t know if you’ve gone down that path, but that’s what I was thinking when I heard simple AB testing is like, not necessarily hold their hand, but almost like, you know, just kind of put, put guardrails up so nobody can get too far off the, off the trail there. 

[00:06:47] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): It’s funny that you mentioned that because that’s exactly how we set this thing up.

[00:06:51] So I come from, uh, I have a physics. Degree. And so like it was beat into my head for every single physics lab that we ever did, like test one thing at a time. If you test two things at a time, you will never know which one is the one that you could tie your result back to, because now you have to separate those tests and you can like do things like, you could say, test four things at a time and then test them two and two, and that way you can say, well, which group is the one that was more impactful?

[00:07:16] But you still have to get it down to like, what was the one thing that really did this? Cuz that’s what, you know, physics is all about. So I kind of carried that into this here. And we basically said, look, you can test subject line, you can test the body, you can test the cta, that’s it. Pick one, test it, and then run that test.

[00:07:35] And then we also had to like do the other part of it with the hard part of the AB testing, which is get it to statistical significance, right? Because some people would be like, Oh, I wanna test this for four hours. It. What if you only get two customers coming through? Like that’s not, no, you, you failed your p test there.

[00:07:52] So like, you have to guide ’em in different ways as well to make sure that they run a, a good, valid test and at the same time that you collect the results in a way that is fair for the whole test and make it easy to use on top of all that. So yeah, I. It’s kind of a brain burner. If you are deep into the whole notion of AB testing.

[00:08:14] A lot of other platforms give you enough rope to hang yourself and your closest friends at the same 

[00:08:19] James Sowers (The Good): time. For sure. Well, before we whip out the statistics textbook and get real nerdy on it, I want to go back to like the bigger picture side of things. Because you’ve been with Recapture for a while. It’s becoming increasingly uncommon, I think, to have somebody find something to work on and stick with it for a few years.

[00:08:33] Even these days, it’s a lot of like, Let me build something, sell it, flip it, get acquired, whatever. So I’m curious if we go back to 2016 ish when you acquired the company, what was it about recapture specifically or eCommerce email marketing in general? I don’t even know if it was eCommerce focused at the.

[00:08:49] I’m trying to go back in my own memory banks, I don’t even know if Clavio was around or privy or some of these other players in the e-commerce email marketing space. It seems like recapture could have been an early entrant there. So what was it about either the tool or e-commerce, email marketing in general that appealed to you so much?

[00:09:03] You’re like, I think I’m gonna buy this product and I’m gonna make this, you know, a big, uh, significant investment of time and energy over the next few years. 

[00:09:09] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): So it’s funny that you mentioned the whole flipping and you know, quick turnaround and stuff like that. So in 2015 I had already been buying and selling various smaller products since about 20 10, 20 11.

[00:09:22] So I’d been kind of doing that for five years. I was searching for, I guess what you could call, not really a forever product, but uh, you know, let’s get together for a long term product. And, you know, I tried a lot of smaller stuff. I even tried to like build my own SAS at the time in the customer support space.

[00:09:42] Failed miserably, spent $50,000 on it, blew up in my face. Didn’t do market research. I mean, there’s lots of bad things, but, so having learned a ton of lessons, I was kind of looking for something that was. A long term fit for me because I wanted something I could grow. I was kinda looking for a way outta freelancing.

[00:10:00] And I also wanted something that in terms of demonstrable ROI, so that I could show a customer look. You use my tool and you pay me this much, I will hand you back this much more money. Like I wanted a huge ROI in things because I had worked on another couple of WordPress plugins and the ROI was a lot fuzzier.

[00:10:22] You know, people had to want this particular product. It was for business directory or classified, and then, you know, they used it, but. There wasn’t a long term relationship you had with them there. Sometimes their directory was successful, a lot of times it wasn’t, cuz they didn’t really know what they wanted to put in there.

[00:10:38] And it was more about the content. So for me it was like I wanted to find something that could clearly demonstrate the month over month, year over year, we are providing tons of value to you. So that immediately attracted me, of course to the e-commerce space cuz there’s tons of stuff like that. And that also sort of brought me to the concept of you wanna be kind of close to the.

[00:10:58] So, you know, I saw other friends of mine who did SAS businesses where they were doing like accepting payments or they’re handling churn, or they’re doing, uh, SAS metrics for Stripe, stuff like that. So all of those folks were close enough to the payments and the, the, how the customer was handling their money on a day to day basis that they could clearly see.

[00:11:22] Value that was coming out of that tool, and so they wanted to pay for it every month, and I’m like, I kind of want something like that because those tools have the longevity, those two tools tend to have lower churn and they tend to be, you know, easier to sell to customers because I can just walk up and show like, Hey, look, here’s your analytics.

[00:11:40] This is how much money I made for you. This is how much it costs. Look, there’s a huge discrepancy between those and you are clearly getting. 10, 20, 30 times the value that you are paying me. I like that because it makes the customer feel good about using our service. It makes me feel good about making their business better, and that’s, you know, one of our goals here at Recapture is to make people’s stores more profitable, better make their business better.

[00:12:06] James Sowers (The Good): Especially with the smaller, or I like to call ’em emerging brands, right? Like smaller and medium sized brands. Founders still pretty involved, or they have a small team and it’s people wearing multiple hats. It’s really refreshing to be able to directly see the impact of a test because you don’t have a whole lot of extra money to throw around on a failed experiment in the marketing realm, right?

[00:12:25] So to have something like email where you can draw, maybe it’s not a solid line, but it’s certainly not a dotted line, right? It’s something in between, Uh, it’s bigger dashes, right? It’s a dash line where it. I’m pretty sure that this email funnel is driving more revenue for our store. And even if attribution’s on a hundred percent perfect, let’s call it 70% accurate.

[00:12:42] Like I know that this tool’s paying for itself, that’s not always the case, uh, with some of the other tech stacks. So I think it’s really smart to kinda attach yourself, as you said, close to the money. That’s why we think about cro. It’s like even if our, we run this test in this very controlled environment.

[00:12:56] With a specific set of, uh, sub-component of your traffic, then let’s annualize that and say, if we apply this a hundred percent of traffic, we’re gonna earn you a hundred thousand dollars this year. Even if we’re off by 50%, that’s still a great outcome for you compared to what you’re paying us. And so they stick around longer because we’re driving results and we can point 

[00:13:13] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): directly to that.

[00:13:13] Those are the kind of businesses that I think have the most longevity and long term viability that you can just keep demonstrating your value over and over again. And the customers love that, you know, And a lot of times if they go to a different platform, they can compare what, what they got on that platform with your platform, especially on email marketing.

[00:13:33] And sometimes we get customers that come back. They’re like, Yeah, I tried this other one. I didn’t like how it worked. I didn’t like the ROI I got, I got a lower conversion rate. I got this, I got that. You can’t do that if you don’t have clear. Demonstrable value there. So yeah, that’s definitely something I love about this.

[00:13:48] So 

[00:13:48] James Sowers (The Good): what kind of changes have you seen in the last few years? I mean, I know I don’t expect you to cover chapter by chapter cuz these things are changing every quarter at least. Right? So, but in general, you know, philosophically at the highest level over the last few years, maybe it’s a mentality around email marketing.

[00:14:02] Maybe it’s a level of sophistication among founders or customers that are coming through your door. Maybe it’s a competitive landscape, but like how has have things changed since the day that you bought recapture to where we sit here today in terms of you like market dynamics and the way that you’re thinking about email marketing or way that founders are thinking about email 

[00:14:17] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): market.

[00:14:18] Now that you’ve asked that question, it’s kind of funny. There’s really kind of a split. There’s like a ton of stuff that’s changed and there’s a ton of stuff that kind of hasn’t, and that’s very odd to happen at the same time and almost at the same rate because I, you know, I look at when I’m kind of mentally thinking about all of the stores that are on recapture.

[00:14:37] There’s definitely a split. Like there’s definitely a set of merchants who are now more sophisticated about email marketing than they were six years ago. Like today, I can go and talk to somebody and say, Abandoned cart recovery, and I don’t have to explain that. You know, six years ago it was not as ubiquitous.

[00:14:55] Definitely. Eight years ago, 10 years ago, you really had to convince somebody why they wanted to do an abandoned cart recovery. So that shift has been very positive cuz now I can come in and say, Look, we do abandoned cart recovery, we do winbacks, we do post-purchase emails, and a lot of merchants get that.

[00:15:13] But at the same time, we’ve had so many merchants that are now coming on board with this, especially during covid that are new and they don’t have that familiarity or. I think there’s another set of merchants where they’re kind of afraid of email marketing, like they view email marketing as basically a spam fire hose, and they’re only willing to like turn it up just a little bit because they’re afraid they’re gonna annoy their customers, and I don’t think they truly realize.

[00:15:41] That, you know, there’s a huge difference between making sure that your customers are informed and engaged and you know, trying to create a relationship with them and build your brand and be helpful, provide value for them versus, Hey, here’s another discount code. Hey, here’s another promotion. Hey, here’s our sale this week.

[00:16:00] Like, I think they just equate the two of those and say it’s the same. It doesn’t matter. So there are definitely those kind of merchants too. But yeah, I mean the level of sophistication that we’ve seen over the last six years has definitely increased and I really, I really appreciate that cuz it’s fun to sit down with a merchant and they say, All right Dave, I want to do this and this and this, and we wanna segment by this and we want turn these things on, but we don’t want these other things on.

[00:16:27] And how can you solve this other problem over here? And I. Cool. I don’t have to go over a lot of basic stuff with you. Let’s just dive right into everything that you’ve got versus having to educate a merchant from scratch. So that I think has been one of the, the positive things. Yeah, it is 

[00:16:42] James Sowers (The Good): interesting. I even see that, you know, just hanging out on Twitter is the, the best brands or the digitally native brands, especially like they’re way up the ladder I guess, in terms of sophistication.

[00:16:53] And they’re talking, they have dynamic quiz funnels that gather information, first party data about a consumer, and then they use that for segmentation and they send tailor to campaigns around that person’s needs, or they make a product recommendation, stuff like that. They’re talking about welcome sequences and they’re talking about anniversary pitches that are a date triggered by the time that they made their first purchase and stuff like that.

[00:17:12] And I’m like, I love to see that. That’s great. I didn’t see any of that a few years ago. But at the same time, we have folks come through our door and I’ll run a test purchase when I’m auditing their checkout flow. And I’m like, I barely get a shipping confirmation email or something like that. Or it’s like just the standard Shopify template that has the most basic things.

[00:17:28] I’m like, this email has a near 100% open rate. Like do something a little bit more with this, please. So there is still so much opportunity there and you know, it’s disappointing, but at the same time it’s kind of encouraging because it’s like if you’re doing this well and you’re on our radar with so many.

[00:17:44] Fundamental email marketing strategies, unaddressed. Then for someone like you or an email marketing consultant, it’s like, Well, yeah, let’s just come in here and pour gas on the fire, cuz you’re not, you’re not doing the basic blocking and tackling, let alone the more advanced stuff so we can get you buttoned up.

[00:17:56] And there’s huge ROI right outta the gate. Basically. There’s 

[00:17:59] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): so many things that merchants have to struggle with. You know, when they set up their brand new store, they’re trying to. Figure out all the logistical stuff there about inventory management and shipping and, and all of those things. But at the same time, they’re probably trying to figure out, do I have product market fit?

[00:18:13] Do my customers really want what I have to sell? Is it working for them? Is is it ideal product for what their, their pains or their needs are? And then add to that, the email marketing, you know, which is again, like you said, gas on the fire. So, you know, some of the merchants that are more successful that come to your agency or that you end up using recapture.

[00:18:31] I see them as the ones that have the product market fit and they’re, you know, kind of like, all right, well I know I should be doing a abandoned cart, so I guess I’ll just use your tool. Sure. But they don’t understand like, Don’t just send one email. Hello. You gotta do the money’s in the follow up here.

[00:18:45] And it isn’t annoying to them to send three of those. And then it isn’t a problem to delay that coupon code to the very end. Like don’t hammer them with the discount codes. Don’t devalue your brand so much upfront. You know, just subtle things like that. So in some ways it’s fun and I feel like I get to hand.

[00:19:04] I get to hand somebody a tool that is building their own house and suddenly they didn’t realize, Oh my God, a screwdriver, I can use that to put screws in instead of this hammer over here. Wait, I had no idea screwdrivers existed. This is amazing. It’s like, Yes, absolutely, please. Now you can build a better house over there.

[00:19:22] You know when I see that aha moment with the merchants and then they look. You know, they’re getting that boost of revenue that feels really great, and I’m sure it feels equally great when you’re working with a brand and you, you hand ’em that first report and you’ve done all the CRO work and it’s like, Hey look, you had a 25% boost over here from this test.

[00:19:39] And they’re like, Wait, what , We can do that. That’s 

[00:19:43] James Sowers (The Good): possible. Yeah, especially when you start with customer research on the front end, which I’m sure is the same way in email marketing. People don’t just jump in and start writing emails based off of their gut. I’m sure there’s customer research and there’s analysis of the data and how folks are using your site and what products are buying and stuff like that.

[00:19:56] And then you’re aggregating that and looking at trends, and then you interview the founder and you get their language and you pepper all that together and you start writing emails that way. I think that’s where you get the best results is when you start with, um, customer insights first, and then layer in some data layer in some brand elements.

[00:20:10] Put that all together and you have something that kind of resonates with your, your ideal customer profile, basically. So we think about kind of historically, maybe a few years ago, it was a lot of promotions, right? It was a lot of like, You’re on this hamster wheel. I think of email marketing where it’s like, what are we promoting this week?

[00:20:26] Is it a new product launch? Is it a collection, a fall collection? Is it a special offer? Is it a partnership with some other brand? Is it the founder story, Whatever. It’s just like, what’s our email this week? And sometimes it’s like, what’s our email today? We’re sending out a daily sales email because that’s the only thing we know about email marketing.

[00:20:41] But now, When this more sophisticated, uh, stage where it’s like you’ve got these activity based things, you’ve got lifecycle emails, you’ve got post-purchase flows, a lot of this stuff runs automatically or it’s triggered by some kind of action taken by the consumer. So now that we have kind of these two different worlds, I’m imagining the right answer is, you know, it depends, right?

[00:21:00] For the brand and, and what your goals are and what your audience is like. But truly it’s like you probably can’t let go of either one entirely. So what do you think is the right mix of promotions versus, I’ll just call them like automated campaigns or workflows. I don’t know what terminology you like to use with recapture.

[00:21:13] We can stick to that, but what’s the right balance of like manual one? Email blasts, as people call them a lot versus more automated, trigger based, activity based stuff that kind of happens in the background automatically. 

[00:21:25] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): Recaps, bread and butter always started out as a ban and cart automations, and then we added on a bunch of other stuff afterwards.

