About This Episode:

Not all online businesses need the same amount of traffic. In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss how consideration, target market, and budget impact traffic for both startups and industry leaders.

Check out the full episode to learn:

• What a traffic moat is, and why established brands want to create them.
• What startups should focus on when it comes to generating traffic.

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon MacDonald: Hey, Ryan, I assume that our listeners are aware, but not all businesses online need the same traffic. So surprise, surprise. So much depends on consideration, target market budgets.

All right. So. If you’re selling a 35 watch band, your conversion paths are pretty likely to be short, but if you’re selling a 25,000 B2B server, or maybe even a SAS product of all things, we haven’t talked a lot about here, but I have a feeling we will do more. You most likely have some complicated paths to conversion.

And I think, you know, we really have not spent a whole lot of time tackling these issues. And I think there’s potentially a more unique [00:01:00] traffic source and pattern there that that we should discuss.

Ryan Garrow: I agree. And I think it seems logical that when you’re looking to drive traffic in a High consideration industry with high dollar value deals or lots of margin in those product sales.

It really still does, when you boil it all down, come a lot of times down to just budget, which in turn comes down to, were you already successful before you started spending money? or where you’re at now. Like it’s difficult unless you have an investor with really deep pockets willing to blow a bunch of money on the internet to hopefully win to be able to compete sometimes when you’ve got a large incumbent brand there.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: I just got the call this morning actually with a company that’s launching into a B2B space. They’re only going to have a couple thousand dollars of budget and they’re competing against It’s the web stronts and the Grangers of the world with essentially the same products in their little small slice of the industry there.

I mean, I, I painted a pretty bleak picture for them. I was like, it’s going to be tough. Your competition is already spending six, [00:02:00] seven figures a month on Google capturing demand. You’re going to be priced out of the ad auctions in just a thousand dollars. It’s like. You know, a pea shooter against a tank to a degree.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Why even bother in those cases?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And I tell them most of the time, don’t, I was like, you can pay me and you know, I’d have no problem taking money, but you’re not going to be happy. So there’s probably better places to spend your money. You know, startups in these spaces have to get somewhat creative for their traffic and lead flow while larger businesses or industry leaders really have to focus on creating traffic moats around what they’re doing.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. So. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard that term traffic moat before what what do you mean by that because I don’t even know how an industry leader would create one. What is that? What are we talking about here ?

Ryan Garrow: Before today? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it. But I was sitting down creating notes.

I was like, how do you explain some of these strategies I would talk about? I’m like, I think of it as like, okay, you’ve got this castle, you know, And you’re, Oh, you’ve got, you can build a moat around it and it helps protect you. And we talk in business around, you know, how do you build moats or, you know, be in blue oceans and keep out the bloody [00:03:00] waters.

If you consider your traffic, your advantage on as a B2B large sales product or a SAS product, then you want to protect that. You don’t want to just make it easy to, to steal that traffic from you. That’s what I think you’re trying to accomplish in a perfect world. And you’re always going to have people trying to take it from you because they’re going to see your size.

They can estimate your profit. You know, we know a lot of what SAS margin products look like. You can see their traffic and do backup math and calculations and be like, Hey, I want some of that profit. To start creating this mode, you got to think through your search funnel and then at each layer, figure out kind of how you’re going to protect yourself.

What’s going to keep the startups from coming in? I usually start with Google Bing and say, okay, you’re capturing demand. And if it was me, I would almost do the opposite of what a lot of e com brands get advised to do. But I would say increase your bids, increase your CPA goals, meaning like be willing to pay more for a CPA than maybe what you can actually capture.

Okay. If you can get a CPA of, let’s say 80 on Google and Bing, [00:04:00] and I can handle 120, 130, I might go up there anyway. Just because it’s going to make it that much more difficult for a startup with less money than me to compete and I’m playing the long game.

Jon MacDonald: Well, it’s almost like that story you were just talking about, right?

In the sense that somebody new who’s entering that marketplace can’t possibly compete spending a couple grand when their competitors are spending tens of thousands.

Ryan Garrow: Google many times will set a minimum CPC in a lot of industries to help give you that moat to a degree. But like I might be bidding a hundred even though I know I can handle.

I can take it for 50 or do really well there just because I’m competitive and I want to win. And I want a monopoly if I can get it, but I want to keep them out. And I want to focus really hyper focus on quality score because that’s the area that small competitors can jump into these auctions and beat you.

You know, if you’ve got a very large Google ads account, that’s not getting a lot of attention in many areas, you may have three to five out of 10 scores. Meaning that if I’m a small competitor, I’m going to get hyper focused on that. I can get a [00:05:00] 10 out of 10 and outbid you for less money. You might be bidding 100, but I might be able to get that same click for only 30 because I’ve got a much better quality score.

Large brands can’t take their foot off the gas and allow for those creaks to come in. So you really do have to pay attention to those details. If I’m advising an aggressive business, you know, somebody like myself. I might say you need to find a way to get a second entity in that auction That you own and control not something that you you don’t break any rules by doing it, by the way It’s just you have to be very clean about it.

Jon MacDonald: Okay,

Ryan Garrow: you can’t have the same credit card on there You can’t have the same billing address You need to make sure google sees that second entity bidding in that auction as a Second entity as a competitor to you, even though the ladies may be flowing up to you at the end of the day So some of them might be that you create a best of list We had a client that did this in a much simpler industry He was selling t shirts based undershirts and he created this huge ecosystem where he became a like a t shirt guy And was like doing all of these reviews of undershirts funny [00:06:00] enough, he won every best of list.

He’s like, Oh, that’s got the best quality. It’s got the highest thread count. It’s all these things.

Jon MacDonald: This is the old mattress play. All the online mattress brands done this for years.

Ryan Garrow: Yes. And it, I think it gets overlooked in its simplicity. Like you’re just going to create this entity that you like, but it can bid because it’s Collecting review. And you might even set up, realistically, you might set up affiliates, affiliate links to your competitors.

Jon MacDonald: Why not make something off of it?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. You send them traffic, you might as well at least make some money off it. Yeah. And so, but you’re gonna win most of the awards on there. So that could be one way to do it.

Sometimes you will acquire or create a reseller of your product so that you know, if you’re selling this piece of sass and this. Ryan’s, you know, store is going to be one of the resellers of that. I can own that. There’s nothing against that rule. It’s a separate business. Maybe my wife owns that and she’s the reseller on there, but it’s my, I’m controlling the budget goes in and the reseller gets some of the revenue share just like a normal one would.

And then sometimes in the B2B like online sales, you would buy [00:07:00] it. You can buy a competitor and

Jon MacDonald: Oh, that’s a good idea.

Ryan Garrow: control it that way. One of our clients, and we pulled this from Fossil Watches. Where I don’t know, 10 years ago, they, they owned the watch market in the U S I mean, they owned like the top 10 brands.

They made all the watches. They had a fossil. They had watch station. They had all of, I mean, they could, they basically came to us during certain periods of the year and said, we want to own watches, wallets, and belts for men. I’m like, well, what do you, what do you mean own it? We don’t want to see any competitors anywhere in the auction on text ads or shopping.

You have all of our properties. Go make that happen. Like, okay. So if you weren’t organic top three on any of those during holiday, you were not getting traffic for those. It was going to be painful competing with our team on that space. So it’s, it’s thinking big,

Jon MacDonald: interesting,

Ryan Garrow: but really focusing on some of those details within the space. Okay.

Jon MacDonald: So I think everyone right now knows that you’re super competitive. So this doesn’t surprise me, but I love that tactic. You know, it’s [00:08:00] taking something that is legit, Google lets you do it and using it towards your advantage. And I love the buying a small competitor up to be able to do that. I think that’s a great idea.

Okay. So I get that you can create this mode around demand capture and properties like Google and Bing, but so many SAS or software as a service clients that we work with at the good have massive amounts of traffic coming from sources like affiliates or LinkedIn is huge now. How do you put a moat around those?

Ryan Garrow: Well, of course, it’s usually, it’s usually not as simple as controlling Google and Bing because that’s a very direct spend a dollar, get this relationship. But again, I think as long as you’re thinking within the details and minutia of those areas of the traffic, I think you can find ways to really Corner the market and keep small competitors out, even big competitors sometimes depending, but like, for example, affiliates are big in the SAS space.

Many of the tech players in my space have affiliate programs and they’re, they’re nice, but they’re almost table stakes for playing. Like if you don’t have an affiliate program or a partner [00:09:00] program that pays me a rev share, it’s like, yeah, are you, are you even trying to a degree? If I were to create a moat in affiliates for a big SAS company, Or a large player in the B2B space.

I would want to create tiers that, you know, a small competitor just can’t play it. And so aggressive pricing is one thing. So if standard in your industry is 15 to 20 percent of the SAS revenue to a partner, go 30%, I mean, make it uncomfortable for a small company without much money to be like, how would we pay 30 percent or more?

