Feel like you've tried everything to boost sales but just can't seem to shift the needle? One of the most overlooked ways to scale your brand is by optimizing your website for increased conversions and customer retention.
In this episode, Scott & Ray are joined by Drew Himel, CEO & Founder of PCR Agency, to talk about conversion rate optimization (CRO) and the strategies that can boost your brand's profitability and retain those hard-earned customers.
With more than a decade of experience leading PCR, Drew shares powerful insights and actionable tips including the oft-missed, consumer-centric elements of a website that keep customers coming back, ways to improve your website’s performance, and the specific strategies to maximize retention for DTC brands.
You’ll figure out where to begin in your CRO journey, which tools to use, and discover how to avoid some of the biggest mistakes eCom brands make when setting up their websites.
For real-time updates, connect with Drew:
Platforms referenced in this episode:
If you enjoyed this episode, connect with us and share your feedback:
Join our Growth & Greatness eCommerce group and connect with fellow business owners & digital marketers alike: Growth & Greatness eCommerce on Facebook
If you want to learn more about us and what we do at Right Hook, visit our website: Right Hook Digital
Full episode transcript & chapter markers for this episode are available on the Growth & Greatness eCommerce Podcast Buzzsprout page!
Feel like you've tried everything to boost sales but just can't seem to shift the needle? One of the most overlooked ways to scale your brand is by optimizing your website for increased conversions and customer retention.
In this episode, Scott & Ray are joined by Drew Himel, CEO & Founder of PCR Agency, to talk about conversion rate optimization (CRO) and the strategies that can boost your brand's profitability and retain those hard-earned customers.
With more than a decade of experience leading PCR, Drew shares powerful insights and actionable tips including the oft-missed, consumer-centric elements of a website that keep customers coming back, ways to improve your website’s performance, and the specific strategies to maximize retention for DTC brands.
You’ll figure out where to begin in your CRO journey, which tools to use, and discover how to avoid some of the biggest mistakes eCom brands make when setting up their websites.
For real-time updates, connect with Drew:
Platforms referenced in this episode:
If you enjoyed this episode, connect with us and share your feedback:
Join our Growth & Greatness eCommerce group and connect with fellow business owners & digital marketers alike: Growth & Greatness eCommerce on Facebook
If you want to learn more about us and what we do at Right Hook, visit our website: Right Hook Digital
Full episode transcript & chapter markers for this episode are available on the Growth & Greatness eCommerce Podcast Buzzsprout page!
0:00 - 0:27 - G&G eCommerce Podcast Theme
This is the Growth & Greatness eCommerce Podcast, powered by Right Hook Digital, with your hosts Scott Seward & Raymond Johnston. If you’re an eCommerce brand founder, entrepreneur, or marketer looking to accelerate profitable growth for your business, then listen in ‘cause this is the podcast for you.
0:27 - 12:07 - Introduction of guest Drew Himel
Scott (0:27 - 0:47) - Welcome back to the Growth & Greatness eCommerce Podcast! First one of the year for me. Ray’s already kicked us off with a bit of a Black Friday review with some of our team, but Ray, welcome back, man! It’s good to get started and jumping into a topic that we haven’t really dived into on the podcast so far so very, very keen to dive in today.
Ray (0:48 - 0:58) - Yeah, thanks, Scott. Man, I’m really excited about this one. Here with us, Drew Himel. Drew, he is a CRO expert, that’s a topic that me and you talk about all the time with our team. So, Drew, welcome!
Drew (0:58 - 1:01) - Yeah, really excited to be here! Thanks, guys, for having me!
Scott (1:01 - 1:11) - Yeah, thanks for joining us. Let’s just get started. Give us a bit of a background about yourself, intro, and how you got into the web design and CRO field.
Drew (1:11 - 3:38) - Yeah, man. So I’ve been at it forever, 14.5 years. So, I started, I was in finance for about a year and I realized I didn’t wanna do that anymore. And so, taught myself web design and read SEO for Dummies, and ‘launched an agency,’ which is just me working in my living room for a while. And yeah, we were just selling, honestly, like, local service contractors for years - you know, your plumbers, your air conditioning contractors. So then, I think, and we were full-service, and I think I was stressed, miserable, not providing the value that I wanted, kind of jack of all trades, master of none. Came across HubSpot, actually, about 10 years ago and all things, kind of, clicked for me where it’s like, ‘Oh, we can focus more on our own audience and the things we have control over,’ so it’s just waiting on what the algorithm update was gonna be from Google or the changes with Facebook on the paid side, really went hard in the paint on, you know, lead nurturing, lead marketing automation, landing page optimization, things like that, for a number of years. That really catapulted the agency to be able to work with some really fun brands like Home Depot and the Chargers, the NFL team, and NBA, Lyft. And then, let’s say, about 2.5 years ago, we started dabbling a little bit in eCommerce, it was just a natural extension for a lot of the work we’re doing with HubSpot. And then COVID hit and, honestly, I think it was right time, right place a little bit for us, from a business standpoint, with so much business migrating more and more online. That was 5% of our business, now it’s about 70%, and our focus is CRO, email, and retention. So we work with, brands usually in that $5 million to, as high as about $75 million a year in revenue, growing really fast, have spent a lot of time on the product-market fit, but they haven’t really looked internally on ways that they can improve profitability across all their channels by CRO and email marketing. So, we’re a Klaviyo Platinum Partner, we do a lot of work with them, but, yeah, it’s been an incredible ride. We work with some fun brands like MUD\WTR, the coffee alternative, to Vive Organic, which is, like, the juice shot company…
Scott (3:38 - 3:43) - Ooh, Ray’s ears just perked up. He’s quit drinking coffee and he’s searching for the next best thing.
Drew (3:43 - 4:01) - Oh, well, MUD’s amazing. It’s got, like, 1/7th the amount of caffeine with, you know, a ton of adaptogens. And it was 1 SKU and they ended up doing close to about $70 million last year off of 1 product. They just launched their 2nd one, :rest, for help with, like, sleep and stuff.
Ray (4:01 - 4:07) - Their ads are amazing. I’ve been stalking them for a year, they have YouTube ads, I know you’re not here to talk about YouTube ads, but they’re fantastic.
Drew (4:08 - 4:23) - No, Shane, the founder, is just, like, an unbelievable product guy and brand, and so, makes our job really easy. They’re really good at bringing the people in the funnel, and our job is to make sure they convert as much as possible, kind of, all the way through.
Ray (4:24 - 4:31) - You brought up MUD\WTR, I’m literally using it right now downstairs! You’re doing the retention, is that right?
Drew (4:29 - 4:32) - That’s amazing. Yeah, yeah.
