At least, that’s what it feels like most days. Just look at the stats:

• There are 2.3 million active sellers on Amazon this year
• Amazon Prime has 126 million members in the US alone
• Amazon’s sales revenue was $75.5 billion – just in the first quarter of 2020

In addition, the ecommerce giant has been steadily increasing its share of online retail dollars over the past few years, and shows no signs of stopping. 

How did Amazon become such a powerhouse? 

The site sells more than 12 million products, but thanks to powerful search/navigation tools, it’s easy to find what you’re looking for. 

The checkout process is lightning fast. 

And the free two-day shipping for all Amazon Prime members is the icing on the cake. 

It may be impossible for DTC brands to compete with Amazon on price or efficiency, but there is one area where Amazon scores poorly:

Customer experience. 

Amazon’s strength (millions of merchants selling millions of products) is also its weakness. In the process of automating and optimizing the purchasing process so that every transaction feels the same, the world’s most popular marketplace has stripped out the human elements of online shopping.

This is great news for independent ecommerce shops. 

How can you turn your direct connection with customers into profit?

Read on to learn:

• What customers want 
• 3 ways personalization can increase your bottom line
• How to turn transactional emails into revenue generators

What customers want

Research shows that 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences, and that 44% of consumers will likely become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience with a particular company.

It’s clear that customers expect brands to deliver an engaging buying experience. But retailers are falling short when it comes to providing thoughtful service. 

“Despite those expectations, however, a majority of consumers are disappointed with the ongoing lack of personalization in their shopping experiences. On average 71% express some level of frustration when their experience is impersonal.”  – Segment’s State of Personalization Report

Let’s take a closer look at this missed opportunity.

3 ways personalization can increase your bottom line

Online shoppers have infinite choices when picking where to spend their money – just think about how many ecommerce mattress companies advertise on the subway, or how many beauty subscription boxes there are in the world. 

Delivering a personalized shopping experience is one way that a brand can stand out in a crowded market, and it’s a very smart move from a financial standpoint. 

Here are three ways personalizing the online shopping experience can increase your bottom line: 

1. Increased Customer Retention

People don’t just shop with their wallets; they shop with their feelings. 

If you can make them feel good about their decision to buy your product by delivering a superior customer experience, or by making them feel like they’re part of something meaningful, they will keep choosing your brand over others. 

According to Hubspot, just a 5% increase in customer retention can increase company revenue by 25-95%. So don’t sleep on building brand loyalty:

1. Offer customers the chance to get to know your brand through your About Us page, or a special email from the founder 
2. Give them the opportunity to meet other customers with shared values via an online community or popup events
3. Reward them for sticking around with a repeat purchase discount, loyalty points or ambassador program

2. Higher AOV (Average Order Value)

“Ultimately, average order value boils down to increased profits and continued success for your brand.” – Alex McEachern, Marketing Manager at Loop  

When you offer shoppers items that align with their order history or browsing activity, not only are they more likely to buy from you; they are more likely to spend more, increasing your average order value. 

A few thoughtful touches you can add to the online shopping experience to raise AOV:

1. Create bundles of related products that customers often buy together
2. Offer a bulk buying discount or subscription on products your customers buy often 
3. Upsell customers on complementary items during checkout

3. New Business (Referrals)

When you invest time or money in personalizing the ecommerce experience, you create happy customers. And those happy customers generate new customers when they spread the word about how great your brand is. 

It’s a beautiful thing.

Take a look at how these Shopify merchants have benefited from creating brand evangelists: 

• Thrive Causemetics earned 18.4X ROI on their referral program in the first month
• The AOV from Pura Vida’s referral sales are 11% higher than normal orders
• 100% Pure generated over $244,000 in 18 months from referrals

Whether you officially build out a referral program, or you delight your customers so much that they can’t help telling their friends, word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool for ecommerce brands. 

How can you get people talking? 

In ecommerce, transactional emails are often overlooked – and therefore a great place to start. 

How to turn transactional emails into revenue generators

Sure, Amazon employs more than 1 million people worldwide. But have you ever taken a look at their customer communications? 

To put it bluntly, Amazon emails suck. It feels like they’ve been written and scheduled by an AI program. 

You can do better. 

Let’s take a look at the transactional emails Amazon is sending, and how ecommerce brands can add a more personal touch to boost customer loyalty and drive revenue.

Transactional Email #1 – Abandoned cart

Amazon example:

Amazon’s abandoned cart email is pretty bare bones: “You added some stuff to your cart. You should go back and buy it.” And the CTA button doesn’t actually demand much action; “View” is a pretty passive verb, after all. 

Ecommerce example (Blume):

Tips for driving more revenue through your abandoned cart emails:

• Pull in customer reviews of the product to overcome any hesitation
• Inject your branding into the copy or design to engage potential buyers
• Provide an exclusive incentive to complete the purchase 
• Offer customer support or a 1:1 session with a shopping specialist

Transactional Email #2 – Subscription activation

Amazon example:

Ah, yes. Nothing screams personalization like using someone’s first AND last name in an email. 

All jokes aside, this is actually Amazon’s best automated message – although it’s plain text the tone is friendly, the benefits overview is helpful, and the nav bar at the top is a nice touch. It’s like they want to convert me as a customer. 

Ecommerce example (Birchbox):

Tips for driving more revenue through your subscription activation emails:

• Invite new members to take a quiz so you can make tailored product recommendations
• Play up any VIP benefits
• Provide access to an exclusive online community to make the membership more sticky

Transactional Email #3 – First purchase

Amazon example:

Once you’ve paid for your first Prime order, Amazon does throw some design elements and product marketing your way. 

However, there’s no hint of relationship building in the copy, and if you note the fine print at the bottom of the email, you aren’t allowed to reply to their “welcome” message. So cold.  

Ecommerce example (Vellabox):

Tips for driving more revenue through your first purchase emails:

• Make customers feel welcome with the copy; like they are joining something special
• Send the message from a team member or founder
• Allow or encourage people to reply to the email with comments or questions

Transactional Email #4 – Shipping confirmation

Amazon example:

Another “just the facts”-style message from everyone’s favorite ecommerce giant. 

Curiously, Amazon’s order and shipping confirmation emails don’t actually mention the products that have been purchased – which can get confusing if you are a frequent/impulsive Prime shopper. 

Ecommerce example (Carnivore Club):

Tips for driving more revenue through your shipping confirmation emails:

• Praise the customer for making a smart purchasing decision
• Build anticipation around the delivery with the copy
• Link to your exchange policy
• Make it easy for customers to contact customer service with questions

Transactional Email #5 – Delivery confirmation

Amazon example:

It is nice that Amazon is asking if my delivery experience was satisfactory, and I appreciate the link to make a return or exchange. But once again, this is a bare-minimum message with no hint of color or humanity. 

Ecommerce example (Teleflora):

Tips for driving more revenue through your delivery confirmation emails:

• Celebrate the arrival of the package
• Share product usage tips to reduce your return rate
• Recommend related products
• Encourage additional purchases with an exclusive promo 

Transactional Email #6 – Refund

Amazon example:

This refund confirmation email is business as usual for Amazon – there’s no mention of the product or the merchant, they make no attempt to ask what went awry, and there are no next steps if you have questions. 

Ecommerce example (Figleaves):

Tips for driving more revenue through refund emails:

• Acknowledge that the customer’s experience may have been less than perfect
• Keep them shopping with free shipping or credit towards their next purchase 
• Provide tips on finding a better size or style of the product that was ordered
• Ask for product or delivery feedback to show you are listening

Transactional Email #7 – Subscription cancellation

Amazon example:

Amazon sends its strongest automated emails at key points in the customer journey – when they are trying to close you as a paying Prime member, and when they have lost you as a paying Prime member. 

Here, they do ask for feedback (though the words “external party” and “privacy notice” do not exactly give me the warm fuzzies).

Ecommerce example (CAUSEBOX):

Tips for driving more revenue through your subscription cancellation emails:

• If you sent an activation email from a team member/founder, send the cancellation email from the same person
• Offer VIP customer support if they are willing to give you another shot
• Remind the customer why they subscribed in the first place
• Pull in data about any loyalty points or referral bonuses they might be leaving behind

Instant replay

For all of its clout in the ecommerce world, Amazon hasn’t spent nearly as much time on the email side of customer communications as it has on optimizing the online shopping experience. 

This leaves the door wide open for DTC brands to create a more personalized customer experience with every email sent – including transactional ones. 

Happy shoppers become repeat purchasers and referrers, so if you haven’t taken a look at your automated emails lately, you’re definitely leaving money on the table. 

Who knows – according to Rod’s experience below, your investment could give you an advantage over your competitors as well! 

The post How To Turn Transactional Emails Into Revenue Generators appeared first on The Good.

In this webinar we explore:

• The data trends that ShipBob has observed over the last several weeks.
• The lessons George has learned navigating the pandemic.
• How ShipBob is adapting to serve their customers through the pandemic.
• How ShipBob’s marketing and sales objectives have shifted.

Transcript:

• Jon: Alright, everybody, thank you so much for joining us today. I am very excited to be doing this webinar with George Wojciechowsky. George is the co-founder of ShipBob and head of partnerships. He advocates for merchant empowerment by working with partners and platforms to develop a best in class ecosystem of solutions for eCommerce merchants. So George used to be ShipBob’s head of the signature shipping services by establishing strategically located fulfillment centers. So George has actually launched and operationalized fulfillment centers in Chicago, New York city, LA, San Francisco, Dallas, and more. And so prior to this he worked in futures trading, which I definitely wanna dive into, especially in these times George might be interesting to see the lessons learned that can be applied. But he really wanted to build something more unique in the world. And this extends from ShipBob as a company down to the hiring and training of all the individuals that constitute the next generation of leaders and employees. So welcome George.
• George: Thank you John. Thank you for inviting me to be on this webinar with you guys and I’m excited to talk to everyone and engage and find out you know, talk about my perspective and what we’re seeing in ShipBob and also learn about everyone else’s perspective and what they may be seeing. So happy to be here.
• Jon: Great, yeah, I’m super excited because, I think in these times the e-commerce seems to be in a 50, 50 split from what we’ve been hearing on our research where some brands are just going gangbusters, right? And some brands are having a bit of an issue with supply chain perhaps, which is hard to get products in and then even get them shipped out. And I think what we’re seeing is there’s a segment of that group that I’ve been talking to and this is why I was really interested to bring you in is, I think it’s going to be really important over the next six months to have the operation side of these eCommerce businesses really ironed out. And that’s gonna make all the difference for these folks. And what I mean by that is if you’re still trying to ship out of your garage for instance, and you’re working on that all day long. That’s really hard to take advantage of all of the other opportunities that are out there for eCommerce businesses as we go through these times right now. And I think it’s going to be really important over the next six months. And that was really why I wanted to chat with you guys. Have a good understanding of as all these eCommerce brands look to rebuild over the next handful of months and continue to take advantage of the times that we’re in in terms of being able to drive more traffic and convert better, but also means they need to get the products out. And more and more brands direct to consumer brands are seeing their shipment levels rise pretty dramatically right now as products like, you look at Amazon and they were for a while, they may still be looking at only shipping a certain types of products or at least limiting that a little bit. So I think what we’re finding is that DTC brands are really having a just a banner year and being able to take advantage of these situations and and really get the products out to consumers and those who are doing it most efficiently are going to win. So as you think a little bit more about logistics, I’d love to hear just kind of one on one. First of all, why don’t you give us the 30 seconds on ShipBob just for those who may not know they’re coming to this. I think most people who are in e-commerce know ShipBob, but could you give us just a quick 30 seconds on it?
• George: Yeah ShipBob is a six year old shipping and fulfillment company will be six on June 6th of this year. It’ll be our sixth anniversary. We came out of Y Combinator in the summer of 2014 and our goal as a company has always been to provide the new generation of eCommerce merchants with the same tools, reach and scalability as the bigger players in eCommerce. What we saw back in 2014 and 2015 was this very fast evolving democratization where individuals with an inspired idea for a business or a product could go on platforms like Shopify and create a very good website and be in business in a matter of hours. Most of the time days, by the matter of hours. And we wanted to support those merchants because we felt that it was what they were creating had a lot of value in what came from a very unique perspective, not a fortune 5,000 company perspective that went through R&D and marketing research, but like inspired ideas from individuals. And we wanted it to be the facilitator to help them compete on the same level as the bigger players in eCommerce. And we do that in a couple of ways. We’ve built our entire tech stack geared toward this merchant, the idea of this independent merchant. And it’s been a quantum leap as far as the 3PL industry goes. Now it was in its time and its still is. But it was a quantum leap in that we provided technology that centralized all the information a merchant would need for the economy the shipping and logistics part of their business under one platform in one centralized place. And also provided really heavy analytics for them to be able to dive into their data and make decisions based on the data that their businesses providing, via where customers are ordering from and what frequency and what velocity. So the software component is super important, but there’s a lot of great software companies out there. We’ve merged that with owning an opera or operating a network of seven fulfillment centers throughout North America. Pennsylvania, Tennessee, two in Texas, Florida, Chicago, California Ottawa Canada and soon Kilkenny Ireland. And what that allows to do, that’s the great equalizer in the sense that it allows merchants who maybe they’re selling vegan handbags on the lower East side of Manhattan or they’re running a cosmetics company in Portland, Oregon. They’re normally shipping from one location to all over the country and all over the world. Well the strategic advantage that bigger merchants have, the Amazon and Amazon’s and the jet that comes in the North terms of the world is that they have hundreds of millions and billions of dollars invested in logistics infrastructure. That allows them to ship products basically anywhere in the country with two day ground shipping, and be essentially free or very low cost of shipping. And they set customer expectations. So if I’m this business that’s doing or it’s running a cosmetics company in Portland Oregon, and I’m shipping to New York and Florida, my shipments are taking three, four or five days to get there. And I have to charge merchants for shipping because it’s going through six, seven, eight shipping zones. It’s an expensive process. While with ShipBob in short is we’re able to work with merchants to distribute their inventory throughout our network so that they too can reach basically any customers in North America with two day ground shipping at a very inexpensive price per shipment. And also meet customer expectations by delivering it to their door within 48 hours of the order coming through.
• Jon: Yeah, that’s amazing because that’s always the value prop that I share with our clients in discussions I have here at the good is you should definitely look at ShipBob because it helps you provide prime like shipping to your customers without having to be on Amazon. And you get all that margin, you get all of the data, you get all the customer information and you get people who have a better conversion experience on your site. Once they do convert, if you want them to come back again, you have to have a great shipping and fulfillment experience and–
• George: And that’s the point Jon, absolutely. You essentially brings the power and the data back to the merchant while delivering on the same capabilities that you might find with an FBA.
• Jon: Mm-hmm that’s wonderful. So I know you guys recently came out with trends.shipbob.com A great site that kind of a sharing a whole bunch of data. I’m not sure how involved you were in that specifically, but what were the major findings from there that you recall and can share with us? What was the most interesting point perhaps?
• George: Yeah, it is a super interesting tool. We felt early on when this COVID crisis started to unravel is that the best thing that we can do right now is not sell our customers or sell our value proposition, but to provide data that makes that informs our merchants and merchants anywhere, whether they’re working with ShipBob or not. With information that allows them to have a good sense of what’s going on as well as make decisions for their own business. And so Casey Armstrong, our CMO and Nick Carter our partner marketing manager worked with our analytics team to kind of dig into our data and find out, okay, as this crisis has evolved, what are the trends we’re seeing in terms of which products are shipping and in what velocity and how does that look? And it’s been super interesting. One of the main, the main conclusion is that, and you alluded to this earlier in the conversation John. There’s been massive growth across the board with retail stores closed. Doesn’t matter what you’re selling, we’ve seen a huge uptake in e-commerce shipments over the last six, seven, eight weeks that wasn’t expected. I don’t think anybody expected it in their business plans going from Q1 to Q2 but there’s been a massive uptick. And if you go to trends.shipbob.com, which I highly recommend everybody does cause you can get lost in the data and it’s super interesting. It was funny like in March how you saw products that normally are fairly steady, shoot up things like baby formula, I think shut up or baby products and baby nutritional products shut up 700%. And the usual catalysts like cosmetics, apparel electronics fell off the board in the early weeks of March. And you saw supplements and nutritional things go through the roof and then the other kind of the usual catalyst dropped. But what we’re seeing if you look at it now is in early April, and this may be a sense of maybe people are bored or maybe they’re, the weather’s changing and they’re buying summer gear. But you’re starting to see an uptake again in the traditional catalysts that usually lead the verticals that lead, what we’re typically shipping out of our fulfillment centers but–
• Jon: Do you think that’s like kind of a new normal as I hear quite often now where people are just getting used to us being in this situation, they’re not as fear driven anymore perhaps, or they’re not thinking about the essentials as much cause they’ve got those covered now they’re getting back to normal buying rhythms perhaps even though they’re stuck at home.
• George: Yeah, exactly. I think that people have come a long way since early March in terms of acceptance of what’s going on. They’ve stocked up on their supplements, they’ve got their organic tissue paper and other essentials that they need, or at least they’re comfortable with the amount of inventory that they have personally. And they’re sitting around the house 7:30 at night and they’re looking about like, well this might be cool to wear during the summertime or I could use this cool sporting equipments once the tennis courts open up. So people are starting to accept the new norm as you said and start thinking about like, well, what’s life gonna be like when it does get back to normal and what kind of things would I enjoy doing? And we’re starting to see that if you can, it’s fairly evident than the trends that ship out website that you start to see an uptake in these categories that people are just, back to their usual mentality of thinking about, activities, and apparel and things like that.
• Jon: Yeah, it’s a great site. As a data nerd myself obviously being in conversion optimization we do everything with data back decisions, having data like this it’s just been really eye opening for us, and being able to keep our customers informed of what’s happening just in general market place. But if you go on this site, you can look at things by vertical by transit times. You can break it down state by state, so you can really see and slice and dice this information. It’s a great resource. Yeah, so I guess we’re good. So everybody listening you please put your questions in the Q&A. We’ve already got a handful in here, George. So maybe I’ll just throw some of these in as we go.
• George: Sure.
• Jon: And we can, you know, I’ll just start at the top here. So somebody asks has ShipBob adapted to using robots in the warehouses yet. Are you still dependent on human labor?
• George: Yeah, great question. This is a question that’s kind of trailed us for the last couple of years as like robotics have become more and more prominent in the fulfillment space. We’ve done heavy analysis on this. And we do have a function of our fulfillment centers that utilize mechanics and robotics, but it is still predominantly serviced and operated by human beings by a far away majority. And we’re very comfortable with the ROI of utilizing people and creating jobs versus investing perhaps a couple million dollars or as much as $10 million in a robotic system. And revamping the entire process. We’re using robotics to help people do their jobs within the fulfillment center. But the robotics themselves are very limited in terms of actually providing a function that a human would previously do themselves.
• Jon: Yeah, and I think that goes really well into this next question I was gonna ask you, which is, do you guys allow clients to run split tests in regards to inserts or packaging? Cause that seems like that’d be something you would want to do through human involvement anyways, right?
• George: Yeah, that is a great question. So, that I understand it correctly. So you get say 100 orders and you want us do inserts and 50 of a certain kind and another 50 units yeah, absolutely. That’s pretty easy for us to do. Essentially what we would do is mark each of the inserts separately as an individual skew. And maybe mark the first 50 orders to get this skew. And then on the back end we would make some adjustments to the dashboard or the merchant would make some to the dashboard and we would see, okay, here’s the next 50, we’ll get these inserts. So yeah, we’re pretty flexible. We’re all about branding and unboxing, creating an opportunity for a merchant has shared unboxing experience with their customers. So a lot of that stuff that you might be find difficulty or resistance to. In other fulfillment operations, we’re very pro, so whether it’s a custom box or using a sustainable materials or sourcing custom tissue paper or inserts, we’ve structured our operations to be very conducive to that.
• Jon: That’s wonderful yeah, that’s something that as we always are doing onsite AB testing, a lot of the things we do look at is what’s the post-purchase situation look like. When we’re auditing a website that is something we always want to look at. And we’ve worked with brands that we get the clothing and t-shirts just watered up in a ball in a bag and sent to us and it’s like, that’s not a great experience right? And so that’s when we bring people to you guys and say, hey, this should really be a better fulfillment experience. If this is the best that your internal team’s gonna be able to do then definitely outsource this.
• George: It’s funny how you can kind of tell where the merchant is and their merchant journey. We’ve been at this six years and you see how people do things for like the first six months to a year where they’re bootstrapping at themselves and maybe they send you a couple sample shipments and it’s just like you explained t-shirts rolled up in a poly mailer and you’re like, huh. But as their product has caught on and they’ve created an audience, they start to take things like that more seriously. They start to take branding more seriously. And at a certain point they go out looking for a scalable fulfillment partner to kind of help them level up in that regard.
• Jon: That’s great. I really wanna get back to trends. But one more question around this. As somebody just asked, do you enable merchants to do dynamic content inserts or packaging other than the obvious labels and addresses?
• George: Mm-hmm, I’m not sure I understand what dynamic content is.
• Jon: So maybe you could put a personalized printed message and an insert something of that sort of
• George: Yeah, so that’s a question that’s trailed us from the beginning as well. So early on when we were a bootstrapping company, we would do it all day long. We would have brands selling custom mugs or something that was very boutique. And that handwritten note really made a difference. So myself and anyone else on the team would sit down and write 150 of those or like sign the name I don’t know. We would do all of that, but unfortunately it wasn’t scalable. So over time we did find a scalable solution. It may not be as custom as people ideally would love, which is like a handwritten note to each individual person. But we can include a message on the packing slip that comes in with the orders so we can digitally write a little message on there and include that in the shipment.
• J: Awesome that’s great. So getting back to trends, can you tell me a little bit more about why you decided to put that site together? I know we’ve talked about what’s on there and the benefits out of it, but why did you decide to put that together?
• G: Yeah very simply to help others. We knew that this was an extraordinary time supply chains were out of whack and we can’t remember, nobody can remember the last time where people actually had trouble getting products that fulfillment centers were closing them. I don’t think it’s happened in anyone’s lifetime because we have a few, we’ve had financial crisis and things like that but never in the sense that we’re like, hey, people may not have access to materials. So we look at the landscape and see, okay, selling right now doesn’t make any sense. What can we do to create value for merchants and the broader e-commerce community? And the answer was, we can help others by providing data. We have over 3000 eCommerce merchants saturated around over 30 plus countries. We have great data that we can share and let people view this and interpreted however it’s most valuable to them. And so that was kind of the positioning that we took back in early March. And it’s not only in regards to the trends that shipbob.com, which, no, Nick Carter and Casey Armstrong did such a phenomenal job but nobody ever expected it to go viral. And now it’s being used on websites across the eCommerce community. But nobody really expected that though. The priority was to let’s get information out there to help others. And it’s not only limited to the trends that shipbob.com it’s in the content that our marketing team and our content team has pushed out. It’s all been about informing and it’s all been about giving people data. As well as Casey and Nick are also have been hosting this operator series weekly for the last three or four weeks that you know about John. And essentially we’re getting merchants to get on a conversation, a four way conversation and allowing other merchants to ask them questions about what’s going on from their perspective, what are they seeing. So that all kind of follows this theme of giving people data, informing them and letting them know that we are a reliable third party data source right now. And that’s what we feel that they need most.
• J: That’s great, yeah. And also just not reinventing the wheel. That’s the big thing I’ve seen coming out of those Q&A’s as well. With these operators has been, if these operators have figured things out, why you don’t need to go repeat the same mistakes, right. Learn from their mistakes and learn from what they’re doing where they’re being successful right now and implement that yourselves so–
• G: 100%
• J: Yeah, as I say, great artists steal so that’s great. So I’m interested, what kind of business goals or KPIs do you think for eCommerce brands have been really impacted by the pandemic?
• G: Oh, that’s a great question. Well, as far as business goals go, like I mentioned earlier and you mentioned it also early on too, that this as far as like e-commerce and the e-commerce industry has been the Black Swan event that nobody ever predicted. And one of the things that you were talking about earlier that kind of was, well struck a chord with me is like how our business is going to prepare for in the next six months for what their business is gonna look like in the future. And there’s going to be a lot more emphasis on what happens when an event like this happens in FBA closes what won’t accept my inventory because I’m selling candles and it’s considered non-essential. What happens if my fulfillment center shuts down, because they’ve had two or three cases of COVID-19 and they can’t run operations anymore. So I think one of the things that eCommerce brands are really gonna start taking into consideration is what do we do as our fallback plan? We have how we’re doing fulfillment now, but maybe it’s worth it to have a backup fulfillment center that we can move inventory to. Let’s secure and double back an alternative route for our supply chain. If we’re ordering products from China or in South America or another country, how do we have a fall back in case that gets cut off at some point. So there’s gonna be this emphasis where people never really thought about it before about business continuity and the steps they can take to make sure that they stay in business when a Black Swan event like this occurs.