[00:21:31] You know, we got winbacks and post purchase emails including, you know, welcome emails and review reminders. And educational content and stuff like that. And then one of the last things that we added last year was actually the, the promotional emails, the broadcast stuff along with sms. And you know, so obviously my answer to this question is gonna be biased in regards to if you don’t have those automation set up already.

[00:21:57] That’s pretty much a priority because I won’t say that email is an ATM cuz I know that, that some people think of it that way, but there’s also money on the table that you’re leaving just by doing the things that you should do to follow up with your customers. Customers appreciate it when. Coming back to them and making sure that things are okay, and I don’t care whether it’s a customer support interaction, it’s an abandoned cart recovery email, it’s a post-purchase educational flow.

[00:22:28] All of these things show if you are writing them correctly, if you’re using the voice of the customer, if you’re using, you know, some of your brand nostalgia, mojo, whatever you wanna call it, and making sure that you know you are providing some value to the customer There. These things work. They’re very effective.

[00:22:47] And so, you know, one thing that I, I find that I fight a lot is that merchants have, you know, less sophisticated merchants, I should say, have an aversion to using too much email. They think that like, one abandon cart campaign is enough, and I’m like, Mmm, no, I’ve got data that says the opposite. So like, let’s go with a data driven approach here and maybe expand that a little bit so when you don’t have automations in place.

[00:23:12] you can go and do the broadcast, but it reduces your overall efficiency so much. It’s kind of effective, but it could be better, right? So it’s the automations that make your store more efficient at bringing people in, at keeping them there, at collecting the user generated content, social proof, stuff like that.

[00:23:34] Making sure that they’re successful with the product, making sure that you get their needs and their questions answered by sending them FAQs immediately after you purchase or sending them shipping notifications so they’re not. You know, wmo, where is my order? Because that kind of stuff just wastes your customer support time.

[00:23:51] If you can be proactive about that stuff, customers are happier, happy customers come back and make more purchases. So getting those automations in place is so important, and I really don’t care what actual platform you’re using. Those automations make a huge difference. So if you don’t have the automations in place, broadcast all you want and send those promotional emails, but honestly, you’re still leaving even that much more money on the table.

[00:24:19] So for me, it’s automations first, promotions second, and then the promotions kind of depend on where you’re at. In terms of your stores annual revenue and level of sophistication, like you should not put every single automation in place. If you’re making less than a hundred thousand dollars a year. It doesn’t make sense.

[00:24:38] It’s not worth your time for all of those things here. So that’s where I’m thinking on these. 

[00:24:43] James Sowers (The Good): Use the phrase, uh, email, like an atm. Like I’ve heard people say that a lot and they’re, I’ve even heard people literally say, When I need more money, I send more email. Right. And to me that’s a little, that’s a little cringy.

[00:24:53] But I will say that like purely by the numbers. Yeah. If you send more emails, you probably will make more revenue. Just that’s just math. Like you’re just sending more emails and more people are reading it and things like that. But is that treating your customer with the respect that you want? I don’t know so much, but I will say, Uh, my gut feeling is people don’t necessarily dislike receiving a lot of email.

[00:25:11] We already, for the most of us, receive a lot of email from all the different areas of life that we’re operating in. People hate receiving poor emails, poor emails that don’t resonate with what they need and what they care about. And so it’s not necessarily a bad thing to send a lot of those broadcasts, but it is a bad thing to do it without segmenting who’s receiving them.

[00:25:28] And if you’re sending me stuff about women’s wear and maybe I wanna buy something for my wife, but I probably don’t, that’s probably not my default. I’m probably shopping for myself or whatever. Or if you send me. A supplement ad for something that is, uh, runs against like a dietary restriction I have, well, that’s not relevant to me at all.

[00:25:42] So the more those emails I get, the more I will start to ding your brand reputation in a negative manner. But I think when it’s done tastefully, sure you can send all the email you want as long as you’re respecting the customer at the end of the day, 

[00:25:53] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): right? Again, it’s about providing value, like your example of women’s wear.

[00:25:57] If you’re not segmenting your broadcast list to make sure that you’re sending the right promotions to the people who care about. , you wasted your time and you’re gonna have a lower open rate. You’re gonna have a lower conversion and click rate, and you’re gonna annoy your customers. You’re probably gonna have a higher unsubscribe rate and eventually, you know, they’re just gonna start ignoring you in the inbox, and that’s obviously not what you want to get to.

[00:26:19] So it’s fine to send those emails just. Keep ’em relevant, keep ’em valuable. And that’s why you wanna be very careful about what it is that, that you’re sending. That’s why I like the automations, because they’re always triggered on some previous action. You know, with abandoned carts, it’s, they went to your site, they did something, they put it in the cart, and they walked away.

[00:26:38] That’s a reason to reach out and talk to them. Or if they complete an order, that’s a reason to ask for a review, or if they, you know, completed their order. That’s a reason to send ’em a shipping notification. But communicate with your customer at points that they care about as much as the ones that you care 

[00:26:55] James Sowers (The Good): about.

[00:26:55] Right. Yeah. And I would say maybe the compare and contrast between the broadcast and the automations is broadcast tend to not be segmented and they’re bad because they’re not relevant. But automations can go awry when they’re over segmented and you get the segmentation wrong. I’ve seen that happen, and, but it really, what it comes back to is relevance, right?

[00:27:15] If this isn’t relevant to me, then I start to think it’s a bad thing, but as long as it’s relevant to me, as long as. Bought a coffee subscription and you’re offering me a grinder or something like that that is relevant, like maybe I don’t want the grinder and that’s okay. I’m just not gonna buy the upsell to the grinder, but I’m not gonna be like, Why are you sending me this?

[00:27:30] You know, like, I get why you sent me this because it goes with what I just bought. It’s when those two things go in different pathways and don’t make sense cognitively that you start to get, like, you start to trip and follow over yourself basically with the, with the automations, 

[00:27:43] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): right? Complexity I think plays a lot into this here.

[00:27:47] I’ve seen brands go both ways, right? Where they just oversimplify it and they don’t send enough email. But then there’s the other side where they overcomplicate it and like I had one brand that had 38 abandoned cart email campaigns, and I’m pretty sure they were not a seven figure brand. And I’m like, Yeah, that might be overkill, guys.

[00:28:06] Like, Yeah, you wanna dial that back a little bit here? Like, why do you really need 30? Separate campaigns and they were segmented all over the place. It wasn’t just like they had a heavy follow up there. I still think they had five follow ups, but they segmented the hell out of it. And I’m like, there is a point of diminishing returns on that and you can be targeted, but at some point you can get too targeted, I think.

[00:28:27] And then it’s really confusing to debug on top of that, so, yeah. 

[00:28:31] James Sowers (The Good): Well, and there’s a lot of technical debt. It’s not really technical debt, but there’s some kind of maintenance debt with that where you have to constantly go back and make sure. Do we even still sell this product? Do we even still serve this segment of the market?

[00:28:40] Let’s erase this entire branch of the campaign because we don’t serve them anymore. Whatever. If you don’t do that, then, then things start to look bad. I was thinking about, you mentioned one of your core values is simplicity. Right? One of our core values here at the good is uh, 1% better every day continuous improvement.

[00:28:55] And so I’m curious in the spirit of helping our listen, To get 1% better today. When we talk about these automations, maybe this ties into your ladder of emails context, uh, but like, what are the fundamentals? The, the basic blocking and tackling, the obvious wins, low hanging fruit, whatever you want to call it.

[00:29:10] All these different, um, euphemisms, but like where should somebody start? Let’s say that they’re just using templated abandoned cart stuff, which is, you know, one email that gives a discount code or something like that, or says, Hey, don’t forget you left this in your cart. Like, I know, I know I left it in my cart.

[00:29:23] Thanks for that. But yeah. Where do you recommend brands start if they wanna take advantage? Not just of features that recapture has, but conceptually these automated, these trigger based emails, uh, that I kind of consider like a foundational revenue stream so that you can afford to experiment with some of those broadcast things.

[00:29:39] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): Sure, sure. So looking at all the different brands that have been on recapture over the years, and we’ve got, you know, almost 7,000 customers on the platform, what I’ve noticed is that the successful ones tend to up level their sophistication. Not all at once, but depending on like how much they’re selling and what they’re trying to sell.

[00:30:01] The generalizations that I sort of figured out when I was going through this, I’m gonna pull up some notes I’ve got here, but if you’re doing like, and these are all annual figures, so if you’re doing like under a hundred thousand a year as a brand and that’s gross revenue, I would say that you pretty much wanna keep your email marketing.

[00:30:19] Simple but complete. And so here’s what I mean by that. So I think that, you know, you should absolutely, positively have abandoned cart and abandoned checkout all the time. Like that’s just a, a given no matter what level you’re at. That’s free money on the table. Those customers are the most likely ones to convert.

[00:30:38] You know, here on recapture we tend to get about an average. You know, between eight and 12%, depending on the vertical boost on the revenue. So if you’re not doing that, like that’s really where you wanna do, and you should send like three of those, in my opinion, based on our data. If you send just one, okay, that’s better than zero.

[00:30:55] But if you send up to three, we’ve found that you recover at least a hundred percent more than the folks that send just one. It typically goes much higher than that, but that’s usually the way that we. To bill it. So aside from those, what else should you have? If you’re sub a hundred thousand, you definitely wanna welcome series for non buyers to help give them an idea of what your brand does, why you’re there.

[00:31:17] You know, founder note. Et cetera. Some educational content, easy to put in there for a series, right? And some kind of a basic post purchase sequence. Hey, thanks for buying from us. We really appreciate it. Maybe ask for a review if you want. And then on top of all that, you’d wanna do some kind of regular promotion campaign.

[00:31:34] Uh, I would say that depending on the vertical that you’re in, it could be anywhere from weekly to monthly. And, you know, maybe it’s just a seasonal thing that you’re doing, but if you’re on more of a consumable pattern, then you know, weekly stuff would probably work a little bit better. And that’s sort of like the very basic level, uh, of a store.

[00:31:54] So you gotta be running like those five things, four or five things. If you’re between a hundred thousand and half a million, you wanna do everything I just said. You want to add things like brows, abandonment, you probably wanna start adding wind backs cuz now you have enough customers that you wanna go.

[00:32:11] And especially if you’re in the consumable space to say, Hey, come back and, you know, reload your subscription or buy this other thing again. Or, Hey, we’ve got these new products to promote, use the wind backs to do that. That drives up your, uh, aov, it drives up your LTV and the, the customers who’ve already bought from you.

[00:32:29] Five to six times more likely to buy it than a brand new customer. So that’s just easy, low hanging fruit there. Then you probably want to add some other stuff like upgrade, post purchase orders, so like, you know, cross sell, upsell, some order notification flows in there, because now if you’re doing more than a hundred thousand a year, There’s definitely a lot of stuff going on.

[00:32:49] There’s more logistics in your backend, so you wanna make sure that your orders are packed and shipped and delivered and notify what the customer, where the customers add in that whole thing. Cuz it’s probably now not something that you’re doing on a daily basis where you can ship it out and the customer gets it in a few days.

[00:33:04] Maybe it takes a little bit longer now. Keep the customer involved with those notifications. And then I would say, you know, you wanna up your promotional campaigns, maybe if you were going monthly now go weekly. If you’re going weekly, maybe do more than once a. I don’t know. Kind of depends. And then if you’re going like half a million to a million, you wanna do everything that I just talked.

[00:33:26] But now you wanna get really into your segmentation. And you know, this is kind of a controversial thing. I know people like to segment earlier than this, but I also find that people kind of suck in segmentation. The problem with segmentation is that you have to understand who you’re sending and why you’re sending that to them.

[00:33:45] And I feel like it takes a long time for brands to really get that information. And it’s not until you’re somewhere in that half a million to a million range that that level of sophistication becomes obvious enough that you can do segmentation and make it super valuable at the same time. So that’s when I recommend that you really push that harder.

[00:34:06] So you just take everything that you’ve already done and start segmenting it better so that you’re getting the right things to the right people for the right. And then, you know, maybe you want to up your promotional campaigns. Once you get above a million a year, then you want to go for a heavier cross sell, upsell.

[00:34:23] And then, you know, maybe you’re upping those promotional campaigns on top of all that. But again, it’s, it’s about the segmentation. It’s about the value you provide. And it doesn’t just have to be, Hey, we have a sale. Hey, we have a sale. Hey, we have sale. Hey, we have another sale. You know, it’s like, don’t do that.

[00:34:40] Like, you gotta be more creative with your promotions. So, you know, things like send out referrals, you know, do you wanna tell your friends about us? Or you know, maybe there’s some seasonal stuff that’s relevant to your brand, or maybe it’s free product with purchase or last chance to buy a product cuz you’re discontinuing it.

[00:34:56] Or here’s a best seller’s email, here’s a birthday email. Like, there’s so many d. Things that you can promote without actually saying, Hey, here’s a sale and a discount code, cuz that’s robotic, That’s boring. People get really bored with that stuff. So, I mean, that’s what I, This is what I mean by the latter of emails.

[00:35:13] And you know, honestly, if we call this the standard eCommerce playbook, I still see that tons of brands do not follow the standard eCommerce playbook. And that’s why, you know, agencies like yours and services like mine can come in and say, look. You do this, you’re gonna make so much more money, and it’s so easy to demonstrate that 

[00:35:33] James Sowers (The Good): value.

[00:35:34] Yeah. And it’s not, it’s not a criticism of any of the decision makers. I mean, what they’re being asked to do, especially at smaller brands, is, is everything. I mean, finance, uh, accounting, logistics, supply chain, product development, market research, customer support, marketing, all this stuff is usually just a handful of people, sometimes more heavily weighted on the founder, especially in the early days.

[00:35:53] So to not have email market. Buttoned. Uptight is not a criticism at all, but when you’re ready for it, it is an area of opportunity that might have a higher confidence interval than some of the other things you might experiment with. On the marketing side, at least in my opinion, it’s like I would probably in those early days, it’s all about demand generation or demand capture.

[00:36:13] You’re trying to get people to your site, expose to your product, expose to your brand, understand the story, but pretty quickly after that, you want to. Retain more of that, that attention. Right. And email marketing and some of those triggered campaigns can be a great way to do that. So it’s not really a criticism, but it’s like at some point as you grow and as you mature and as you have more resources, this is one of the smarter investments you can make, 

[00:36:34] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): I think.

[00:36:34] Yeah. And to the criticism point, like. The other observation that I’ve made a lot in speaking with people on the support side, which is one of the great things about a founder, is I kind of get to see like store owners, you know, the in-house marketers and, and different roles that that use our tool. The person who is usually tasked with email marketing.

[00:36:53] Isn’t just tasked with email marketing, like they’re also doing the demand generation. They’re also doing the social media. They’re also doing the customer surveys and the research, like this is one tiny sliver of their job, and so they’re already over tasked on all the other things, especially if they’re early on in that demand generation takes up a huge amount of their time.