Ray (4:32 - 5:14) - We’re not talking about, we’ll get to the CRO, but I’m really curious. Alright, so I thought, ‘cause I just went through the funnel myself, and there’s a few key points that I thought were amazingly fantastic. I wanna ask, like, your strategy behind it. So, for example, once I placed an order, one of the first things I got was, I literally had to question my mind, ‘Okay, how do I heck do I make this thing?’ I got an email and text message about recipes. It was order confirmation with the recipes. And then, the second thing I got was, I think leading to the order, is I got another reminder about the recipes. And I thought that was fantastic. It was the first time in my life where I literally had a thought in my head about it and, the next thing I know, I get an answer to that question.
Drew (5:14 - 6:43) - Yeah, yeah. I mean, thank you, that was a lot of our, so we got engaged with them about 6 months ago. Yeah, they were incredible at the acquisition, product, everything else, but they haven’t really spent the time on retention. So they engaged us, they had, I think, 8 different technologies speaking to the customer, and they were treating everybody the same - person that bought the product for 3 years, every single month, to the person that has never tried it before, saw one of their ads and wanted to experiment. So we did a full analysis on the technology stack. We introduced probably, like, I think it’s now about 25 new flows and segmentations within, to really, what you just talked about of, like, every touch point, between the brand and the customer, figuring out ways to address any challenges, obstacles, things like that. We use a lot of qualitative data from surveys and things like that of, like, why do people drop off, why do people not repurchase, and then use Klaviyo and Recharge, their subscription management tool, to consolidate all of that and build it out. We’re continually adding new flows, new segmentations, new ways to communicate with the customer - churn’s gone down by 20%, they’ve added hundreds of thousands of dollars in new revenue just through these, you know, kind of, like basic flows. Yeah, it’s cool that you’ve had the hands-on experience because if you were to try 6 months ago, it would’ve been significantly different, the kind of experience.
Ray (6:43 - 6:58) - One thing I loved was the human touch. Once I made that order, I got to the order confirmation, had the recipes there as well as the reminder about the recipes, but also, what it had was, it had a video touch from, I think, the lady who heads up customer success, something like that.
Drew (6:57 - 6:58) - Yeah.
Ray (6:58 - 7:21) - Just a really great page and it’s funny because me and Scott, I don’t know, for like 4 years, part of strategy on the paid acquisition side is, after someone purchases, we actually run a thank you video to people that purchased in the most recent few days. It always has really high returns. I was really happy to see that you guys had that really warm experience, ‘If you have a question, reach out to us,’ and the copy was just really fun as well. Just, kudos to whoever made that.
Drew (7:21 - 8:18) - Yeah, and like I said, it’s a home run for us because they’re so good at brand, they understand their customer really, really well, so they - tone of voice, copy, the videos, everything from Shane. Shane is as authentic as they come, in terms of a founder who’s really passionate about these things, and so, we just have all these great assets to work with. And then, you know, a lot of what you’re experiencing after is Malomo, which is that post-purchase that helps, kind of, beautify the design of the order confirmation, instead of getting just, like, Shopify, really stale, kind of, HTML email where you’re able to enhance that, have the videos, have the recipes, and everything else. That’s actually one of the top-performing flows in terms of, obviously, open and engagement but revenue as well, so people might purchase the coffee creamer or some of the accessories and, unequivocally, it demonstrates, the lifetime value increases by really getting ahead of that once the order has taken place.
Scott (8:18 - 9:05) - Yeah, that approach has always made so much sense to me. Going back to when Ray & I were talking about this years ago when we started doing the thank you video. It always works better with the founder doing it, as opposed to just a video or an image or something like that. I always thought it’d be great to extrapolate that throughout the whole retention process. Once you’ve had that positive experience, that thank you, no one asks for anything like that, but then, down the path, if the founder or whoever’s, you know, representing the company is likeable and personable, you almost have, like, many infomercials with the person selling it as opposed to it being a text or a video or whatnot. I think it’s something that’s really, really underutilized so it’s cool that you guys are making some really good progress on that.
Drew (9:06 - 9:47) - Yeah, and it’s simplifying it. When we first engaged, they have, like, long, long emails - 18 calls-to-action, there’s so much content. We’re like, ‘Alright, let’s simplify. What are the 1 or 2 things you’re trying to accomplish?’ And then, you know, we can send more based on the funnel and the journey, but we also did that. The first, just like you talked about, Ray, when you first got it, what are the recipes? That was a common question asked through their CS team. And so we were able to get ahead of that, you know. There’s little things and those different touchpoints that we can help, you know, kind of address through a little bit of data, a little bit of insight, kind of, across the board.
Ray (9:47 - 10:42) - One thing I thought was really cool, sorry, I’m nerding out because this is so much fun, is the marketer in me, the first thing I do is, I start clicking all of the buttons. I canceled my subscription just to see what happens. I’m really curious to see what happens. I go to cancel and it probably has the most exhaustive survey of why, when I canceled my subscription, I’ve ever seen. Everything you can think of is there: ‘I just don’t want it anymore,’ ‘I don’t like the taste,’ all these different reasons. What I thought was really cool is that, when I went all the way through it, at the last minute before I cancelled, they gave me a really great offer to keep me to stay. I thought that was really great, and I’m not sure if that was a Recharge application that they do on Recharge, but that was really great. Whoever incorporated that, what I loved is, because, you guys, I think it was a really great offer to where you’re gonna give me a really great bundle for an incredible deal - the creamer as well as the MUD\WTR as well as another mixer or something like that, just a really great offer. Man, if I was gonna cancel, that would probably convince me to stay otherwise.
Drew (10:42 - 11:50) - Yeah. And, also, it’s a little counterintuitive, but Recharge does collect all that data, we use that in forms, in some of the new flows and segmentations, but also we launched Recharge SMS because the 2nd and 3rd most reason for why they cancel is because they just weren’t drinking it as much as the subscription was coming in. With Recharge, with SMS, we give you a notification now saying, ‘Hey, your shipment’s about to be fulfilled. Would you like to pause, delay, or gift?’ And even cancel, we make it pretty easy through a simple text because we do notice that if they, at least, had that ability and they’re not worried about being locked in to, like, a 12-month, ‘I’m gonna have, like, boxes and boxes of MUD\WTR sitting on the shelf and they’re not using it,’ you can at least have that ability to pause or delay or even gift it, if need be, or just maybe cancel altogether. That has been shown to increase LTV by 20%, 30% just by giving them that option, or making it really easy, versus like, you know, the gym memberships where they make you fax in your cancellations.
Scott (11:50 - 12:07) - Dude, The Wall Street Journal or something like that, they basically make you call them to be able to cancel it, and you’re never coming back when you have an experience like that. I’m like, just wanting to pause it for whatever reason, but if you’re making it difficult for me, I ain’t coming back. It’s not a good experience for anyone.