• J: Yeah, I saw a really hilarious meme along those lines this week that said it was a bunch of, like a board of a company sitting in a boardroom and they said, what was their digital plan? And the hell said digital transformation COVID-19. And I thought that was really funny because it’s like, yeah, all these brands aren’t really thinking about the digital operations and all these other things they could be taking advantage of, but now they’re forced to think about that and they’re only forced to think about it and actually take action because of what we’re going through right now. So I thought that was really interesting and definitely ties in well with, you seeing people in brands thinking about continuity, which is really gonna be important I believe as well.
• G: I also think that there’s a little, and another thing that I just wanna mention really quick is looking at the analytics of your business, find out who from your are most of your orders still coming from your, how are, what are the buying patterns of your tried and true customers during this time and how many new clients are you seeing? There’s this company out in Brooklyn called O’Douds. They make pomade and men’s grooming products. And things like that. And I’m a big fan of their products and I use them and I wanted, even though I didn’t need to I didn’t need more product. I went specifically online and ordered from merchants that I still want them to to be doing well and to spend my money with them during this time. So like what is your merchant makeup right now look like if you’re getting orders, are they people coming in new first time buyers or are they perhaps your core and how is your core reacting during this time? Are they still buying or they’re reminded by their buying pattern elsewhere.
• J: Somebody asked a relevant question to this, which is, what would you recommend for using 3PL as a fallback plan? Is there a particular months worth of product that you would recommend or some other way that you would engage with ShipBob is that kind of a second continuity plan?
• G: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, yeah, if you’re fulfillments, if you’re working with a fulfillment center, you may want a formal relationship as a backup that you know, that like, okay, if one shuts down, I need, I can call these people up and perhaps they’re not going to be experiencing the same problems but not to ship out as value proposition. But I would look to link up with a fulfillment center that has a network. It’s a lot easier and it’s already a built in backup if the fulfillment center that you’re working with has multiple fulfillment centers. So maybe one does get shut down, you still have three or four options to move inventory to. And it’s a lot easier because you don’t have to re onboard with a new, fulfillment center, with different SLAs and a different tech stack and the different structure. So ideally you would want to find a partner that has a network that if something happens in one part of the network that they can transfer your operations to another part.
• J: That’s a great idea. And a great point there. So thank you for that. Can you talk, I know you’ve just mentioned at one brand that you’ve found that has been doing a great job recently you wanted to support. What have you guys seen over at ShipBob, of companies that have done a great job pivoting in the last few weeks?
• G: Yeah that’s a really great question. Actually product diversification is something that I didn’t expect going back to March, but looking at what some of our merchants have done over the last six weeks, I am beyond impressed. And it’s not right for every business I think you still need to have some sort of a vertical that’s complimentary. But for example, there’s this company that works with ShipBob called Kenny Flowers, which is an apparel company. They make these Hawaiian shirts kind of in the theme of Kenny powers the character from the baseball show in HBO. And they have a very good business. They do a lot of shipments per month in ordinary times. But when apparel dropped off, what did they do? They took that same design in that same style. They knew that they had a really core group of enthusiasts for what they put out there and they started making masks and they’ve been able to sustain and go above and beyond during this time where normally their business may have taken a little bit of a ding, but now they’re selling masks and they’re sustaining. So product diversification, I’ve been very impressed with the merchants that have been able to take their day to day vertical and expand on that to have a product that’s more relevant to the times and the situation that where we’re presently in.
• J: That’s great. Yeah man, the questions are coming in faster and quicker, so I’m trying to sort through them as well, yeah. So I guess one question I have for you and then we’ll just basically get into the Q&A for the last few minutes we have here. What do you think, over the next six months, what’s gonna be really crucial do you think to long term growth for these eCommerce brands?
• G: I think all businesses, and I’ve read this in a couple of business books that I’ve read over the years and what I’ve seen personally in six years in the logistic space. The businesses that are able to curve out a fanatical base of followers who just love that brand, love talking about their brand, talking about that brand will do anything to support that brand because they see themselves in that brand or they love the founder’s story or they love the content that’s being pushed out. Emphasizing that base and kind of circling the wagons to make sure that that base is strong because those are the people that are gonna forward the emails of promotional campaigns. And they’re gonna buy at all times and they’re gonna be the ones that tell other people about your product and get them excited as they are about the product that you’re selling or about the brand that you’re building. So I think the key to the success is shoring up that core, making sure that you’re still delivering on that value that they have absolutely fallen in love with about your business.
• J: That’s a great point. Okay, so I’m gonna run down some of these questions we have. Do you have about 10 more minutes you can spend with us today? Okay, Awesome. Okay, so question here from Nick. Nicholas, do you think the consumer spending will dramatically go down over the next six months? And if so, does that spending go down for in-person purchases but increase for online or do you think it will go down across the board because of the high unemployment numbers?
• G: Great question. I honestly wish I had an answer to it. My personal view is that it’s, I mean I just read something that here in California and here in Los Angeles, 50% of the people are now unemployed in the city of Los Angeles. I don’t know how this is gonna shake out. I feel like, naturally I tend to be an optimist and I think we’re gonna come back and we’re gonna come back strong and we’re gonna find solutions to people to live in a world in which there’s this lingering potential of getting sick and it being a serious problem in people’s lives. But I think the… Before this all happened, we had what seemingly was a strong economy. The contraction is really scary and what really scares me is the domino effect. Like person doesn’t pay the rent because they don’t need to pay the rent then the landlord doesn’t pay the bank and vice versa. And the domino just keeps tipping where everybody’s kinda passing the buck. That terrifies me. But I tend to be optimistic and think that we’re gonna be okay. I don’t know about the specifics, whether spending levels will go back to what they were in February, in January, in 2019. But I’m hopeful and optimistic that people will slowly start to get back on their feet, that the underlying fundamentals of our economy were strong before this. And that the contraction that we’re seeing right now is not gonna be to fade. It’s not gonna be so traumatic that we’re not able to recover and get back to some semblance of what it was like before this. But the honest answer, candidate answer is I don’t really know.
• J: Yeah, I think we’re all wondering and don’t really know and I think we’ll find out together. But I do agree with you based on what I’m seeing, the core tenants of our economy are good. It’s just a pause and we really the faster we can get through the health issues, the quicker we’ll get our economy restarted. So, yeah and in the meantime, being an e-comm is not a bad play. People are still buying as we’re seeing as trends are showing you, right. The site you guys have. So we’re seeing that with our client base too so.
• G: I agree and yeah.
• J: Next question here is, what advice would you give the folks who ran into stock issues recently? And you’ve already talked about this a little bit, but the second part was how do you think they can be better prepared? I think having that continuity we talked about, but what advice would you give folks who find themselves in that situation right now. They already have stock issues.
• G: Where they’re unable to get products delivered to them. Yeah, we have merchants that I’ve talked to personally that are experiencing that. There’s no easy answer to it. I think that having stronger relationships with and fretting or candid relationships with your suppliers is about the best thing that you can do. So that if what I’ve seen a couple of times in the last couple of days actually is people expecting inventory to arrive from another country. But they’re basically getting the runaround. They’re saying, Oh yeah, it’s on the way and it’s not arriving. And they’re basically getting lied to. So the stronger the relationships you have with your suppliers, the stronger relationships you have with the different components of your supply chain. I think I’ll always work to your advantage. Doesn’t always work out that way, especially when you’re starting out then you may not be a big part of your partners revenue base. But as you continually reorder business and you grow the business, getting closer with those different components into your supply chain in establishing a relationship is super important. And I don’t have any answers for like what to do if your inventory is stuck right now and you’re waiting to sell product accept that communicate to your customer. It’s likely that you have orders that people have placed and just let them know what’s going on. I think most people right now would be pretty understanding if you said, hey, we were expecting these masks to be here last Wednesday or Thursday, they still haven’t arrived. And then offer a little something as a consolation, maybe like 50% off or 20% off next order, but be like, thank you for your patience. Let them know that you appreciate it their willingness to stick with you.
• J: Yeah, that’s great.
• G: People know what’s going on, so they should be understanding God.
• J: Yeah, for sure. And we actually have a great insight article up on our site we wrote a few weeks ago. It’s all about how to deal with how to stock items. So, I don’t know who asked that question came up as anonymous, but I definitely recommend going and looking at the good.com/insights, or just click insights up in the nav. And then you get that article.
• G: I’m definitely gonna read that. Can you talk a little bit about that? I’d love to know like what some of–
• J: Yeah, so there’s, look, there’s a bunch of different things that brands could be doing but right now making it feel like an exclusive, that they’re on a waiting list that they’ve joined some type of exclusivity around getting the product when it comes back in. This is also a great opportunity to find alternate ways to communicate with your customers. So take a phone number and text them when the product comes in so they’re first to know and now you’ve got a new communication channel that you could use for instance right. There’s a lot of great texting tools out there right now I know privy just came out with one not too long ago that’s pretty good and very inexpensive. So there’s a lot of means out there to do that. I think having people sign up to be notified. I think having if there is a delay, throwing something extra in, as you mentioned, a discount. We typically just in conversion optimization, the last place I always wanna go is discounting. But I think it’s possible a lot of brands do it, but I would think adding an incentive around, hey, when it does come in, I’ll overnight ship it to you or a two day ship it to you. If I can something of that sort to get it to me even quicker to know you’re doing what you can. There’s also options around, throwing in a gift, those purchase. So what does that small little item that you do have tons of stock on that you could include that maybe as a nice little benefit for them. So there’s a lot of extra stuff like that and I think like when they fulfill through ShipBob, one thing you could do is just add that note on the shipping package to say thank you so much for your patience. Really appreciate you as a customer. I know we all trying to be a little more understanding, but know that this purchase is valuable to us and I appreciate that communication. As you said is going to be key here, but there’s a lot of things that could be done to set expectations appropriately and then let people have notification channels. And also just making it easy for them to get in line. One thing we’ve seen be really successful is place a pre-order and then you can cancel that order anytime between now and then. So now when it ships, so what I mean by that is if there is uncertainty, you’re not sure if you’re gonna lose your job or whatever else might be going on right now. Go ahead and place the order and you can cancel it anytime before it ships, no problem.
• G: That’s a great idea.
• J: Yeah, and you’re just taking the risk out of it for people. I think that’s what the biggest concern is, is there’s inherent risk in ordering out-of-stock product cause you don’t know when you’re gonna get it in theory right. Even if you try to set some expectations there. And look, we’re all in uncertain times. We don’t know what position we’re gonna be in as a family personally, et cetera. By the time that product does come in stock. So, what might change. So eliminating all of those concerns is great things to do from here.
• G: I love that thank you for that, Jon. All wonderful points. I love the personalization angle of it too.
• J: Mm-hmm yeah, for sure. Here’s a great question. I think is really helpful. What stage is an econ brand growth? Does it make sense to move to the third party? Logistics service like ShipBob?
• G: Yeah, so great question. I don’t think that there’s a specific like template or a specific time to move in a merchant’s journey. However, when you get to a certain threshold in which you’re spending more time fulfilling orders, that would be more valuable focusing on things like product development and marketing and other aspects of your business that really move the needle, is the time that you need to start outsourcing fulfillment or at least looking for a partner down the road. Historically, I’ve seen that, at around 200 shipments per month or something like that, depending on what you’re shipping, if you’re just taking product and dropping it in a poly mailer, you can probably wait out until you’re like at 300, 400. But time is the most valuable resource any entrepreneur has. And if you think spending three or four hours in the back room packaging and labeling and printing out labels is worth your time then you’re not ready to outsource. But if you are find yourself in that back room and you’re like, man, I really wanna get to those customer emails or do that webinar, then it’s time to start outsourcing.
• J: That’s a great point. I think looking at this as a return on your investment is likely going to be the best way to handle that right. What else could you be doing with your time if you were able to invest your time elsewhere instead of packaging up and applying labels, printing, all of that, right. So great point there. Okay, couple more questions cause I know we only have you for a few more minutes. Amazon tested a interesting model allowing advertisers to brand boxes and packaging and offering discounted shipping to their merchants. Do you see this trend coming in larger force?
• G: Yeah.
• J: I know many merchants would allow their branding to take a backseat for cheaper packaging Interesting.
• G: Yeah, it is an interesting question. I actually didn’t know about that program but definitely going to read into it afterwards. Cause Amazon’s always been about Amazon boxes, Amazon branding, you’re selling through our marketplace, but it’s our customer, not your customer, which has always been my problem with Amazon.
• J: Right, you don’t own the data as we talked about earlier, right.
• G: And the data, exactly. Yeah I definitely see that as a trend emerging. I mean it’s something that we’ve always been very big proponent of is giving a platform for merchants to express themselves to their customers. And I think the brands of the future are going to have a really strong core and a really strong following and are going to be battling over, who can create, when you get that package, there’s already this excitement. I can’t wait to open these new sneakers or whatever. And like creating an experience that’s so memorable that there’s no other one, no one else that you want your merchant, your customer to ever order from because they were so addicted to that cool experience that you’re giving them when they get their product.
• J: Yeah, that’s great. Okay, and last question here, if anybody else has any other questions, we have a couple more minutes. Go ahead and put them in the Q&A. But the last question I see here is, has ShipBob thought about using peer-to-peer spaces instead of leased or owned warehouses?
• G: Yeah.
• J: It’s a very specific question but.
• G: Yeah, it’s interesting. I wouldn’t necessarily call them peer to peer, but dynamic warehousing in the past specifically during Q4 peak season where some of the slower moving skews we might move to an offsite location. And then fulfill from there or take extra inventory out of the fulfillment center because we have such an influx of goods in Q4 we have not really looked at peer to peer. Part of the problem is that it’s way want to be absolutely sticking to our guns on the SLAs and when it’s your team and your managers and your processes under one roof, it’s a lot easier to do and scale that and measure that and improve upon that versus utilizing a peer to peer warehousing system. It’s an intriguing idea, and it’s something worth looking into and see how that space has evolved. But we’ve used extra warehousing space that other companies and other startups were using but never, not from a fulfillment aspect. That always happens either through our team or one of our proxies in the fulfillment center.
• J: Yeah, I mean that’s a, it’s a brand promise to get that product out in two days that a brand has made. And so if you guys can’t help them fulfill that because of a pure situation, then it kind of hurts that brand, right. So I think protecting that is probably more important in what you’re thinking about at this point, I would imagine.
• G: Yup, I agree with that.
• J: Awesome, so just thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. Do you have any, anything we didn’t cover today that you were hoping to get out there working obviously shipbob.com, trends.shipbob.com. Anything else that we didn’t cover you wanted to make sure people knew about?
• G: Not really I mean, I think it’s a tough time for everybody. I think calling up people, other merchants, maybe an agency partner that you used in the past and having a conversation and just find out what they’re seeing from their perspective is incredibly valuable, I’ve seen it. I’ve done it personally where maybe I haven’t talked to a partner in six months or since summer or IRCE last year, but I’m just calling them up and having a conversation talking about what we’re seeing from our unique perspectives. And that’s created a lot of insight and a lot of value into this time to kind of puzzle together piece together that puzzle of what the heck is going on. So I urge people to kind of do that and reach out and talk to people, participate in the operator’s web series that Nick Carter is running over at ShipBob along with Casey Armstrong. Take advantage of the content that you have done at the good. And I know you some of the things that you’ve done with partners as well. Just absorb information, talk to people and be open to hearing their perspectives I think is super important right now.
• J: That’s great. Well, I’ll miss hanging out with you at IRCE this year since they’re not doing it. I was supposed to speak there as well. I’m sure Casey was or you were, but yeah, so, well hopefully in 2021 we’ll be able to make that happen. But I know that Nick and I have been having a lot of conversations about getting me out to Chicago to chat with your team there. So, I look forward to doing that at some point in the near future.
• G: We will do that and I still need to visit Portland. There’s three great American cities that I’ve never visited. It’s Portland, Nashville and Boston, so I need to make my way out to Portland to so.
• J: Yeah, you’re welcome anytime I will introduce you to the craft beer scene and all the great wine we have. So, awesome George, thank you again so much for your time. I really appreciate it. To everybody listening, we will have the recording of this up on the site probably in the next day or so. And we’ll make sure we get a follow up email out with that link. If you have any questions, George how can they get ahold of you? Is there a best way, Twitter, something of that sort or email with what works best for you?
• G: Yeah, I don’t really have a social media, but simply george@shipbob.com is my email address and you can hit me up there or on LinkedIn and I’d be glad to talk. And like we just talked about a couple minutes ago, which just talked to kind of hear each other’s perspectives and what we’re going through. I’m open to that, so feel free to reach out george@shipbob.com.