If you’re smaller, oftentimes you have to overshoot the incumbent. to take that partner away. Aggressive pricing can be one thing. It doesn’t have to be an all the time thing, right? You could just be like, I know this guy over there or girl over there is starting to start up a competitor of mine. I’m going to make sure they don’t get off the ground.

Small competitors usually lack a few things, money, time, and clients. And so if they don’t have all of those that you have an abundance of, or at least more than they do, as an affiliate, you want to provide those things to your partners or your affiliates that you know your small competitors can’t do.

You’ve [00:10:00] got the clients they don’t, you can provide leads. For your partners, find a way to engage your clients. Find some needs that your partners that are sending you business will like, I mean, everybody in the partner space loves reciprocal lead flow.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s a key, right? It’s gotta be reciprocal, but 30 percent is intriguing.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. I mean, so I have some competitors that will just do it for Revshare and that’s fine. You know, there’s many agency owners that will take, you know, 15, 20 grand a month in rev share from partners. That’s great because that’s going right to the owner’s bottom line or affording employees that maybe you’re trying to build up when you’re as big as LP 10, 15, 20 grand.

It really doesn’t. It’s not bad. We’re not going to turn it down. Don’t get me. Don’t hear me to say that.

Jon MacDonald: Shop in the bucket. I get it. Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: It’s a drop in the bucket for us. But so it’s when you can give leads that keeps me from saying, Hey, all things being equal and you’re giving me leads, guess who’s going to stay the predominant partner for us.

You know, there may, if you’ve got more cash, you could provide cash for a certain tiers that you hit. You know, we’re working with a partner right now to try to do some of that for some of our employees. Like, Hey, we’re going to do a set of incentive trip for some of the [00:11:00] lead flow that they’re going to be getting.

Well, that’s unique enough that a small competitor to them is not gonna be able to come to me and be like. Yeah, we’d like to, you know, give your employee a 100 gift card. Cute, not gonna turn it down, but at the day, they’re probably not gonna pay attention because they have this big cruise trip coming up with this partner.

Inviting them to events with your client. So if you’re already doing some events with your clients, where they’re just gonna be in the same spot. Invite a partner that you like, that you want to keep from going to a smaller competitor. Just getting them in the room with your clients is going to be valuable to them.

Again, if you’re inviting me to just meet with your clients because you’re there and you’re saying that Ryan’s valuable and logical position does good stuff.

Jon MacDonald: I mean, I feel like that’s the only time we see each other face to face anymore since COVID is like those events, right? Come see our clients. That’s an interesting one too.

Ryan Garrow: LinkedIn is tough because I feel like it’s been evolving a lot and it seems to be, it’s a pretty even playing field. Anybody can post anything they want. There’s no restrictions to being able to post a piece of content there. You don’t have to pay to play there. And so it is fairly [00:12:00] flat, democratic, even playing field space.

Most bigger businesses though will have a content team to help. And I think that’s the resource that becomes more valuable is if you have a solid content team regularly posting. The key is engaging thought leadership pieces. And this is going to take some work because there’s a lot of garbage on LinkedIn.

Like it’s just I don’t want to see another case study. I I don’t I just don’t care great You have a business you’ve probably done something good and you can spin the numbers most case studies when I get in them It’s even some of our partners I’ll go into the case and be like don’t you want to put this in front of your clients?

I’m, like no your case study is garbage because you one partner in particular talk about How they increase conversion rates. I can increase conversion rates. Like we talked about, like, not, and it wasn’t you, it wasn’t Jon, by the way, but it was like, I could just cut off your non brand traffic and conversion rate goes up.

So how can you tell me that making this little change just magically increased conversion rates across 5, 000 clients? Maybe, but you’ve got to give me some real data there and your case studies are fluffy. So,

Jon MacDonald: yeah, I think, you know, LinkedIn’s becoming more like, in some ways, like Reddit, where the community will come after [00:13:00] you in a way, they’ll call you out.

If you do things like that, and it used to be that you could post whatever you wanted to LinkedIn and everybody was kumbaya. Everyone was great with it. And, you know, high fives and likes and thumbs up everywhere. And I’m noticing as a lot of folks who were on Twitter left Twitter wanted something more business minded as Twitter has gotten away from business have really come on and said, you know, like, I love this, but you got to bring value.

And if you’re not bringing value, then I’m Or you’re trying to fake bringing that value, then I’m going to call you out on it. And I think that’s fair. And I love seeing that. And I think there’s a lot of ways to make LinkedIn work for brands. But you’re right. It’s tough because anyone can post anything.

And you are at the whim of the likes and follows, if you will, that are on there. And you got to deliver value. It’s the only way to do it.

Ryan Garrow: Yep, giving me a picture of you and partners at happy hour.

Jon MacDonald: [00:14:00] Like, yeah, this isn’t Facebook.

Ryan Garrow: I mean, no, it’s like that. There’s a time and place for that. And I get it. And you want to call them out, but it becomes the easy button.

I think it’d be like, I’m going to go to face facing and I tagged you and it’s great. And yes, you need to tag partners and give them some of that. Especially if you’re a leader in the space, your team does a phenomenal job at this. I mean, there’s so many times that we come across clients, we share, they’re like, yeah, Jon is everywhere.

He’s such a big deal. And I’m like, he is. Yes. But I also know that he’s got a great team behind him, you know, pushing that out there. Like it doesn’t just happen by accident. There’s a lot of intentionality with what your team does and how you’re repurposing content. You write books. To give yourself more things to talk about and do so.

I think Jon MacDonald is a great person to go if you’re trying to think about LinkedIn. And he does it from, yes, he’s a leader, but he does it with a very small team. So you can adopt Jon’s strategy as the market leader. But also maybe think about it too, as an incumbent, like you just have to be very intentional. So LinkedIn is somewhat challenging as the market leader because of that.

Announcer: You’re [00:15:00] listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of the The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers.

And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes.

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon MacDonald: I think it is, and I think too many people lean on the business instead of the individual, but LinkedIn. nobody follows businesses. They follow people on LinkedIn. And so you can’t just post from your company account and ask your team to like it. Not going to do anything. You really have to engage and be part of the community.

Similar to Reddit, as I mentioned, where you have to be part of the community. You can’t just pop in and promote yourself. Doesn’t work.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, [00:16:00] I wouldn’t even go to those stories I have there with I was trying to solve some Amazon problems. I went in there and I could see people doing I’m like, Oh, this is Stay away from that part of Reddit.

Yeah. But yeah, another example to look at too is Barb Brewis from No Commerce. I think he does a great job of being really authentic on LinkedIn. Yeah. Historically, he’s really built up a good following, and so you can duplicate what he’s doing. And No Commerce, I would argue, is one of the, one of the market leaders in the post purchase survey space.

Yeah. So they’re trying to keep their selves insulated, and so the whole team has to be going. Like, if you don’t have, I’ll say this, if you’re a large entity, In the B2B, SaaS space, and you don’t have a LinkedIn strategy for your organization, I think you have a problem.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: Because it’s not like your business needs to post. Again, like you said, nobody cares. But your C level VPs, directors all have something that they are strategically posting about. And you have to be willing, I think as a big company, to let your people become elevated. There’s a lot of leadership, I think, to get worried like, Oh, if they get too big for me, they’re going to demand more [00:17:00] pay, or they’re going to get recruited.

I’m like, well, anybody can recruit anybody on LinkedIn. I know who the best people in e com are across the board. It’s not a question. If you want to hire the best here, here, here. I know who it is. It’s, it’s more about, are you going to create some value and encourage them to be part of your company is how you should be thinking, not like afraid of them getting picked off because they’re being helped in their LinkedIn strategy.

Jon MacDonald: You have to understand that you’re going to be helping people with their personal brands and that’s okay. You want that. And yeah, they take that when they, when they move on. Hey, at the same time, I think that obviously we do it. So I think it can be fairly, really valuable. And any other points for like a large brand wanting to create a moat around their traffic? You mentioned a few large names earlier, but

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, I would say events can be a great moat for trackers. If you’re in the SaaS or B2B space, you’re probably involved in events, or there are industry events that you probably need to be at if you’re not. That is a great source of traffic and lead flow and you need to create a mode around that.

I don’t think it needs to be a booth at every event because I think a lot of times that’s [00:18:00] a waste of space. The expo, we rarely do, and I can’t say logical position is perfect at this, but we rarely have a booth because that’s not often where the money’s made. Sometimes you have to have a booth and that’s fine, but even just making sure your logos on the event guide.

So you have some branding and awareness and you have a person there that is willing to go out and meet people. So when I’m going to events. I find that the the companies that are most successful have the right person at the right event. I often don’t like multiple people at events if I’m the same company. Just a personal preference of mine.

Jon MacDonald: Okay.

Ryan Garrow: Because I find that they, you’ll have maybe one person that’s good at events and they put somebody else to tag along. They end up latching on and not covering double the space. They cover maybe less space than one person would alone. And so one person that really understands how to just network. And I’ll say this. If I go into an event not knowing if it’s going to be good, it’s already failed.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: Like your event is made the two weeks to a month before you even show up. Where you’ve got meetings already [00:19:00] booked. You’ve got partners already engaged. You’ve got events outside of it that you’re attending.