[00:37:13] The email marketing, they know it’s something that they have to get done. One of the things that I’ve. Uh said is that email marketing always ends up on store owners top five list, but it never hits number one because there’s always something that is, is going above that. Whether it’s logistics or customer support or product development or you know, inventory management, whatever it is, it doesn’t matter.

[00:37:35] They know email marketing is important, but it’s never the thing that bubbles to the top of that list, and so anything you can do to make it easier to help them get it done. To walk them through best practices to show them how to do the testing or to do it for them, like you guys do it. The good, All of these things are huge wins for merchants.

[00:37:54] So 

[00:37:55] James Sowers (The Good): yeah, I agree. Uh, what I love about the latter concept that you shared in those break points with the revenue is that, to me it aligned pretty well with three kind of KPIs and like I said, that first stage, that very early stage. You’re just trying to get eyeballs on, on your thing, on your website, on your product, on your brand.

[00:38:10] So that’s kind of the priority. And then it sounds like as you move into that middle stage, it’s more about increasing, What I would say is like aov, like how do you get folks to buy more from you? How do you increase conversion rate? How do you convert more people into customers? And then a little bit of that cross sell, upsell, bundling, whatever, that kind of thing.

[00:38:26] But then as you get into that last rung of the ladder, that sophistication is really about lifetime value and it’s how do you get somebody to buy from you again? Make a second purchase, How do you get them to tell a friend? How do you get them to buy for somebody else? Like how do you turn them into a brand advocate?

[00:38:40] So I love that, like it’s tied to the revenue, but in terms of the email marketing activities, it seems like a level of sophistication where it’s like, okay, drive traffic to site, convert traffic to customer, and increase AOV and then increase lifetime value and turn one customer into 2, 3, 4 customers from that single touch.

[00:38:57] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): It also speaks to the fact that if you’re trying to make email marketing work, trying to do it all at once is basically the way to make it not work. , because there’s some complexity to each of these things, and you can keep ’em simple, but you have to, like, you can’t build a complex system by starting from a bunch of complex, smaller systems.

[00:39:17] You gotta start. Small, simple working things. And so you gotta get one campaign dialed in and then move on to the next one. And once you’ve done that, then you move on to the next one. And then, you know, by the time you’ve got seven of those campaigns working, now you have a complex email marketing system that is now working for you.

[00:39:33] But you would never just start out from scratch and write all seven of those campaigns. That’s a recipe for a disaster. You’ll never manage that. Right. The same 

[00:39:42] James Sowers (The Good): way that you wouldn’t start developing a product and you wouldn’t place an order with a manufacturer after talking to 10 customers, Maybe a hundred, right?

[00:39:48] Ideally closer to a thousand. And you need, you need a bigger pool of data to have, uh, confidence in whatever decision you’re making, whatever product you’re creating. You wouldn’t just dive in head first into email marketing events, invest a bunch of time out of the gate when you could do one or two of those things.

[00:40:02] Go back to supply chain, go back to customer support, go back to accounting, and then, you know, get better over time. I think that’s kind of the spirit of what, what you’re sharing here. Interesting. I love that. Uh, I love that methodology. I guess with the latter concept, like the 1, 2, 3, I think, and I’ve seen so many brands that are.

[00:40:17] In the level three in terms of revenue, but not doing some of the level one kind of automations like I have bought from a very established brand. And from the point, the day that I bought to about a week later when I received the product, the only thing I got was the order confirmation in the shipping confirmation.

[00:40:33] That’s it. I got nothing else about how to use the product, you know, the benefits of the product. No testimonials, no FAQs, nothing like that. And then even after I received it, never got asked to leave a review, never got asked to, you know, come back and buy again. Nothing, and it’s just like, again, to my point earlier that I see that as opportunity because if you’ve gotten this far, and if you’re a six, seven figure brand that is still not doing those things, then imagine, you know, the revenue opportunity that they’re leaving on the table by not having some of these.

[00:41:00] Yeah. 

[00:41:01] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): Oh yeah, totally. Money left on the table. I just keep saying that again and again about email marketing. Depending on your level of sophistication, there’s always some money that you’re leaving on the table there. You just have to know what it is, how to fix it, and when to do it. 

[00:41:16] James Sowers (The Good): Have you seen any like creative uses of email marketing?

[00:41:18] We’ve got, and maybe it’s one of these examples that we shared, and maybe it’s just a case study around somebody who’s done well with segmentation or something like that. But we know that once you get through kind of that blocking and tackling phase, once you get into the higher levels of sophistication, I’ve seen people do some pretty impressive things in tandem with email and SMS or email and quizzes.

[00:41:35] So you work with these folks day in and day out and listen to their strategies. Are you, They’re more sophisticated customers that you’ve had the opportunity to like learn from and, and the ways that they’re applying email in their. Yes. 

[00:41:46] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): So the two examples that come to mind. So the first one is from a brand that works with recapture and they do aquarium supplies.

[00:41:54] And what’s interesting about how they do this, they actually do this through segmentation. So they have a variety of things that they sell, including basically fish drugs. So you know, your fish gets sick, they sell you the things to make your fish not sick, right? Well, they segmented on this one antibiotic.

[00:42:14] So, When this antibiotic goes into a cart, The guy was telling me, Well, the only reason they have that in the cart is because their fish has X, Y, Z disease, and I forget what it was, but it’s basically like a very serious thing, like they need to get this treated within a week, or the fish is in big trouble.

[00:42:32] So he knows that as soon as he sees that product in an abandoned cart. He can hammer them with abandoned cart email. So he does this at an incredibly high frequency. I think he sends out like five or six emails, and it’s at like two hours, four hours, six hours, eight hours one day. So five emails and a 24 hour period.

[00:42:54] It had an amazing recovery rate. 36% boost, 36% of the customers. Converted. Usually we’re talking about what, five to seven on the clicks rates and you know, one to two on the conversion rates, 36% conversion rate insanely high. But that’s because he understood his audience, he understood the pain and he understood the timing, and he was able to totally nail that with.

[00:43:20] That sequence. I’m not saying, you know, if you just heard, Oh, if I send five emails to my customers in 24 hour period, I will have a 36% conversion rate. You were not listening . That’s not right. It doesn’t work for everything. He knew it because of a spec. Thing with his customers and it was very successful.

[00:43:39] So like segmentation, extremely powerful. But that is knowing your audience and knowing their pains, not just like dumb demographic data. Oh, this is, uh, women from 25 to 34 that drive Volvos in Maryland. No, this was deep understanding of his, of his product, his audience, and the pain that they were suffering.

[00:43:59] Right. Then I love that example 

[00:44:00] James Sowers (The Good): because I think. People might gloss over that and say, Well, that’s just, that’s just an aquarium supply company. Like, I can’t replicate that. I sell pacas or whatever. And it’s like, but you can, because people are already doing this in the ad world. Like if I land on your site and I look at a certain paa, I’m gonna get retargeting ads for that exact parca if you’re doing your job right.

[00:44:19] And so it’s, it’s kind of the same thing. It’s like, Hey, I know that you’re looking for this and I know you have a specific use case, so let me show you an ad to try to get you to come back to the site. This is a similar concept. Like I know if you’re shopping for this product, you have a very specific problem or a very specific challenge, or a very specific question goal you’re trying to achieve.

[00:44:35] Let me tastefully continue the conversation about that, because there’s a reason you’re shopping for this, right? And I know that reason, and I have something that I can help you with. So I think like a lot of brands out there, at least the ones that I talk to, they’re like, Well, you know, ads are getting more expensive and we wanna do some more kind of owned marketing and stuff like that.

[00:44:53] But we’re just not sure where to jump in on content. Like that’s where to jump in on content, you know, write the article about that disease and the definitive guided treating that disease. And by the way, we sell this medication and then when somebody abandons cart, drop that article in there, drop the whole body, write in the email and say, Hey, I saw you were looking at this.

[00:45:08] You probably have some questions. We did our own research. Here’s the study. Here’s exactly how to treat it. You don’t have to use our product, but we sure hope you do. That kind of thing. I don’t know, I just think a lot of brands are like, I wanna get into content market. Or I want to like make FAQs matter, but I don’t know how to do that.

[00:45:23] I think that’s a great example of it, and it’s something that we can basically lift and shift from the ad. Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:45:28] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): So going with your Paka example, I was just, when you were saying that I was like churn away in my head and like what I would do for that. So obviously there’s like, I would see that there’s two main times of the year that you would probably be selling paass, and it depends on whether you’re northern hemisphere or southern hemisphere.

[00:45:43] So you want us. Segment your buyers to understand are they coming from South America and Australia and are they in colder climates like, you know, Chile or Argentina or New Zealand where they’re trying to buy these things in, you know, May or April or something like that right before the winter hits? So you know, you could have a park of buying guide and make sure that you’re promoting that to those customers during those periods.

[00:46:04] And do the opposite with Northern Hemisphere in like October, November, right before the holidays, right? You have to understand when it is your customers are buying that thing, and then make sure you put it out there at that time to provide that value for them. So again, it’s understanding your audience at a fundamental.

[00:46:21] James Sowers (The Good): Yeah, for sure. Uh, sorry I cut you off. You had a second example there too. I think you were gonna share. Yeah, 

[00:46:25] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): so this one is, uh, it’s kind of funny because I would say the reason this has gotten more effective is because we’re just being blitz creed by tons and tons of sophisticated. Highly designed email and that is the unreasonable effectiveness of plain text emails.

[00:46:45] So I see that plain text emails work extremely well when you have like personal note from the founder. And I use this with my own sas. So that’s how I know that this works extremely well. So we actually dial down. You dial down the rhetoric. You don’t put graphics in there. It’s just, Hey, humans talking to other human, you know, here’s some, you know, personal story or here’s, you know, thanks for using our, our brand or what, whatever it is.

[00:47:12] But you know, you just, you talk at a very basic human level and these emails, Really have an impact. You know, it doesn’t have to be the thing that you were spending hours in Figma and coming up with the ultimate fancy graphic designs with the perfectly styled brand colors in your, your html, like none of that that matters sometimes, but sometimes just send them an email that has some nice words in it that isn’t overly fancy that.

[00:47:41] Talking to them as another human being. And those emails I’ve found to be unreasonably effective. So that’s the other tactic that I would say, you know, that people need to be doing more of that, just being more human in emails in general, but using the plain text email kind of sets you aside in a very crowded, brightly colored, fancy, inundated inbox.

[00:48:04] James Sowers (The Good): Yeah, I think there’s a lot of pressure to have these highly designed emails, especially with physical goods because you’re like, I wanna put a product photo in there and a gonna put a product photo in there. I need to wrap it in some pretty frame and stuff like that. And like interactive elements. And I get it.

[00:48:17] We’re talking about tangible things that people are gonna hold or wear or consume or something like that. But to your point, like there are certain touchpoint. You want it to feel like a one-on-one conversation. Founder letter is a great one. Even the abandoned cart email, like, what if it had James at whatever your website is here?

[00:48:34] She’s just like, Hey, James, from the customer support team, I saw you were checking out this product. Uh, just wanted to let you know that it, it’s a great one. Uh, this has 500 plus. Five star reviews and you know, it’s one of my favorites. Here’s a picture of me wearing it, whatever. Like, I’m not saying manufacture those things, don’t make it up.

[00:48:48] But if it’s genuinely, like you have team members that love that product, drop a photo of them in there in a plain text email and just say, Here’s me wearing mine. I love it. And be genuine about it. And I think that can be the personal connection you need or some of those post-purchase emails where it’s like, Hey, this is James personally and or the founder, and like your stuff’s on the way.

[00:49:04] I’m so excited to have, uh, your business and I really appreciate you giving us a try. I made this because of xyz. Here’s my story. I think you’re gonna love it too. If you have any questions at all, reply to this email and somebody on my team, or I’m gonna get back to you. And that can really make the difference between you and unnamed brand X, Y, Z competitor, just because you took the time to form a personal connection instead of constantly trying to extract money from them, right?

[00:49:26] You’re trying to relate with them on a personal level, right? 

[00:49:29] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): When you’re working with corporate brands, you will never see this. You’ll never see, you know, an email from the founder of Home Depot, , or Creighton Barrel, or any of those large corporate entities. So this does set you aside, especially if you know you’re a DTC brand or you’re just getting started, or you wanna, you know, stand out in the inbox.

[00:49:49] All of those suggestions that you just said are exactly the kinds of things that I think are unreasonably effective because they look different. 

[00:49:56] James Sowers (The Good): Totally agree. All right, Dave, I wanna respect your time. So I have one more question for you and then we’ll let you get outta here with whatever message you wanna.

[00:50:02] Uh, with the audience, but you have this unique position where you’re sitting on kind of the software and tooling side of the world. There’s also the brands, then there are the agencies or the consultants, or the advisors. I feel like a lot of times there are these silos in between those units and it’s like the brand likes to blame the tool because attribution is off, or deliverability is off, or performance isn’t where they want it to be.

[00:50:20] The tool likes to say, Well, you’re not using us properly. You didn’t follow the training, you don’t have your settings tweaked just right. So an effort to kind of. Deconflict, all of those, uh, notions. What is maybe one thing that you wish brands or merchants knew about what it’s like to try to build tooling for eCommerce?

[00:50:36] And maybe it’s something that’s particularly hard that a lot of people don’t understand, or maybe it’s something that, like, if you just looked at it this way, you wouldn’t have as much friction with the tools that you’re using. That 

[00:50:45] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): is a very difficult question and you know, I 100% sympathize with the merchant perspective because you are trying to pull in multiple apps, multiple things to fill holes in whatever platform you’re on.

[00:50:59] I don’t care whether you’re on Shopify or Big Commerce or WooCommerce or Magento, it’s the same problem all around. You’re trying to make sure all of these pieces are put together in your store. You want all of those pieces to work well together, and oftentimes they don’t. , and that’s super frustrating.

[00:51:14] You want ’em to share all kinds of information and oftentimes they can’t. So I get that. As a merchant, you’re trying to cobble together something that works for your store and your needs, and we don’t always provide that. So the hardest thing I think, from my side as a vendor here is that. I wanna make sure that the initial experience is as frictionless and as intuitive and easy for the merchant as possible.

[00:51:46] But the problem is I don’t always make our product meet where the merchant is at. So sometimes there’s super sophisticated merchants and they totally get it right out of the bat. There’s like brand new merchants that have never used this before and it’s very hard to meet both of them. At the same time with the same information, especially when you’re coming at me and all I know is here’s your store name and you know, over some time I might know some other stuff, like do you have a high sales volume or do you have no sales volume, or do you have a low sales volume?

[00:52:16] Like that doesn’t come out right away. It doesn’t come out fast enough for me to start tailoring information, cuz I know you just need to get it set up and get going and there. There’s a short window that people take to evaluate stuff and sometimes, you know, I see it’s funny, I will, People will install recapture and then six minutes later they’ll be like, App is not performing well.