The post How We Rebuild This – The Next Six Months in Ecommerce appeared first on The Good.

In the webinar, Jon MacDonald (Founder of The Good) and Dan Weinsoft field ecommerce-related questions and challenges that have arisen as a result of the pandemic, and Dan details his companies strategy for getting through the next several months of economic uncertainty.

In this webinar we explore:

• Goodr’s business leading up to this year.
• The lessons Dan has learned navigating COVID-19.
• How Goodr’s marketing plans have shifted over the last several weeks.
• Dan’s advice for ecommerce brands right now.

Transcript:

• Jon: Well, Dan, thanks so much for joining us today. For those who don’t know Dan, he might be a familiar face to several of the attendees today, actually, but Dan went from leading our strategists at The Good for a handful of years, to leading digital and e-commerce at goodr. And so we’ll talk a little bit about what that is here in a second. I think a lot of folks attending will know that brand. So Dan’s also an Ironman finisher and avid cyclist, and when he’s not a constant source of puns, which is a pride of his, I believe, Dan is a professor of marketing, and also an e-commerce, I would say master. So today we’re gonna walk through goodr’s handling of all of the changing climate that’s happening right now, and Dan’s advice for online brands. So welcome, Dan.
• Dan: Yeah, thank you, thanks for the introduction. I think that’s all pretty true still, still rocking the puns.
• Jon: Awesome. Well I’m sure that has bled well into goodr’s brand, that’s a pretty fun brand. Why don’t you tell people really quickly what goodr is? For those who may not know.
• Dan: Yeah, so we are a sunglasses company, and we were founded by runners. We make specifically running sunglasses, and we kinda branched out from there, so we’re in the golf vertical, we’re in obstacle course racing, we’ve got our hands in the bike industry, but we make sunglasses that have a rubberized texture so they stay on your face better, and everything’s polarized, and everything’s super-fun.
• Jon: Well, that’s awesome. Yeah, the brand, as I mentioned, is super-fun. You guys have definitely put an emphasis on that, even as I give you a little bit of a heads-up on some of the questions that I wanted to answer today, the responses that you gave to those were quite enjoyable. So, why don’t we kick off just talking a little bit about the background of goodr leading up to this year, I know you guys have had a very, it’s been a successful brand, it started from nothing into really growing pretty quickly over a handful of years. And obviously, I’ve known Stephen as well, before I think I even knew you, and you were involved in The Good, and so Stephen is one of the founders, and so it’s been fun to kinda watch that journey, and it’s really just taken off since you’ve gotten involved as well. So can you tell us a little bit about the history, a little bit?
• Dan: Yeah, absolutely. Because we’re a sunglasses brand, we’re largely very connected to the running community. A lot of our brand is seasonal based on summertime, obviously, people buying more sunglasses when it’s sunny out, but also very much aligned to running events. We have a series of marathon sunglasses tied to all the major marathons, so we’ve been foundationally very much involved in the running community, and we try to do things in the spring and fall that are a little more, we try to pump some energy into the brand by doing some new releases, some fun colorways, some things that are tied more into sport. So, going into this year, most of our campaigns and products are planned out at least a year in advance, and some of them on a shorter timeline, but a lot of them take a lot of planning going into it, and so we kinda went into 2020 expecting that, you know, the Boston Marathon would go on in April as scheduled, there would be basketball, there would be golf, everything just kinda got shut down in a matter of about two weeks. So it was a quick change. Usually we stack our spring and fall with a lot of new product releases, and then we let the summertime breathe with lots of promotions and fun activities to get people buying the sunglasses that we’ve already released. So things kinda changed pretty quickly. Do you want me to kinda dive into what happened?
• Jon: Yeah, so let’s talk about that roller coaster a little bit. I mean, I know a lot of e-commerce brands that are listening to this have gone through similar roller coasters, and hearing you say just now that spring is really when you do a lot of those releases, I’m interested to hear how that might have been impacted and what the plans might be around that.
• Dan: Yeah, so we made a couple changes. That first week, when things really got out of hand with events getting canceled, races getting canceled, and a lot of travel getting shut down, sporting events, like everything kinda happened all at once, we had had some plans to, it was humorous at first, because everybody across e-commerce, and every brand was sending out an e-mail that said, “Here’s how our company is adapting to coronavirus,” and we were gonna make…
• Jon: We’re all working from home.
• Dan: Yeah, everybody’s working from home, yep. You see the same e-mail over and over again. Okay, I don’t need the local Applebee’s to tell me how they’re handling it, that’s okay, I don’t need an e-mail about that. So we were gonna make kind of a joke about it, but things got real serious, real fast, and we said, “Okay, it’s probably best, “let’s hold off here, things are too serious. “We’re gonna do nothing for now.” So we just kinda let things simmer down just a little bit, and then we wanted to, because our brand is fun and spontaneous, and it brings a lot of joy to people, and it’s a low price point, $25 or $35 sunglass, so it’s an easy way to kinda send some happiness, and kinda connect with people, as, either a friend of yours across the country, or like a family member that you can’t see right now, we encouraged people to do something that was a little more fun-oriented, rather than just going straight for, you know, new product, new product, we went for just a fun thing. We tried a free shipping promotion, which turned out to be great, and it was just an easy way, because normally our free shipping minimum is $50, we reduced it to zero dollars, and said, “Yep, ship them to anyone you want. “Send them to a colleague, “send them to a healthcare worker, whoever you want.” And the response was really, really positive. So we adapted pretty quickly to say, like, “We’re gonna be a fun brand here. “We’re gonna bring people joy, “we’re not gonna talk about “all the scary things in the world, “but we’re gonna try and just instill a little bit of fun, “because we’re selling a $25 box of fun.” That’s our goal.
• Jon: And you guys have sold in retail quite a bit, and I know that’s been a huge expansion for the brand. Obviously that’s been impacted to some degree? Has that changed your plans? You’ve obviously focused on free shipping, but really trying to draw those retail folks into e-comm as well?
• Dan: Yeah, yeah, and really, retail really took a sharp dive, because, we do a lot of specialty run stores, we do some big box stores, but all stores have pretty much stopped. They’re not really selling direct-to-consumer. But what we’re starting to see is kind of a, at least for that first week or two, orders kind of, for them, really slowed down, so they’re trying to do some new things, and a lot of them are launching e-commerce experiences for their first time ever. So we’re trying to do our best we can to help support them in any means necessary, so we have kind of the separate campaigns on the back end for retail, that are like, “What can we do to help you out during this time?” Trying to lend some expertise in e-commerce to help them out. I know even my local running store in Bend, they’ve been around for 27 years, I think? And they just launched e-commerce for the first time two weeks ago. This brand new world for a lot of them.
• Jon: Welcome to our world, right?
• Dan: Yeah, right? Coming into our world now.
• Jon: Yeah. I’m interested to hear about some of the high points that you’ve mentioned, like doing a positive message around the free shipping, and kind of maintaining that with the brand. And you guys have this like, immensely positive brand, right? It’s all about having fun in such a time where it’s really difficult to, as you said, you had to cancel a fun e-mail, because it just maybe would be taken the wrong way. What have you been able to do to kinda keep things flowing on that front?
• Dan: We’ve really kinda put our resources into, kinda half of it’s around customer engagement. So, I think lot of you out there who are watching this are probably thinking we’re gonna come back as a brand from this, but I wanna be able to connect with my customers, so we put a lot of energy just to make sure, the brands that are making the best connections with their consumers during this time are gonna come out of it stronger. Because you have a lot of consumers that are really just connecting with you as a brand at this time. You give them some fun activities, some ways to challenge them, just some ways to make them laugh, even, that’s gonna go a long way in a time when it’s otherwise kinda scary and sad, so we came up with a lot of activities, we created a whole section of our website dedicated to distraction attractions, we made Zoom backgrounds, which I probably should have put up on mine now that I’m saying this. We’ve been doing some custom word searches, and posting them on Instagram. We launched a campaign called Sweat goodr, where we’re getting people to work out in exchange for some sort of discount, so like they run for 16 miles, they send us a screenshot of their watch, and we’ll give them 16% off. Just fun ways to connect, and just really trying to embrace this time, and being that fun beacon of joy.
• Jon: That’s great. Those are all wonderful ideas. And have you done, I thought I saw a few new product launch e-mails too. So have you been keeping that up as well? I mean, obviously, you mentioned it, it kinda disrupted some of the plans, but this is your season to be launching products, so have you just continued to plow through that a little bit?
• Dan: Yeah, some of them, for sure. We did a few that were a little more segmented, like we had a line that was inspired by a golf tournament that typically happens in Georgia around this time of year, names shall not be named, but that was gonna be kind of a bigger launch, instead we went with more of a segmented approach, where we just talked to our segment in the database, our e-mail database, that is interested in our golf products, we sent them more of a golf-specific e-mail about this launch, and so, it was not tone deaf to the rest of the audience. We adapted some of the copy on it to say, like, “You’re probably missing golf right now, “so are we.” But it was just, again, like not even really intending to sell a ton of product, but more like, let’s kind of engage our golf audience, and make sure that they’re knowing us as a brand, and understanding the feelings here, of just like, “I miss being able to turn on the T.V. “and watch some golf, or like, “get to to the links right now.” So, we found a few new ways to adapt, and then we went ahead with a new style, we came out with a circular lens style, and that’s really been helping just keep the energy up, and we’ve got a lot of content around it. So we’ve also created a lot of quick campaigns around it. These launches take generally about a year to do, but we’ve reduced that year timeframe to about five days on a lot of these things, and just coming up with stuff on the fly, like, “That would be fun, let’s do that.”
• Jon: So we’re getting a couple of questions in the Q and A, and forgot to mention, but those who are watching live, feel free to add questions to the Q and A, and then I can make sure that we answer them. But one question that just came through was, “What aspects of your business “do you think will return to normal “after this season, “and what do you think will be more permanent “due to the current situation of the pandemic?”
• Dan: I know the retailers are gonna come back, that’s not a question. People are gonna be hungry to run, people are gonna be hungry to do lots of activities. What we’re seeing is, and especially travel, so I think everything’s gonna come back really, really strong from this. We’re already seeing some trends overseas of more aggressive online shopping in China, not from our brand, but just in general. So, there’s more like a, “I’ve been cooped up too long, “I need to get out there and do all these things.” So we’re seeing that as a trend, especially with summertime coming up, we’re gonna see lots of engagement sales, retailer’s coming back, and then it’s gonna be wild, especially with our business, because so much of it’s connected to the running industry, all the running races have really pushed out to the fall, so there’s just gonna be a convergence of races, and people trying to train really hard during the summertime. So, it’s gonna be kind of a wild time across the sunglass and athletic industries during the next six months plus, probably.
• Jon: Yeah, I was gonna ask you as well, from my home office, I can see a street down kinda below a little bit, and there’s been a ton of people running. I can’t imagine you’ve seen a huge drop-off in runners, obviously the big events, right? But it seems to me like that’s the one solo activity that gets you outdoors right now, which is everybody’s dream, right? It’s like, “Let’s go out, let’s do something outdoors.” And it gets you physically active. So I was wondering, like, have you seen a drop-off in just physical activity like that? Or has it been just a drop-off in people who maybe are just sheltering down completely? I kinda was just wondering what you’ve seen around that, because by just looking at the street, it looks like people are running even more now than they ever have.
• Dan: Same thing, anecdotally, we’re hearing a lot more people running, because that’s the only activity that they can do right now. Or just running for the first time, kinda learning how to run, so we’re getting, and this is just purely anecdotal, I don’t have any data, but, we’re hearing a lot of people saying, “Just getting into running,” or, “I’m glad you’re around “because all I can do right now is run.”
• Jon: So, what kind of lessons have you taken away from all of this?
• Dan: I think this is the time to really be creative and fun with marketing, and your conversion. We’re trying lots of different things, we’re testing out tons of different promotions and activities. So you should be experimenting a lot. This is the time. Usually we do that summertime, and I think I see at least another person in the sunglass industry here, who I’m sure are gonna test the same thing. Summertime is nuts for sunglasses, so all the big stuff that we wanted to do in summer, we’re kind of bringing up a little bit now, and starting to push them out, and get people engaged, and then we’ll just change things up in the summertime and do something different. But yeah, start to study your audience too, is the other thing, we learned pretty quickly that shopping behaviors have changed too, so the time of day, in particular, has really shifted. I think it’s mostly because people are working from home and trying to manage a family, and with active kids, and trying to keep them entertained, and trying to keep them on some sort of set schedule, they’re finding that the hours where they can actually shop and have fun are more later part of the day, or super-early in the mornings, or on the weekends. So, assumptions that you may have about your audience before have almost certainly changed over the last couple weeks, so start to adapt those things. And you’re really gonna find better results if you can adapt your promotions to match the time of day that they’re shopping.
• Jon: Yeah, that’s great. What’s an example of one of those promotions?
• Dan: We did about a week ago, we did a happy hour, because we’re a fun brand, we wanted to make it better than a regular happy hour, so we made it six hours, the way that it should be. And it was free shipping again, but our audience really responded, because they had kind of a narrow window, but it was designed more between 4:00 to 10:00 in their time zone. So they responded really well to that, because they had the opportunity, means, and the motivation to actually make a conversion.
• Jon: That definitely makes sense, it’s a lot of fun. We have another question here, from Rudy this time, “How have your business goals and objectives “been impacted by the pandemic? “Are you having to put some of those goals on hold “until things return to normal?
• Dan: Yeah, a little bit. I think we’ll see a little bit of it. Things have changed a lot, and our CEO is kinda working actively to make sure we’re adjusting goals, and staying on track. We’re studying all the data, we’ve got a team of people just making sure that they’re keeping tabs on the industry, they’re keeping tabs on sales, consumer market, and adjusting the, we’ve got a pretty solid indicator that in a few months, we’re gonna be back on track with just the overall trend that’s gonna hit during the summer, so we feel pretty confident around that. Some of the business goals have changed, but right now it’s all about, let’s focus on the consumer, let’s make a great experience, let’s have fun with it, and the sales will come then.
• Jon: Great, I think that we’re seeing a lot of brands who, I keep saying that stopping right now is reaction, it’s not a plan.
• Dan: Yeah. Right? And so brands who are just stopping what they’re doing are really gonna suffer, because a lot of their competition has a wide-open highway to just sprint down right now. Cost-per-click would go way down, you can own branded terms for next-to-nothing, all these brands have just retrenched, and it could leave so much opportunity out there. Which, if you’ve been a well-run brand who has a decent margin on your products, has a little bit of cash built up, now is the time to really invest back into it. So I’m glad to hear that goodr’s handling it in the same way of not really adjusting the outcomes so much, maybe some of the goals, but rightfully so, you don’t wanna pin people into things that aren’t possible right now, but definitely wanna continue to have that plan.
• Jon: I have several questions for you, but a few keep coming in, so I’m gonna ask these questions so the people who are live get the benefit here. “Goodr seems like a pretty risky brand in general,” maybe because you have more fun, right?
• Dan: Yeah.
• Jon: “Do you ever use testing to know “how far to push the envelope “in terms of branding and messaging?” There’s a second part to this, “But do you have any stories “about how your team decides where to land “between what might be funny and what might be offensive?” That’s a great question.
• Dan: Yeah, a really good one. Yeah, we’ve done a few tests. We try to do our experimentation in a few different places, to get some indications. We test a lot inside of e-mail, and we do a lot of on-site testing as well, just to measure a little bit of impact.
• Jon: You do on-site testing, no surprise.
• Dan: Shocking right? Yeah, we’re trying some different things too. We test imagery a lot. We have images that go from kind of high on the absurdity scale to high on sort of a product placement scale, so like product on faces that have kind of a serious look, and they’re kinda pointing up, and having some reflection in the lenses, just to highlight the products, versus like taking some risks and coming up with some names that would probably get flagged by Facebook very quickly. So, we walk a fine line, but yeah, there’s a lot of testing involved, and there’s a lot of research in the background that helps determine what will be successful and what won’t.
• Jon: I’ve always appreciated that about the brand, though, it does seem like you’re willing to try to tiptoe up to the line, and have fun with it. Which, I’m a big believer that if you’re not upsetting some people, then you’re not gonna have fans on the other side. And the hard-core fans come from the other side. If you’re just playing that mushy middle, then nobody’s gonna be happy, right? You’re not really making fans who are upsetting people, and you need to really ride that line, so that’s always something I’ve admired about the brand. Wendy asks, “Are you taking this time to do projects “you don’t normally have time to do, “and if so, are those bubbling to the top of your list? “Or what are some of those “bubbling to the top of your list?”
• Dan: That’s a good question. We’re trying a couple new ones. There was one that I had wanted to do for a long time, it’s actually a chat bot with a drift, you remember them. Some people on the team have a little bit of bandwidth, and have a great niche and a big need for it, so we kinda escalated the timeline to really get that moving. That should be coming pretty soon, that’s a fun one.
• Jon: I can’t wait to see what the branding you guys do in the middle of that. That’s a great opportunity to have some fun, right?
• Dan: Oh my gosh, right? I’ve always wanted that, I’ve always wanted a sunglass face fitter, and we decided we could make that happen inside of a chat bot that’s just like, give me some ridiculous ideas, and pushing you to try different things, so yeah, I mean, that one’s been big. I think there’s a few other, I just can’t remember off the top of my head. But yeah, I’d say that’s true for us, we’re trying a few different things.
• Jon: That’s great. There’s more questions coming in, but I have a couple I wanna ask, I know we have a limited time, we have to wrap up in about 10 minutes or so. So, what do you plan on doing moving forward? This is one of the funny answers that you originally gave me when I asked you about it a little bit earlier. But you had some good stuff, you’re saying your basically not focused on conversion as much right now, you’re just trying to keep the entertained, and active, and staying in front of people, is that accurate?
• Dan: I think we’re trying a mix of 50% engagement and fun, so anything that’s in the realm of doing a word search, or doing a workout, or what are the other things? Oh, man, we created this page that’s just, it’s an endless scroll of these buttons, that in each one, it says, “Click here to win a free pair,” and all but one of them actually will give you a free pair, so, just anything that’s just totally goofy and wild, anything goes right now. So you know, 50% of our effort’s there. 50% is on doing some sort of promotion or activity to keep the sales coming in, but keeping our customers happy and engaged with it. So it’s a little bit of Thunderdome, no rules, kinda, here’s where we’re going with this, all sorts of experimentation across the board. So half that, half that, another 80% is just focused on how do we build up the brand, how do we keep things moving there, and then 10% is like, pure math classes, because, clearly not good at that.
• Jon: Exactly, yeah. I thought that was funny. It’s like, you know, like you’re focusing on converting some people, because you obviously, still, you’re an e-commerce business, you need to convert, but you also wanna do some things to just have fun and take people’s mind off of things right now, and I think the brand is well-positioned for that, so that’s great. What advice would you give to other e-comm brands right now?
• Dan: Have to be looking at your data, all the time. Like, we are constantly reviewing things, because it is a shifting dynamic every day. Time of day is a big one, time of week is another big one, what channels are working and which are not. We’re seeing huge growth in channels that aren’t. Look at your paid campaigns, because they are gonna perform completely differently, and try all sorts of different things. So if you’re not studying your data, and looking at the different segments you have set up, and starting to do more experimentation, you’re just gonna be completely lost during this time, and then moving forward, because we’re gonna come out of this in a whole different world. Once people start coming back and being able to communicate socially, and physical interaction, it’s gonna be a different game altogether. It’s not gonna be the same way it was. You’ve gotta be looking at this stuff, and if you’re not, then you’re gonna be completely in trouble.
• Jon: That’s great. I’m really interested to see how, knowing your background and everything you were doing with our team at The Good, and all the data science and everything, what types of data are you paying attention to the most right now? You mentioned a couple of analytic-type data, but are there different resources or tools you’d recommend right now, in terms of what data people should be using to adapt to this new normal?
• Dan: Absolutely. Definitely your standard ones, you gotta have Google Analytics and Hotjar, constantly looking at your site and seeing what’s going on. Another big one we found is Glew, it’s a really powerful tool to kinda aggregate all your different channels, and it’s a great one to look at time of day, and time of week. So, Glew is a super-great resource for that. We look at product trends within Glew as well. Another big one is Nosto. Nosto is really cool to build out segments, and get a good understanding of your on-site analytics based on segments. It’s pretty cool because you can set up, if you have a vertical around, like we do around bike, I can set up a segment in Nosto to track anyone who’s interested in cycling-related content, that’s come to our site, cycling-related products, and then just puts it together and says, “Okay, they’ve been bouncing at an increased level, “but they’ve been buying more, “what does that mean?” I’d say those tool sets, if you have the ability to get like a Nosto or a Monetate, or a Dynamic Yield, like something in the segmentation and data personalization, those are great tools to look at.
• Jon: That’s great. Well, I know that we need to sign off here in about two minutes or so. Any final thoughts that you might have at this point?
• Dan: Whoa, man. I don’t know, it’s a wild time. If you’re comfortable trying different things, and lots of new fun strategies, it’s a really fun time to be a marketer. It’s probably a little bit scary if you’re a business owner, but thankfully I’m not, so it’s a fun time just to try different things, and really just build up some engagement. If you have the brand and the ability to do so, it’s wild, and I love looking at the data right now, it’s fascinating to see what’s going on with it from a pure scientific standpoint.
• Jon: That’s great.
• Dan: Keep having fun.
• Jon: Well thank you so much, Dan, I really do appreciate your time today. This has been great, and it’s always great to reconnect with you.