Like we have a person or he loves conferences. Like he, it is hands down. He loves it more than anybody else on the planet. And he wants to meet every single person. He’s phenomenal at these, but he, he doesn’t plan yet. He like, it’s like two days before he’s like, Ooh, I got to get to a happier on Tuesday because I don’t have one yet.

And then what am I doing after happy hour? So he’ll do it. But he does it in much more condensed than I would prefer, but he, after every event, so that’s one of the people I will go to an event with because he’s fully autonomous, but I, and he stays out later, like my bedtime, usually in an event about nine o’clock and I’m done. You’ll take the early morning coffee.

Yeah. He handles the 9am to 4am or 9pm to 4am shift and it’s great, but we leave an event and Everybody knows it’s amazing if you’re going to do an event, you don’t necessarily need to do all of you know what he does and stays up late, but he has an impact. And so if you’re going to be in an industry leader and keep those away, you need to have some of that.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. And I think, you know, you have to have the right personality for that, right? If [00:20:00] you’re just a by nature and introvert. And don’t really like those things, then don’t, don’t go because you have to engage.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, don’t force yourself into that.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. You’ve got to be willing to sit down at a bar with a beer and talk to somebody you’ve never heard or, you know, even a glass of water.

You don’t know them. You’re going to meet them and they may be a prospect. They may not, doesn’t matter. And the final point, I think for large brands. is going to be you need to have great relationships with the other top companies in an industry. And so if you have the, like the top three companies in an industry solving problems together for the same group of clients, you’ve essentially created an unbreakable cartel scenario.

Like always one of my goals, you know, there’s like, I want to be able to have a cartel or I kind of friend, lead it up to a syndicate. Now you get the best of the best. And once you get them together and then they’re solving problems for these clients, those clients are not going to leave, right? A group that’s working really well together to help them grow.

And so when you have the scale to be able to pick up the phone or email The other really large company helping them and say hey, we’d like to help [00:21:00] solve this problem with you And we’re going to we have the resources just to give you and not ask for anything in return We just want to make sure this client’s taken care of that goes a long way And that’s going to come back and create this circular system of referrals Which will keep going around and around and it makes it very challenging for You know, a competitor, small competitor to try to jump into that flywheel because it just won’t be an entry point.

Jon MacDonald: Well, I’m glad I’m part of your cartel. Excuse me, syndicate. How would you suggest the startup do just that though? I think the vast majority of brands are chasing the market leader, right? So if you’re not part of that market leader cartel, how do you make that happen? What do you, what do you think you need to do?

Ryan Garrow: It’s obviously tough as you would see, like the reason the big companies are big is because they’ve done some things right. And so you’re trying to undo something that’s been done very well. And so I think against the grain, probably I would tell a smaller brand to think small, not as in you don’t want to take down a big competitor of lofty goals for your business. But you need to get very specific and targeted.

Jon MacDonald: Okay.

Ryan Garrow: And I have this [00:22:00] conversation regularly with partners trying to partner with me at logical position saying, you know, we want to partner with you. I’m like, okay, great. Yeah. Everybody wants to, cause we have a lot of clients and that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you can’t come to me and say, well, we can’t, we built this tech to do all of these things that probably take place.

Or of 10 of your partners. I’m like, well, you’re not going to replace 10 of my partners. You have 50 clients I can’t afford to do that. Number one, you might be the best and i’ll need to pay attention to that And help you along the way if you are the actual best in certain niches, but be hyper specific around what problem you solve for my clients that I can go to them with My account teams and say hey i’ve got this partner That’s going to solve a very specific problem that is not probably being solved as well by other partners More specific is more better because you can always expand on that.

But if you’re telling me you can solve all my problems I’m just not going to listen, it’s not going to help. And another thing I would do is if you’re a small business at startup, you’ve got some clients that are probably pretty passionate about you, they’ve taken the gamble on you and they like your tech, [00:23:00] usually you’ve started that because of relationships, double down on those, follow those customers to their events.

Doesn’t really matter what event it is, you want to be by their side. Number one, you’re playing defense to keep in front of them and build a relationship, keep the competitors out, but you also want to see who else is there and what’s the potential. You know, a great example was early on in my partnership career.

I followed one of our clients to outdoor retailer, which is a, that’s an amazing event. I love it. Everybody listening should try to get to outdoor retailer because it’s just super cool.

Jon MacDonald: The kegs come out at like two, it ends up being a party.

Ryan Garrow: and there’s all the coolest stuff coming out next season is there.

Like you can see all the new shoes, all the new stuff going on trucks. You see, you know, vehicles that haven’t come out yet because they’re outfitting them for products. Just do it. It’s super cool. And it’s in Denver, usually, which I like, I think they started moving it around, but it’s just a cool spot.

When I went there with this client, number one, we had a ton of fun. We rented an Airbnb with. They’re they’re team and I stayed with them. I kept them and deep in the relationship, but I also leveraged that relationship to open up new doors and outdoor retail. So I was just [00:24:00] walking the floor saying, Hey, how you doing?

What are you doing for marketing? What’s going here? I saw, you know, opportunities for clients or new companies come on board, but also I was like, Hey, you service the same companies I’m trying to talk to, and we don’t compete. I’m going to partner with you. Yeah. So I created some great partnerships there and I wasn’t supposed to be there.

So they don’t allow agencies in Dow to a retailer unless you, you might be able to, if you spent a disgusting amount of money at the time though, they were like specifically. No agencies.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. And so the hack for us was we would go every year and speak there and we would have a client speak with us. And that was always the hack to get into those conferences because if we can have a client get us a badge and a speaking slot and then we would do it with them and we would basically turn it into a case study and they would talk about their experience and we would provide value. Right. Of how to do something and how it turned out for this brand out there. Retailer love that.

Ryan Garrow: Oh, yeah.

Jon MacDonald: [00:25:00] They always loved it.

Ryan Garrow: And it’s unique enough because your competitors weren’t thinking like that because there was, there was a wall around that event saying it’s really difficult for an agency to get in.

So don’t try. I was like, well, I’m not going to, I usually don’t take no for an answer. So I’m like, what can I do? And great. So think through things like that, where it is a walled garden, keeping in mind. You out on purpose along with your competitors, no matter how big they are, then figure out what can I do?

Sometimes it’s just, Hey, I’ve got clients there. I’m going to have, find some, look at the list of sponsors and be like, Hey, I see you’re going to be there. I’d love to throw an event for you and some of your clients. I’ll cover the costs and we’re just going to do. A happy hour across the street. Yeah, you know, I did that at, it used to be called IRCE.

Jon MacDonald: Oh, yeah.

Ryan Garrow: It used to be good. Now it’s garbage. I don’t even know what it’s called now, but it’s, I don’t even, don’t even waste the time going at this point. And IRCE, if you’re listening or whatever you’re called now, you can call me and we can talk through it. But it’s not great. But then it was, and I said, I had Brent Baum, Ross, the CEO of Listrack.

I had one or two people from Google on stage. And I just opened up a [00:26:00] bar across the street from McCormick Place over there in Chicago and just said, Hey, invite some of your friends and come on in. I literally whoever who cares that I had some budget spend. It wasn’t a ton, but it was great. Met some phenomenal companies, but I had to think outside the box of how to get companies outside of the event that I couldn’t pay for because I was small at the time.

I couldn’t make it happen. Love that. And I think you need to think through partnerships. You know, big competitors can really do more in partnerships. Then you can, if you’re small, but partnerships becomes a way that you can level the playing field. If you focus more on the relationship piece. I think a lot of large brands that I see in the SAS space gets large enough that the partner team isn’t maybe necessarily as important as some of the other things in the organization.

And so it doesn’t get the attention and therefore they don’t attract the top talent into the partner space. Not always, but many times. And so their partnerships in that ecosystem become more of just an affiliate relationship essentially, where you get a, you’re a number and you get a newsletter and commission payouts.

But if you have somebody that’s really good in partnerships and building relationships where they come into your [00:27:00] organization with existing relationships, that can do a lot to move the needle because I will often do more for a partner that is just a good person and have a good relationship, even if I could make more money from a payout or something from a larger partner in their space.

I think you just have to get a little more creative in that space. And then I would say when you’re looking at the search, you are going to look at marketing online. And I think you have to play a spot in that to a degree. But if your budget is such a small magnitude, it’s hyper focused. And so you might only attack a small sliver of the market.

And, you know, if you have a tenth of a percent of the market right now, getting to two and three percent would be huge anyway. Yeah. Very targeted landing pages. And think through the entire search funnel, because you don’t have the shotgun blast to hit everything in the funnel. Across all search terms and so you need to think kind of that ClickFunnel, like if they need to see this piece of content on LinkedIn, then how do I get them in?