[00:52:36] I’m like, You could not have sent a single email in six minutes. You can’t even abandon a cart in six minutes. So I know you didn’t really test this. You just got frustrated because something wasn’t easy for you to use. And so what I would say is, From the vendor perspective, you need to make sure you’re reducing friction at every point.

[00:52:56] You need to make your onboarding seamless. You need to make that documentation obvious. You need to have things like videos that train anybody at any level, but at the same time as a merchant, I think that, you know, if you run into something, it is hugely valuable to tell the vendor, Hey, I couldn’t do X.

[00:53:16] Maybe not all vendors are gonna say something and respond to you because customer support’s not the same for every single vendor out there. But if you tell me that, I’ll be like, Really? Oh, I had no idea. Well, let me take a look at that and if there’s a problem, I will fix it immediately. Like that is a huge priority of ours to make sure our platform is reliable.

[00:53:37] That’s another one of our values. So if you could just communicate with the vendor and say, This didn’t work for me. That’s why I can’t use your thing anymore. That’s hugely valuable to me, and I can make the tool better for. Or you if you wanna come back. So I would say that those are the things that we really wanna balance here, mostly about communication and I think that the vendors can get better at communicating in customer support too.

[00:53:59] I saw some cringy customer support interactions this morning on Twitter that somebody was like, Oh, I’m so glad I sold my shop if I app, And I was looking at their customer support and I’m like, Yeah, if I saw somebody talking to me like that, I’d probably be a little mad too. So . 

[00:54:14] James Sowers (The Good): Yeah. Yeah, I totally get it.

[00:54:16] I mean, I, the thing to remember is building software is incredibly hard. Building an e-commerce brand is incredibly hard. Nobody gets into it to try to swindle folks outta money. Uh, for the most part, folks have good intentions and if things don’t go well, they’re emotionally invested in fixing it and helping make it right.

[00:54:30] So, to your point, the communication is, is the best part. And I would say not just the bad stuff, like communicate the good stuff cuz uh, software. Creators don’t hear nearly as much praise as they probably should for the things that they put together. That that just cuz when something works well and it just works, you almost don’t notice it.

[00:54:45] I would say be gracious with your, with your praise too. Not just the criticism because uh, we’re all trying our best out here. Right. So Dave, thanks so much for your time today. I’ll let you, uh, get back to the rest of your day, but before, uh, we hang up here, where would you like to point folks for more information?

[00:54:58] I know you’re at recapture.io so maybe I’ll do that part for you cuz I just approved, I did my research, but, uh, is there anything else you’d like to plug or any message you’d like to leave folks? Sure. 

[00:55:06] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): So if you’re interested in connecting with me on Twitter, uh, and we’ll put this in the show notes I presume, but I am at Dave Rodenbach and I spend most of my time on there, kind of, you know, checking out other brands.

[00:55:18] And I’m always interested, especially if you’re a brand a. Out there, you know, what you’re doing with email marketing or what you’re struggling with or what you’re selling, like that’s always something that I’m curious about. So connect with me on Twitter. I’d love to have conversations with you there if you’re interested in checking out.

[00:55:35] Recapture again, you know, we do email marketing for brands that do in-house stuff that wanna keep it simple. Can’t afford an agency, don’t wanna deal with an agency. Just want it easy to do and get it done quickly. We have amazing customer support and we really do care over here. So check us out@recapture.io.

[00:55:53] Come install us and give us a try. Yeah, 

[00:55:55] James Sowers (The Good): give Dave a she, folks. He’s, He’s good people. He’s good people. Thanks so much for your time today, Dave, and drop in some insight. We could do a whole other episode on that ladder concept, cuz I was about to go deep on segmentation and what does an abandoned cart sequence look like as a best practice?

[00:56:08] What does a post purchase flow look like? Uh, there’s a whole workshop in there and you’ve probably already created and you got it sitting on your Google Drive somewhere. So we might have to do a follow up at some point, but really appreciate the time you did give us today and, uh, we’ll hope to have you back 

[00:56:18] Dave Rodenbaugh (Recapture.io): soon.

[00:56:18] Thank you so much for having me on today, James. This was a lot of fun. 

[00:56:23] James Sowers (The Good): Hey everybody, this is James again, and before you go, I just wanted to invite you to join one of the coolest things I get to work on as director of marketing here at the Good. It’s called the eCommerce Insiders List, and it’s a private version of this podcast feed that gets you access to tons of additional bonus content, like extra interviews, q and a Sessions, website, teardowns, and anything else we can dream of.

[00:56:41] It doesn’t cost you anything but your email address, and we promise to always respect your inbox. This is just our way of forming stronger relationships with our listeners and making sure that we produce content that is actually valuable to you and to your business. If you’re interested, you can join the rest of the e-Commerce insiders by going to the good.com/podcast and dropping your email into the form at the top of the page.

[00:57:01] We’ll follow up with directions for how to access the private feed, and you’ll be off and running. Like I said, this is one of my favorite things that I get the opportunity to work on because it lets me interact directly with e-commerce founders and leaders just like you. If you’re interested, I’d love to see your name pop up in my notifications.

[00:57:16] Until then, keep an eye out for the next episode of the E-Commerce Insight Show and we’ll talk to you soon.

The post Effective Email Marketing for Abandoned Cart Recovery with Dave Rodenbaugh appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

One of the largest groups of online shoppers often surprises brands and marketers… adults over 55. While it’s a mistake to ignore this key group of shoppers (and their disposable income), it’s also tough to connect with them when there’s a lack of understanding around their needs and habits. So, to fill that gap, the Good surveyed Active Agers on a large variety of ecommerce practices, attitudes, and their general outlook on digital commerce.

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about the findings and insights from The Good’s latest research report published in collaboration with Age of Majority. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. How to understand and engage adults 55+ 
2. Surprising (and unsurprising) insights about this group of shoppers
3. How to build trust with Active Agers
4. The best ways to connect and build trust

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, hit us up on Twitter. We’re @jonmacdonald and @ryangarrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Ryan:
So Jon, interesting thing that I’ve come across recently, one of the largest segments of online shoppers often surprises a lot of people and it’s those people over 35, or no, that’s the old people that are me. It’s the old people that are over 55. Good job on my notes there.

Jon:
Well, that’s a nice little slip actually because-

Ryan:
That is.

Jon:
… we’re both older. Not to spoil anyone’s surprise on your age, but we’re both definitely older than 35.

Ryan:
We are both. Yeah, I’m over the age of the 40, so I’m just trying to age gracefully here and not doing a great job on podcast notes. But that group of people, outside of teasing my parents in that category about Binging when they’re supposed to be Googling, I honestly don’t know a lot about their online habits and how they do things when they’re interacting with devices or websites. I therefore avoid talking to clients or prospects about that category of online shoppers. Thankfully, as usual in my world, you’ve done most of the heavy lifting for me so I can sound smart. Your team did a good size survey that I heard took over a year to get through it all to learn more about this category of online shoppers and then be able to advise your clients in how to engage them better and how to get them to convert at the end of the day.

Jon:
Yeah.

Ryan:
So I’m excited to dive into some of this data and hear from you about what this is and why it became important for you.

Jon:
Yeah. Well, we did this in conjunction with a agency called Age of Majority. Age of Majority is a marketing firm that helps brands who want to reach the 55 and older consumer. They’ve been in business a handful of years, but what they found very quickly was that it’s a unique demographic and most people are thinking just old, quite frankly. They think 55 and older, oh, that’s my grandparents. But I think what you’re forgetting is that the over 55s are having more fun, have more disposable income for the most part, and have more time on their hands than the rest of us. That is something that cannot be ignored if you’re trying to market your product, and especially if you’re trying to market your product to an older crowd. The challenge that we find was that so many brands don’t even know how to optimize their site for the over 55 crowd. You look at products that are specifically for them and what do you think about? You think about, what’s the necklace, the life-saving necklace, that commercial I’ve fallen and I can’t get up?

Ryan:
Yeah, that was a great [inaudible 00:03:01]. I’ll never forget that one. [inaudible 00:03:02].

Jon:
You’ll never forget it, but here’s the thing, that is the portrayal of this audience. Age of Majority released a great report that caught our attention when we were doing some research on this originally called Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll. The reality was that over 55 is having more sex, listening to better music, more often going to concerts and they just can buy whatever they want.

Ryan:
Doing drugs?

Jon:
You’d be surprised. They are one of the highest demographics when it comes to marijuana usage. A lot of this stems from their youth. It was a much different society in the ’60s and ’70s. Free everything, free love, free drugs, Woodstock, do all that stuff, right?

Ryan:
Yeah.

Jon:
That’s where I think it’s really overlooked, is most people see them as gray hair and that’s it. So really, just a little bit of a groundwork here. An active ager is anybody over 55. We’ll talk about active ager. That’s the term the Age of Majority has branded for this audience. But at the same time, this research was really brought to us because we have had some relationship with Age of Majority over the years. Jeff Weiss, the founder of that, approached us and asked if we could partner on a research report here because they wanted to know more about e-commerce to this audience and so did we. It was pretty interesting.

Ryan:
Was there a specific client that needed some help on this demographic or thought they were targeting them more and needed to do that? How did you decide that this was really something to jump into with the Age of Majority?

Jon:
Well, the reality is that we work with clients who definitely are trying to reach that audience. What we kept hearing was make the buttons bigger and easier, simplify everything. But when it would come to actually understanding what the challenges in online shopping are with this audience and what their concerns are, we didn’t know and neither did the brand. We needed to find that out. Now, demographics are something we user test on every day. So we were able to user test with those folks to understand the experience and their challenges, but we wanted a very large data set and that’s one thing that Age of Majority has, is actually has a pool of test subjects that all are over 55 and have other demographics applied to them that we can then go and run some testing with. They were able to bring the consumers and the perspective, and we were able to go source that data and bring the insights out of that data, which is what we were experts in. So it really worked out well for everybody.

Ryan:
Got it. Okay. I read through that earlier this week and there was some surprising stuff in there, things I definitely wouldn’t have been like, “Oh, yeah, I would’ve totally guessed that.”

Jon:
Yeah.

Ryan:
One that really stood out to me was the typos and incorrect grammar because I can actually hear my mom responding verbally to a text around that’s not correct. My mom is a big on grammar. We’ll just be walking into a store, she’s like, “That sign’s stupid grammar.” I’m like, “We still understand what it says,” but if you have poor grammar on a site, my mom’s not going to buy it.

Jon:
Love it.

Ryan:
Typos, I can read a side note. Okay, you probably were in a foreign country putting up a drop-ship site and that’s when you came out of this. For you, obviously, being in the minutia of something, what stood out to you that was like, I just would not have guessed that?

Jon:
Well, first of all, I think that there are a number of surprising things, but also a number of things that you would be able to guess and were confirmed, right?

Ryan:
Mm-hmm.

Jon:
But things like typos and grammar decrease trust, and trust was a big item that kept popping up here. There’s a lot of data that we break down into charts and whatnot in the report and on a lot of them, number one or number two is trust and security. Active agers are very tech savvy, which surprises a lot of people, but at the same time, they’re very security conscious because a lot of them have just seen all of the warnings about people having issues around their data breaches and data security. The reality is if somebody gets their retirement or their cash savings stolen later in life, it becomes a big issue for the quality of life for the remainder of their life, so they need to be a little more cautious because they don’t have the ability to as easily, I should say, go out and just re-earn that money. That was something that was interesting, is to see security and trust so high up.

Ryan:
Got it. Okay. As you say active ager, does that include everybody over 55? I guess I should have clarified that earlier or is it just this age range or is it just a subset of people over 55 that actually play lots of pickleball?

Jon:
First of all, to answer your question, it’s everybody over 55.

Ryan:
Okay.

Jon:
The reason it’s called an active ager is to dispel the myth that they’re just sitting in an arm chair watching Jeopardy! all day. They’re not. They are active. I listed some examples of that earlier, but that’s really what’s important to understand is people are living longer and they’re being active later in life and they’re finding things to do like pickleball. The vast majority of folks over 55 are enjoying life more fully and longer and being active, so it’s why it’s part of the name.

Ryan:
Got it. It’s funny because, for example, my wife’s grandfather is still alive and he’s 89 and he still golfs every week. He’s got a golf membership at a local club in Beaverton. I think he pretty much has been sandbagging most of his life except for the championship every year because he wins it every year. I’m like, “You’re 89.” He’s like, “Yeah, yeah, but I compete against all these old guys.” I’m like, “You’re 89.”

Jon:
How old?

Ryan:
He’s my definition of the active ager. You’re older than almost anybody you’re playing golf with, but yet they’re the old guys because they can’t get around very well.

Jon:
That’s amazing. That’s amazing.

Ryan:
What I’m most curious about probably is based on what you saw in this report, how does this group of people deviate from average? Because when I look at data on analytics, I’m not usually diving into demographic data because Google gets less and less of that. I’m just looking at this page converted here, this keyword did this and this and here’s what I’m looking at. But there’s probably some ways that this group of buyers are different than what I would generally see as average across the board in certain areas. Where did you see them deviating the most? We talked about trust a little bit, but were there specific areas of the site or aspects of the purchase that were like, yeah, these people are way higher on this than normal or way lower?

Jon:
Well, yeah, exactly. I would think that there’s a couple of big issues. Number one is they want to talk to somebody, where if you ask any Gen Z millennial, they don’t want to talk to anybody. For instance, I’m okay texting. I would much rather text because I can be short and to the point, get it done, and move on. Active agers want to be able to have access to a human customer service representative.

Ryan:
Yes.

Jon:
What you find is that almost 90%, close to the 85% said that it was extremely important, very important or somewhat important. I find that really-

Ryan:
Wow.

Jon:
… interesting because if you ask a millennial, “Hey, I’m going to give you a phone number. You need to call somebody,” they’re going to be like, “Okay, thanks,” and then immediately try to text that number.

Ryan:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, like making phone reservations for a restaurant. No. No, I want to just go online, book it, and not ever [inaudible 00:10:36].

Jon:
I don’t want to talk to anybody. That just slows things down. You’re going to put me on hold. You’re going to ask your manager. You’re going to type it in. Just let me do it. I had this example of this issue just last night. My wife and I are taking our son to Disney and we were trying to book food reservations because everything’s on a reservation system there now. We’re taking some family members with us, so we needed a table for six. The most you can book online is five. We’re like, we got to call. Okay. It took my wife four days to call, not because she’s lazy, because she just didn’t want to talk to anybody. She just kept going back to the app and seeing if maybe a table would open up for six because that was the issue. I’m like, no, it clearly says. Just call them. Then she had to wait on hold last night for 45 plus minutes-

Ryan:
Oh, my God.