12:08 - 18:28 - eCom brands’ gradual shifting to CRO (conversion rate optimization) in a post-iOS14 landscape
Scott (12:08 - 12:46) - Let’s pivot it back to the CRO side for a second. I’m really curious, ‘cause you said 2020 was a big changing point for you guys, in terms of pivoting more towards eCom, and it was probably the biggest year in eCommerce we’ve ever seen. We know that, when COVID hit, online sales just went bananas for a period there. With the shifts in 2021 from tracking and attribution, paid traffic not seemingly performing as well, generally, across the board, did you see a change in people’s focus towards CRO as looking at the alternatives and how they can increase ROI?
Drew (12:46 - 15:54) - Yeah, no. I mean, it, kind of, coincided two-fold for us - one, I brought in an incredible Head of UX. She’s been in Victoria’s Secret for decades, she was running, you know, thousands of experiments and seen tons of products and a lot of, you know, revenue for the company. She came onboard and just added another, like, you know, arrow for us in terms of, like, what we were equipped with. And then, two, what was happening was a lot of these iOS updates and things like that where people were starting to be like, the heyday of, you know, having the crazy valuations and throwing a ton of money at Facebook, which was pretty easy to do, they had to start looking a little bit more inward, ‘Alright, what’s going on here?’ So, for us, a lot of the times, we’ll have brands that are hemorrhaging that are like, 90% of our business, or 80%, or 50% was coming through Facebook ads, and now we’ve just been absolutely crushed. We can’t even make heads or tails, like we’re not just completely gonna go away from that as an advertising medium, but we can’t sustain. And so, a lot of times, we would be able to, like, look, Google Analytics has so much data, it’s great, but most people can only go to like 1 level deep. We’re able to go, we have a data analyst that’s able to go 3, 4, 5, levels deep, and not just look at cumulative bounce rate, or cumulative conversion rate, but, like, separate it by new, first, returning, mobile/desktop, what is the traffic source?, where is the entry?, what is the first page they’re looking at, what is the last page before they make a purchase? I think it allowed a lot of marketers and brand owners to sleep a little bit easier knowing that they, at least, can ascertain what the problem is and then a little bit of what the solution is to be able to address that. I think we just found ourselves in a right place, right time where I think a lot of people are focused, you know, on paid and acquisition. We’re like, ‘We’re not gonna touch that. That’s not in our wheelhouse. We’re gonna focus on your site and that digital experience that you have control, like the digital storefront, with email and SMS tied in to the website.’ I think it was great, we can look at your average order value, how much traffic you’re getting, and your conversion rates. If we can just increase this by half a percent, this could result in hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars in revenue, depending on the brand, just by some small tweaks. And it’s gonna help your SEO, your paid efforts, your cover costs across the board too. Yeah, that was a big, big uptick for us where it was kind of, like, neglected. I think a lot of CRO brands knew about it, but they didn’t really spend any time or energy towards it. Getting all these body punches from Apple and Facebook, they kinda had to start to figure out more creative ways and more profitable ways to sustain and grow the business.
Scott (15:54 - 16:54) - The balance there got lost when Facebook was so easy because that just became the focal point and there was just complete neglect to the back-end. There were times when that was a struggle, probably a frustration now, because we can only control so much when we’re focusing on paid, like, pre-click, creative, what’s happening within the ad account, but if the bottleneck and the issue’s post-click on the website, and the founders are not focused on that or understanding it or willing to invest in it, at least 50% of the equation is what happens after we drive traffic. I think that definitely got lost and the same for retention. We go back to the start of last year and the question, when all of the Apple stuff started rolling out, the question we’re asking ourselves, ‘What’s not gonna change?’ That was email, CRO, these back-end elements were all the ones that became much more important moving forward with the restrictions and challenges on the paid traffic side.
Drew (16:54 - 18:28) - Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of times, we’re the performance marketing agency’s best friend. We work really hand-in-hand and, if anything, they give us the creative, they let us know what’s going on in the campaigns so we can help inform what’s working and what’s not. You also get the inverse of it where, you know, Black Friday or whatever, everyone’s kind of like taking credit. It’s the merchandisers who say, ‘Oh, it’s the product,’ and it’s the performance marketer saying, ‘No, it’s the creative,’ and then it’s like, it might be the web guys saying, ‘I built this beautiful site.’ You know, I think it’s hard to ascertain when you’re running such deep discounts. We had a big engagement with Fathead. They had the big stickers and decals you put on the walls as a kid. They were, notoriously, a discount, you know, they’d make up, ‘National Flag Day, we’re gonna run a BOGO (Buy One, Get One), it doesn’t really matter. And then, we started to do some analysis and we realized, like, it was actually hurting the brand’s bottomline pretty significantly and the brand equity, and went away from doing like 1, maybe 2 discounts the entire year without a huge drop in terms of revenue. But they were so scared to do it because they had 10 years of just discounting, discounting, discounting. We were able to do a little bit of an analysis and say, ‘Okay, let’s just run some experimentation and kind of see,’ and it saved them so much money by not giving that away. And then, if you factor in RMA (return merchandise association) with, like, returns and things like that, it’s very difficult to run a profitable business unless you can really do that, kind of, comprehensive analysis.
18:28 - 21:53 - A/B testing and micro-experiments to find your profitable offers
Ray (18:28 - 18:54) - I have a question for you, Drew. On that topic, we work with a lot of fashion brands. It’s not all we work with, but a significant amount, and some of them, once they get to a certain size, they feel like they always have to, they give a lot of discounts, I tend to find. I’d love to hear, on that topic, how would you recommend brands challenge that philosophy of discounting too often and running promotions too often?
Drew (18:54 - 21:02) - Yeah, it’s a challenge and I think it has to be very multi-faceted because, again, the CO of Fathead, I’d give them a lot of credit, at least have the conviction to try it, knowing that it could have a pretty significant impact on, you know, the business. Again, depending on who’s in control, a lot of times, the marketers want to continue to run those discounts because they’re responsible for hitting gross revenue, but not, maybe, looking at profitability. And so, I think, first and foremost, you have to get buy-in from leadership, ‘Look, this is gonna be an experiment. Here are the things that could possibly go wrong.’ And then, what we try and do is mitigate that risk as much as possible. When we’re running, you know, Google Optimize or any kind of A/B testing, we can run it in a side-by-side, with discount, without, based on different audiences, being able to kind of experiment with that. And there are other things that you can do, ‘cause even, like, free shipping gets thrown around a lot, and you don’t think a lot about the impact, but a lot of times, we’d be like, ‘Hey, do that,’ but maybe introduce a minimum. Otherwise, again, it’s just crazy, but a lot of brands aren’t focusing on bottomline. They’re just, ‘We have to hit this growth, we have to hit this.’ I think if you can get leadership to buy in, run very isolated experiments. Don’t do it, probably, during Black Friday or your busiest month, or busiest days, but think about things that they’re pushing for that. Is there another way to be able to run it? Do it in a way that is a little more creative. Maybe it is that free shipping on a $100 order, or also, a great one is some sort of $5 - $10 gift that you can kinda have. That way, you can bundle that in, as you kinda have the upsell. So, there are experiments that you can run, and you just gotta have the right team, I think, in place. You have a data analyst, you have, whether it be a A/B Tasty or Dynamic Yield, Optimizely, or even just, we use Google Optimize a ton, just because it’s free and, as long as you’re not trying to run 8 or 10 multi-variant experiments, if you just run 5 or 6 A/B, it gets you to everything you wanna try and accomplish.