A first party list of remarketing, so I can say, then I get them on, you [00:28:00] know, meta and then I can get them on the display network around Google and then I can get a YouTube video in front of them. You can be big to a very small group of people with the, with the budget, but doesn’t even have to be big.

Yeah. You just have to be highly intentional and that’s where you’re thinking small. Like if I’m going to create a POS system for aftermarket auto, that’s a massive mark. You cannot spend enough money at SEMA to have an impact for that as you launch. And so what you need to do is say, I’m going to be aftermarket for this particular subset of products.

Maybe it’s going to be chrome wheels for cars between the sixties and seventies. And those are one really good at, and I will know the product better than any other partner trying to service them. So when I get in front of them or get on a phone call, they know that There will be nobody that knows the products I’m trying to sell better than them and you land and expand from that say, okay, I’m the best at this.

Now I’m going to add on the ancillary products that maybe they have or spend this other retailer that’s trying to sell those. Similar enough things will look at them and say, Oh, you [00:29:00] do work with them. I know them and you’re doing really well. Great. Let’s try that as well.

Jon MacDonald: I love it. It all comes down to face time, right? Being willing to have that conversation, meet up with them in person and share the love, right?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Well, and just making sure that you’re not, you know, once people are getting insight, like you’re taking advantage of, you know, like Jon’s team and making sure the conversions are good because it’s, you offline around, The SAS product, the conversion doesn’t happen on the site necessarily, like getting somebody to sign up for free.

I do that all the time. I have so many emails with free Adobe. Don’t tell Adobe, Jon. I know you’re looking at Adobe things that I had to edit a PDF. So I’m like, God, I got to get another email address because I just need to edit this one thing.

Jon MacDonald: Stop killing our conversion right over there.

Ryan Garrow: But it’s, it’s after the fact. So you guys make sure you’re, you are thinking through that full funnel, not just. Oh, we got a free trial. Therefore, we’re done now.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah hundred percent.

Ryan Garrow: Don’t ignore that.

Jon MacDonald: Awesome. Well, this has been enlightening to talk about more traffic for larger brands and how that complicates things and how to build that moat of the traffic moat, thinking about all the other ways you can, you can make [00:30:00] this work. So I appreciate your time today.

Ryan Garrow: No, thank you, Jon. Maybe I’ll have to trademark that traffic mode thing.

Jon MacDonald: Love it. Have at it.

Ryan Garrow: Thank you.

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

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 125): Larger the Brand, More Complicated the Traffic appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

Creating a well-designed SaaS website requires a strategic approach. In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss the key fundamentals of creating a SaaS marketing website that not only attracts and engages users but also converts them into customers.

Check out the full episode to learn:

• Why identifying your target audience’s needs, behaviors, and pain points comes first.
• How to deliver a seamless experience that connects with your customers, answers their questions, and shows them how to take the next step.
• The importance of regularly testing and validating your website with your audience.

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Drive and Convert a podcast about helping online brands to build a better ecommerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Ryan Garrow: Jon, you without much of an argument or debate, do know quite a bit more about sales. SaaS products than I do. Your team has done phenomenally well at helping SaaS companies scale over the last few years. A ton about ecomm, we know that, but SaaS is a, it’s a unique area for me because I don’t lean into it nearly as much as I should probably, especially hearing some of the things you talked about leading into this podcast recording, you have some great insights on what you need to be doing from a SaaS company when you’re building the website. And there isn’t necessarily, and maybe you’ll correct me through this podcast, but it’s not as simple as Oh, there’s like a Shopify for SaaS. You just put it up and then it automatically converts at this range.

And it’s yeah, you’re done now. You just collect money and it’s awesome. There probably needs to be, maybe we need to go [00:01:00] on another tangent and solve for that and create a Shopify for SaaS because when you’re going B2B, I feel like there’s a really high expectation of what you’re going to get on the marketing site.

There’s so many ways to do it wrong because you can go so many different directions and you’re applying probably to a vast spectrum of clients on that first marketing page, not knowing what you’re going to hit. So you’ve got a lot of data here. So I’m excited to hear about this. You’re going to talk to us about how to, I assume, remove some friction on these sites and make it super simple SaaS product. Is that right?

Jon MacDonald: That’s right. Yeah, I think begin and maintain as well.

Ryan Garrow: Got it. Okay. And so when you’re setting up your SaaS website, you’ve outlined in the notes here, 11 fundamentals for a marketing website that you want to cover today. And there’s different pieces of SaaS, right? There’s the front end marketing site, and then there’s the actual product that you can optimize as well.

So we’re focusing on Marketing, which I like, but it’s how you’re acquiring customers. Customer acquisition websites, essentially.

Jon MacDonald: [00:02:00] Exactly. Yeah. This is for the marketing website. Let’s just say pre conversion to becoming a trialist or a paid user of your SaaS tool.

Ryan Garrow: Okay. So there’s 11 things we need to be paying attention to when we’re looking at the design on these that are going to make sure that we don’t do something dumb and create a bunch of friction. We don’t need to.

Jon MacDonald: There you go. Before we jump in, I just want to be clear about one quick thing, and that’s that. You called it out, right? The SaaS digital journey does not always begin or end with your website. For instance, your user’s journey might start when they read a recommendation on another site.

And in SaaS, there’s several of these, right? You got G2, you’ve got all of these other top whatever sites that are out there for apps, right? You got Product Hunt, you got all these. Great resources for small, especially small and medium businesses that are looking to purchase a new tool, right? And solve a pain point that they have.

Usually, it starts with them doing some research. Okay? And then it [00:03:00] ends when they have a conversation with enterprise, with a salesperson, or with them converting into that trial user.

Ryan Garrow: Okay. It’s obviously imperative to have a seamless experience that connects with the customers. Answers questions and then basically tells them how to take the next step because it’s, we’re multi step.

It’s, I joked about click funnels. It’s all about click funnels to a degree. It’s you’re just moving people down a process and it’s not where to. And you

Jon MacDonald: mentioned earlier that there’s not like a Shopify for SaaS brands, and I would say that there’s several tools out there that are trying to do that.

So there are tools that can help you now for the front end marketing side, right? Not necessarily for the app itself, although AI is coming a long way. And maybe that’s a whole nother show about how you can, as a single person, tell AI what you want and have it generate the entire app for you now. The code may or may not be usable, but it’s there, right?

It’s the one thing to debate, but I think, creating that well designed SaaS website does require a strategic approach. And that’s the thing [00:04:00] that I want to break down and talk about of these fundamentals, because it’s important to focus on these several key fundamentals. There’s not just one, there’s actually 11 that we’ll talk about quickly today.

If you’re listening to this, 11 sounds like a lot. I promise you we’ll move through them pretty quickly, but they’re all important and things that we’ve seen come up time and time again. And these all enhance that user engagement and customer satisfaction. What we’re aiming to do with these fundamentals is to help you to create a SaaS website that not only attracts and engages users, but also will convert them into customers.

Ryan Garrow: I like it. Okay. Look, let’s dive in then. I want to start getting through this list. Yeah, sure. I’m going to learn some cool things here. Okay. So step one where do you start in this journey? Like I’m based on your car conversations, I guess I could hypothesize, but

Jon MacDonald: yeah, the first one is starting by understanding your user.

So you begin by identifying your target audiences, needs, behaviors, and pain points. These are all things that would be key to good product design [00:05:00] anyways. If you have a great product design team, getting them involved in the marketing side can be helpful here. But this understanding also guides the design and the content strategy of your site and really helps you to ensure that your website serves your users well.

Ryan Garrow: What happens if you’re not necessarily sure about who your user is going to be? Do you have to have multiple instances you test at the same time for that or do you have to pick one and go?

Jon MacDonald: Normally, if you have product market fit, But you should have a good understanding of who your consumer is going to be.

Where in ecomm, that could be much wider. In SaaS, you typically have somebody who’s approaching with a very specific problem that you’re solving for them. So you’re able to talk to that problem. That’s where I think, it varies from e com, but also it is something that is actually helpful because that’s really going to be able to guide talking to consumers because you’ll be able to find the right people.

And guide actually writing [00:06:00] content for them, where you’re going to be able to address that specific pain point at each step.

Ryan Garrow: Got it. Okay, that is much simpler, actually, because you go into e com thinking you know where you’re going to be, and then all of a sudden you’re like, Oh, we, these people found us and liked us even more.

Jon MacDonald: Honestly, that may happen SaaS, and it does quite often. You think about Slack is a great example of this. Slack did not start out as a company that made a chat, right? SaaS, I believe that Slack was a gaming company at one point, and they had built this tool to have internal conversations.

And then that became the thing that everybody wanted and was like, this, we have something here. This is pretty cool. We should sell this. And so that’s how they ended up down the line. There are now a billion dollar companies sold to Salesforce.

Ryan Garrow: Taking lots of my money every month. Okay. So we know who our user is.

And you mentioned the content, so I guess we’re informing our content creation on the site to make it, to put it there, right? But is there more about the content we need?