The post How Goodr Sunglasses is Using Data to Adapt to the New Normal appeared first on The Good.

In the webinar, Jon MacDonald (Founder of The Good) and Jeff Sheldon field ecommerce-related questions and challenges that have arisen as a result of the pandemic, and Jeff details his plan for weathering the next several months of economic slowdown.

Key Takeaways:

• The Ugmonk brand leading up to this year.
• The recent ups and downs of the past few weeks.
• The lessons that Jeff’s taken away so far.
• Ugmonk’s strategy moving forward.
• The essential tools and resources Jeff utilizes at Ugmonk.

Transcript:

• Jon: Today we have a really great webinar I’m super excited about. We’re gonna talk about lessons for thriving during economic uncertainty. And we have Jeff Sheldon, the founder of Ugmonk with us today, which I’m super excited about. So Jeff started making t-shirts for other sites in 2009. And he had some really big winners and popular designs, so he decided to start making them on his own site. Since then, Jeff has added more objects to his library of creations and it really started with a really big win around the Gather Desktop Organizer, which was Kickstarted and funded in an amazingly short amount of time, and it raised over half, or just about a half a million dollars. Jeff aims for really high value rather than discounting, and this was really the other big reason I wanted to connect with him today. So before we really dive in here, I just wanted to thank Jeff for joining us and really just wanting to know from Jeff to kick things off. So Ugmonk started in the middle of the last recession, and can you Jeff, give me a little bit more background on the business leading up to where we’re at right now in this year?
• Jeff: Yeah, I think for me, because I wasn’t necessarily raising funding, I didn’t really think of Ugmonk as a business for a while. People were asking me am I gonna quit my job and go full time? And I was like I don’t even know what the heck I’m doing, I gotta sell these shirts first, I gotta figure out what I’m doing. And the way that I built the business was I didn’t touch any of the money from the business for the first two years, and just worked my day job and put all the money back into Ugmonk that I earned. So if we sold any inventory, put it back into inventory, and we operated so so lean, that it was like, almost no overhead other than basic basic computer expenses and those types of things. I did borrow $2000 from my dad to print those first 200 shirts, so he was my venture capitalist. But what that did it was it taught me, I couldn’t afford to buy a nicer printer, or a nicer camera or even lights to shoot the photos with, I operated on shoe string budget. And what’s interesting is that kind of formed to the entire arc from then till now, our budgets have grown a little bit, but we’ve still chosen to operate with very DIY, like, this is my home office, that I built into the Ugmonk headquarters, it’s just a bedroom in my house. And I’ve got my photo studio over here, but it’s all completely like, if you saw how bare bones everything was, you would be like, oh wow, I thought that from the website, from the end result, from the product, it’s really polished.
• Jon: I think that’s a really good point Jeff, that you can run lean and look really big online. And if you just put some, like you said earlier, a good attention to detail to how you’re presenting yourself, the consumer experience on your site goes a long way to swing in above your weight class if you will in terms of how big you really are.
• Jeff: Yeah, totally, and I think people assume that you need to have a fancy office, you need to have a big staff, you need to do all of these things to make good products, but the reality is like, we’re not manufacturing products here. I work with craftsman and manufacturers all over the US, really like small businesses that we support, and they’re the ones that are experts in that, so I don’t have tons of overhead. Would I love to have a nice office and warehouse outside of here, when I have screaming kids in the background? Like, for sure, but it’s not needed. So we’ve really kept like this, keep our overhead as low as possible, which means our business is gonna be way more profitable at such low amounts and we’re not huge, but we’ve been able to do it by keeping that same mentality. I think right now, everyone’s like, how do we cut expenses? How do we tighten the belt? What do we actually need? And I think one of the things that has helped us is we’ve just always operated that way since I started.
• Jon: So how has that impacted you now, can you talk a little bit about maybe the rollercoaster that has been the last couple of months that everybody is going through together.
• Jeff: Yeah, it’s crazy, we just didn’t see it coming, and we heard about it, it just didn’t seem like it was all actually going to play out the way that this pandemic has affected everyone. And even though we have low overhead, even though it’s like, it’s me and then my mom does all of our shipping. My sister-in-law runs all of our operations, and then my brother is my business partner, and so it’s like a true family business, that’s our entire staff. So we don’t have massive a payroll that we’re like, oh, how we’re gonna meet this? But it’s still, as the virus and the news about things pick up, sales start going down, the more we hear about it, the more sales were screeching to a halt, and it was like, even we need to have consistent revenue to make it through this. Just because we’ve been doing this for a long time, doesn’t mean that we are immune to any of the pandemic affect of what’s happening. So what’s interesting is, what we do have, and I think really has helped get through, and I give all the credit to, is a community of people that came to support us when I sent an email out. I didn’t know how to approach it, I’m not trying to capitalize on it, I’m trying not to say, “Hey buy Ugmonk products “instead of go buy toilet paper,” but it was like, look, we’re a small business and we need to keep the lights on, we need to keep our family fed, literally, so I wrote an honest email about here’s what we’re doing, we’re gonna do a work from home sale, we can get into more of this too, just the strategy of what we pivoted into. But the response, that was insane, just unbelievable from our community and people the have been following us for five, six, seven, a decade.
• Jon: That’s so wonderful to hear. And it’s just speaking, people have been asking us, here at The Good, how do I market, how do I sell in a time of when people have basics needs they’re trying to meet as well and maybe our business isn’t top of their mind. And I think it’s having empathy, and starting with that empathy, knowing their situation, like you said, look, we’re just a small business, I’m not asking you to not buy toilet paper or essentials for yourself, but if you can help out a business, and you’re either going to choose a big business or us, I would really prefer you choose us, and really help us as a small business. And I think being personal goes so far right now, it’s really great to see. And so you said that the response to that was amazing, what did you find to be the biggest high point coming out of that?
• Jeff: Yeah, so it wasn’t like an instant response, I sent out the email and was starting to see some sails come in and starting to see just people saying, “Hey, we wanna support you,” or, “We don’t have the money now either, “but we’re here for you when we get through all of this,” people that we weren’t trying to trick them into buying anything that they didn’t need, but then the orders started rolling, and started rolling in faster. And March actually ended up being our best month compared to January and February, even though it was when the pandemic he’s really impacted the most people. And I don’t say that to brag, I really just say that to say that the relationship that I have with our audience, the power of that doesn’t go away, even through a global pandemic, and I can’t emphasize enough, having that connection to an audience and how much that means, that’s by far my greatest asset, is that I have people that actually care, real people that care about the real products that we make. And at the end of the day, no sales tactic, or pop up, or anything would’ve done that, it was just an authentic email that I rewrote six times, ’cause I wanted to make sure that it felt really honest and transparent.
• Jon: That’s great, that’s wonderful to hear. For folks who are wondering how did you grow a community like this, I know we talked about Kickstarter earlier, and I mentioned that, and you know, you just have some raving fans that have come to this community, but how did you build this community over time? Where did that come from? How did you do that?
• Jeff: Very slow and very steady. Because I’ve been doing it for so long, I’ve been doing Ugmonk, the same thing, for so long, just showing up day after day after day, and year after year, the community has been built one person at a time, word of mouth, somebody buys a product, somebody gifts a product, somebody finds out about us. And has been such an organic build that if you saw how big our newsletter list is, it’s substantial, but it’s nothing compared to probably the numbers of brands that are put in the same category as us. But we haven’t bought or tricked or done anything to build that email list, it’s people that actually wanna be there. I actually prune our email list and take people off all the time because I don’t care about the numbers, I’d rather have 1000 people that are tuned in than 100 000 people that are marking it as spam every time. So I think just the nature of what you said about being human and relationship and all that stuff, that’s always been there, it’s more important now than ever, because people wanna connect with people. We’re isolated, we’re quarantined, and that authenticity, people know when a brand’s being authentic, or when they’re just kind of, they’re spit balling, they’re putting something out there just to get your email address so they can spam you.
• Jon: So you’ve talked a lot about the highs and how great that rush was to have that community respond to your really heartfelt email. What were some of the lows like? Going through this you mentioned, at least I heard you say initially, that you sent the email and it wasn’t just a rush of replies right away. What were some of the lows like going through the last couple of months?
• Jeff: Yeah, I think just doubting, is any of this even worth it? The things that I make, the products that I make are not truly essential. You can buy t-shirts at other places, you can buy desk organizers at other places, and started to question how much of this even matters? If worse came to worse, and food and shelter are things that people are going for, I started to question is all of this that I’m doing worth it? And I believe that it is and what we’ve seen now as everyone’s shifted to working from home, I think a big part of that increase in orders is because people are setting up their work from home spae. And a lot of our products are leather mouse pads, the Gather Desk Organizer, the mugs, the coffee equipment, all of these things that people are now settling into this routine, ’cause we don’t know how long this is gonna last. We made a work from home collection and we did do a sale on that collection specifically just to highlight that and to be sensitive to what’s going on, but we’re not even actively, we’re not doing any paid ads on it, we’re not doing anything to bring in those orders, but yet we still see orders coming in every day. And I think it’s really just like, the lows were, does anyone need any of this? Is this even gonna be what I’m gonna do in six months from now or three months from now? And then the highs are like, wait, these products do actually help. Yes they’re luxuries, but we’re not making up these products to capitalize on the pandemic. These are things that I’ve already designed, that I truly believe help you be more productive, and if you’re gonna work from home, it’s really important to have a good set up than trying to be working on the kitchen table where kids are spilling drinks on stuff, which it’s fine too, but I think people are seeing the value in setting up a good space.
• Jon: Yeah, I think that that’s important to separate work and a home life for sure. I know I have a three year old, I’m struggling with that every day, I had to risk my life to come into the office today. It’s not that dramatic, but I came in to have a quiet space to do this. Yeah, so Jeff, what are the some of the lessons and take aways you have had out of going through this the last few weeks and months?
• Jeff: I think like everyone else that runs a business here, you’re reevaluating your priorities, you’re reevaluating, what am I spending money on? Where’s the value? How do I keep my employees? How do we get through this logistically? I think that’s a good exercise anyways, it happened in the last recession, it happens whenever money gets tight, we start to evaluate the things that we’re investing in, that’s not to say, just cut every expense and downgrade everything, but it starts just so you’re like, there’s certain things like my email list provider, I, 100% am going to keep paying for that because that’s my life line, that’s how I reach my audience, so it really starts to help you prioritize and put value on the things that are like, yes I should be paying for this. Should I buy a new iMac right now? Probably not, the one I have is fine. It puts you back on your feet, to really think through from a business perspective, what you need, how can you do things, how can you make it work, and how can you make sure you’re taking care of your employees and your people?
• Jon: So you mentioned your email provider, what are the other essential tools that you’ve decided you would never cut at this point?
• Jeff: Shopify is the no-brainer, our site’s been on Shopify for nine plus years, I think we’re almost there full time. And without Shopify and all the work that they’ve done up and to this point is to make us successful as a merchant, as a seller, we would have no way to reach our fans, no way to reach our customers all around the world and that’s one of those things. That’s obviously a no brainer, our email list, we use Klaviyo, again, a no brainer. These are our storefronts, so we don’t have a physical brick and mortar storefront, brick and mortar building that we have to pay rent on, but these are things these are the non-negotiables. And there’s a handful of Shopify apps that we use to make our site work and bundled products and a lot of those smaller things that are not major expenses. Obviously the technology and internet connection and a computer, the things to make it work. Cameras and things where we’re doing product photography, that are essential to what we do, to get new products out there. But yeah, I don’t think we’ve had to make major shifts, but it’s also just kept us really aware of where we’re allocating time and money and just thinking through, as a business, do we want to eventually have a storefront? Do we wanna have a warehouse space? What would it have looked like if we had a $20 000 a month building that we had to all of a sudden shut down? And I feel for all these businesses, these brick and mortar businesses, coffee shops, restaurants that I love, it’s paining me to see what’s happened, because they’re almost completely shut down. Another thing, a thought exercise to think about, if this happens again, or when this happens again, what would that look like if we had a building?
• Jon: Yeah it’s very interesting and I think that we’re finding a lot of folks who are just trying to get online for the first time and I’ve seen so many people on LinkedIn, there’s groups that have been forming to help, if you’re a retail business and you’re not online, you can go to this group and they’ll help you to set up your site for free and get everything going and just give you the expertise and knowledge that you’re looking for. And I think the community aspect has been wonderful. We had a question come in, I’m gonna ask you this question, Jeff, and we can maybe just in and answer this really quick, what aspects of your business do you think will return to normal after this season, and what do you think will remain permanent due to the pandemic?
• Jeff: It’s hard to know, it’s hard to know how long this is gonna last, I wouldn’t wanna make any predictions too strong because I just feel like things could change, could take a u-turn. I wanna say that we’re gonna come out of this stronger and better moving forward, but the reality is we honestly don’t know exactly what this is gonna look like, so I think for us, being that we are non-essential, mostly non-essential goods, I mean, clothing is essential. But the spending, as people are more comfortable spending their money, as they normally would on things other than food and toilet paper then I think we will hopefully see sales pick up and be more steady from that perspective. I think for us specifically, because we sell so many work from home workspace related products, we’re just seeing the increase in that, so I think that’s actually going to be higher and more of our focus internally and more of our customer’s focus, just because the world is shifting to this work from home set up. I don’t know how many people are gonna go back to an office, or how many big companies are gonna say, “You know what, we’re gonna cut that “half a million dollar lease, “and you guys can all work from home, “and here’s $1500 to go set up your home office.” We wanna insert ourselves in that conversation since we can actually provide value with tools to work from home.
• Jon: Yeah, that’s great to hear. I heard that Facebook gave everybody on their team 1000 bucks to get a set up going at home and I know I’m evaluating, as a business owner, we’ve always had a really flexible work from home policy anyways. I always say it’s not a buts and seats type of place, nobody’s checking to make sure who’s in the office and what hours, it’s more of just get your stuff done. And I think our team has really taken that mentality and culture and done really well with everybody being remote. And it makes me wonder, do we really need an office? So I think a lot of people are starting to question that. That’s great. So the next question that somebody asked really goes in, and I have a very similar question I was gonna ask next anyways, but how has this affected your goals for the future and in what ways? What do you plan to do moving forward?