Scott (21:02 - 21:31) - What was that free gift part? I think you can just add more perceived value, right? Retail value’s a $20 gift, but it might cost you $5 + free shipping, well, in Australia, ‘cause it’s expensive as hell, it’s like $13 bucks. I think you can add a lot more perceived value for those other offers and stand out a little bit more as opposed to just the standard stuff. I mean, is there a point in giving away things if you’re just killing your margins and you’re driving yourself backwards?
Drew (21:31 - 21:53) - Yeah, or x2, they’re just like, ‘Well it’s how we’ve always done it.’ You know, there’s nobody there to, like, challenge that. And so, that’s what we first, kind of, like, start with. What leeway do we have to be able to run some of these experiments? Some of them just say, ‘Hey, we’ve done it this way. We always will. Go and improve on all these other things.’ You know, if that’s the hand you’re dealt, you have to deal with it.
21:54 - 28:07 - The biggest mistakes eCom brands make with their websites
Ray (21:54 - 22:02) - With those discounts, for example, you’ve probably seen everything under the sun. What are some of the other big mistakes you’d often see eCom brands make?
Drew (22:03 - 25:23) - Yeah, I mean, I do see a lot of, just not even focusing on the website in a way where, well, I’d say, first, it starts with just, like, even accurate reporting. The troubleshooting that we do in Google Analytics from what Facebook is reporting and what Shopify is reporting, it’s always incredible, you get kind of a mixed bag. And so, we have one partner that we always recommend called Elevar. They help either, kind of, centralize a lot of the errors, the troubleshooting, getting the data accuracy of 95% or more. And so, I think that is incredibly important because, if you have inaccurate data to perform a lot of these decisions, you’re kinda swimming upcreek, you know, without a paddle. And so, for us, that’s first and foremost - I’d say, 90% of the time, you just have to go through and clean that up, they don’t have the right tagging and all that stuff. And then, two, once you have that, the website, I think everyone just looks at it as like pretty and flashy versus, like, what’s functional. And so, you know, they might look at conversion, but again, if you’re running discounts all the time, that is gonna have a pretty healthy impact on conversions. They have to be able to look at it comprehensively, of the whole picture of like, ‘Is this profitable, is this sustainable around CAC (customer acquisition cost) and lifetime value?’ and things of that nature. I find a lot of people don’t look at it in the way that they have. So that’s, like, business, you know, kind of, decisions and strategy. And then, I think on the site, I don’t know, this gets lost, but, again, you’re dealing with people with an attention span of a second-grader, reading level of a fourth-grader. You know, it’s amazing if you just go through it, and I always try and do this when we’re dealing with the sales process of just to buy something and how hard that is a lot of the times. Some easy ways to be able to mitigate that are, what we found on, like, home pages - again, some might be a new customer, some might be, they bought 10 things from you, they know where everything is, just make it really easy. Simple things of, like, the add-to-cart, right on the homepage, versus making them click, go to the product page, and then add-to-cart. That’s like one step that seems kinda small, but you would be amazed at how much, how often we come across that, even for very large brands that feel like they’d spend $150K, $250K on a Shopify site, it’s got all the bells and whistles. So, you know, reducing that friction as much as possible, trying to simplify, go through… the power of search is incredible, even with, like, brands that we work with that have 5 or 10 SKUs. They’re like, ‘Nobody’s searching.’ I mean, 5 organic has 5 SKUs, a little shot company, but what we found is, people were searching and they couldn’t find it ‘cause they didn’t have the search bar, so we introduced that and if people might search by ingredients or by their state, battle for immunity or fatigue or have more focus, or I’m looking for turmeric or cordyceps or whatever it may be. Search is often the highest traffic page on the site, or most used feature, and it gets 3x - 5x conversion over any other page on the site, so like highly, highly recommended. People just, kind of, don’t focus on that, and they don’t make it very prominent on the site - it might just be a little magnifying glass.
Scott (25:24 - 25:50) - So much to learn in there from a marketing and product standpoint. ‘Cause I remember, when I had my brand, I had the same thing - I was selling towels, I had a bunch of people coming in to the search engine and the highest-searched thing was pineapples, like pineapple towels. I had no pineapple towels, ‘Shit, I gotta do pineapple towels,’ there’s loads in the search keywords on your website that you can really learn about product or how you’re gonna position something.
Drew (25:50 - 27:40) - Yeah, I’m, we’re huge, huge advocates for it - the filters, the facets, and being able to sort properly, and things like that too are incredibly important. Yeah, it does inform product strategy and, if they don’t have that already, we’ll get that from the CX team. What are the common questions or obstacles or things like that? That really does help inform a little bit of the user experience on the site too. So those are just some, like, big, big learnings that we see on the CRO side that they haven’t, and then it’s like, little things of, like, you have, I hate rotating banners, you know, the carousel, because it’s like, ‘Oh, I’m ready to add it to my cart. Wait, it changed! What’s the next thing!?’ I mean, again, you’re implementing distractions unnecessarily. Like, it’s preventing them from doing the thing you want them to do, which is purchase the product. And so, there’s a lot of, like, little things that we’ve, kind of, like noticed every time, it’s almost like a parade that, you know, we’re recommending - sticky add-to-cart on mobile, on the product page. Please, please put it on there, all your product pages, because we’ve noticed that it will increase conversion by half a percent, just by adding that 1 feature, takes 10 minutes of development time. So that’s another low-hanging fruit out of the gate that a lot of brands, you know, forget. And then, I’d say the last one, just asking for the upsell in the checkout process. It’s just so surprising how many brands just, you know, add the product, checkout, without mentioning, kind of, cross-sell, upsell opportunities. If you don’t ask, it’s never gonna happen, but we see average order value increase by 15%, 20%, just by adding those elements. If it’s at least there, they’re already in their buyer mentality ready to check out, being able to quickly add something to the cart.
Scott (27:40 - 27:45) - You already do that pre-purchase or post-purchase as one quick upsell?
Drew (27:45 - 28:07) - Both, both. So the pre-purchase, kinda, the hamburger mini-cart: have it right down below, have it on the product page, and then even the post-purchase too. Post-purchase, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Do you want some survey data? Use EnquireLabs to understand, you know, some qualitative stuff, which is really helpful, or you can have a post-purchase as, like, an upsell as well.