Jon MacDonald: [00:07:00] Yeah. So the second thing is keeping that content compelling. Because it’s very easy if you feel like you know the audience to not make it compelling.

Make it as engaging as it could be. You really want to make sure your content is engaging. And it, that really, I keep saying that word because it’s crucial. It is crucial for capturing and retaining interest, right? You really want somebody to be reading down the page and say, yes, that’s me. Yes. I have that problem.

Yes. Great. This sounds like the solution for me. And as they continue down that journey, so using clear, concise, and persuasive language here, that’s going to speak directly to that audience’s needs and highlight the benefits of how you solve that for them. So you can do things like using imagery. People love actual product shots, not just illustrations, right?

They love videos. Anytime you do a video walkthrough or click snippets of things being used, it really helps visitors to learn. about the product.

Ryan Garrow: Don’t just give me a marketing video on the marketing page. I think [00:08:00] that’s where people will often confuse Oh, I’ve used your video that we used to run an ad one time.

We should put that on there.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. No, you definitely, it goes back to the same thing as ecommerce. I say all the time that marketing’s won once somebody’s gotten to your site. Time to actually help them solve their pain or need.

Ryan Garrow: And number three is use directional guidance to help users find what they need.

Thanks again. And directing them down the page further or to contact forms?

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Directional guidance is this kind of umbrella term that really encompasses anything that puts the user on a path to help them find what they want. That can be navigation, calls to action, strategic use of white space, right?

Nothing at all could be helpful. I think, you start, working in that direction. on how you’re going to guide people along that journey and help them find the necessary information and tools that’s important for them. It’s a very kind of umbrella term, but it really is something that needs to be considered.

Where are you telling these people to go next? Where are you influencing [00:09:00] their journey on your site?

Ryan Garrow: That helps quite a bit there. Your next point might be one of my most frustrating in the business B2B world. As I search for apps and things that help my business, but it’s a seamless customer experience.

The website on the desktop complements what I’m seeing on the, on my mobile device. Cause I often am jumping devices throughout days, weeks, even, and not everybody does this very

Jon MacDonald: well. No, but I think, the key here is to have a smooth user experience that optimizes the website’s performance.

You can make it responsive, but. Ensuring usability across all devices, as you mentioned, you really just need to fix anything that’s broken or introduces friction into that experience and consider each step what devices they might be on all the way from that initial conversion and beyond. How many times have you have fired up an asset, a SaaS app and tried to use it on your iPhone in a mobile browser, and it just doesn’t even work, right?

You’re just like, Oh, what am I doing here? I can’t, [00:10:00] it’s way too big, and it’s not responsive. There are tools that are just meant to be used on desktop, and I understand that, but not delivering a seamless user experience across all devices is a huge issue for a lot of SaaS brands, and you really want to make sure that’s touched on your marketing site.

You’re setting the tone for the rest of what it’s going to be like. And if your marketing site doesn’t work across different platforms, then people sure aren’t going to think that your app is either.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, there was even just, I think, I forget which one it was. It was a competitor to DocuSign. But I had to execute something on a mobile device, and it was the worst.

I actually stopped and had to wait till later in the day to get back to my computer because it was like, I just, I couldn’t get the fields to work. It was embarrassingly bad. I’m sorry to hear that. I can’t blast them, but I hope it wasn’t Panda Doc. DocuSign does a great job at that. Yeah,

Jon MacDonald: DocuSign does a great one.

That’s one of the benefits of pretty much owning the realtor and real estate, because those folks are setting those things up on [00:11:00] the go all the time. If you’ve ever had to sign a real estate contract, 99 percent chance it came from DocuSign. There’s a lot of them out there now, and they’re all competing on very similar functionality.

So if you don’t have a seamless journey, you might as well just stop.

Ryan Garrow: If that ever happened again, I’d be like no, I’ll send you a docu sign. Let’s do it this way.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, exactly. Download the document, resend it to them.

Ryan Garrow: Yes. All right. Number five is design with product verbs in mind. This is not something I would have thought of.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, we actually have a whole article about product verbs up on the good. com. Just go search verbs or whatever you feel comfortable with on the good. But the reality here is that you really want to focus on action oriented language that emphasizes the core functionalities of your product. Okay. So that’s why it’s called verbs, product verbs, because you’re really trying to convey actions that users can take, such as create, manage, track, analyze, right?

These are all things that make the [00:12:00] benefits of the product clear to the end users.

Ryan Garrow: And I would imagine this is not one where you’re going to be like, Oh, let’s think of some cool synonyms to maybe sound different. This is just keep it simple, stupid almost. Yeah.

Jon MacDonald: You don’t want to get cute with this by any means.

But you definitely want to communicate in a manner that is going to help people understand what it’s like. You hear this all the time about resumes. If you’ve ever read a resume filled with these type of verbs, it feels like that person’s way more qualified, right? They’re like, I curated, I influenced, I managed, I did these things, right?

Where if you just say I was part of a team. That doesn’t sound as good. If you say, I led the team, or I did, had some action with the team. I was an integral part of the team. You really want to influence with the verbs. And it’s the same thing here. You’re trying to sell your product through.

You really want people to understand how it’s going to benefit them.

Announcer: You’re listening to Drive and Convert a podcast focused on ecommerce growth. Your [00:13:00] hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with ecommerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers.

And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay per click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes.

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Ryan Garrow: Oh man, this one is probably, I mentioned the non seamless experience. But being clear about pricing and plans, Oh man, maybe I’m young enough. I don’t like it. Maybe I’m too old. I just don’t like, I don’t know. There’s something in there that I do not want to talk to sales. What does it cost? Okay, great.

Does it make sense? Let me make that determination, but don’t force me to talk to somebody before you tell me how much things cost.

Jon MacDonald: Ryan is a hundred percent of get off my lawn guy.

Transparency [00:14:00] and pricing and subscription plans builds trust, okay? So that’s what you’re talking about. Like you say, Hey, I want to know what I’m getting into, right? You want to aid that decision making process. And that is what’s key here, clearly presenting all the options available. Including the features and costs and then helping consumers choose the plan that best fits them.

All of that can be done without a salesperson. And in fact, so many SaaS brands try to integrate salespeople, they think that’s the route they need to go. When in reality, they’re probably any gains they have by. inserting a person who’s really just there to convince often, unfortunately, they lose by people who just give up and go to a competitor who makes it real easy in that research phase to understand what they’re getting into.

Ryan Garrow: I feel like if you need a sales people or sales person to get it across, your product probably isn’t developed well enough. So that’s just the way my perception is. When I’m looking at it, if you can’t tell me how much it costs, you have to get somebody [00:15:00] on the phone to sell me because it’s not good enough on its own.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And that’s how I personally approach it.

Jon MacDonald: There are benefits from the SaaS perspective, right? Of saying, Hey, I’m going to have a salesperson on my team and really what they’re doing is not there to sell and convince. They’re there to understand what are the common questions? What are the key pain points?

Why are people calling? What did they think our app does? When I give them a demo, where do they go? Oh, I like that. Or, Ooh, that’s a problem. Or I, does it also do X, Y, and Z? That’s very similar to what customer service role plays at Ecom. And I say consistently. Get customer service involved and optimizing your e com website.

It’s the same thing here. If you have salespeople, they should be contributing content back to the site. And ideally, as a SaaS brand, a salesperson gets on the call, and they should just be confirming. If you’ve done the right job, that person should just be saying, yeah, so you need this customization.

We can work out a [00:16:00] custom plan for you. Or saying, yeah, our feature does that you do you want a demo? Let me give you the demo answering questions you have. That’s great. But they shouldn’t be there to do cold calls and outbound calls and then say, I got to convince you of X, Y, and Z. They should be more of a consultative sale at that point.

Ryan Garrow: Love it. Okay. I knew this one was coming because it’s Jon MacDonald, but we’re going to test and validate with our audiences.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Are you surprised this is more than halfway down the list? I would say regularly test your website with real users. I, we could probably almost skip this because it’s a broken record with me.

A/B testing, user surveys, analytics, validate your design choices to ensure they’re meeting that user expectations and produce a user friendly design before you do anything. And I’ll just say here, I understand if you need an agency to help you with this. Might we might know somebody

Ryan Garrow: a little hint there. Jon. There you go. It’s not the first thing [00:17:00] you do though it’s are these kind of in order of a process you would have somebody go through like this is Generally best after you’ve been already clear about your pricing and plans and before we get to the next step

Jon MacDonald: I would say You know, you can pick and choose from this list.

They’re not in any specific order, but I do think that they are in the order of, I would say, to me, anyways, importance. You’re going to start with one and work your way down to the bottom of the list because they start building off of each other, right? You can’t really test and validate until you have some idea of who your audience is, right?

So you have to have that understanding first, right?

Ryan Garrow: Once you have some traffic, you’re testing and validating. Getting some feedback and then you’re going to use that feedback, I assume. And you’re going to iterate on your website design and feed that loop back almost. So like the seven and eight points probably are almost circular constantly.

If you’re really trying to grow your SaaS product.