• Jeff: I wish I had a great plan and outline of how to navigate all this. I think for us it’s doubling down on more of the same. What my goal has always been is to make the best products I possibly can and put them out when they’re at the best point. And sometimes that takes weeks, sometimes that takes months or years. You mentioned Gather, which is the modular desk organizer. I worked on that on and off for like three or four years, just toying with it, trying to prototype it, and going back and forth until it finally got ready. So what we don’t wanna do is rush into just launching products because we’re like I don’t know what else to do, let’s just launch products quickly, or import products and slap our logo on them and get them out the door. I still really wanna take this methodical approach to how we launch products and how care and time we put into each thing. But, right now, I think that focus and where my focus was kind of already going, but this really pushes us this direction is to focus on workspace, other workspace products that might’ve been halfway developed or in the prototyping stage. I’ve got a product that I’m gonna be launching on Kickstarter here shortly, that this whole pandemic screwed up our schedule a little bit with, and we’re figuring out how to launch it, but it’s related to helping people get stuff done. And it’s like the way that the climate has changed, is just helping us say, this is the path where everyone is going, people aren’t gonna stop working, technology has made it so we can do a Zoom call like this, what are the challenges that people are facing with working from home and working in a work environment or co-working space or anything like that? And thinking more along those lines, so I think it’s steering our ship a little bit more that way versus some of the clothing and apparel stuff that we’ve done.
• Jon: That’s great. So another question that just came in, besides your community, what are some other business decisions that you made before the crisis that you feel were central to your survival today?
• Jeff: Yeah, I think I touched on that a little bit just about keeping overhead really low and lean. We don’t have massive ad budgets, we have zero debt on the business, which also means we can’t do necessarily big crazy things and experiments, we can’t afford to lose $100 000 on a marketing experiment that doesn’t work, because we will not exist anymore. So really the way that we’ve structured our business, I don’t know that I intentionally did it because I thought a global pandemic or something like this would happen, but it’s really taking down all the risks we possibly can, that we can control and made us weather proof in a way, to get through things like this. That said, there’s still the nervousness inside of me like, are we gonna make it? Is this gonna work? I don’t know what it’s gonna be like in six months or a year from now, but I think that thought process and hopefully I’m not hammering the same thing home too many times, but I think that’s important to think about. This isn’t gonna be the last time that we go through something like this, how are we gonna do it the next time? Should we keep our staff minimal, or should we be thinking about getting that physical space which we were actually in the process of looking at warehouse and looking at things, it’s like, all right, that whole conversation got paused majorly, because if we were locked into a five year, seven year lease, it would be a different story, that could sink us alone. So I try to operate just purely on cash, not taking on a lot of debt, so that we’re not in a hole when something else comes and we have to dig ourselves out of.
• Jon: Yeah, that’s great. I’ve heard quite a bit from brands I’m talking to, there’s two camps happening right now, and there’s one who the company was well run, or you know, at the very least they didn’t have debt, they kept expenses low. And I would say those are pretty good business tenets to have anyways, but they were generally well run companies, and they’re gonna easily get through this because they are able to scale back when needed, and they’re fiscally responsible, and they were just a well run company. And there’s others that aren’t gonna survive the shock to the system, because they already had systemic problems. So you think about just like a patient who goes into ICU, if you’re gonna go into the ER or ICU, you wanna be in good health before you had that issue. It’s harder to recover. It’s no different for a business right now, you wanna make sure that before you end up in these types of situations that you’re run pretty well. So there are things you can do now, but I think we’re clearly seeing with the brands I’m talking to on a daily basis, that there’s some who are looking at this as an opportunity or at the very least, that they’re like, I’m gonna survive, I’m gonna do all right, and I’m gonna come out of this stronger than ever because I’m investing in marketing right now or all the other things that I could be doing. And then there’s the handful that are saying, “Hey, I just need to increase conversions today, “because otherwise I won’t be here next month.” And I think that that’s hard to persist with.
• Jeff: Yeah and I would say there are things in our control, like our website, so conversion rate or thinking about landing pages or things that we can build out that are very low cost and that I can design that we have it developed or build out on Shopify. A lot of the stuff, we actually have it set up so I can go in and build a landing page without touching any code. These are things that we can optimize and we can invest time in that don’t cost us money. So that’s another big thing. We all have this time still where are we gonna allocate that, even if I don’t have $10 000 to throw at something, well how can I best use the time that I have and the attention that we have right now, to make our website better, make our packaging better, design a whole new line of products? I’m in a really fortunate place where I can do this. On a digital presence, if you run a SaaS company, if you run a physical product company, there’s things that we can do right now that will actually help in the future. We’re not completely handcuffed like a lot of these restaurants and stuff.
• Jon: Yeah, that’s true. I just had a conversation this morning with a brand that I thought was really interesting and they said, “I don’t have money to really work with you guys, “but I just wanna know what’s the number one thing “I could do?” And I said, “You know what, there’s a lot of things “that you could do,” but I think it’s just going back to that list, that some day maybe list, the things you were maybe gonna do some day, down the road, that you just, now you have time to do. You have more time than you have money right now, so use that time productively. I was like, let’s pull up your site and look at it, and the product photos were just horrible, and I said, “You know what, do you have a decent camera?” And they said, “Yeah, I have a DSLR, I like it, “I know how to use it to some degree.” I said, “Great, go take all new product photos,” and I was like, “Take a 1000 of those photos, you’ll get better and better “at them, and then go back just take a new photo “for all of your products,” and I said, “That is gonna be so much more helpful “than almost anything else you can do “and I can tell you haven’t been doing it “because you just haven’t had the time “and it hasn’t been high enough on the priority list. “But now you have the time, so why not try?” And I think there’s a lot of things like that that brands could be doing to take a step back and say, “Okay, what are the things I know I need to doing “that I haven’t had time to do?” And now they’re not commuting so maybe they’ve got an extra hour on each side of their day, things of that sort.
• Jeff: It’s definitely caused me to look at my some day maybe list and say what are the things that I thought I wanted to do or I keep saying I’m gonna do? And yeah, a couple of those are now moving onto my today list, it’s like, I’m gonna do this stuff. Now I can’t do anything else, we can’t get product from a lot of our manufacturers right now because they’re shut down, even in the US. There are certain things that we can’t do and how do we take these constraints and how can we use these to do something else that we wouldn’t otherwise had time for? And I made the joke on Twitter, which some people took a little bit too literally, but right now, people that don’t have kids, I hear, “I’m so bored I don’t know what else to do, “I’ve already binged watched Netflix “and I’ve already learned “how to make sourdough from scratch, “I’ve already done this stuff, what else should I do?” And then people with kids, parents with kids are like, “I have negative time, I don’t have any extra time “in the day, I doesn’t feel like I have extra time.” But from a business perspective, we do have time allocated now that we wouldn’t have had before and I’m trying to think through some of these things, get them off my some day list that I’m finally gonna do. And one of those, last week I did a live Q&A, kinda like this, just put it out to my audience and like, I should do this more. And a bunch of people showed up, asked questions, when are you gonna do it again? And just being there and connecting with people, the relationships, the attention we have now, is something that we can all take advantage of because we have more time.
• Jon: Yeah, that’s a great point and I’m definitely in that camp with, I heard you say you had kids, I think right, I’m in that camp, same thing, where it’s like I don’t feel like I have any more free time at the moment. Someone asked here, are there any resources that you would recommend to other eCommerce brands like yourself? It’s pretty generic, but are there any resources off the top of your head that you’re like, wow, I can’t live without this? I know you’ve mentioned a few that you would never cut, but what are some that you just feel like you couldn’t live without?
• Jeff: Yeah, the eCommerce space has grown so much and I’ve been able to ride that wave and even though we’re still a little guy, I keep my ears open to all the stuff happening in the DTC space and all of the stuff that has been built. You look at Shopify 10 years ago, you look at Shopify now, it’s a completely different platform. But as far as resources go, I think there’s a lot of great podcasts, there’s the Ecommerce Influence podcast, I’m blanking on some of the other ones now. If you look up on iTunes, eCommerce podcasts, there’s so many of them that you can listen to and maybe they’re more about drop shipping, maybe they’re more about Amazon. I feel like I gained so much from these podcasts, anything from very specific, niche eCommerce podcasts, to stuff like How I Built This, which is one of the best podcasts out there, just hearing how these big businesses have come to be. I’m trying to think of other resources.
• Jon: You realize with all of those big businesses that it’s been a 20 year story or a 10 year story like yours, where it’s not an overnight success.
• Jeff: So give me 10 more years and maybe you’ll see on there. I’m trying to think of other resources for eCommerce. I mean Twitter, honestly, if you’re following people on Twitter in the eCommerce space, I feel like there’s just a lot of valuable links and resources passed back and forth. And so much of its free, people are just giving, here’s how I ran ads, or here’s how I designed the landing page, here’s how making Shopify do this with subscriptions. There’s endless opportunity if you go digging for it. So I find tons of stuff through podcasts and through Twitter.
• Jon: So one of things, in preparation for this I Googled you, I just wanted to see what are the different stories that came up and I was shocked, you guys have been in some really great press. What do you think has been the one thing you’ve got in that just totally changed the game for you? Was there one time you were wrote up in some blog or something like that, that just all of sudden it clicked and that was the moment you knew you had a sustainable business?
• Jeff: Yeah, it wasn’t one specific site. So early early on, it was the very first year that I launched, maybe it was year two, we got featured on a few design blogs, back when blogs were so much bigger, it was pre Twitter, pre social media, but Swissmiss, she runs a design blog and she’s still running it to this day, made a little link to the And Then I Woke Shirt, that we had, it was a big ampersand, it was our best selling shirt. And then, we’ve been featured on a lot of the bigger sites like Uncrate, Gear Patrol, and Cool Hunting, and Cool Material and all these sites. I don’t think it was one specific Oprah moment where we got featured and all of sudden we couldn’t keep up, but it’s this layering on of things and then we’ve been written up on Shopify’s blog and I’ve been a bunch of different podcasts about how I built Ugmonk. And over the years, all of the things and magazines, I’ve spoken at conferences, I think really for me it’s been like this one on top of the other building, and has built a presence and a validity of what we’re doing. People want to know more about my story and how we run things since we do things pretty differently than a lot of other eCommerce brands.
• Jon: Yeah, and one of the things I didn’t read in any of these articles, where the name Ugmonk came from.
• Jeff: I figured that question might come up, ’cause people always wanna know. So I haven’t ever revealed the origin of the word, but the way we came up with the name was we spent $300 000 on a naming company, no, I’m just kidding. We were launching this in 2008 actually, when I first put out the very first website, it was awesome, it had a wood grain background and neon blue letters, it was terrible. But for the time, it seemed cool, drop shadows and stuff. It was almost like an after thought, oh, we gotta call this something, was it gonna be like Jeff’s T-Shirts? Or you know like, Designtshirt.com and kinda going through different things. And we ended up just Googling all these random words and things that were inside jokes and whatever. And we Googled Ugmonk.com, there was nothing, or I think the word Ugmonk came up twice or something, in another language. And the URL was open, again, this was before I thought this was gonna be a business, this wasn’t some master plan, this wasn’t a branding exercise, we were just like, oh, let’s just do it, let’s just call it Ugmonk, there’s nothing else out there. So we ran with that and now if you Google the word, Ugmonk, there’s, I think someone said it recently, I think it’s like 400,000 results or something, and every single one of them traces back to us somehow, through some link, because we’re the only Ugmonk out there.
• Jon: You saved yourself $300,000 in the process, right?
• Jeff: Yeah, exactly. Having a short URL like that in a dotcom was not necessarily all planned out that way, but it’s been interesting because we’ve gotten to define what Ugmonk is, the same way that Google defined Google, like now you say, “I’m gonna Google something,” but before that, nobody knew what the word, Google meant. So again, you have people asking me all the time, should I name my company something I make up? Should it be a literal thing? I think it’s really dependent on the company and where you’re going, but I wouldn’t necessarily say to take the path we did, but it’s worked out really well, and it’s weird enough for people to remember and short enough that they can type it in the URL bar.
• Jon: That’s great, yeah. So before we start wrapping up here, is there any advice that you would give to eCommerce brands right now that we haven’t covered? I know we’ve looked at this from a couple of different angles, and it’s been amazing, I already have a whole bunch of takeaways that I can’t wait to share, but is there anything we missed or what other advice would you give for eCom brands right now?
• Jeff: I think just in this time and what I’m noticing across the board is that, we touched on this earlier, but just the relationship aspect of being a company, running a brand. If you’re the president of the company, the founder, you don’t necessarily have to be the face of the brand and be the one communicating to everyone, but there should be a personal touch, they should feel like, “Hey, when I talk to this brand, “I know who I’m talking to, and I know who’s behind it all.” Obviously, the CEO of Nike is not gonna write every promotional email from Nike, same with Apple and all those things, but there is a connection, I would say, that even with Apple, we see the people behind it, they’re trying to show us the process that people appreciate. And in a time like this and where things are headed, I think it’s more important to be more human, less worried about getting in front of camera, just doing it, just saying like, hey, if I’m gonna sit down, if I was to have a brick and mortar retail store, I would be the one greeting you at the door, ’cause I’m the one running it. And we should be treating our eCommerce brands the same way. And people respond really well to that versus you know, your ticket number is 6201, a representative will be with you in 15 minutes, nobody wants that, that’s just not human. So any way you can make your brand more human I think, is really important.
• Jon: That is awesome to hear you say that. I frequently tell big brands, just because you can’t see the human on the other side of the screen, it does mean they’re not a human. It’s the same thing, treat your eCommerce site as if it was a retail store. People walk in, how are you gonna treat them? What is that experience like? And you really need to have that empathy for the people on the other side of the screen and that will take you so much further. So that’s really great Jeff. Anything else you wanted to say today that we didn’t cover, do you have any new products coming out or anything of that sort?
• Jeff: Yes, I do have a new product we’re gonna launch on Kickstarter, I can’t reveal it quiet yet. I think I might do a sneak peak live Q&A here in a few weeks. The best way for people to stay in touch is just through our newsletter, it’s just ugmonk.com/newsletter. And that’s where I’m sending out, every month I send out an email called “Five Things I’m Digging,” and it’s just music or food or links or design links. It started kind off again, as an accident, and I’ve been doing it for two years now I think, and people love it, they open it, it’s like our highest opening email, most clicked email. So if you want to see what other things are inspiring me, get on our newsletter.
• Jon: That’s great, and I’ll definitely go sign up for that too, that sounds awesome, I definitely wanna know what your five things are. Well thank you so much Jeff, I really do appreciate it, you’ve been wonderful and gracious and very open and sharing today. So thank you, I hope the everybody here got a lot of value out of it. I just wanna remind everybody about two quick things, one is the recording for this will get posted up on our site, here shortly, in the next day or so. And also, next week we are doing another one of these with Dan Weinsoft from Goodr Sunglasses. And so we’ll be asking him a lot of questions as well. So Jeff thank you so much again, I really do appreciate it and have a wonderful day, stay safe and stay healthy everybody.

The post Lessons for Thriving During Economic Uncertainty appeared first on The Good.

The industry will undoubtedly experience significant changes over the coming months, so it’s time to prepare a strategy now to help your company weather the storm.

In this webinar, Jon MacDonald (Founder of The Good), and Ryan Garrow (Director of Client Solutions at Logical Position) field ecommerce-related questions and challenges that have arisen as a result of COVID-19. 

Key takeaways:

• The key changes occurring in ecommerce due to COVID-19
• The key data inputs to be tracking and following right now
• How to manage your marketing budget in an economic slowdown

The post Driving Ecommerce Growth in Challenging Times appeared first on The Good.