Jon:
… while she’s getting my son ready for bed. Then, of course, while we’re brushing our her son’s teeth, they answered the phone. It’s like the worst possible timing. The fact that as you are getting older, you have less of those distractions so you can spend the time on the phone. You don’t have a kid running around your house that you need to go take care of. You might be okay just setting the phone on the counter and doing something else for 45 minutes. Or you just feel more comfortable knowing, you know what? This is real if I talk to somebody. It’s actually going to happen. What if there’s any issues? I can easily deal with it when I’m talking. Where I’m like, oh, they’re going to tell me an issue and I’m just going to type back and we’ll work through it. But yeah, I think that that was one of the big things that surprised me.

Ryan:
Got it. Then as a group, they have more money generally as a generation, the baby boomers and older there. I would guess they’re not as price sensitive as maybe me in my 20s. If I could save a dollar, I was going to do it. Now, I’m like, just whatever. How do they handle price discrepancies across sites? Do they do a lot more research?

Jon:
Yeah. Looking at this data, it’s almost like an inverse bell curve. You’re more price conscious when you’re starting out in life because you just don’t have the means to not care about it. You get into your high earner years and you’re like, you know what? It’s worth the 10 minutes to me to pay the extra two bucks and do whatever. I will not do my research. I’m going to stop at the expensive coffee shop because it’s on my way to work and I don’t have to drive two blocks out of the way. I know it’s going to cost me an extra dollar or whatever for that cup of coffee, but you know what? I’m going to enjoy it. I’ve earned it. As you get older and you’re on either a fixed income or you are more impacted by swings in your balance of your retirement fund, you start to have those thoughts again about being price conscious.
What’s interesting to me is if you look at that same chart along with who has vast majority of funds of resources in the United States, it’s the over 55s that have the vast majority of money. So you start looking at that and you’re like, okay, so they have more money and they are more price conscious. That is completely a mentality at that point. It’s not a necessity in a lot of cases. Now, that doesn’t mean there aren’t people who are clearly on a fixed income, living social security. I understand that, but what we found is the majority of people who are shopping online, it is more about just being price conscious. They want the best deal and they have time to go find it and do the research and look at the coupon code sites and do all of that stuff. So abandoning cart issues are more prevalent with this age group.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, the digital marketing agency offering pay per click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Ryan:
In my world, abandoned cart a lot of times. I like, well, let’s go look at what your shipping rates are. Where are you keeping free shipping? I just had that conversation, I think three times yesterday.

Jon:
Yeah.

Ryan:
I assume free shipping falls genuinely in line, but do you see it more or less or is it actually just everybody cares about it almost exactly the same?

Jon:
Everybody cares. The reality is Amazon has spoiled everybody for online shopping with free shipping. It just is what it is. It’s expected now. One of the tests that this led us to run actually is just bake shipping into the cost of the product, raise the product cost to cover our shipping for the client and go from there. Just call it free shipping, but raise the price.

Ryan:
Yeah. Even if this price is the same for me, that line item of shipping just pisses me off.

Jon:
Yes. Everybody. Yeah.

Ryan:
Just give it to me for 20 instead of 15 plus five.

Jon:
Yes, exactly.

Ryan:
I hate doing math probably. Maybe that’s it. And also reading this, I think I determined that my wife is already an active ager in her mid 30s. That’s how she shops. She does all of the things listed that an active ager does. I’m like, huh, I married a woman that’s already an active ager.

Jon:
That’s amazing.

Ryan:
She’s just up there waiting for me.

Jon:
Yeah. It’s funny. I think that trust matters a lot to more people, but I think that the trust and the free shipping and being price conscious are things that are prevalent across all ages. But it’s just what was really interesting was the very high percentage of respondents to this survey that made it very clear that it is more important to them than anything else.

Ryan:
Mm-hmm. Now as a brand, do you think it’s possible to have a site that appeals to all of these various age groups on there or do I need to probably pick a target and say I’m going to be an active ager brand or I’m going to be a millennial brand or can I blend a lot of those things using your data to make it okay for most?

Jon:
Mm-hmm. That’s a great question. I think that it’s going to depend on the product, but we have worked with brands that sell incontinence products. Now there are age groups that buy it that are younger. Maybe they have a health concern, but the vast majority of people on that site were active agers. They were over 55. The reality is you need to look at your product and you probably, as a store operator, know your demographic. One thing we did find is you will not alienate the younger people if you focus on those, serving the needs of the 55 and older because their needs are really not so far out in the field. As I mentioned earlier, everybody cares, like your wife about trust, price, grammar like your mom, right?

Ryan:
Mm-hmm.

Jon:
All these things apply. If I see a grammar mistake that’s very obvious on a homepage of a website, I wonder what the quality is of their product. It’s one of those things where if you target the 55 and older crowd and you emphasize what’s important to them, you won’t alienate other people. Now, if you go on your website and you just post a bunch of pictures of what would look like elderly folks who aren’t active at all and is not a true representation, it’s more of a derogatory representation, then the reality is you’re going to turn some people off. Like when we work with those incontinence products, brands, at that point, we’re making sure that we are showing people who are active and enjoying life. Maybe they have gray hair as well, but they’re not out there in wheelchairs just looking like they are disabled. That’s not the case.

Ryan:
Mm-hmm. I like that. As long as you’re generally broad stroke increasing trust, you’re probably going to be able to appeal to multiple things. Maybe just give me an option to get out of having to call you. Let somebody call you if they want.

Jon:
Well, that’s exactly it, offering options. You could do live chat and phone and have the same people answer both. That’s a very possible option.

Ryan:
Now, one thing that was missing from your survey that I’m curious about, and you probably still have some data around it, I didn’t see if Wheelio was more or less effective in the over 55 group at collecting emails or text message or phone numbers. Did you get any data around that?

Jon:
No, we didn’t do any data around pop-ups, anything of that sort. I should have now that you say that, because I can almost promise you, based on the user research we’ve done with that crowd, they’re going to bounce even more than anyone else. They have no tolerance for collecting information and the reason being is that they are super concerned about security and privacy. 43% are concerned about giving away their information and what happens to it after. 34% regret giving an email, but also feel like they don’t really have a choice. They have to do it. So you start getting into these challenges of a pop-ups come up and they’re having challenges getting it closed just like everybody else and they get frustrated and then maybe they think, oh, I have to give my email address to enter. Then from there, they’re already starting from a place of lack of trust because you-

Ryan:
Got it.

Jon:
… forced them to give your email. The reality is they hate spam more than the rest of us, and this is because we found in our research, they feel compelled to read every message that’s sent to them. Because if you think about it, it’s just like receiving a letter in the mail. You’re going to open that. In that sense, you feel compelled to open it. I think that that’s changing quite a bit, but I can tell you my parents do that. I know my mom’s opening every single email message that comes to her and I find it scary at times. I’m just saying. I know her quantity is way less than you or I, but at the same time, what’s in that email that I don’t want her clicking on?

Ryan:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s true. I was on a webinar today with a company we probably both partnered with and they were talking about their new options for pop-ups to collect phone numbers. They talk about, “Oh, yeah, this big brand increase revenue this much and had this much adoption of the coupon code.” I’m like, yeah, but you gave away a bunch of margin for people that are already on your site. Have you not listened to Drive and Convert? I’ve got to get this in front of that brand. But if you are targeting an older demographic and you start by just saying, “Hey, spend this wheel for money,” and I’m like, ooh, bad, bad, bad.

Jon:
Yeah. You’re going to lose out there pretty quickly.

Ryan:
In my world, so much of our focus is on acquiring the traffic and just getting the conversion. That’s it. A lot of it in yours, but you focus a lot more post purchase as well just in your conversations with clients. I know that post purchase is very important in this group of people. What are your recommendations? What were your findings around once they click buy, you built the trust to get the buy, how do you not blow it and have them just regret immediately pushing that button?

Jon:
Well, I think that this goes back to them being price conscious to some degree, but really what happens is that they have a high instance rate of buyer’s remorse. What you typically will see is after they’ve purchased, they immediately start thinking about whether they should have done that purchase or not. What happens, we’ve seen this trend in user testing, they start going to other sites to see if they can find a better deal. They’ve already spent the time buying.

Ryan:
After purchase, oh, man.

Jon:
Then they go and they’re like, oh, well, did I get the best deal? Maybe there’s something better out there. I find that really interesting. I think there’s ways to combat that that come up in here, price guarantees, easy returns, really focusing on education, meaning, once somebody’s purchased, making sure that you’re getting them some education about the product, getting them excited while they’re waiting for it to arrive. That can be really important, and giving ongoing support. Active agers want and they really do need continued service and support once they’ve made a purchase. How do you provide that to them? When they post these reviews post purchase, it’s follow-up. Everybody asks for reviews. Active agers are really good about leaving reviews. That is something that I find interesting. They’ll come back and feel like they’re part of the brand by giving more information and saying, “Hey, I like this product. Here’s why.” We have a breakdown in here in a chart of the top three things they talk about in reviews. Number one is that they got a really good deal, so price.
Number two is that the customer service was great. Number three is product selection, which to me is not necessarily the fact that you have a lot of SKUs. It’s that you’ve made it easy to filter through those SKUs and find what’s important to them. That’s what’s really the key out of that. Then shipping, and then lastly, the site was easy to use. So again, before you even get to the fact the site was easy to use, you have four other indicators of whether or not someone’s going to have a positive experience on your site. It all starts with price, goes down to customer service, that you make it easy to find the products that are great for them, and then that you ship free and fast. Then outside of that, the site was easy to use as well. So you look at all of those things and really, that’s not too divergent from what you or I would buy online and how we think about it, but the numbers are much greater. Again, that inverse bell curve of needing to find the best price for instance.

Ryan:
Yeah. I would say the fact that they are more likely to leave a review also means if you don’t take care of them, the Better Business Bureau is going to get a bad review. Yelp is going to get a bad review. There will be multiple bad reviews. I see this-

Jon:
They have the time to do it.

Ryan:
We have a client that does accessories and aftermarket things in RVs, and they’re generally targeting the active agers. This is a report I’m going to send over obviously, but their negative reviews are a small portion of their overall sales, but it is a large portion of their overall reviews. It is like all kinds of terrible. This particular business owner likes being right rather than keeping customers happy, which is something we’ve had to talk to him about because he’ll have debates on… You can go to Better Business Bureau and see the debate happening and you’re like, oh my gosh, this was a $200 product. Who cares? Move on. Your business is doing millions of dollars.
This could have been so easy if you just be like, “Fine. You’re right. Yeah. Uh-huh.” But all that to say, expectation setting so that you don’t get in a position of a bad review, or if there is something wrong, just eat it and make it right because the upside of a positive review or the word of mouth in that group of people is so much greater just by who they are and how they’ve done it in the past.

Jon:
100%.

Ryan:
No ego.

Jon:
Yeah. You’re fighting a battle you’re not going to win. That’s hilarious about the example you share though. It’s always the brands that are never wrong that end up having more issues.

Ryan:
Oh, man, you got to get rid of your ego in the e-commerce space. The customer may not always be right, but online, you let them know they are and just eat it because it’ll be better long term. I learned a lot. Hopefully, our listeners did as well. If our listeners want to see the data for themselves and dive deep into this document that took so long to do, but also has great insights, where do they get that?

Jon:
Just go to ageofmajority.com and it’s right there on the homepage right now. You can quickly download it. Unfortunately, if you are an active ager, you do have to give your email address to get the report, but I promise that nobody’s going to spam you. The reality here is, yeah, it did take a year to put this together and there’s some great information in here, a dozen or so pages just packed with data. I know our team at The Good has really taken this and altered how we’re doing a few things based on this data and that’s why we got it. I know that Jeff and the team at Age of Majority are using this to alter how they’re marketing to this audience. Excited about this. Proud of it, and hopefully, people get some value out of it.

Ryan:
Yeah. I’m excited for you. Thanks for doing that, Jon, and thanks for enlightening me.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 061): How Active Agers Shop Online (And How To Connect With Them) appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

Soon enough, Google will be launching its new Performance Max campaign option. The addition has received mixed reviews from agencies and in-house teams alike, but ad managers will need to find a way to adjust their strategies in this new environment.

In this episode, Ryan and Jon provide a detailed overview of what Performance Max offers, how it fits into the existing set of tools and tech and what acquisition teams should be doing to prepare for the upcoming launch.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. What is performance max in Google Ads and why you should take it seriously
2. How it is different from the existing toolset, and what that means for your campaigns
3. What advertisers need to be doing to prepare and take advantage of this new feature
4. Informed predictions about the long-term impact of Performance Max

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, hit us up on Twitter. We’re @jonmacdonald and @ryangarrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon:
So, Ryan, welcome. I’m glad to be chatting with you. It’s been a while. I think-

Ryan:
It’s been too long.

Jon:
It’s been too long. We haven’t done anything since we connected for the event with the eCommerce, I guess it was a high level … VPs, CEOs, things of that sort in Bend, Oregon when we did a little mini conference there.

Ryan:
Yeah. We went and drank probably too much wine and ate s’mores out of at Brasada. It was great.

Jon:
So for people who haven’t attended any of the logical position events, Ryan has a way of agreeing to a catering contract that’s always more than what we can finish. So we end up having to order, I don’t know, the most expensive wine on the list in order to meet our minimums, because it’s going to go away anyways. So, that’s always fun. And I do appreciate that. And so we had a good time

Ryan:
And this time Troy had to pay, so it was even better.

Jon:
That’s true. That’s true. Well, I enjoyed that event. Got some great feedback on it and I hope we get to do more of those soon. Love the smaller intimate conversations and dinners. I think that stuff is where it’s at now.
So, today we’re going to talk about winning with automation and more specifically, Google’s Performance Max, I believe, in the context of that. So I know very little about Performance Max. Although you tell me it is coming whether we like it or not, which makes me scared quite frankly, when people say that, because I’m like, I don’t know if I want it or not, but when you put it that way, you make it-

Ryan:
I hate being forced into things. I always want options, but Google’s fast taking away options.

Jon:
Well, there we go. So I’m interested to learn more about this, but my understanding is the agencies and companies that have relied on these manual approaches over the years to driving traffic from Google, well, they’re going to need to change a few things and rethink this.
So let’s just start high level. I always like starting high level with you because you bring something new to the table I know nothing about, so educate me on what is Performance Max and why does it matter? Let’s just start there.

Ryan:
Performance Max, it’s something I’ve generally pushed back a lot over the years with Google and I like control. You can ask my wife, I am a control freak, my core. I like to know exactly what’s happening, and when I do this, this happens. Google does not like that when it’s not them. And so Google’s also a control freak, and they want to control everything. So which is fine, it’s their platform.
So if you’re listening to this, you probably understand Google a little bit and you’ve been familiarizing yourself with Smart Shopping campaigns. Smart Shopping is generally Google saying, hey, give us all your products. We will put them on Google based on the goal you give us and we’ll also do some remarketing for you as well.
You don’t get to see search queries. There’s a lot of differences with standard shopping campaigns that I haven’t liked, but for a lot of our clients at LP, they’ve been working fairly well. Now, we had to put some parameters in place, put some segmentation and get a little more granular, but we can get performance out of them pretty good.
So the next version of Smart Shopping is what Google’s referring to is profit max, or not profit max, Performance Max. I wish it was profit max, maybe they should have called it that.