Jon MacDonald: And that’s really why they’re lower on this list because they’re going to continually. cycle through making sure [00:18:00] that you’re validating and testing, but then you’re iterating on your website design. So you’re putting that test and validation back into your site and, every website, including SaaS, should evolve based on user feedback.

There’s always technological advancements, there’s changing market trends. The reality here is, Just continually update and refine, right? Same thing you might do with ecommerce, but I think you have a lot more leeway with SaaS to do this because you’re not stuck to having to find a template that works across hundreds of SKUs.

You’re really trying to hammer home one key solving point that you have. That’s really something that’s going to enhance that user experience and stay ahead of the competitors.

Ryan Garrow: Now, one thing this doesn’t mention in your notes is landing squeeze pages on your website, you should have lots of them.

Jon MacDonald: It’s not here.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, it’s not here.

Jon MacDonald: And I think that’s a great point. Almost what’s not on these lists as much as what is, right? I think that having a hundred [00:19:00] different landing pages is a sign that you still don’t have great product market fit. Now, if you have a handful that are around specific pain points and you know you can solve a couple of pain points or maybe there’s a couple of industries like we talked about DocuSign and Realtors or maybe DocuSign and legal like lawyer teams or, there’s a whole bunch of different ways you could use a tool like that at that point, you can have a landing page for each of those that talks to the specific page.

angle on that same pain point for them, right? You got to get documents signed in an efficient manner. What does that look like for them? It’s different. I guarantee you a lawyer, not guarantee, but I will say high likelihood your legal team is not sending a docu sign from their phone. Just probably not.

But a realtor on the road, ready to get that offer in a hundred percent, probably doing that. They would approach that a little differently.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, I like that. Okay, that leads right into your ninth point, ensuring mobile optimization.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. So with an increasing number of users accessing websites on [00:20:00] mobile, you need to make sure it’s optimized for mobile.

I almost feel like I shouldn’t have to say this one, but unfortunately we do. And for as much as people have pushed it in ecommerce, SaaS is still behind on this. They really are. They often aren’t using responsive design. The loading times are slower because they just expect you’re on a corporate network or that, you’re okay with it being a little slower.

And in a lot of cases, consumers are, so that’s fine, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to optimize, especially for smaller screens, right? You want that smooth experience across all devices.

Ryan Garrow: And Google’s ranking those first time from an SEO standpoint. Yeah. So if you’re going to compete, you got to go to that Google site and see what Google thinks of it. Yeah.

Jon MacDonald: That’s a great idea.

Ryan Garrow: Mobile first. Not desktop. Love it. Even if that’s what your users will do.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. And you can understand too. There are plenty of SaaS tools that are really desktop first and I get that. I wouldn’t want to be doing QuickBooks on my phone. I just wouldn’t. There are some functions of QuickBooks that I would want to do, but I [00:21:00] would not want to be maintaining a P& L and running reports and doing that type of stuff on my phone.

But, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t functionalities that I would want on my phone. And it doesn’t mean I’m not going to do research about the tool itself on the marketing website on my phone. That is something that is very likely. Regardless of whether or not your app is Desktop first or mobile first, you should be making sure your website is mobile first.

Ryan Garrow: Your next point, 10, I would say is probably an area that SaaS is ahead of a lot of the ecomm potentially, but it’s focusing on accessibility and those with certain abilities or lack of ability to read and engage with your site. ecommerce has struggled at scale for sure to label their images and.

Jon MacDonald: Which is interesting to me. I often wonder why ecomm struggles with this as much as they do. And I think that you’re seeing over the past five or six years, a lot of those lawsuits from lawyers who do nothing but chase down these e com sites. [00:22:00] And, I think that’s because they’ve already, those same lawyers have already run their way through every SaaS site.

And so they made their way to ecomm next. Because SaaS has all the money in the world to, to pay them off, right? And settle. But ecomm typically doesn’t. So they knew the margins were thin there. They’re not gonna, go after where the margins are thin. It’s just not as big of a return. I think they’ve worked through most of SaaS now.

SaaS is really good about accessibility. But I think, number 10 on this list is focus on accessibility. You have to design your website to be accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. It’s just, you need to do it. You’re leaving out. A large segment of the population. If you’re not doing that, all texts for images you mentioned, that’s great.

Keyboard navigation is huge color contrast. If you even go to HubSpot’s blog, now HubSpot’s blog. I’ll let you do a high contrast mode and they have a on every single page, they have a toggle. It’s like high [00:23:00] contrast or not. It really is something that you can tell if HubSpot’s doing it. It has really worked its way into SaaS.

If you’re not focusing on this and haven’t came this far, you’re behind

Ryan Garrow: for sure. So focus on that accessibility. And then final point, number 11 is leveraging social proof, which in e comm comes naturally you gotta have that, but

Jon MacDonald: Exactly. It does come naturally, and you see there’s so many tools out there asking for reviews.

There’s really only one that I ever hear about from B2B, and that’s G2. It’s the only one that ever emails me and says, Hey, leave a review for this product. And you’re just like, Okay, I don’t know. But here’s the reality is that if you incorporate customer testimonials, case studies, even reviews build credibility and trust.

You’re going to be ahead of the game. You can’t forget to do that. And I promise you, just putting a star rating, et cetera, is not going to get the job done. Same thing that you have on e com. You really need to make sure that you are showcasing world [00:24:00] success stories here. And you really want to make sure positive feedback is from existing users.

You’ll see a lot that will have influencers in SaaS world. That’s happening more and more now, and not just in e com.

Ryan Garrow: There’s more money. Yeah,

Jon MacDonald: yeah.

Ryan Garrow: You can pay those influencers more.

Jon MacDonald: This is where the whole cottage industry now of LinkedIn influencers, right? They’re all going on there and getting paid quite a bit by B2B companies to, to influence around their products.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. No, I agree. I think it’s definitely valuable there. We’ve gotten through 11 and the punchline feels that designing a SaaS website is about more than just making it look pretty. Yeah. And have high contrasting covers.

Jon MacDonald: A hundred percent, right? How did you know that was coming? Because the reality is it’s very similar to what I’ve talked about with e comm and I think the play here is a lot more similar than not.

The fundamentals don’t change. Your visual appeal of your website, it’s important, but it’s important to remember that websites are made to be used, and that goes for e com or [00:25:00] SaaS. SaaS website design is about creating a user experience that clicks with your target audience. See what I did there.

But there’s this wireframe in design should be validated with real feedback before you launch anything and test it with your ideal audience before you start building. Why waste the money? Your development team has better things to do inside the app. I promise you that’s where they want to focus.

And if you validate everything, you say, Hey this has already been proven out. We’ve already refined and iterated. Now I just need you to build this version. I promise you the relationship with your development team. Between marketing and development is going to be that much better and I hear this all the time from product design and product development folks.

If you are a product manager design development, you often have a rift between you and internal implementation teams, the technical teams that are actually building something because They are getting pulled in so many different directions and marketing is [00:26:00] unfortunately not usually a priority for them.

They’re solving bugs, looking to retain customers, add new functionality. So you really need to be able to speak to them appropriately.

Ryan Garrow: I love it. That was helpful for sure. I think we’re all going to be doing a lot more SaaS marketing and growing of those brands in the near future. I’m excited for it.

Jon MacDonald: It is where it’s headed for sure, especially as I mentioned earlier with AI being able to build SaaS apps. You’re going to see a lot of these. Small creator sites popping up the time and again, so

Ryan Garrow: Excited. Thanks, Jon. I appreciate the insights.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, thanks for hanging with me today through my head cold.

Appreciate it.

Ryan Garrow: Anytime.

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

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 124): The Fundamentals of SaaS Marketing Website Design appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

2024 was the year social ads made a serious comeback, and the focus on social selling will continue into 2025. In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss how YouTube is poised to impact the marketing stack in 2025.

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. Why YouTube’s roster of influencers and the YouTube Shopping program are attracting media spend.
2. The four unique ways YouTube can track attribution.
3. How brands should get started with YouTube in 2025.

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon MacDonald: Ryan, clients are starting to plan for 2025. We’re seeing it across our client base. I’m sure you guys are as well. 24 seemed like a big focus in social selling. TikTok shop is something I continuously hear about now. And I know there’s others that kind of have blown up for selling online this past year.

A lot of that’s been happening for a handful of years, but it really seemed to take off this year. So I know you want to talk about this. I’d love to get your thoughts on it. So it seemed like a good topic for today. What do you think?

Ryan Garrow: I agree. It’s, I have mixed feelings on TikTok. I’m not on there because I’m, I just don’t have time.

I’m maybe too old to get new tricks going. All of our clients, it does feel like everybody had to have some insights or [00:01:00] questions around TikTok. Do I do it now? When do I do it? I have to be involved. What does it look like? Then on the other side, I hear a lot of people burned out from TikTok shop and influencers doing nothing but peddling products and pushing it.