28:08 - 31:32 - Redoing the brand website vs. split-testing
Ray (28:08 - 28:15) - Drew, in what scenario do you recommend that a brand just redo their website versus going through many, many split-tests?
Drew (28:15 - 28:44) - I’m usually an advocate on holding off on the redesign, replatform, kind of everything. Let’s do some experiments first and have some data to, kind of, inform these decisions. The times that we’ve gone against that, one client was a cosmetic brand, they have, like, 65 scripts running on the site. They had old product pages, orphan pages that they didn’t even know how to get to and be able to…
Scott (28:45 - 28:46) - A good clean-up job.
Drew (28:46 - 29:59) - The theme was, like, really outdated and the site speed was, like, 15 seconds to load. It was just a bunch of factors where I’m like, ‘Let’s just rip the band-aid off.’ Let’s do a retheme, let’s, you know, kind of, upgrade. Let’s do a, you know, kind of, refresh. There are situations like that where I’m an advocate for, or if it is, I’m just a big believer in Shopify. If they’re on Magento, WooCommerce, and they don’t have the Shopify app ecosystem and being able to utilize that in the right way… We had, another was, actually a granola, she visited Australia and started this and it’s doing really, really well. They couldn’t take advantage of, like, fast and some of these marketplaces that were Shopify-enabled. They wouldn’t work with WooCommerce at all. And so, she had all these opportunities for all these third-party marketplaces, but only if she had Shopify so we, you know, we’re going through that, you know, kind of, retheme, migration from Woo over to Shopify as well. I’d say platform, and then, you know, some of these other things like site speed, scripts, kind of, where it’s like too much work to try and put duct tape on it and patch it together.
Scott (29:59 - 30:40) - Yeah, it’s really hard to find a good reason not to be on Shopify, unless there’s purely a limitation, if from some custom functionality that you wanna do that Shopify can’t do, and Magento is the only solution or whatever. Having worked with, and I’m sure you have as well, working with all those platforms, like, Magento, particularly, is just a beast, it’s so difficult to get things done. And Woo is just so much more maintenance in the background. It may seem cheaper upfront, but what you gotta do to maintain that - plug-ins, all those sort of issues. I never understand it if there’s no reason not to be on Shopify and make things as simple as possible.
Drew (30:40 - 31:32) - Yeah, and, I mean, they just keep making updates to the product that are, head and shoulders, above anything else. The recent theme upgrades and what you’re able to do is pretty remarkable. We had one client that has a lot of retail locations. They have 10,000+ SKUs, they’re on BigCommerce, and they’ve asked us, honestly, maybe it’s an incremental benefit, but the lift is gonna be enormous to integrate Lightspeed, which is like the retail checkout and everything else, with all the SKUs, get it all over. I mean, you’re talking a long project, in terms of time, and a very expensive one. We’ve actually, that’s one of the rare cases where we’re like, ‘Stay on Big Commerce. There’s not really enough of a benefit to justify moving over to Shopify.’
31:33 - 34:58 - Optimizing site speed for your website
Scott (31:33 - 31:41) - You touched on the site speed, and that’s such a critical thing. What are the key things that you’re looking at implementing on the website to maximize that?
Drew (31:41 - 33:18) - Yeah, it’s, you know, I think a lot of times, these big visual sites with a ton of images look really pretty - one super simple one is lazy load. It’s an easy plug-in that, you know, the images only load as you’re scrolling down. That can help increase site speed pretty significantly. Take a look at the scripts that are running on your site. You’ll be amazed at how many still have: they have 4 different Facebook scripts, they have old loyalty, you know, programs that they’re running that still have scripts. That all has a negative impact. What we recommend is, you know, for reviews, like Okendo is a great partner because they can load their reviews in the CSS without impacting site speed whatsoever. Some of the other platforms can’t do that. And so they do weigh it down a little bit. It just becomes, like, pros and cons with that as well - the benefits of the user experience but the impact it’s gonna have, you know, kind of, on site speed itself. And just like little things like compressed imagery, alt-text, kind of stuff like that, it’s all incredibly important, and we’re just fanatical about it. Every second it’s taking to load, additionally, you’re negatively impacting conversion by 10% for every second. We’re pretty relentless and focusing on that. We do a complete technology audit, script audit, imagery, all that stuff, to kind of make recommendations, to be able to address that.
Ray (33:18 - 33:31) - A rumor I’ve always heard on Shopify is, because they’re the ones hosting it, you can’t get any faster than 3 seconds loading time unless you do, like, a headless commerce. What’s your opinion on that?
Drew (33:32 - 34:58) - Yeah, I tend to agree. We are seeing headless come up quite a lot. We’re still, I think it’s still early phase, kind of, experimentation, but there’s like, we’re a partner of Swell and Builder.ai, headless solutions, that I think do a pretty incredible job to address some of that. Again, what is your technology team, your dev team, gonna be able to update that ongoing? 3 seconds is still really good for a site to load. We’ve seen some that are like 18, 20 seconds, but I think we usually say, unless you really have a complex, like, we really recommend CityRow, it’s kind of like Peloton but for rowing machines - they have on-demand classes, they have physical equipment, they have subscription. Headless was able to, allowing them to really customize that experience and help with the site and integrate it to the back-end and the membership side. That made sense, but they have a CTO and Head of Product and a pretty significant dev team to be able to navigate that where, you know, if you’re most brands, you just don’t have a technology team to be able to meet the demands of headless and how much it’s constantly changing so, I think Shopify still gets you 80%, 90% of the way there. Introducing headless can be a little bit more of a headache than it’s necessarily worth.
34:59 - 39:32 - Recommended tech stack for an effective DTC brand website
Ray (34:59 - 35:10) - So you mentioned a bunch of different apps that you personally like to use? Would you say that, what is your recommended marketing stack, or really tech stack, when it comes to a well-effective DTC site?
Drew (35:10 - 35:56) - Yeah, that’s a great question. Shopify, like I said, and mostly just Shopify. We get a question a lot, ‘Do we need Shopify Plus or not?’ It’s a very significant technology cost. Most of the time, I’d say, just Shopify, you’re good. We’re huge advocates for Klaviyo, both on the email side and SMS. We’ve experimented with, you know, we have clients on Attentive and Postscript, but I just personally like it all in one dashboard. A lot of their updates have been very significant where, ‘Hey, we wanna run this shopping cart abandonment. Let’s try a split-test, one email, one SMS, see how it performs.’ That’s like a click of a button, it’s not, with these other platforms, you have to manually upload the lists sometimes and it can just be a little bit more…
Ray (35:56 - 35:59) - Sync it. Yeah, we do the same. It’s a nightmare.