You’ve probably heard it described in terms of changing button colors, mixing up calls to action, testing headlines and copy for 24 hours, and other small tweaks. And while these things are certainly part of optimization, they barely scratch the surface. It’s like describing the workings of a car engine in terms of spark plugs. It’s accurate, but also a massive oversimplification.

To start, you need to recognize that conversion optimization massively differs by company.

Your users are going to vary significantly depending on your industry and target demographic. Men between the ages of 18-25 purchasing Crossfit equipment are going to interact with a website much differently than a middle aged woman purchasing beauty supplies. If you sell clothing, your optimization practices need to be nuanced differently than a sports equipment ecommerce site.

As Dan Barker notes:

“A first-time visitor to your site who has never bought from you before, is far, far less likely to purchase than an old, loyal customer. On the opposite side of that, a very loyal customer & regular visitor is far less likely to be swayed to make a purchase because of little conversion tweaks.

Lumping those 2 groups together is like lumping “first time house buyers” into a big pot with “castle owners” & trying to make sense of the strange “average house price” that throws up.

Visitors from different traffic sources / referrers will also differ wildly. Direct visitors will tend to convert more highly still since they tend to contain more existing customers. Likewise brand and non-brand search terms, generic vs long tail terms will vary too.”

In other words, best practices are helpful, but far from sufficient.

Best practices are helpful, but far from sufficient.
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Conversion optimization is a holistic, thorough process that involves optimizing your entire website for sales, based on your data, target demographics, conversion goals, and more.

This goes far beyond a simple tune up.

To do it correctly, you need to do a deep dive into your data, understanding who your consumers are, what they want, what stops them from purchasing, and what changes you can make to eliminate friction points. In order to get to your goal, you need to first understand where you are. Only then can you take the proper steps.

You also need to determine which metrics matter the most. Which levers generate the most growth and sales?

Finally, you need to be able to form hypotheses, thoroughly test them, and then iterate. Optimization relies on testing, not on guessing which change will make the most difference.

Optimization relies on testing, not on guessing which change will make the most difference.
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This is a complex task, but it results in a thoroughly optimized website that is perfectly tailored for your customers and industry. If you don’t use this process, you’re essentially firing without aiming.

So how do you make this optimization process a reality? How can you go beyond colors and buttons and headlines? There are three primary steps, with a number of crucial substeps within each. It starts with understanding your consumers, moves to identifying areas for improvement, and then concludes with designing experiments around key metrics.

Understanding Your Consumers

To state the obvious, not all consumers are equal. Some will be high-revenue, while others will be nothing more than tire kickers. Optimization starts with fully understanding your target customers, which then allows you to tailor your site toward them. Getting a firm grasp on your ideal customer starts with gathering all the relevant data about who is visiting your site, what they’re doing on your site, which demographics are generating the most revenue, and more. It includes studying your quantitative data like conversion focused analytics as well as qualitative data like user testing, heatmaps, and surveys. Let’s take a closer look at each of them.

Conversion Focused Analytics

Analytics give you a broad picture of your website visitors. They allow you to determine your high growth levers, like your overall traffic levels, your conversion rate on different pages, and your average order value. They also allow you to determine your cost per acquisition, customer return rate, customer retention rate, and other crucial measurements. Often times, marketers fall victim to using the out-of-the-box reports from popular tools like Google Analytics.

Unfortunately, these default reports provide little more than vanity metrics. Those vanity metrics might be great for tuning your marketing, but not for improving your conversion rate. Your reports and analytics need to be tailored to your business goals and key conversion levers, not generic reports. Once you learn to manipulate these levers, you can then increase your overall ecommerce revenue. You can also see which pages are pulling in the most traffic, which pages are getting the most return visits, how long customers are staying on pages, various bounce rates, where you’re losing your customers, and page load time.

Knowing your most valuable pages allows you to later identify your high impact areas. Analytics allow you to analyze visitor flow through your site. You can see where “loops” are occurring. A loop is when a visitor keeps flipping back and forth between two pages, like the home page and a product page. This indicates confusion and shows you where improvements can be made. Additionally, it can open your eyes to places on your site where you’re essentially leaving revenue on the table.

You can also evaluate key conversion rates. Which demographics are generating the most revenue? Which copy and headlines are converting most effectively? Are certain countries outperforming others? What about times of day? If your conversion rates for key demographics are low, it indicates you’ve got some serious room for improvement. With analytics you can examine your various channels and traffic sources for effectiveness. Does social media or organic search traffic produce more sales? What about Facebook ads vs. Google ads? How well is your email marketing converting?

By seeing which channels are producing conversions and which aren’t, you can evaluate and change your strategy in those channels. These, as well as dozens of other analytics, will give you a broad picture of what is happening on your site. It will also allow you to see sticking points, friction areas, and places where visitors are abandoning the site. It’s not enough to simply look at analytics averages. You need to dig deeply, identifying the true causes of surges and drop offs. As Dallas McLaughlin says:

“…knowing your traffic sources can reveal only so much. Whereas, understanding who your visitors are and what their intent is can be game-changing. In fact, I would say it’s crucial to the success of your company. When you know who your visitors are and what their intent is, you can tailor your site content to reflect their interests. This will result in higher conversion rates and a better return on your marketing budget because you’ll be making better use of your website traffic.”

User Testing

It’s been said that a website should be usable for someone who’s thoroughly drunk. And while this is an oversimplification, it gets to the issue of user testing. User testing is crucial for tracking visitor behavior within your site. It lets you see exactly how your customers are moving through your website. It shows where your visitors are getting lost or stuck, as well as how they navigate through your site. It reveals whether navigation is simple or contains unexpectedly confusing elements.

By working with users, you get to see through their eyes. You can identify category overlap, checkout inefficiencies, unclear product pages, and other issues you would miss on your own. When you spend every day on your site, it seems easy to understand and navigate. You’ve designed it, after all, and know exactly how it’s supposed to work. User testing shows what the experience is like for an unfamiliar visitor. It reveals whether your site is really as user friendly as you believe.

Heat Mapping, Scroll Mapping and Click Mapping

Heat maps are all about determining how and where your visitors are moving and clicking. Are they clicking on unexpected locations? Are they losing interest at certain points? Are your visitors engaging where you want them to? Are you putting your most important content in your most engaging spots? Is your email opt-in getting the exposure it needs? You may think your sales banner beneath the fold will generate increased sales.

On the contrary, most heatmap testing shows that content below the fold gets far less attention than content above the fold. People give 80% of their attention to content above the fold and only 20% to everything else. You may think that the left side and right of the page have equal value when heatmap studies show that 69% of attention goes to the left side. Turns out intuition is often wrong. Heat maps can reveal your false assumptions and gut feelings, showing you what is really happening on your site.

Surveys

One of the simplest, most effective ways to determine what your visitors want and what problems they’re encountering is to simply ask. Asking your visitors for their opinion and then evaluating the themes and trends that emerge can give you an idea of whether you’re really addressing the relevant pain points. It can also reveal unexpected trends about what really matters to those visiting your site. Finally, it can help you create customer personas around specific data.

Additionally, when using surveys in conjunction with analytics, you can target specific segments of your customers, like churned customers, prospective customers, and engaged customers. Finally, surveys allow you to take phrases directly from visitors and put them straight into your copy. This allows your copy to resonate much more with customers because it’s in their own voice. Discussing customer surveys, Jennifer Havice says:

“I’m talking about little nuggets of insight straight from your customers’ mouths. These are pieces of information that inform your copy so you can do all those things like address their concerns and provide the ideal amount of detail to your argument depending on how aware they are or not of your solution.”

More Context

Can you see how gathering this amount of data give your far more context and nuance than simply evaluating buttons colors, headlines, and calls to action? You need wide swaths of data to make informed decisions. Otherwise, you’re still just guessing. When you analyze things on a surface level, it can be difficult to determine why certain things actually work. Why did one headline outperform another? Was it the word choice or did it touch closer to the pain points? Did one button outperform another because of its location on the site, a change in the traffic source, or the page load time? Without gathering large amounts of specific data, it’s impossible to tell what changes truly optimize your site and which are just lucky guesses.

Identifying Strategic High Impact Areas For Improvement

Once you’ve gathered all the data, you need to determine which areas and metrics matter the most. You don’t want to simply start at the top of your list and check things off one at a time. You need to determine which changes will have the greatest impact and generate the most revenue. You’re looking for exponential results. Ask yourself these questions:

• If I changed this metric, how significant would the results be tomorrow? It’s one thing to improve a metric, like bounce rate. But if it doesn’t generate significant results, it’s not a high impact area.
• Will improving this metric contribute to our actual goals? Improvement for its own sake isn’t enough. You can easily increase traffic without seeing an uptick in sales. You need to determine which metrics will make the biggest dent in your goals.
• Is this a metric that will also improve other metrics? Many metrics are interconnected, and improving one can create a domino effect. For example, identifying key traffic channels can improve the quality of your traffic, which can then increase conversions.
• How sure am I about this metric? Do the analytics sufficiently support this confidence?

You may even want to create a score for each answer to help you determine which metrics are most valuable. For example, on a scale of 1-10, if you think a change would have a big impact, it could be rated as an 8. After answering all the questions, you add the scores up to get a cumulative answer which can be compared against other metrics.

Creating this kind of scale can make the process even more objective. It can be tempting to focus on the vanity metrics, like traffic or increasing social shares on content, but vanity metrics rarely are the most impactful. Every metric is a lever. Pulling on some will generate large amounts of growth, while others will barely move the needle. You need to determine which ones truly matter and which are only about padding your ego. Remember, you’re after conversions, not just a boost in traffic or reduction in bounce time. The 80/20 rule applies to optimization as well. 80% of your growth will come from finding and optimizing 20% of the metrics. You want to start with the most powerful ones and move down the list from there.

Designing Experiments Around Key Metrics

Once you’ve identified the high impact areas, you can begin imagining, crafting, and testing solutions that focus on your key metrics. The temptation is to immediately make changes and then push them. After all, if you think the changes will generate positive results, you want to get them out there as soon as possible. But this is shortchanging yourself. You may see an uptick in results, but not the kinds of gains you’d see if you spent time creating and testing hypotheses.

Deploying User Tests

A better solution is to deploy user tests around key, high impact problem areas. User tests call upon real people who match your target customer profile to browse your site and follow a series of instructions. The testers we deploy at The Good have been trained to think out loud so you are able to get a look at their consumer experience and their thought process as well.

For example, let’s say your analytics reveal that customers are getting confused when they visit particular product pages and then try to check out. By doing a user test on those pages, you can experience what it’s like for them to try to navigate what seems very clear to you. As they run into problems, you can note those problems for changes. This gives you a lot more insight into the problem than simply guessing. You can create hypotheses based on actual user experience rather than blindly trying to figure out why problems exist.

Testing Your Hypotheses

Once you’ve formed your hypotheses about how to fix the problem, you can make the change and then begin testing. One simple way to test is to automatically show these changes to half of your visitors, do an analysis, and then determine whether the hypotheses was proved true. Once the test is done, you can make a second change, test again, and so on. This iterative process allows you make incremental changes in a positive direction.

It should be noted here that you’re going to need a minimum amount of site traffic to reach statistical significance with your test. If you’re a low traffic site, it’s going to take longer to make valid conclusions than it would with a high volume of traffic. This is why many conversion rate optimization firms require a minimum traffic volume. This type of testing takes guesses, gut feelings, and intuition out of the optimization process. The changes are made based on hard data and winners are only selected when statistical significance, a way of mathematically proving that a specific statistic is reliable, is reached.

Iterating The Process

So how do you fit all these pieces together? How do you truly optimize your site for maximum ecommerce revenue? The final step is to develop a cadence and tempo to your testing. You’ve identified your key target audience and problem areas, and know how to iteratively test your hypotheses. The only thing that’s left is to develop a steady rhythm for this testing. Twitter’s rapid growth between 2010 – 2012 was largely due to their aggressive, high-tempo testing. During that period, they cranked their testing velocity from 0.5 tests per week all the way up to 10. As Morgan Brown notes:

“The tests that they were doing wasn’t anything crazy. It’s tests that all of you as optimizers in here would recognize as familiar. They did many homepage tests, they also did things like fix form validation errors in non-western language countries that led to massive gains. All basic conversion optimization things. The difference is that at such a scale and without people really noticing it, people turn around and say, ‘Wow, Twitter is growing like crazy. They’re growth hacking.’ Well, no, they just massively increased the velocity of their tests.”

GrowthHackers did the same, nearly doubling their monthly active users thanks to a massive increase in the speed of their iterative testing. As Sean Ellis notes:

“We grew from 90,000 MAU [monthly active users] to 152,000 MAU in about eleven weeks without spending a dollar on advertising or increasing the size of our growth team. The only thing that changed was the velocity of our experimentation. We achieved that velocity improvement by adopting the high tempo testing framework to help us prioritize and close the loop on the growth experiments that we thought would move the needle.”

Running a few iterative tests can certainly improve the conversion optimization of your site, but upping the tempo and consistency of those tests can truly move the needle. One essential part of this process is recording and archiving all results. This keeps you from repeating tests, allows you to communicate wins to your team, and enables you to continuously improve the quality of your tests. The more tests you’re running, the more crucial it is to keep a good record of the results.

The Beauty of Compound Growth

This cycle of analyzing, identifying, experimenting, and iterating creates a beautiful cycle that compounds upon itself. The first round produces growth, the second round produces exponentially more growth, and so on. It’s like interest on a bank account. The initial results may seem insignificant, laughably small even. But the more iterations you cycle through, the greater the impact. Pretty soon, you’re seeing massive growth that can transform your company. You’re reaching levels of ecommerce optimization you previously thought untouchable. True conversion optimization is not simple or quick. There are no shortcuts. But if you’re willing to do the work, you’ll see the results.

The post Beyond Vanity Metrics: Understanding the Depth of Ecommerce Conversion Optimization appeared first on The Good.

With the 2019 holiday season rapidly approaching, now is the time to start preparing your ecommerce store for the months of November and December. Instead of guessing what your customers will respond positively to, make data-backed decisions through user research and testing.

The Good recently presented as a part of ShipBob’s Virtual Ecommerce Holiday Sales Accelerator and our presentation focused on conversion rate optimization for Q4. We also included a live landing page teardown, where we used heatmap data to determine areas of improvement for the site.

Here’s what you expect to takeaway from this webinar:

• A better understanding of what CRO is, and why it’s so effective
• The four key types of data involved in CRO
• Actionable tips for optimizing your site’s homepage

If you enjoyed this webinar, sign-up for our weekly Insight emails to keep up-to-date with the latest trends and observations in the CRO industry.

The post [Webinar] Conversion Rate Optimization for Q4 Sales (with Live Site Teardown) appeared first on The Good.

Analyzing and interpreting the results of your user testing sessions can be a daunting task. A standard test with five to ten participants can potentially produce sixty or more UX issues. It’s important that you know how to filter through these issues so you don’t end up wasting your time developing solutions that don’t address the broader usability issues at hand. 

We previously covered in parts one and two of this series how to select appropriate user testers and what questions you should be asking those users. In this final part we’ll be focusing on how you can turn the data that was collected in your user testing sessions into quick wins, A/B test ideas, and bigger strategies. 

How to properly analyze and interpret your testing results

After you’ve invested your time and resources into selecting a great panel of testers, formulating tasks and questions, then collecting all of the results of the testing session, you’re ready to interpret those results into usable findings.

Through our experience (listening to dozens of user recordings every day!), we’ve identified a number of advantageous tips that you can use to get the most value out of your user research.