TikTok may have gone too far. They’re really in tight with Amazon. And there’s a lot of stuff on there from trying to sell products and which is fine. Influencers have to make some money, but we saw a big decrease in social ads through the pandemic because of the Apple iOS issues in 21 and changing tracking for all of us.

Which was painful for somebody that’s been doing the same thing for a long time. For me, it feels there’s even ancillary data around that, but social ads really did make a comeback in 24 meta stock price alone would be proof that social ads are doing fairly well. It’s gone bonkers.

And so I think that everybody here’s aware of social, I don’t have to talk about, why you need to be involved in social ads or Just a presence on social media. What I think is missing [00:02:00] is a good discussion around that other social platform out there called YouTube.

Jon MacDonald: Oh, the other, huh? I would have said the main one was the first.

Not the first, but it is a big dog for sure.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Google had their little foray into what’s called, what was it? Google plus, or that they tried to have, what did they call that? Yeah.

Jon MacDonald: Was a mess. Yeah, that

Ryan Garrow: was, I was one of the, I had one of the first ones and I thought it was going to be great.

And then they, it was terrible. But historically YouTube is not really fit into the Bucket of social marketing. I’ll say that it wasn’t necessarily social. People have comments on it, but it’s not like there’s a lot of two way interaction. At least that I see, it’s like you’re posting to be seen, but not get feedback really.

Or yeah, it’s not like LinkedIn

Jon MacDonald: where it’s a conversation every post.

Ryan Garrow: There’s a conversation or I follow my friends on YouTube so I can remember people from high school or my family. Wait, that used to be

Jon MacDonald: Facebook. Wasn’t that what Facebook was for?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And so it’s [00:03:00] now it’s I don’t know what Facebook’s for now.

My mom’s on it and there’s a lot of politics essentially, which is why I don’t get on there anymore. Yep. Yep. But YouTube wasn’t really doing that. It was like you would go there, I think, to be entertained or follow somebody who created content that you liked. And so I think Tik TOK had an impact on that to a degree, but there weren’t people going there to maybe get influenced to purchase.

It was, my dad uses YouTube a lot to fix stuff and I do as well. If I need to solve a problem in my house, cause I’m not a fix it person. I’m like, I don’t know. How do I change? Every time, man, this is funny. I just did this last week. My wife’s expedition. She’s the back windshield wiper needs to be replaced.

I’m like, okay, great. I think I’ll figure out and get the wiper. And I’m like, I get back in the truck. I’m like, I gotta, you gotta Google the same video. I think every single time. Replace the windshield wiper on the back of the expedition. That’s what I use YouTube for having worked with Google for 15 years now.

I’ve seen them try so many different ways of selling my clients on. They need to get on spending on YouTube. Like it’s [00:04:00] every year. It seems to be like, this is the year, Gerald, you’ve got YouTube. They’re missing out and for 15 years, they’ve not spent on YouTube and they’ve not missed out with a few exceptions like our team does really good stuff on YouTube.

We’ve won awards two years in a row for our work on YouTube, so there is some really good things happening there, but it just hasn’t felt like it got critical mass to really be like everybody needs to be on YouTube and everybody’s knows it and they’re asking us questions about it and just saying, Hey, what do I need to do?

How do I scale YouTube? I think 25 is going to be that year. I just

Jon MacDonald: so this is the year Google got to you

Ryan Garrow: if I’m making a prediction now in 24. Yeah, this is the year that I’m going to listen to Google. And I’m going to be like, Yes, we are doing it is we are going to get people spending on YouTube because it’s going to have an impact.

Jon MacDonald: Okay, so you’re saying that my teams are going to actually be looking at landing pages this next year, and we’re going to have to optimize them for YouTube traffic. That’s what I’m hearing.

Ryan Garrow: I’ll say this. I’m not going to stand on a battleship and say [00:05:00] the battles one and everything. YouTube is success.

But what I am saying is I finally believe YouTube has a compelling reason to be looked at much deeper. And I’m betting some of my own time and money on the fact that it’s going to work. It’s rare that I would do that with a Google property that I haven’t seen a lot of traction at scale. There’s, Blenjet did some amazing things with our team and grew their brand really well there.

There have been wins, but I think it’s going to be a lot of wins in 2025.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. I’ve always looked at YouTube as the second largest search engine. So under that kind of line of thinking, it would make a lot of sense to be there. So why is this time different? What’s different for you?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. So I think that I agree, second largest search engine, if you looked at it that way, which is always how they put set it, but it’s like Google has, you What 95 percent of the search volume in the US and being has 30 percent so like beating being wasn’t exactly this great amazing thing, but YouTube as a search [00:06:00] engine is interesting because yes, I search YouTube, but I’m searching for a video to explain something or to entertain me, not like I’m going to say what’s the best.

Headphones. Maybe there is a YouTube video, but that’s going to happen on Google. And then they’re going to drive me to YouTube to watch a video if I don’t want to read it. And for my personality, I like reading rather than watching or listening because I can do it quicker

Jon MacDonald: but unless you’re changing a wiper.

Ryan Garrow: Unless I’m changing a wiper, then I already know I’ve got to have somebody show me how to do it or even change you. It’s always cars for me cause I’m not a car guy. I enjoy cars, but I don’t work on them. And so even changing the battery in my remote, I’m like, I forget how to change it again.

And I’ve got to figure out how to get into it.

Jon MacDonald: I had to do that for my Audi remote. And I will tell you, it was a pain in the butt to get the battery out. And I’m glad I had a video show me how let’s do that. I would have broke the key 100 percent

Ryan Garrow: me too. Like every time and I’m like, at some point, I probably should be like, it’s worth 300 for a new remote.

We’re going to trash it. The battery’s dead. It’s not worth it. Historically on YouTube. [00:07:00] We’ve really had one way to measure. And that was through a brand list study. And if you can only get that if you spent seven grand a month or more. And so most of the scale on YouTube was large brands that could say, Hey, you, Google’s going to do this cool study for us.

And we’re going to be able to use that and say it worked and obviously not perfect, but functional, but it’s also. Like going to the IRS and saying, Hey, did I do my taxes? They’re like how much did you pay us? Oh, you paid us enough. Therefore you did it. And so it’s always been a struggle when it comes to YouTube, because you had to do it outside of what we normally looked at as a source of truth, where I can’t just go To analytics and see what it is now meta has a different side of that where there’s been They are able to tell us whatever they want And it’s always different than google analytics or what we’ve seen in the past as our social truth for some reason As advertisers, we’re always like that’s all right Okay So I think they broke the that glass ceiling to a degree for youtube to say It’s okay if we’re showing numbers that are different as long as it’s true We’re seeing the growth.

It can’t be like [00:08:00] meta is saying they drove a million dollars in sales last month when the site only did 20, 000. Okay that’s obviously not working.

Jon MacDonald: I think I hear about that all the time. And as marketers, we have a hundred percent been conditioned, if you will, to the fact that data is never going to be the same across platforms and you’ve got to have that single source of truth.

And I think that’s why we’re just okay with. Like each platform being wrong because you don’t know which one’s right. So you just assume, you know what? They’re all biased and they’re all wrong. We will find what that, what go in the corner and do your numbers. I’ll do what I need to do and we’ll just work with it.

That’s pretty much the attitude, unfortunately.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And the problem YouTube had in that world is it’s being run in a Google ads account with like next to a campaign where you’re trusting. That data in Google ads and Google analytics matching up and Oh, I get it. Yep. Here’s what they’re saying then you’ve got this YouTube campaign.

That’s like what the heck is this? It doesn’t not even close to matching up or making sense based on what we’re looking at from a Shopping or text [00:09:00] ad standpoint because the intense a little different on those and so lots of issues from tracking My wife even brought this up to me. She’s think about YouTube like our kids have our YouTube login like yeah You Why not?

She’s I have yet to give our 11 year old my Instagram login. Oh good point when it’s on Instagram or meta, they know exactly whose eyeballs they’re looking at. Yeah. When it comes to YouTube, we have YouTube TV. We have YouTube like for video game solving problems. Like my son needs to figure out how to build something on Minecraft.

Guess where he goes? I can’t answer the questions. I’m like, I don’t know. I’ll just YouTube that and figure out somebody else has done it. Change is coming, which I’m excited about. They’re bringing in shopping feeds, which is exciting because it’s putting it more into the flow of okay TikTok has shopping feeds.

Meta has shopping feeds. Everybody has shopping feeds of YouTube. Hasn’t really leaned as much into the shopping feed and now they’ve got some cool stuff coming up with that. And so I think that we’re really going to start seeing the e com brands lean in a lot more because of it’s going to feel and work a lot more similarly to [00:10:00] what they’re used to on meta and tick tock.

Jon MacDonald: Are you saying that Google had to come up with its own YouTube specific tracking?

Ryan Garrow: Pretty much Google’s realized that I think in 24 that. All right we can’t beat them, join them, let’s understand how we get meta advertisers because that’s the same place they want to play in from a social standpoint

Jon MacDonald: okay

Ryan Garrow: see YouTube in the same way.