Drew (36:00 - 38:20) - Yeah, yeah, it’s not fun. So, Klaviyo for email, Klaviyo for SMS. Recharge for subscription management, Recharge SMS launched in June, July last year, which is really nice where it’s ‘press 1 to pause,’ ‘press 2 to cancel,’ just makes it easy to, kind of, manage it. And then, Okendo, I mentioned, for reviews; we’ve used a bunch of them - Stamped, they’re all good, but I just like Okendo. You can customize it really easily, like I said, no impact with the site speed, it has the deepest integration with Klaviyo so you can actually pull the qualitative data from the reviews and use that as a segment, like from MUD\WTR. People that, maybe, give it a 1 star ‘cause they don’t like the taste, we can run a campaign to send them recipe recommendations with a creamer on us, to try it with a creamer. So that’s kind of cool. You know, for pop-up catchers, sometimes, Klaviyo scripts take a little while to load so you can look at Justuno, start running little experiments where you can customize that. It still has great integrations with Klaviyo but, again, couple seconds for that pop-up to take place, it’s gonna have a pretty dramatic impact on conversion. And then, Smile for referrals and loyalty, Smile.io. What else? Anything else that kinda comes to mind? Oh, HotJar, Crazy Egg for heatmap tracking, things of that nature. And then, yeah, I mean, don’t sleep on Google. Google, you can build some really cool data dashboards, adjust data. I think Glew.io, a lot of times for BI is like a little bit overkill for most of the brands that we’re working with. Having a dashboard, having the analytics in place… Google Optimize for A/B testing and experimentation is great. Those are the most cost-effective. And then, for the shipping, the one that we talked about with MUD\WTR, Malomo, is really great. It takes a lot of your transactional emails - order confirmations, shipping notification - and it just kind of beautifies them, puts a little design to it. You can add videos, make it a little bit more interactive, feels more on brand than just getting the standard Shopify transactional emails.
Scott (38:21 - 38:33) - They seem to get ignored quite a bit, they get sent out, when there’s so much opportunity. The open rates on those are gonna be, like, 100%! There’s a huge opportunity to maximize value in those emails.
Drew (38:33 - 39:27) - Yeah, that’s an easy one. They have shown, really, really helpful with average order value. We see those emails, it’s usually the top 5, top 10, top-performing flows, and it’s just revenue-driven. I wouldn’t sleep on that at all. Malomo’s a really easy tool that integrates with Klaviyo as well to be able to handle that. I’d say, you know, on the inverse, I see some brands that are, maybe, earlier stage, like they have it all. I’m like, ‘This is so overkill.’ You know, the technology costs alone, they’re just not getting the benefit if they sign up for every single thing, LiveRecover, but they’re spending thousands of dollars sometimes a month, and they’re really not reaping the benefits from it. Start small, keep adding as you go on, but you don’t need like 10 or 15 technologies, ‘cause even consolidating all of that data can be a little bit of a nightmare.
Scott (39:29 - 39:32) - You mentioned Klaviyo a few times in here, which we’re, obviously, huge fans as well.
39:33 - 48:45 - Most effective strategies to maximize retention for DTC brand
Scott (39:33 - 39:45) - Quick side step, but what are the most effective strategies that you see, maybe, outside of the typical flows to maximizing your retention with DTC brands?
Drew (39:45 - 40:52) - Yeah, that’s a great question. I think, ‘cause there’s like the top 5 or 7 flows that everybody should have - welcome series, your shopping cart abandonment, browse abandonment, post-purchase flow, and customer win-back. Those, usually, either, kind of, out of the gate, you always wanna have, don’t be afraid to have 3 emails in each flow, you know, as a gentle reminder. We see that engagement doesn’t really, significantly, drop off either, kind of, from that perspective. And then, the customer win-back, I think, a lot of people are, they put too far out. We see 90 days for the win-back, for the post-purchase - those are separate flows. So the customer win-back, you can give it 90 days, you can automate that. Klaviyo’s really good about making your list being, you know, kind of clean and keeping the integrity of that, setting that up. Post-purchase - asking for reviews, asking to subscribe, asking for another product is a huge, huge driver of revenue. I think people always think they’re just used car salesmen if they’re just asking for basic things, but we really haven’t seen a huge uptick in unsubscribes or anything like that…
Scott (40:54 - 41:15) - And they bought from you, right? They like you! I never understand that one. Unless you’re sending out something that’s just obnoxious or annoying or whatever, then sure but, I mean, you’re not emailing cold people. They’re people who’ve shown an interest in your brand and probably really like your product.
Ray (41:16 - 41:29) - I think it’s ignorance too. I often tell brands that, listen, let data tell you. If people are unsubscribing, okay, then maybe that’s a good signal, but if they’re not, they’re clicking, they’re viewing, they’re opening, there’s still an amount of valuable exchange so why not capitalize on it?
Drew (41:29 - 42:44) - Yeah, no, I couldn’t agree more. So the post-purchase, I feel like is one that’s really, really underutilized. We’ve touched on it, SMS, just by adding that in to their messaging strategy, increases 10% in their revenue, from SMS and email combined. I think that’s been really important. The darlings of the DTC world are Olipop, you know, the beverage company because they really focus on their customer service. They listen and I think they do that surprise and delight in a way that a lot of brands are really struggling with. Eli, who’s one of the partners there, I think has just done a remarkable job of really thinking about the customer experience and rewarding them when they’re not expecting it. So, using CX to, kind of, help inform retention and really be understanding, MUD\WTR is a good example. We can pull out these VIPs that have been a fan of the product, purchasing the product, for 2-3 years - whether it’s exclusive content, whether additional gifts, or thank yous - we’re doing some of that ideation, which is really, really fun. It doesn’t cost the brand that much, it just takes a little bit of time to think through in terms of a strategy and stuff like that too.
Scott (42:45 - 44:32) - I think a lot of brands still neglect that customer service part and how impactful. It’s probably the easiest way to maximize retention and your LTV (lifetime value) overtime. Perfect example, this was last year - I always bring my wife up ‘cause she’s my case study with brands and shopping. She received an email offering free shipping on something. She went to the website and it didn’t work, or it just ran out, or something like that. She emailed them, and they said, ‘Oh, that offer ended. There was no communication around it.’ They didn’t offer her the free shipping, and she didn’t make a purchase, but I know what happens with that. She would find a product she likes, she goes and talks to her mum, she goes and talks to her sister, she goes and tells her friends - after that experience, for not fulfilling on an offer, I actually think the offer was still within the timeframe specified in the comms or something, but there was a mistake in the comms so they didn’t honor it. They probably just lost, potentially, thousands of dollars in lifetime value by not fulfilling, honoring something that wasn’t in their communications. It’s just those small, little moments of opportunity to wow a customer that, I think, really get missed. That can always start with a great product. If you’ve got a great product and you’ve got no returns, it gives you so much more flexibility to do those things. So, you know, again, going back to when I had my brand, I have very little returns on the towels. If there was any problem with the towel, I just pick up one and send them a new one. It’s just those things. How can you turn the challenge of any new customer that comes to you with a bad experience and how can you turn that into a potentially positive experience to get a positive word-of-mouth experience and effects you want?