Jon:
Well, that’s probably how they’re going to sell it.

Ryan:
Yeah, exactly. But it sounds awesome. I mean Performance Max, I mean all the words Google’s using to describe things are great. I mean, they’ve got a good marketing team. Smart Shopping. Well, I want to be smart so I’m going to use Smart Shopping.
So Performance Max takes that shopping and adds a few layers on top of it. So Smart Shopping has been pretty good at bottom of funnel traffic. We’ve seen a lot of good things, for example, in the automotive space where there’s a lot of product number searches or really long tail, very specific, I have this exact car, I need this exact product to fit that. And there’s generally lower search volume there, and Smart Shopping’s been phenomenal doing that and then engaging remarketing on the layer above that.
So profit max says, all right, we’re doing good at that. We’re going to keep that. And then we’re going to add on display prospecting type things, we’re filling the top of the funnel, and we’re going to leverage YouTube because there’s a lot of excess inventory available on YouTube. And we’re going to create video ads for you, for example.
And so it’s same basic structure that you throw your products in there and give it a goal and it goes off and does this stuff, and you get to see traffic come to the site and hopefully money print out from the site.

Jon:
So they’re replacing Smart Shopping with this. Is that accurate?

Ryan:
Yes. So Smart Shopping will be going away and the campaigns will be … Google’s supposed to have a migration tool coming out that says, “Hey, use this to convert your Smart Shopping campaigns into Performance Max.” And it’s been delayed a couple times. I think it’s supposed to come out in July as of now, maybe August, it might have been delayed till August now.
We internally keep hoping it’s pushed back again and again, until we get to put, for example, some negative keywords in or see some queries, have some semblance of some control.

Jon:
I mean, let’s just play the advocate here. I’m the brand, I’m upset that they’re going to create video ads for me. Really?That I’m a brand who’s spending hundreds of thousands on Google and Google gets to just go and create a video ad for me? What if I don’t want to be on YouTube?

Ryan:
At this point, you don’t have a choice. And so you have to give Google the right assets and hope they create something that’s appropriate and that you can keep yourself off inappropriate videos. If you are taking a stance on a cultural issue as a company, you might not want your video being shown on something that is directly or right against that stance, and moving into Performance Max, you won’t be able to do those types of things.
And my hypothesis is that some of the things Google’s trying to figure out is they’ve rolled this out to brands already and probably heard or seen some of that feedback. But a little secret of Google in theory is that if you don’t give people access to see where their ads are showing or the search queries, they’d have to see it in the wild to be able to catch it. And they might be betting against you being able to see it in the wild.

Jon:
Yeah. That’s fair. To me, that sounds like a negative, but there’s got to be some good in this, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it because people would just stop advertising with them.

Ryan:
True. And so Smart Shopping adoption has probably not been as quick as Google wanted it as a whole, but it’s been adopted and it’s, in many cases, performing okay. And I think that a lot of the pushback against those things has been probably twofold. Agencies a lot of times maybe like Logical Position that have been doing a lot of manual work and take a lot of pride in being able to drive results from that manual work and offer a lot of insights into what’s happening and let their clients know where they can pivot or grow.
And then also internal teams at companies that are really wanting to show that they have value or providing a lot of that. If you’ve been doing paid search for 15 years, you’re used to being in the minutiae of search query reports and showing that value to your organization. If that’s gone, then you may cease to have as much value to that organization. If they can run a Smart Shopping campaign at the same level you were before and you don’t have to be there and you’re not a cost anymore. But I can see some arguments in where there may need to be less humans managing paid search campaigns. And so there’s obvious pushback around that just fo are being able to have job security.

Jon:
So what does an advertiser need to be doing then in this new world of Google? That is unfortunate. And I have one question before we jump into that though, this is really replacing Smart Shopping. So I could still go to Google and just run a campaign on AdWords, essentially?

Ryan:
Yeah, you can. Text ads are going to be not part of this. So you can still run general text ads. You basically just go and give Google a goal for your performance match, whether you’re going to be looking for leads or looking for sales, what type of goal you look at, you look for a cost per acquisition or do you look for a return on ad spend goal? There’s some protections in there in places you go set these campaigns that’ll allow people to still do many of the same things.

Jon:
And if I want to go to YouTube, I can still just go advertise only on YouTube. I don’t have to use Performance Max, right?

Ryan:
Yes. You can still do ad-only creative. I mean, Google wants to fill inventory, so they’re not going to take away people’s ability to advertise there. What they want to do is generally continue to increase the cost of that.

Jon:
So in theory, your team could cobble together almost like they’ve been doing today where they say, “We’re going to run a discrete campaign in each of these channels that Google’s offers. And then we don’t have to worry about being part of the Performance Max.” Is that accurate?

Ryan:
Yes. But Google has done a pretty good job of keeping certain ad positions or ad types available exclusively to these campaigns. We’re going to creating Performance Max, so we’re going to keep some … Gmail is part of the Performance Max. You can’t run Gmail ads anymore, but on Performance Max, you can get in there. And so there’s benefits to it.
So a lot of companies are going to be more or less forced into using it at some point. And so I think that’s what a lot of companies have to come to accept. Fighting Google can only get you so far. They’ve got a lot of very, very smart people. And so you can either fight against this engine or figure out how your company can operate within what Google’s doing, because that’s generally where you’re going to find the most growth. You’re always going to be able to fight against it to a degree, but if you find that you can’t make Google work the way you want it to, because you’ve been doing it this way for a long time. Great. Go work on Bing and see how big your business grows. It’s just, there’s not enough search volume on Bing to grow your business probably.

Jon:
Sorry. That had me cracking up.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, the podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, the digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes.
If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon:
So we’ve talked a little bit about this, but I feel like this comes back to the line we hear you say quite often, which is set better goals.

Ryan:
If there’s one thing I’m standing on regularly, it’s probably that most e-commerce businesses have bad goals. And so that’s part of what you have to think of when you’re looking at all of this AI and automation that’s in place for marketing, is if you’re giving these systems bad information or bad goals, they’re going to struggle to do things.
If you’ve got 20 people advertising or 20 companies advertising on a product, and in Google shopping, we can see when you go into Google shopping in the shopping tab, it’ll say that there’s 10 or more advertisers that have this product and there’s one primary one at the beginning. So, hey, there’s 20 companies advertising for this. Well, if all the companies are using Performance Max and you’re the only company that sets some crazy goal, like every dollar I spend needs to generate $15 of revenue and all the other 19 advertisers have said, Google give us $5 for every dollar we spend.
You’re not going to get any traffic. I mean, it’s just, you got to think about algorithms almost being lazy and saying, hey, they’re going to go for the easy money or easy revenue. And if you’re giving a goal that doesn’t make any sense, best of luck to you. So it’s understanding what Google’s role in your marketing ecosystem is.
I think still, I mean, I talked to, I don’t know how many hundreds of businesses regularly every month that still, I come across business owners that are like, “I need Google to provide a profit or I’m not happy.” I was like, “Well, I think Google engineers are smarter than your engineers and they’re going to get more money than you with their goals.” And so making sure that you’re looking at Google as a customer acquisition tool, not as something that I’m going to go put money in and try to print profit out.
That’s what your business as a whole needs to do. Obviously, you run business for profit. There’s only so many years you can take tax deductions on businesses anyway. So you want profit, take care of your family, take care of employees. But Google is generally … Google ads, at least, is generally not the best place for profit. And so set appropriate goals for your business that allow it to scale and allow the algorithm to go out and do more. Well, generally the business that can be more aggressive with their goals will thrive on Google more.

Jon:
So you want to have almost a set of goals specifically for Performance Max. Because your overall goal may be to have a 15X ROAS, but you know if you say 15 ROAS in the settings, you’re not going to get traffic. So maybe if you’re looking at customer acquisition, you set that to one and you just say, just give me one to one, and I’m okay with this. And Google will show you more often than anyone else. And you’ll get your ad spend in. I guess it becomes a relevance issue of who the market that sees the ad. But at the same time, is that better than nobody seeing your ad? So there’s a lot to consider here.

Ryan:
There is. And I think there’s going to be a lot of testing and measuring for brands as they start to see, as I play with that goal and let the system do some work, what’s my site doing? What am I seeing in analytics? Am I seeing people coming back to my site, am I seeing brand traffic increase?
If you’re running Performance Max, you should for sure see, or have, a brand campaign and text ads to see how many people are searching for you. Because if you are filling the top of funnel, in theory, more people should be searching further down the funnel for your brand in a month or two as they started the process of looking for your product or service.

Jon:
So what do you think this is going to result in? I mean, this is a big move by Google. There’s a lot of negatives that I’m hearing, maybe some positives, but definitely weighed heavier on the negative.

Ryan:
Nobody likes change. So I mean, there’s going to be change and it’s not the most fun. I mean, if you’re really good at something and then it changes the rules. If your free throw line moved back five feet, that would just be annoying.

Jon:
That definitely would be annoying.

Ryan:
Especially with a bad shoulder. So there’s going to be certain things that are more important, like feeds. Feeds have become more and more important over the last few years. But when your feed is controlling a lot more things within the Google ecosystem, if your feed going into the merchant center is … like Shopify, for example, has a great integration right into the merchant center, takes your products, pushes them right into the merchant center. You can start advertising.
Good. It’s not bad. But many times what you put on your website is not what you want to have in the merchant center. The title on your site might be good for when somebody’s already at your site, but if you’re bringing them to the site and they’ve never seen or heard from you before, you might need a different title there, you might need different images at the top.
I mean, there’s a lot of optimization that needs to happen within a feed to start getting these to work better. And I think you’re also going to need a lot more holistic brand strategy to understand where these campaigns fit in the process of, I’ve never heard of you, now I’ve heard of you. I’d like to buy, I’m considering buying. Let’s buy. I mean, it’s not a, 15 years ago there was a lot of clicking and buying. Like my wife’s attribution, I think I made fun of in a few public speeches where it’s basically a bowl of spaghetti where you’re trying to track my wife and how she came to finally buy something on your site. You’re not going to do that. But getting some of that clarity in play will be helpful.
So a lot more strategy from agencies or internal teams. Reporting is probably going to be way more important. How can you tell the story? It’s something we tried to focus on a few years ago and I still don’t think we’re great at it yet, but it’s being something we’re forced to do more, is you can’t just report spend and revenue. It’s more of an, all right, what’s the story of what’s happening within this campaign and how your brand is growing online?
And the punchline, I think, to a lot of this is the rich are going to get richer. And I’m not talking about Google necessarily. I mean, they’re going to get their money regardless, but it’s more about brands that have a lot more data, a lot more of that first party data. They have audiences they can leverage on Google that the Performance Max campaigns will take advantage of, that have conversion data that the system can optimize off of, those companies will be able to grow a lot more efficiently with all of this data that Google has.
So if you’re going to start something in two years, I don’t know how you would do that on Google, because your site will have no data. You’ll have no sales data for that. So if you’re jumping into a vertical where other people are already selling, pretend you’re a retailer, you’re like, man, I’m just really passionate about product X and all of the things that go … Like barbecue. There’s a big barbecue retailer by my house and I love cooking meat and smoking meat. Most people are not starting up their own brand of grill or smoke, you’re reselling somebody else’s. So I feel like, I’d really love to get into that in a couple years. I save my money. I get the location. I got to get online to get people to come. You have nothing. Google doesn’t know you from anybody, and you can’t put the products on there and say, I’m selling everything everybody else is, because Google doesn’t know how your site performs. So what searches will work for you?
Whereas, if I’m starting right now and I already have a few years worth of data on Google analytics and they see all of the products I have, they know exactly how they convert on my site. I can set the appropriate goal. You are light years ahead of somebody that’s going to try to compete with you in two years. And that’s a frustration of mine because I like how we can set businesses up or start businesses now and compete. And it comes down to just, hey, if your marketing’s better, you’ve got a chance. But now when the marketing is kind of like taken out of the equation and it’s just, if everybody has the same feed, they have the same goals, it’s unfortunately looks like it’s going to become more like the socialist world of marketing online.

Jon:
Where consolidation’s happening.

Ryan:
Yeah. And it hasn’t been that way before. And I think we’re very quickly approaching that because it’s just made logical sense to Google as they’re building this up, that, hey, if we put this automation in place, we take out the risks of a small business being able to push the buttons to get on here. So it’s very easy to do, but it’s also, well, now you’ve …
I’ve looked at actually in this space where on Google, you can own multiple businesses in the same vertical or industry and have all of them advertise at the same time on the same keyword. As long as the sites are different, the content’s different, you can do it legally. You can’t duplicate your site to Jon MacDonald one, Jon MacDonald two and have the same exact content, the same ads just to take up two spots. Google will flag you for that.
But if you go buy a competitor site and now you own two individual sites that all roll up into one owner, Jon McaDonald, Google’s fine with that. They were two advertisers before. There’s still two advertisers. Good to go.
So in theory, if you go out and buy two or three competitors, you can monopolize Google if you are aggressive enough at the beginning that nobody’s going to be able to break through that stranglehold you have with four or five large retailers in the same space, or large sellers. So I want to go roll up companies and buy my competitors now. Maybe after this year, because they’re all going to be down this year.

Jon:
I was just going to say, you might want to put the breaks on that for a few months. Valuations will come down from the moon to something more reasonable. Awesome. Anything else you want to add on this topic? This is fascinating. I learned a lot today.

Ryan:
Well, we still have hope that we’re going to get a little bit of control. Because it’s not being forced out yet, I haven’t given up all hope that we’ll get some control around PM ads and negative keywords and things that you can do now. Even at Smart Shopping, technically Google says, “Don’t add negative keywords or you can’t see queries,” but if you have a Google team, you can have them add negative keywords to it and actually do some cool stuff with it.
And text ads. I think those largely get ignored. In fact, I talked to a large advertiser today, spends well over 40 grand a month and they run a single Smart Shopping campaign and a DSA campaign. And so they let Google basically do everything. And I’m like, well the DSA campaign, which is a dynamic search ad, just captured your brand terms. And that was 95% of the revenue on your site. So it’s not doing a good job at finding new people that don’t know you yet.
And I think that’s still going to be an important thing, is the text ads still get a high click-through rate versus shopping ads. And I think overall, somebody that understands the ecosystem and can test and measure and pivot quickly once they see data will always stay important. But I think it’s going to become a larger component of a successful strategy than it is now where, hey, I can do some certain things and ads and tweak some things here and there and bids. But if you don’t understand the strategy piece, then you’re going to struggle.