Return to Your Original Objectives

As you start to analyze your user testing sessions, reflect on the objectives you created when you first launched your user tests. What were the goals that you and your team established for the test? Reflecting on these objectives will allow you to generate valuable insights that you can share with your team. 

Don’t take user tester suggestions literally

User testers often suggest solutions to the micro-frustrations they encounter, but users are notoriously bad at thinking outside the box, and we caution you from letting these off-the-cuff “solutions” directly guide your design process. In our experience we’ve heard some pretty wild suggestions from user testers, but oftentimes these suggestions don’t address the root of the issue. 

As the old (most likely made up, but regularly cited) adage goes, Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” While user frustrations are valid, their suggestions are typically laser-focused on the problem directly in front of them and lack the data and context that researchers are armed with. 

So rather than getting caught up with tedious UX fixes, wait until enough feedback is collected to roll up these issues into a hypothesis that will address greater opportunities.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” –Henry Ford

Capture quotes that synthesize misunderstandings, not just opinions 

Direct user quotes are a great way to understand what page elements miss the mark, but make sure to capture the misunderstandings as well. Users will frequently say they’re likely to do something but end up getting lost along the way. 

Quotes can contain more subjective feedback, but capturing the language that they’re using can be valuable as it helps you understand sentiment, both positive and negative. Even if what the user is saying doesn’t necessarily match up with their actions, it allows us to see what they’re noticing. This information is most easily found in the form of user feedback/direct quotes because it’s nearly impossible to tell what users are expecting to find on your site through heatmaps or analytics alone.

Don’t trust the user. Be skeptical and read between the lines

Listening to what your user testers are saying is important, but it’s even more important to pay attention to what they do. Users will often rate their experience on a site favorably despite having struggled more than they would on a more optimized site experience. Even when users spend longer than average looking for pertinent information, they often rate ease of navigability highly. So take users opinions with a grain of salt. 

Users are often willing to forgive and forget a subpar site experience because they believe they have failed the site, rather than the site has failed them. Even if a user is not providing verbal feedback, pay attention to how long they spend on a task versus what they do not notice. 

Users are often willing to forgive and forget a subpar site experience because they believe they have failed the site, rather than the site has failed them. #usertesting #UXdesign
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Prioritize the Identified Issues

It’s important that you prioritize the issues you’ve identified throughout the user testing sessions to help you determine which problems are more critical than others. It can be easy to underestimate the volume of problems even a handful of user testers may uncover on your site, so once you have a complete list, begin organizing them based on impact and significance. You don’t want to find yourself caught up with tedious minor fixes to your UI when there are larger glaring issues that should be addressed first. 

Save yourself time and create a spreadsheet of all the problems you’ve identified. Organize them based on the frequency that the issue occurred, and the impact it had on the overall user experience. Then use your spreadsheet as a checklist as you determine what usability issues to tackle first on your site.

It’s time to start testing!

Analyzing and interpreting the results of your testing sessions is easily the most time-consuming but most valuable aspect of the user research process. Once you’ve invested the time and resources into a series of user testing sessions, it’s crucial that you draw as much insight and value as you can from the results. 

We hope the tips we provided can help you run a more successful and efficient user testing program in the future. This concludes our three-part series on user testing. If you missed parts one or two, make sure you read those as well and let us know your thoughts!

• Part 1: Thoughtful Panel Selection
• Part 2: Formulating Tasks and Questions

If you’re looking for the best usability testing platform to use for your next round of user research, make sure to check our comprehensive list of every usability testing tool imaginable.

About the authors:

Natalie Thomas is the Director of CRO & UX Strategy at The Good. She works alongside ecommerce and lead generation brands every day to produce sustainable, long term growth strategies.

Maggie Paveza is a CRO Strategist at The Good. She has over five years of experience in UX research and Human-Computer Interaction, and acts as an expert on the team in the area of user research. 

The post How to Conduct High Impact User Testing: Part 3 – Analyzing the Results appeared first on The Good.

Running frequent, iterative, unmoderated user testing can help you uncover pain points and inform your design decisions before committing resources and development time. However, if we’ve learned one thing about user testing, it’s that the user test is only as good as the questions you ask.

Regardless of what testing tools you utilize, it’s the thoughtful responses you get from your user testers that make your investment worthwhile. If you’re finding that the results of your user testing endeavors are not productive, it’s possible that you’re just not asking the right questions. This Insight is focused on how to surface useful and meaningful feedback from user testers. 

In this article we’ll cover: 

• How to avoid biasing your audience
• Why it’s important to set learning goals
• The importance of a pilot launch
• How to avoid staging unnatural behavior
• The suitable number of tests for your audience

Don’t prime or bias your audience

The first questions we almost always ask when conducting a user test is, “What do you think this website offers? What would you come here for?” Giving users a concrete idea of what the site sells before they have a chance to tell you what they think can mean losing key insights. And we’ve found that asking a question like the one above can surface unexpected results.

ECOS Paints assumed that education was critical to helping users understand why they needed to choose eco-friendly paint, but through user testing we found that the education emphasis gave the illusion that this was a manufacturer’s website. This resulted in a typical 5-10 minutes on the site before users realized they could buy products here. 

Aim to put users in the right mindset, but not prime them to know exactly what the site offers. So instead of saying “Imagine you are shopping for environmentally friendly house paint” we would recommend a prompt like, “Imagine you have an upcoming home renovation.” The latter gives the context needed to prompt a thoughtful response, but doesn’t give away the purpose of the site. 

Decide ahead of time what questions you are looking to answer

What tasks are you hoping to see users accomplish? Do you want to know how and why they use the menu, where they have difficulty finding a product, or why they may be dropping out during the checkout process? Outlining key pain points that you may have already discovered in your data will help guide you to create tasks that reveal why users behave the way they do on your site. 

Do they find the user interface of your site to be intuitive, or frustrating? Asking users to rate their experience as they perform tasks on your site may reveal not only why users choose to purchase from you once, but also why they may return to your site. 

Do they find that you are better or comparable to your competitors? Utilizing competitive user testing – asking users to explore your site alongside one or more of your competitors – can reveal where your strengths and weaknesses are as well as why your target audience may prefer to shop with your competitors.

Running competitive testing will help you compare how your audience perceives the competition against your own site, and the data you draw from this will help you identify what’s great about your site, and what needs to be optimized. 

Once you’ve screened for the ‘right’ audience, the user test is only as good as the questions you ask.
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Don’t risk staging unnatural behaviors

The number one mistake that we see new researchers and strategists make is thinking too narrow-minded with user tests. It may be a goal of yours to know how users react to one particular page on your site, and you may want to test your assumptions, but we often gain more refreshing and impactful test results when we aim for natural behaviors that aren’t influenced by the structure of the test. 

Over-structure the tasks in your user test and you risk missing key behavior patterns that are stopping real users in their tracks and causing funnel abandonment. 

In our experience, the first few minutes a user spends on the site is the closest to “natural” we will get in the session, so we leave those first few minutes relatively unstructured. For this reason we often ask users early in a test “Explore this website in whatever area interests you. Spend no more than a few minutes on this task.” This produces close-to-natural behavior that will show you what’s grabbing user attention and how they would naturally behave on site. The rest of the tasks should be formulated to help users navigate down the conversion funnel with just enough guidance to stay on-task and deliver pointed insight. 

Under-structuring tasks can also lead to unnatural behaviors and over-emphasize the impact of page elements. 

User testers who find something annoying can end up dwelling on a single trivial detail for a majority of the test, which is rarely useful. One way to get natural-like behaviors with more pointed tasks is to give a time limit. Since real users are unlikely to browse a site for 30 minutes, giving an estimate of how long users should spend on each task will assure the feedback is useful and not overly specific or critical. Simply adding “Spend no more than a few minutes on this task” to your prompts should do the trick.

Always launch a pilot test

If you’ve done everything right up until this point, then there shouldn’t be much to correct, but there’s always the chance that one of your links didn’t work or there’s a task that just doesn’t make sense to user testers. Launching a single “pilot” test will assure you have all your ducks in a row by uncovering any questions that may be unclear to your testers, or where you can ask them for more feedback. Having this opportunity to edit and refine the test will ensure that you’re set up for success with the rest of your user testing sessions. 

Don’t waste resources running too many tests

It can be daunting to launch a batch of tests and look at the sheer number of minutes left to annotate and analyze. But we assure you, most people are launching too many tests. Industry colleagues at Nielsen Norman Group have found that roughly 5 users per usability test uncovers about 80% of usability issues, and that after that tests have diminishing returns. (We’ve found that at just 3 users, we start to see patterns between sessions.) By sticking to 5 tests to start, we avoid over-emphasizing small problems and instead uncover more overarching issues: reasons users abandon your site and how they can become brand loyalists. 

If 5 sounds like too few tests, try embracing smaller sample sizes, which we believe fosters a culture of experimentation and validation. Start by running a handful of tests early on to uncover major usability issues, followed by small iterative testing cycles to refine your site experience. This approach to testing will result in more accurate results, and will ensure that you’re not wasting resources on futile tests.

The art of formulating user testing questions is one that can be refined and continually improved upon 

Even trained experts go back to the basics every time. Learning to remove bias, set learning goals, and avoid staging unnatural behavior will assure that each testing series is high impact. Launching a pilot test, and moving in small, iterative testing cycles means you’re never taking risks by investing precious resources into a potentially faulty test. 

Once your tests are compiled and your panels fill, then comes the fun part of analyzing all the hours of testing you’ve collected. Analysis is the final critical part to your user testing program, and is usually what makes up for the time and resources you’ve invested in planning and executing the tests.

Read Next: How to Conduct High Impact User Testing Part 3: Analyzing the Results

About the authors:

Natalie Thomas is the Director of CRO & UX Strategy at The Good. She works alongside ecommerce and lead generation brands every day to produce sustainable, long term growth strategies.

Maggie Paveza is a CRO Strategist at The Good. She has over five years of experience in UX research and Human-Computer Interaction, and acts as expert on the team in the area of user research.

The post How to Conduct High-Impact User Testing: Part 2 – Formulating Tasks and Questions appeared first on The Good.

User testing is commonly used to reveal a host of usability issues and quick wins for your site. While this is a great application of user research, by the time you’re ready to conduct a test, you often already know the general behavioral metrics (e.g., time on page, exit rates) that indicate key pain points your users are experiencing. 

However, with the context of quantitative and demographic data, well-executed user testing has the potential to reveal not just general usability issues but insight into the expectations of your unique audience. We put together some guidelines to help you get the most out of your user testing program and start improving the user experience on your own site. 

In this article, we’ll cover:

• The difference between user testing and user research
• How to screen for a relevant audience 
• How to select for a fresh perspective
• When to talk to your core audience vs. niche segments with differing needs 

How Is User Testing Different from User Research?

User testing and user research are two terms that are often used interchangeably. User research is seen as an umbrella term that refers to a variety of methods for researching your users, including interviews, surveys, focus groups, and user testing. 

User testing is a sub-division of user research that allows you to validate design decisions, reveal common pain points, and inform a/b testing by asking members in your core audience to think out loud as they complete specific tasks on your site. During testing, the evaluator observes how users complete the tasks without assistance, and then draws conclusions from the users’ ability to complete the tasks. 

User testing is a highly effective method for identifying pain points in the user experience, but the success of your testing hinges on how you screen and select your users.

So how do you determine which users should be part of your test?

Use screener questions to identify your target audience

Reaching the right audience on your testing panel will open up a host of contextual insights, showing not just how users perform, but what motivates them to make decisions. If you approach user testing with the assumption that users in your target audience (or segments of your target audience) share some unique attributes, you’ll set yourself up to get more accurate test results and understand what your site is missing. 

Reaching the right audience on your testing panel will open up a host of contextual insights, showing not just how users perform, but what motivates them to make decisions.
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To choose the right users for testing, define your core audience demographics by mining your analytics for sample data on age, gender, and location; this will tell you who is converting and who is not at a basic level. Most testing platforms will allow you to screen for gender, age, and location simply by checking a few boxes. 

However, while screening for these demographics is a start, it doesn’t encompass all of the characteristics that are unique to your audience. 

Once demographics have been identified, take it a step further with carefully formulated screener questions. Answers to these questions will connect you to users with psychographic qualities that match your unique audience profile on a deeper level (e.g., price-insensitive homeowners) and provide insight that gets at the heart of why your target audience is not converting better. 

Here’s an example of a screener question that would weed out a group of potential testers based on psychographic characteristics:

What is your approach for shopping for home furniture or appliances?

• I go low stress. I prefer to make easy decisions from a few options to save myself time. [Reject]
• I take my time. I aim to find the best deal at the lowest price. [Reject]
• I take my time. I aim to find the best product, and I prioritize quality over cost. [Accept] 
• None of the above. [Reject]

Note: Be careful to formulate screener questions that don’t give away the “right” answer among the various responses. When filtering for users who won’t be stuck on the prices of high-end goods, for example, aim to make every optional response sound positive and appealing. Make sure you have a “none of the above” option when applicable so you’re screening out folks to whom the question doesn’t apply.

Avoid talking to users who have already experienced and “learned” your site 

When our strategy team is looking to learn more about how to convert visitors to buyers on a client’s site, we often prefer to first talk to users with a clean slate. Starting with an uninitiated audience will give you a good understanding of how a typical user will experience your site and highlight problem areas that those who have already “learned” your site may naturally overlook. 

To find new users with the right fit, screen for those who have heard of in-market competitors (which assures that you are talking to the right audience) but reject users who have already heard of the brand/site you are testing. Here’s a simple template you can use to screen potential users:

Which of the following brands have you purchased from?

• Competitor 1 [Accept]
• Competitor 2 [Accept]
• Your site [Reject] 
• Competitor 3 [Accept]
• Fake company [Reject]
• None of the above [Reject]

Start by talking to users with the highest intent to purchase

…and avoid users with no intent to purchase.

Screen for the most basic criteria, then try branching out. For instance, if you’re a direct-to-consumer brand selling personal care products online, you may want to ask users how often they shop online or how they shop. Your primary audience may be users who shop online at least once per week. That’s a good place to start. 

Screen for the most basic criteria before you try branching out.

Once you’ve decided which attributes are critical for relevant feedback, you’ll know what you need to screen for in initial testing rounds. For example, you may eventually want to run another test with a group of users who prefer to shop in-store, in bulk, once a month, to understand if there’s an untapped market you could be reaching and how to appeal to them. 

User testing is about more than usability—it’s about the thoughts behind the actions users are taking on your site.
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By treating these as discrete segments you’ll be able to rediscover their needs through iterative user testing cycles and personalize your site experience for your many unique audience segments.

User testing is about more than usability–it’s about the thoughts behind the actions users are taking on your site 

User testing is more than just a usability gauge. By defining your core audience, targeting unbiased users with aligned interests, and starting with those with the highest intent to purchase, you’ll set yourself up to talk to an audience with insightful feedback. 

But remember: Once your panel is set up, the work has just begun. A user test is only as good as the questions you ask, so if you’re finding that your user testing endeavors are not fruitful, check out part two of this series where we’ll walk you through formulating high-impact tasks and questions to get the most from user testing. 

Read next: How to Conduct High Impact User Testing Part 2: Formulating Tasks and Questions

About the authors:

Natalie Thomas is the Director of CRO & UX Strategy at The Good. She works alongside ecommerce and lead generation brands every day to produce sustainable, long term growth strategies.

Maggie Paveza is a CRO Strategist at The Good. She has over five years of experience in UX research and Human-Computer Interaction, and acts as expert on the team in the area of user research.

The post How to Conduct High-Impact User Testing: Part 1 – Thoughtful Panel Selection appeared first on The Good.