Drew (44:32 - 46:04) - Yeah, 2 things kind of come up as you’re talking - one, I mean, you’ve seen it now where Amazon’s doing it with refunds. I mean, they’re just saying, even if it’s a valid return, they’re just like, ‘Keep it.’ They’ve probably done, and I know they’ve done analysis on what it’s costing them and so, getting, and that dovetails into my 2nd point where, we did have a brand, unfortunately, that just kind of hid behind COVID and, you know, the shipping was not communicated, and they’re running into issues with their suppliers and manufacturers. They just, kind of, like, put their head in the sand and were hoping for the best. I think I get it, I get the reasons why, there’s a lot coming, but the next year, they ramped up. They hired 15 CS people to help them with the customer service side. We really advocated for, like, ‘Hey, when they’re checking out, be clear.’ Everybody’s expecting the Amazon of ‘I can buy something today and have it at my house 6 hours later.’ You know, we’re not built like the short-term of Amazon so get ahead of it. If you can communicate it, I think, give people the benefit of the doubt. They can be more understanding. You always hear these hellish customers, you know, kind of, complaining, but for the most part, they understand that you’re a small brand, you’re trying to figure these things out. If you can, at least, communicate on the front-end, and then maybe come sooner, then that really helps. I think that a surprise & delight customer experience just gets neglected ‘cause it’s, like, the soft touch thing that’s a little bit harder to quantify.
Scott (46:04 - 46:48) - Totally, and you mentioned it with the website, removing friction. My perspective on that is the same with customer service, friction point - if I’ve got something and it’s faulty, the fact that, even if you can go and return it, no questions asked, it’s still a hassle. It’s a hassle for me to go and return it. You’re still creating a problem for me and it’s not a good experience. Obviously, it depends on the value of the product and how many returns you’re receiving and things like that, but if you can let them keep it, just ship them a new one. The positive experience in that is, that’s a WOW experience. That’s where I think, it’s the intangible - business owners can’t see that, or they don’t know exactly what it’s gonna do, so I think it’s not being able to quantify that’s the tough part.
Ray (46:48 - 47:16) - I equate it to, it’s the long-term thinking versus the short-term thinking. Think about the short-term loss of revenue with shipping a bag and I also equate it to brands that are afraid of giving offers, I mean, not offers, guarantees. They’re like, ‘Oh no, what if they call me back on a guarantee?’ They’ve done studies, 5% of people ever claimed a guarantee. If you do a revenue and conversion increase on what, increase your conversion rate on people that claimed a guarantee, it’s a freaking no-brainer if you do the math, but it’s just the thinking, right? The short-term versus the long-term.
Drew (47:16 - 48:45) - I think, too, you wanna try and get ahead of it. This is where, like, it’s kind of, following the CRO, especially as you guys mentioned with fashion apparel. A lot of it is fit, you know, and you can go in the retail shop and be able to try it on, it’s very challenging to do that. We’ve done a lot around sizing charts. There’s even experimentation now with, like, you know, augmented reality where you can, not try it on yourself necessarily, but really be able to look in and see the stitching, things like that, where you can kind of see it on a person. Having a lot of great pictures, talking about the size, all that stuff can really help mitigate some of the returns that is gonna be a loss leader for you, for most organizations. On the product page, that’s why Okendo is cool too because they can customize the reviews based on, you know, a lot of different attributes. It could be, ‘Hey, I’m this size, here’s how it fit!’ You can kind of look at it based on the star rating, you know, they gave it a 1 star because of this, you can sort by that. It helps it a little bit easier, I think, as people are going to make that purchase and, you’ve done the hard work, like, to get it up there, but trying to think about, it might be more information that can have a negative impact on conversion, but that’s why we do both is because, then, we’re also looking at lifetime value and things like that, not just trying to acquire as many customers as possible if they’re not the right types of customers too.
48:46 - 50:59 - Strategies to mitigate return rates for online orders / Providing pivotal product information to customers to deliver the best shopping experience
Scott (48:46 - 49:29) - Just on that because that's really common, we work with a lot of fashion brands. Again, knowing how my wife shops and her friends, and seeing how brands deal with them, they often have return rates of up to 20% because customers buy 2 or 3 sizes to figure out which one fits best, or they’ll buy 4 items, see which one they like most, and then ship them back. How do you see brands, sort of, factor that into ‘cause the only solution is to try and provide as much information on the sizing before the purchase to give them an insight? Is that something you see brands having to factor into their margins, those return rates, or what are some of the strategies that you say might impact that positively?
Drew (49:29 - 50:59) - Yeah, I mean, the more information, the better. I think working closely with sales, customer service, to see what are the common questions… what we do with MUD\WTR - why are they returning it - so that we can start helping inform that product. I’m very, very fortunate, again, with my head of UX, she spent a decade doing and running these experiments, thousands of them, so she has just a lot of experience where she can look at things, where they need to be, and just make it really easier. On the product page, it’s that balance of putting so much information around the sizing, the imagery, and the reviews, product details, but still doing it where it’s like, having it be collapsible, making it easy to navigate where it’s not overwhelming. You have to be able to balance that. I think, if you look at your favorite brands, the brands that are doing hundreds of millions in revenue, you know, look, let’s copy that. I’m sure they’ve done enough experimentation. They’ve kinda figured it out. What is on their product pages that we can apply to ourselves and Shopify has the templates for it, it’s pretty easy to maneuver and, kind of, manipulate as well. It’s just, I don’t think there’s a golden egg there. It’s a challenge, it’s always gonna continue to be a challenge. All you can do is try and mitigate it, but you’re still gonna get 10%, 20% returns, but how can you just even decrease that by a couple percentage points can make a big impact.
51:00 - 59:27 - CRO strategy - where to start & which CRO tools to use?
Scott (51:00 - 51:14) - CRO side, again, going back to the tools. There’s so many platforms out there. What do you guys generally run with? Pros and cons of some? Where do people start with choosing a platform that might be right for what they need?