Jon:
Well, it definitely makes sense. And man, I’ll tell you what, I’m glad I’m not an ecom business right now. There are so many battles to be fought. It’s like whackamole, things are popping up left and right. I’m glad that you’re here to keep everybody informed and educate me as well, as I’m having conversations with these folks and know the head space they’re in. So I appreciate it, Ryan. This has been-

Ryan:
Thank you, Jon.

Jon:
… enlightening as always.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 060): How To Win With Automation appeared first on The Good.

You must master the demonstration and communicate how your solution helps your customers manage questions and concerns related to your products, bolster their interest in your product and solidify their decision to buy from you. Without this skill, you’re losing out on leads and (worst of all) sales.

In this article, we’ll review: 

• What product demonstrations are and why you should use them
• Common questions about product demonstrations
• The types of product demonstrations 
• How successful SaaS and ecommerce companies use product demonstrations in their sales strategy

What is a product demonstration? 

A product demo is a sales presentation to prospective customers on your product’s core functionality in hopes of closing a sale. Product demonstration occurs in the middle of the sales funnel in the consideration stage after qualifying a lead. Once you determine where your leads are in the funnel, you can set up a product demonstration. 

What are sales demos, and are they the same as product demos? 

Product demonstrations are also called sales demonstrations, sales demos, SaaS demos, or simply “demos.” Hubspot differentiates between product and sales demonstrations, saying that sales demos provide demonstrations to prospects, whereas product demos provide demonstrations to current customers.

However, thought leaders in the SaaS industry like Jacco van der Kooji consider them to be the same. In this article, we don’t differentiate between the two terms.

What are the different types of product demonstrations?

Product demonstrations can be live or recorded, delivered in person or through a digital medium, and given to one lead or to many at once. Several product demonstration methods convince your prospects to buy from you that you could be using today. They are: 

• Product demonstration videos. These illustrate how your product functions and to help prospective and existing customers obtain relevant information to make a purchase decision. 
• Store demonstrations. These demonstrations allow brands to showcase and promote products in-person to encourage immediate sales. 
• Trade show product demonstrations. Just like in-store product demos, these allow brands to demonstrate products in real-time and allow sales reps to connect with prospective customers directly. 

Why is product demonstration important?

Product demonstration is your chance to show potential customers why your product solves their problems. 

Here are several additional product demonstration benefits: 

Speeding up the purchasing process

Signing up for free trials or calling your sales team takes time and time is of the essence when persuading your leads to buy from you. Three-quarters of leads complete a sale within an hour of visiting your website, so you need to demonstrate the value of your product fast. 

Product demonstrations are no-commitment, no sign-up solutions that save time for your leads. In just a few minutes, they can see how your product can solve their specific problem, and that’s worth a lot more than another sales pitch. 

Allaying customer fears

According to Gerald Zaltman, a Harvard Business School professor, humans make 95% of their purchasing decisions subconsciously, meaning you must achieve a positive experience with your prospect. One way to do that is by talking directly to their pain points. 

When giving live product demonstrations, leads have the opportunity to ask questions and offer product-related concerns.

They provide a rare opportunity to address your prospect’s main problems and offer potential customers a chance to see the product in action and experience how it works. This can be the deciding factor in whether or not they make a purchase. 

Giving customers a sense of buying power

Customers don’t want to be forced into a sale; they want to be inspired into a purchase. Product demonstrations put the decision-making in the hands of the customer. 

When customers see a product in action, they can imagine themselves using it, becoming the one in control of the product. Vividly imagining how your future would be better after purchasing the product can be a persuasive sales technique, which is why the test drive is the foundation of car salesmanship. 

Enabling your sales team

Your best weapon for successful product demonstrations is: your salespeople. Your salespeople are highly-skilled professionals who know how to use the product to its best advantage and as a result, know how to sell it. A product demonstration is an excellent way for your sales team to seal the deal with prospective clients.

What should a product demonstration include?

A product demonstration must give prospects a clear idea of what the product does and how to use it.

To this end, your demo should be well-organized and concise, covering the most important points in only a few minutes. 

The demo must be visually engaging, with clear imagery and an appealing design. But, of course, aesthetics and presentation are only part of the equation–the product itself must be compelling and offer value to potential customers. 

What are the steps involved in a product demonstration?

There are several steps involved in creating a compelling product demonstration.

Choose the right format for your audience

Product demonstrations done right are a powerful marketing tool; done wrong and you lose out on potential sales. The first consideration is choosing the correct format. 

Will you demonstrate in-person, through a video, or live stream? Each option has its own advantages and disadvantages. 

In-person demonstrations allow you to build rapport with potential customers and answer their questions directly. However, they can be logistically challenging to coordinate unless you have your own storefront. 

Video demonstrations can be watched easily by a wider audience but lack the personal touch of an in-person demonstration. 

Live streams offer the best of both worlds, allowing you to interact directly with viewers while reaching a large audience. 

Ultimately, the best format depends on your specific product and goals. You can ensure a successful product demonstration by taking the time to choose a suitable format. 

Plan ahead

Without preparation, your meeting will fall flat. You must tailor your demo to the audience you’re addressing, which means understanding their company, values, challenges, goals, and any additional helpful information. Identify at least 2-3 value propositions for your prospect.

Research who you’re meeting with, what role they have in the company, and cater your demonstration to how your solution addresses their needs and helps them meet their goals. 

Establish a schedule

No one wants to go into a meeting without knowing what to expect, so don’t do this to your prospect. Instead, send all demo participants the presentation agenda in advance through email.

If you’re giving a live stream or in-person presentation, create social media posts in the week leading up to rev up your audience. 

Include the demonstration’s run time as well as an outline of the meeting. This way, you won’t waste your prospect’s time or yours.

Allot time for questions

After you present your demonstration, allow time for questions. This way you can address any questions or concerns your prospects have. Then, ask your prospects questions about their goals, and current problems, and follow this up with ways your product’s features can help your prospect meet these goals and solve problems. 

Questions might look like:

• “What is the top challenge you’re facing with your current solution provider?”
• “Your goals are A, B, C, has your current solution helped you attain these goals?”

Then, you can take the answers to these questions and follow them up by describing how your product’s value proposition solves their problems and helps them achieve their primary goal.

For example, you can say, “You mentioned A, B, C, are your goals. Here’s how our product helps you meet these and how you can achieve X result.”

Then, provide the prospect with further explanation for why the offered functionality is valuable. 

Clarify the next steps

Once you finish your demonstration, ensure you have your prospect’s contact information, preferably email so that you can follow up in the next few days. 

Send an email with details about what you discussed in your demo and remind your prospect of the unique value proposition your product provides for them. 

You’ll move your prospect further down the sales funnel if all goes well. Integrate product demonstrations into your strategy to help increase conversions. 

What are the qualities of great product demos?

Good product demos take your potential customers on a journey. 

1. First, you introduce the product. 
2. Then, you inform your prospects of its value proposition.
3. Last, you persuade your prospects to act. 

However, all three are pointless if you don’t convince your prospect that your product can solve their problems. 

5 Stealable SaaS, B2B, and Ecommerce Examples of Effective Product Demonstrations 

With the product demonstration basics down, we’ll examine compelling product demonstrations from different brands. 

Once you see the principles of effective product demonstrations in action, you’ll be ready to prepare your own. 

1. The Interactive Product Demonstration: cPanel, a B2B company

cPanel is a web hosting control panel software providing website management and automation tools. Their demo is a classic example of a practical product demonstration. Here’s why: 

• There’s no sign-up required to try it out. Prospects can interact with the demo immediately.
• What you see is what you get: the demo is exactly what a paid user’s control panel would like. 
• Prospects can play around with the demo, testing out email forwarding, adding files to the public_html folder, and more.

cPanel provides a real-time, fully immersive customer experience without any gimmicks or marketing. 

This works because it puts your product directly in the hands of the consumer, allowing them to imagine themselves using the product as if it were their own installation. There’s no guesswork for the prospect. All of their answers lie in the demonstration. 

2. The Product Tour CTA: Marketo, a SaaS company

As soon as you land on Marketo’s landing page, you’re greeted with a CTA button for their interactive product tour. 

This CTA does two things:

1. It takes the user directly to the product video demonstration.
2. Once users land on the page, it immediately asks for their contact information.

This clever exchange gives both Marketo and the prospect what they want: Marketo can collect the lead’s contact information to follow up, and the prospect can view the product tour video. 

Although it isn’t the only strategy, it is one of the best strategies since collecting lead data presents logistical challenges if you don’t have a plan in place. Put your CTA too low, and your customers may leave your site before they see it; leave your CTA out entirely, and you risk never gathering any lead information. 

Once a lead types in their contact info, they land on the product video demonstration page:

Marketo’s video walks users through common problems marketers face, use-cases, and its best features. Once viewers finish this quick three-minute video, users can scroll down to view additional use cases.

This allows potential customers to choose the video most relevant to their use case to see the product in action. 

3. The Demo Webinar: LeadDyno, a SaaS company

LeadDyno is a leading affiliate software program allowing users to manage and track their affiliate marketing efforts. On their demo page, LeadDyno offers prospects an option. 

1. They can join a live webinar.
2. They can view three different videos showcasing LeadDyno’s features: a high-level overview, the affiliate dashboard, and the affiliate website. 

This is great because users can choose the demonstration method they prefer. 

If users opt for the live webinar, they have the chance to ask questions about how LeadDyno’s software can solve their problems. And you have the chance to answer any questions your prospect may have. Offering a live webinar is a perfect chance to get to know your customers and build trust, a leading purchasing factor for customers. 

Users who opt for the video walkthrough get a quick overview of how the product works (and if they still have questions, they have the option to sign up for a live webinar).

In addition, webinars provide an opportunity to showcase your product or service and drive more interest from potential customers.

4. The Detailed Product Demonstration Video: Patagonia, an ecommerce company

Patagonia is a leader in sustainable outerwear. They use product demonstrations in two ways. 

The first way is through imagery. On their product pages, they show models of varying heights and sizes so customers can compare sizes and visualize themselves in the clothes.

Not every man who orders this jacket will be 6’0” and wear a size medium, so they cover their bases by comparing it to another model wearing a larger size than the first.

Then, they include a video of another model wearing the jacket and turning around to give customers a 360 view of what the jacket looks like when worn. This way, customers don’t need to use their imagination. The jacket is right before their eyes so they can see what it will look like when they wear it. 

5. The Traditional Product Video Demonstration: Solo Stove, an ecommerce company

Solo Stove sells stainless steel wood-burning stoves for campers. 

This is a quintessential example of a product demonstration video. It has all of the qualities of an effective demonstration: 

• It gives prospects a clear idea of what the product does and how to use it: while explaining Solo Stove’s main features, they show scenes of different people in their target demographic (campers) using the product. 
• It’s well-organized and concise: In only 2 minutes, it explains what Solo Stove is and what it does as well as who uses it. 
• They show videos of actual customers using them as social proof to build trust. 
• They introduce a problem and follow it up with a solution: spending time with our loved ones is becoming more difficult so here’s how Solo Stove solves this problem.

They also use a lifestyle showcase technique where customers visualize themselves in the video, with their loved ones, using the product. They’re saying Solo Stove isn’t only a product, it’s a lifestyle and if you use our product, you can have this lifestyle too. 

You can use this technique with your products, showcasing your products in a demonstration video as a part of the natural environment. For example, if you’re a makeup company, you can create a video showing various individuals wearing your makeup in different environments. Or if you’re a clothing brand, show individuals in different situations wearing your clothes. 

Show customers what it’s like to experience your product so they can’t imagine a life without it. 

Winning with product demos

Product demonstrations are an effective sales tool, moving leads through your sales funnel and closer to a purchase. If you can master the demonstration and communicate how your solution solves your lead’s problems, you will likely close the sale. 

If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe to our newsletter!

The post Product Demonstrations: Your Secret Weapon to Convincing Leads to Buy appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

A lot of CRO firms try to close a deal with an ecommerce brand by promising them that they will run “hundreds of tests,” sometimes over the course of just a few weeks! While that sounds like a great bang for your buck on the front end, it’s probably not the best option for your company long-term.

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about the perils of high volume or high velocity testing programs. They also revisit the concept of “rapid testing,” including why it’s a different (and better) approach than programs built entirely on volume of tests.

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why, when it comes to testing and optimization, more doesn’t always equal better
2. What risks come along with high volume and high velocity testing
3. How to know the difference between a good deal and a “too good to be true” deal
4. How “rapid testing” is a similar, but better approach to optimizing your site

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, hit us up on Twitter. We’re @jonmacdonald and @ryangarrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Ryan:
Jon, I get these clients to talk to me about CRO and optimizing their conversion rate. They talk to us about companies they’re talking to, and so I get some insight into some of your competitors. A recent one came to me and was like, “Well, we’re looking at… Look at the CRO company, we’re talking to them. They are trying to get us to do all these tests at the same time, like tons of them.” They’ve kind of touched on something, like we’re going to test this page, this page, this page, we’re going to test these things on this page, probably hundreds of them at the same time.
This site was not, by any means, millions upon millions of monthly visitors a month. It was pretty standard e-comm site doing, I don’t know, 40, 50,000 a month in traffic. I kind of like the idea, hypothetically, since I tend to be aggressive and I’m like, “Let’s just blast all these tests really quick, learn as quick as we can. Go fast, break things.” My typical mantra.

Jon:
Yeah. I’m over here in pain.

Ryan:
Yeah, I’m sure you are. Thankfully I didn’t tell them that. I was like, “You know what? You should probably talk to Jon. It doesn’t sound like you’ve got enough…” My initial reaction was like, “I don’t even have enough traffic to do that. If somebody thinks you can be, they’re probably smarter than I am on conversion optimization.” I would hypothesize that there’s some risks to doing hundreds of tests all at once on a site. I would love to get some of your feedback on… I guess a couple of questions would be like, why would a company tell somebody that? Then, is there any validity? It sounds really different and I guess conceptually cool, but what’s going on there?

Jon:
Well, I think you just answered the question of why brands tell leads, if you will, or companies they want to work with this, right? Because to folks who like to move fast and break things, which is most entrepreneurs, it sounds great. Right?

Ryan:
Except for you. You’ve gotten through the go fast, break things phase, it feels like, and you’re much more just relaxed. I’m like, “Gosh, I want to be Jon when I grow up sometime.”

Jon:
Well, I mean, look, today is actually our 13th anniversary of The Good.

Ryan:
Oh that’s awesome. Congrats.

Jon:
It took a lot of years, a decade plus, right, to get to that level of acceptance, if you will. I don’t know if it’s calm, but I would say acceptance. There’s always going to be a storm brewing and you just go with the flow. When brands come to us, I hear the same thing. Well, how many tests are you going to run? Because I could go over here and get hundreds of tests run.
It’s like, “Well, you could, I guess, but are you going to actually get anything out of that?” The answer is probably no. In 99.99% of cases, it’s no. Now, who’s running hundreds of tests? Let’s just set the benchmark. Amazon, Walmart, Nike, are you any of those brands? Probably not. If any of those brands are listening to this, please give me a call. Would love to work with you more.

Ryan:
Yeah. I want to work with you. Like, “Hey, Nike, Amazon, come see me.”

Jon:
Yeah. We’ve worked with Nike in the past and they have a whole team doing optimization, right? The reality here is 99% of brands are not the brands that can really truly run lots and lots and lots of testing, as good as that sounds. You really need to be informed and measured with your testing, and that’s how you’re going to see results. At The Good, what are we experts at? We’re not experts at building or running tests. Anybody can do that. You can go get a Google optimized account and set up a test and run it.
You can do that with a train yourself in a couple hours on how to set up and run a test. Now, that doesn’t mean that you’re going to run the right test. That’s where we come in is analyzing the data and helping brands to understand what they should be testing for the highest impact. Right? Could we go through and test hundreds of things? Yeah, of course, we could come up with hundreds of test ideas, but the vast majority of those aren’t going to move the needle. They’re just inconsequential or, for the most part, there’s other challenges that are there too. I’m sure we’ll talk about those.

Ryan:
Got it. Okay. It’s, yes, you’re probably going to get to a lot of those tests. Well, potentially, but at least with somebody like you or your team looking at it, you’re going to be able to say, “Yeah, that’s kind of a cute test, but this one we think is going to move the needle the most across all of your channels. It’s not going to be testing red versus blue checkout buttons.”

Jon:
Right? Yeah. That’s where we are experts in helping to bring the voice of the consumer to the brand and help brands understand what challenges their consumers are having at each step of the funnel. Right? That helps inform what the test should be. I just today got an email from somebody who is an aspiring conversion strategist, works at a generalist digital marketing firm right now, is their only conversion strategist. He’s been applying apparently to work at other CRO focused agencies like The Good.
He wrote me an email and he said, “Hey, I really loved your email newsletter article you sent out this week because I just interviewed at a firm. They asked me to do a test, like a pre-qualification exam, if you will, whatever. The activity was to put a testing plan together, and all they gave me was analytics data.” They said, “Based on this analytics data, form five tests you would run for this brand.”
He said, “Based on all the training that I’ve done and all of my experience, I told him, I would never do this for you. Instead, I would want to run user testing, talk to consumers and then look at the data.” He said, “So without that, I can’t put five tests together.” He’s like, “I honestly thought it was a trick question.” I was like, “Let me introduce you to our director of client services, who is looking for a new strategist [inaudible 00:06:07].” Because that is exactly the type of answer that I would want in an interview to hear.
It goes to show you that a lot of people out there who are, you can’t really see in air quotes right now, doing CRO, they’re misguided. They’re offering what they think the brands that they’re selling to want, which is just A/B testing. They say, “Oh, well, we’ll do hundreds of those for you.” Business owners like yourselves who are move fast, break things, love that. It sounds great to them, like, “Yeah, I’m going to learn a lot. I’m going to move really quickly. We’re going to get this done.”
Then, they call us and they say, “Okay, well…” And I’m like, “Well, how much traffic do you have? Honestly, you shouldn’t run more than four or five concurrent tests.” They’re like, “Wow, how are we actually going to get a return on that?” It’s like because I’m testing the highest impact items and we’re going to solve those within a monthly cycle where if you’re running hundreds of tests, you’re not going to be able to do that.

Ryan:
It’s almost like, if I can oversimplify, it sounds like if somebody is just looking at analytics and they haven’t done anything on your site or understand your user at all, and they have, “Hey, here’s the hundred tests we run out of the box,” run for the hills. You don’t want that. I mean maybe it would help with what we have affectionately referred to as CRI. Yeah, you might get some improvements, but it’s not optimization. Some of those improvements might be accidental.

Jon:
Well, and those improvements should just be made. I mean think about a test. Should you actually run a test or should you just make the change?

Ryan:
Yeah, it’s true. If you have no product recommendations on a PDP page, you probably don’t need an A/B test for that. Let’s just put it out there, because we know that once people click those, conversion rates increase on the site anyway. That’s pretty basic data.

Jon:
Yeah.

Ryan:
Okay. What’s the big risk of somebody executing this and saying, “Yeah, we’re going to test a hundred tests all at one time?” What’s going to happen to them in reality?

Jon:
Well, I think there’s three things that always come to mind for me on this. The first is that it’s going to take much longer when you’re splitting the traffic in so many ways to prove out what test is a winner, what variant is a winner, right? Without getting too deep into the math, let’s say you have a hundred people coming to your site, you’re going to split those into segments, so like groups. You’re going to say, “Okay, everybody, I want to run a test that is specifically targeting people who have been to the site before.” Right? Then, you’re able to via Google Analytics know who’s been to the site before within the last seven to 14 days.
That would indicate that somebody’s at the next step in the buyer journey because they’re doing their research. They were at your site, then they went to look at other options, now they’re coming back, right? We want to run a test against that audience, but it’s going to be impossible to reach that statistical significance on the test against that group if you’re running a ton of tests that you need to keep that traffic separate, right?
You only have a hundred visitors and you want to run 15 tests. Now you got to divide that hundred visitors by 15 plus, actually 16 because you need a control group who sees no changes. Right? Now you really are just like… You have very few visitors that you’re testing with. It’s going to take a very long time for you to feel comfortable with the math, statistical significance, that you have actually proven out that a specific change is moving the needle for you. The first risk is just it’s going to take months for you to prove that out unless you, again, are a Amazon, Walmart, you have millions of visitors coming a day

Ryan:
Or you just make a bad decision saying, “Hey, one of those five visitors converted, so that must be good.”

Jon:
Right. That’s where statistical significance comes in, right, where you’re saying, “Okay, how many people actually saw this test and how many converted?” If it’s one out of one, an inexperienced optimization person would say, “Well, that’s the one. Somebody converted and nobody converted on any of the others,” but the confidence levels can be very low on that.
The second thing that’s a challenge is when you’re running hundreds of tests, you really lose your focus. It becomes difficult to determine what tests are actually improving. Right? For the same thing, for reasons of math, but you’re much better off saying, “Okay, right now, I know I can’t run tests across the entire customer journey. I’m going to focus on improving this step of the journey. How we’re going to measure success is does somebody get to the next step?” Right? That’s the goal is always to help people get to that next step in the conversion journey. If you realize there’s a step where people are dropping off, that’s the step you want to start improving.
If you are trying to optimize the entire journey, you really end up doing the third issue here, which is crossing the streams, right? Like in Ghostbusters, right, where they don’t want to cross the streams of the ray guns because it explodes essentially. Well, here’s the thing. You will have no idea what tests improved around that step of the customer journey, because you don’t know if a test that you ran earlier in that customer journey is influencing what happens later in the journey. Does that make sense? In essence, you end up needing to run multiple tests on the same segments of users and you just can’t really tell cleanly what test is having an impact and was actually the driver for them to convert.

Ryan:
Well, I think you just simplified my response to anybody coming to me with this problem, like, “Well, do you want to cross streams?” I’m like, “No, no. That’s just a general best practice, do not cross streams.” Well, that’s what you’re going to do if you go work with that crappy CRO agency. For some people that have listened to us before, to me, it seems like high volume or high velocity testing would be similar at least in vernacular to rapid testing, which we’ve had a podcast about. I know that rapid testing is good, high velocity testing or hundreds of tests at a time is bad. I can hear somebody telling me, hundreds of tests, say, this is going to be really rapid testing. We’re going to solve all your problems very quickly. How are they going to be different?

Jon:
Yeah. I think that’s a really good point because I think a lot of people mostly just don’t know the difference, quite honestly, and it causes confusion. I think it’s because they both have testing in the term. Right? Really high level, what’s the difference between the two? Rapid testing is a… It’s a type of testing different from A/B testing that most folks think about when they think of conversion optimization, right?
Rapid testing is very small discrete tests that are things that are not necessarily onsite testing. I’ll explain what that means in a second, but the reality, these are things like five second tests. Okay, I’ll put a page in front of you for five seconds, take it down and then run a survey, ask you or record a video of you and ask you what you thought, what stuck in your mind, did you like that page or not? What was your sentiment? Did you know what action to take, what you needed to do next? Right?
What can somebody gather in the first five seconds is very indicative of how clear that page is. Is the messaging clear? Is the actions you want them to take clear, right? If not, then they should do some other items, right? You should really take a step back and redesign that page probably.
There’s also things like preference testing, “Hey, here’s two options. Did you like A or B more, right?” Or if you were going to take this next step, would you prefer A or B? There’s a lot of preference things that you can do here. Then, there’s things like card sorting, which this is great for like navigation, helping sort navigations, where you get consumers involved and you say, “Okay, here are all the navigation options. How would you sort these into a realistic navigation?”

Ryan:
That’s cool. I’ve never actually heard of that. That’s cool.

Jon:
Yeah. The whole point of that is what’s their preference? What do they think is clear? Because, as a consumer, you’re too close to your brand, right? You know what all the products are and how in theory they should be organized or how… I’ve seen brands, I ask them, why their navigation is organized in a certain way. They say because that’s how their warehouse is organized. Well, that might be great for, yeah, might be great for the person picking and pulling the packages, because it’s really efficient for them. I’m a consumer, who’s trying to help me? Not make it easy for your dude who’s picking the packages.
The point here of rapid testing is these are usually all done offsite, right, with testers that are paid and driven to that test specifically. Okay? That’s a good way to think about it. These are things that should take a couple of minutes at most, really quick testing. That’s where the rapid comes from because you can learn a lot very, very quickly by sending a hundred people to a five second test. Right? It’s cheap to do it in theory. Again, you still have to know what to test, what questions to ask, et cetera. There’s some experience there for sure, but that’s where rapid testing comes in.
Now, A/B testing on the other hand is what most folks think about when they hear about CRO. This is done onsite and that’s the big difference. It’s done by taking actual site visitors and segmenting them out into groups based on maybe like where they came from, have they been to the site before, the things I mentioned earlier, right? Then, you’re altering the site experience in small ways to influence their actions on your site. These folks usually have no clue that they’re being tested.
I mean this is happening all over the internet to you, and you have no idea that you’re being opted into a test, which you need because then you’re not poisoning the well, right? You’re not influencing the behavior. I’m poisoning the well by telling you, “Hey, you’re being opted into a test,” because now you’re looking for what’s the test? You don’t want to be tricked. You don’t want to be tested, so now you’re trying to figure it out as opposed to just doing what you would normally do.
The big difference is that if you’re doing hundreds of tests and they’re not these rapid tests, which in the cases that you and I are talking about today, hearing from brands, that’s not what’s happening. They’re being told we’re going to run hundreds of A/B tests, and that is where it becomes a challenge. You’re right that there’s these different types of testing and it can be confusing for folks, but rapid testing and A/B testing are completely different. When we hear about this, most folks are really talking about A/B testing and that they’re going to offer hundreds of A/B tests.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, the digital marketing agency offering pay per click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Ryan:
Now, these companies that are doing these hundreds of A/B tests all at once, from a technology standpoint, is there a way to say, “Hey, I’m testing this product page that we’re landing this traffic on. If I exit the product page, can they keep me from seeing any other test or is it once I’ve seen …”

Jon:
Yeah. With A/B tests, you can segment your audience and declare who can see what tests based on those segments. This is where having a very clear strategic plan for your testing is going to matter because you really want to be able to say, “There is a test this step in the funnel. If I go to the next step down, am I being influenced by what happened before?” You really need to map out your test. This is where, like I said earlier, it gets impossible to track all of those tests and what’s being influenced and what’s not, and how do you separate all of that? If you don’t have enough traffic where you can say, “I only want to run this one test with this segment at a time,” and that’s really important.

Ryan:
Until you’re working with a brand, you don’t actually tell them what you’re going to test, right? You realistically couldn’t.

Jon:
I couldn’t, no, because like a doctor, we have to go in and diagnose before we prescribe. When a brand comes to us and says, “Hey Jon, we’re not converting very high. I know I need a knee replacement.” Well, if the first thing I do is go and operate on their knee because they said they needed a knee replacement and it doesn’t solve their problem, guess who gets fired? Not only that, but I mean if a doctor did that, it’d be malpractice, they’d lose their license. Right? The reality here is we really need to diagnose and do our research before we prescribe what we’re going to do. Other than that, it’s really just guessing and you know where that gets us.

Ryan:
Yes. To summarize, you need to have… To do real CRO, which if we’re saying that there’s differences, like real CRO is doing what Jon does, you have to have enough traffic and you have to have hyperfocused a testing plan that only comes after you’ve begun working with the CRO company. There’s no way a CRO company can tell you what’s wrong with your site until they’ve understood your user and what’s trying to be accomplished and uncovered a lot more things that can be done from an external analysis.

Jon:
Yeah, exactly. Every client we work with, we have about a three week onboarding period where we’re doing that diagnosis. We’re making sure all the data is correct. We’ve talked a little bit about, in previous recordings, about clients who don’t have clean data. Well, we want to go in and at least, moving forward, make sure that they have clean data as much as we can. Right? We have to correct any issues that are there.
There’s a lot of work that would be done that is, a, valuable and, b, when you go into a doctor’s office, to keep that same analogy, you don’t walk in and say, “Hey doc, thanks for meeting today. Can you tell me everything that’s wrong with me? Then, yeah, I’m not going to have you do the surgery, so I’m not going to pay you for this appointment.” The doctor still gets paid for that appointment. They still get paid to diagnose you, because it’s valuable to you to understand exactly what’s wrong.
Whether or not you choose to resolve it and actually get the surgery is up to you, but they still need to go do the MRI, do the X-rays, take your blood panel, whatever it might be. Those things take time and expertise to diagnose. I think that doctor patient analogy is about as close as I can get to how we operate.

Ryan:
Mm-hmm. That’s great. For any of you with my personality that wants to go fast and break things, if you are trying to do that in CRO, you’re going to be very frustrated and not get what you want. You have to adopt patience to get the best care.

Jon:
That’s fair. I think it also goes the same for driving traffic, right? You’re going to move fast and break things and just start spending money all over the place in driving traffic? Probably not. You want to diagnose, whoa, let’s test a few things here and there, see where you’ve spent in the past, what pages and collections should we advertise. Right? I mean you’re going to put a plan together and then execute on it.

Ryan:
Yeah. I mean we do have companies that come to us and like, “Hey, we really need to be launching something next week.” We’re like, “Okay, well, that’s not going to be best for you. You’re going to have some inefficiencies and holes in what’s going on so you can rush it, you’ll waste money.” Oh man, e-commerce requires patience, so I’m having to learn that constantly.

Jon:
I’m glad we balance each other out.

Ryan:
Yes. Jon, I appreciate you educating me so I can be more valuable to my clients talking to them about high velocity testing.

Jon:
Love it.

Ryan:
And how it’s not in the best interest of companies. Thank you for your time.

Jon:
Thank you.

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The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 059): Why Not Test Everything? appeared first on The Good.