Drew (51:14 - 53:16) - I think, you know, if you’re doing, even as high as 10 million a year, Google Optimize is gonna get you there. I think it can do the majority of what you’re looking for, in terms of testing and experimentation. Having a HotJar or a Crazy Egg, pretty inexpensive to put in place. I, personally, maybe I just, the reason why I’m in this business, is I totally nerd out on the user recordings, seeing where the drop-off is, where the challenges are, and really diving into that data to help, kind of, inform some of these decisions. Those are, like, the 2 that are super easy. As you progress, and get a little bit more sophisticated, we do look at Gusto, not Gusto, sorry, Nosto as, like, they do a little bit more personalization on the site so they know if you’ve already made a purchase, they know if you’ve already kind of logged in. They can customize the product experience. That’s really, I think, valuable - the more friction you reduce, the more personalized you make it to their experiment, their experience, then even better. But you’re still talking 20 grand, 30 grand, to kind of onboard something like that. It’s not an insignificant cost, but that’s one that we recommend for a lot of brands that are starting to mature. You get the really comprehensive ones of A/B Tasty, is a great, kind of, multi-variant experimentation onsite that we see a lot of 50 million plus brands, kind of, using. And then, you have Dynamic Yield, that’s a lot of cool personalization and things like that, and A/B testing as well. And then, you know, Optimizely. For the most part, I think you can get there with Google Optimize and HotJar. And then that next step would be a Nosto or an A/B Tasty to just start running more complex experimentations.
Ray (53:16 - 53:23) - Drew, last question on my side. Where would you recommend a brand even start with CRO as a strategy, if this is their first time diving into it?
Drew (53:25 - 54:50) - I mean, yeah, the Internet these days, you can learn so much so quickly. There’s people that I definitely follow in terms of newsletters - Matthias Schroeder is great. He’s got his own brand so he’s running the experiments himself and he’s a huge data nerd, geek, and he’s very thorough in terms of ‘I ran this!’ and he’s one who brought up the idea of maybe putting thresholds around free shipping or not. He’s always experimenting. Nik Sharma, you know, I think does a really good job of thinking about landing pages and combining that with paid efforts. Those are 2 that are a little bit more CRO-focused. I have a newsletter, I’ll put myself a little bit. It’s like a weekly, we do our experience, it’s kind of like Tim Ferriss, kind of, 5-bullet, it takes 30 seconds to read - ‘Here’s an experiment we ran, here’s the result, here’s a brand we admire, here’s a tool we’re experimenting with.’ Just because it’s more educational for me, a podcast I’m listening to or a book I’m reading that’s a little bit more business strategy. We have a few thousand people subscribed to that. We send that out either weekly. Just go to ConsultPCR, subscribe there. And then, honestly, like Klaviyo, A/B Tasty, a lot of these platforms, their blogs are chock full of resources that are really, really valuable too. I think the newsletter acts a little bit, with the websites themselves, as a great starter kit.
Scott (54:51 - 55:27) - Yeah, for the smaller brands, ‘cause this is where I see the challenge, and I’d love your perspective on this because there’s obviously constraints with budget, traffic, when’s the right time to look at a CRO agency, and Ray touched on it earlier, what situation is it worth overhauling versus having someone going testing, you know, if traffic’s not at a certain level, it’s gonna take a long time to get the data you want or you’re running single test per month - for the smaller brands, say under 200K a month in revenue, what do you suggest in terms of how they approach it and getting started with this?
Drew (55:27 - 57:20) - Yeah, I think, if you have a little bit of development, like a Google Optimize, here’s what I would do - I would kinda, educate yourself a little bit, kinda read a little bit about some of these things. There are some, emails like the top-performing flows. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit. More likely, you don’t even have to run an experiment. As an experiment, I hate saying that, but if you just don’t have the resources, going to dev, I can almost guarantee adding sticky add-to-cart for your mobile PDPs, like your product pages, is going to increase conversion, there’s just no doubt. Adding search and making it more prominent is going to have a positive impact, either on conversion, adding add-to-cart, reviews on your homepage, collection page, is going to have a positive impact. You know, doing some of those things, you’re kinda out of the gate, then you can start doing, once you’ve gone through that initial, like, surface-level stuff that does help, then you can start looking at a Google Optimize run and, kind of, creative experimentation but don’t get crazy with it. Have it where it’s like, experiment with having the upsell and not what does that look like and what is the impact, like little things. Changing ‘buy now’ to ‘shop today,’ trying things and calls-to-action to see what the impact of those things are. I think we can engage, most CRO agencies, you need 30,000, 40,000 visitors a month with a decent AOV so that, if that half a percent increase in conversion can justify a 5,000, 10,000 dollar a month retainer, we look at that. We run the calculations, like, ‘Oh, wow!’
Scott (57:20 - 57:22) - It’s gonna make sense!
Drew (57:22 - 57:52) - It’s gonna be incremental, kind of a net, probably doesn’t make sense so we’re pretty straightforward with that. There’s not a lot of us out there so, hopefully, I always advocate for the freelance consultant hourly. Work with them first, and maybe upgrade a little bit to the agency. Obviously, all the full service guys add CRO as a component, but I don’t think they do near as good of a job because they don’t focus just exclusively on that, understandably.
Scott (57:52 - 58:35) - Agreed, that’s a reason why we stayed out of that space for the most part, from outside, just because one of us has gotta really, really, really deep dive to get the depth of understanding that we know specialized people would have. Drew, thank you so much for jumping on, man! This has been an amazing chat. It’s been great to discuss this side of running an eCom brand. I think this has been neglected, but I think it’s gonna be, it’s critical to everyone getting ROI back to where they want it to be after, probably, a pretty tough year in 2021. Let’s hope 2022 is a bit better. Let’s wrap it up. Let everyone know where they can find you and if they’ve got any questions or wanna reach out, go for it!
Drew (58:35 - 59:18) - Yeah, no, Scott, Ray, like I said, I really appreciate you guys having me on. It was fun geeking out on these things and I’d have to be able to dive into it a little bit deeper than I normally do so I really appreciate the time. Yeah, I mean, pretty straightforward for me, you can obviously connect with me on LinkedIn. I’m usually pretty active, posting different tips, articles, tools. And then, yeah, I have the weekly newsletter is really the main 2 vehicles, if you just go to ConsultPCR(dot)com, there’s a little pop-up to subscribe. I do that weekly, maybe 2 minutes out of your day, we try to keep it short and succinct and of value. Those are the 2 ways to connect with me.
Scott (59:18 - 59:20) - Awesome, I’m signing up.
Drew (59:18 - 59:19) - Love it!
Scott (59:20 - 59:25) - Appreciate your time, Drew! Thanks so much for joining us, and stay tuned until the next episode.
Drew (59:25 - 59:27) - Amazing! Thanks, guys!
59:27 - 1:00:22 - Episode Outro
Scott (59:27 - 1:00:22) - Thanks again for tuning to this episode of the Growth & Greatness eCommerce Podcast. I hope you got a ton of value out of this episode and if you did, we’d love for you to leave us a review on your platform of choice and help us reach as many people as we can. Now, if you’re a brand founder, an eCommerce entrepreneur, or an in-house marketing manager looking to accelerate your growth this year, reach out to us at Right Hook Digital. We’re a performance branding agency and we specialize in partnering with eCommerce brands to help them hit their growth goals with maximum ROI. Now, if this sounds like a solution that you need, then check us out at righthookdigital.com and schedule a call with our client partnerships team. They’d love to have a chat with you and see how we can help you grow.