So if so, we’ve got to learn how to track it the same, but also in Google’s, we got to be different because we’ve got to somehow be able to show we’re better and get that. So YouTube now has four different things, I say for tracking, which. Again, makes it somewhat complex, but we’re getting a lot of really cool points that tell a story.

I say you’ve got to use multiple different data points and our team’s going to talk about, you’re going to need to have some to help measure the impact and say, Hey, when we do this, what else happens and using all four of these things together, it should create a much cooler picture than just saying.

[00:11:00] Spend a million on meta and they 3 million and analytics says half a million. We’re going to meet somewhere in the middle. Two of the YouTube more things that are currently in process are in closed beta. So I can’t get into the super details on that from

Jon MacDonald: okay

Ryan Garrow: summary standpoint. They’re going to give you the geographic impact of ads and just think a way to scale blackout tests without having to do it manually.

Interesting. And it’s show ads in Seattle, but not in San Francisco and then see what happens as far as sales to the site. And then they have three different lifts that they do. Conversion lift, brand lift, search lift. And generally speaking right now, those are for larger advertisers because you need volume of conversions to really see it.

You can’t be doing, 50 conversions on the site. Okay. Go spend on YouTube and see the impact through their measurement. I think there’s going to be ways that we take a lot of those enterprise strategies in 25 and boil them down to somebody that only wants to spend or can only spend a thousand or 1500 on YouTube to be able to say, great, we’ll black out, or we’ll only run it in one market to see, what’s going [00:12:00] on.

What is that having an impact on and then we can run some of these tests individually in each account to make it work for that merchant.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. So with all this stuff, YouTube’s coming out with, you’re able to prove the ROI a little better. It sounds do some testing with the data. Do you think that’s going to pull money and budget away from meta and tick tock?

Ryan Garrow: I doubt it. I think those platforms have done a good job in 2324 of showing what they can do. And they’re probably going to get more spend this year. If anything, my guess is it’s going to pull more from television buys and display buys from large advertisers. So if you’ve got a, 2 million a month display budget, it’s probably going to make sense to lower that half a million to a million and throw that on YouTube if you haven’t been there yet.

And I think if you’re a smaller advertiser, I’ll say six figures or under a hundred thousand or less. I see. You’re probably going to be seeing YouTube as the logical flow up the funnel. Like you’re covered a lot of your Google search and shopping. [00:13:00] Now it’s going to make sense. How do we get to that next layer?

That mid funnel, that’s going to have an impact and that’s going to be some in meta, but it’s probably going to be some in YouTube as well.

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

Ryan Garrow: What I found interesting, we had this big event in Boston. It’s one of their Google office by MIT. We had some of the top YouTube talent inside of Google come and talk to us. Some of the numbers are fascinating in explaining how under invested in YouTube it is. [00:14:00] Facebook had, I want to say 130, 31 million or so advertising revenue in 23.

YouTube, I think, had 30, 32, somewhere in that space. So roughly 25 percent or just under 25 percent of Meta’s ads was YouTube and YouTube actually had just a super small fraction less time on the platform than Facebook did include Instagram and WhatsApp in there too, but it shows the Delta in investment in YouTube from an ad standpoint.

Is dramatically less as a percentage of available inventory than meta has, and so it should be cheaper and have more scale.

Jon MacDonald: Do you think that’s, to me, the way that was, I’m hearing this and correct me if I’m wrong, though, is that is Google cannibalizing their own ad spending. Cause you had mentioned like people pulling from display and maybe even search into YouTube, that would be mostly Google just moving their budget over to YouTube, which as an end user, it seems like it [00:15:00] makes sense to me because they’re rolling out the AI answers is not a lot of clicks happening on ads.

Inside Google these days, at least for me, I haven’t, I don’t remember last time I got past the AI answers because they’re actually getting pretty good. None of them have told me to eat something that’s going to make me sick or anything like that, which was like the early answers we’re doing.

I remember some of those examples, but I do think there’s good opportunity for them to move that budget. People were already spending with Google to other channels and I can’t help but wonder if that’s part of the play here.

Ryan Garrow: Google’s hoping, I’m sure, that they keep search and shopping there, and then YouTube would be the next layer up, that mid funnel that would help feed some of that down the funnel.

So it’s like when I talk to a meta advertiser yes, you should be spending some money on meta, but if you haven’t covered the searches on Google at the bottom of the funnel, you’re likely investing some money in meta to your competitors. And so make sure the [00:16:00] bottom is solid, that you know you’ve got it covered, then move up a layer.

I think too often, especially smaller CPG brands, I see this a lot, where they really just want to be like I heard this brand did really well. Like Nick Sharma had a brand that spends 2 million a month on social, so I should do that. I’m like, what? Probably, but maybe let’s take some steps to get there and build something.

Cause they don’t hear about some of that kind of nitty gritty yeah, you do have to cover it. And the best social brands really do have a solid bottom of funnel. If you search their brand on Google, you’re going to see a almost monopoly on the shopping ads. You’re going to see a well built text ad, usually taking up real estate to keep the competitors off of that space.

Cause they will be there and they should.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. Yeah. So that’s fair. You’re not going to. As a brand, you’re not going to move on from it. You might just not iterate as much or invest as heavily, but that definitely makes sense. You don’t want to give up ground. So to date, when we’re recording this episode, there’s a big boxing match coming up.

I believe that’s tonight or very soon with [00:17:00] Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, which is going to be amazing to watch. I can’t wait to see it. Yeah,

Ryan Garrow: I, me too. I’m excited. I’ve been excited about a boxing match for probably 15 years, maybe 20 years.

Jon MacDonald: we could probably do a whole episode just on this because I really only see this going one of two ways and a older gentleman is going to get the legacy knocked out of him or a young person is going to get seriously hurt. It’s going to be one of the two. Yeah. There’s this not and that’s why this is going to be entertaining. It’s not for the boxing itself. I’m not worried about the skill here. This is just a rough match, but

Ryan Garrow: no,

Jon MacDonald: I am thinking about how Jake Paul got here. And I’m thinking about how there’s been so many influencers, especially in YouTube.

And not that much on products. So I’m wondering what the play is for YouTube with products.

Ryan Garrow: It’s true. YouTube, the biggest influencers in the world are generally [00:18:00] got their start on YouTube. If we look at Mr. Beast, like the billionaire influencer started by posting YouTube videos over a decade ago.

Same thing with Jake Paul. Like it was pranks and stuff and about, getting information on YouTube and people following there, that’s where they made their money and their impact and those same influencers. I think there was a crazy stat when Tik TOK released their creator fund in, I want to say 21, 22, Mr. Beast was massive in 21, 22, just like he is now, I think in 10 months, he made something like. 14, 000 despite having yeah, almost a billion views. And then while YouTube is paying him disgusting millions of dollars from an influencer standpoint, just creating good content. YouTube has generally been way ahead of the game.

When it came to we’re going to get people to watch and be entertained and have eyeballs here. But what they haven’t necessarily done is say, how do we bring products into that? Whereas TikTok and Meta, it was really simple. Yeah, there’s a feed. And [00:19:00] so you’re going to ship this influence or a product and they’re going to talk about it on TikTok and people are going to buy. Like it was pretty stupidly simple, actually. And TikTok and Meta didn’t have to pay their influencers really. Whereas YouTube didn’t have that. So it was always like, Hey, we got to pay for this content. Looking at it almost like Netflix buying movies or having their own creative thing.

If they’re going to pay for that, it costs them money and then people pay to be there. YouTube’s advertising funneled it. And so all that to say YouTube. Adding product feeds for creators to tag products and enter more into that, what we expect to see on social now, like I, it doesn’t bug me when I’m scrolling through a feed now to see somebody talking about a product or being pitched a product. And so I think in YouTube shorts now, their competitor to reels and TikTok.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah,

Ryan Garrow: I think people are going to be just used to seeing products. And if the targeting is done right, which if you’ve got a good advertising agency, hello, come talk to me. It should drive some decent traffic and [00:20:00] conversions because it’s now set up to handle that.

Yeah. It’s cool. Cause it’s cool in beta. So there’s not a lot of details I can share publicly, but there’s ways now for brands to go in and from an affiliate standpoint, incentivize these creators to talk about you. And there’s a discovery thing in there. For both creators and brands. I think this is going to be big.

I do. And brands can bring the creators in. So if you’ve got a decent amount of creators on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, you should be able to move a lot of those in to the YouTube environment. And there’s going to be some incentive for those creators to come make sure they’re creating content for YouTube.

And so we’ve got some larger brands are going to be hopefully moving their creators into the system that we’ll be able to hopefully maybe towards the end of Q1, I’ll have some really cool data to share that’ll be like, Hey, I’m Here’s the actual numbers that I talked about, at the end of 24 that are now going to be real and tangible.

Jon MacDonald: Okay. I’m convinced our listeners are convinced. How should they get started with YouTube in 25? Because that sounds to me like that’s going to change. Based on what they have been [00:21:00] doing.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, I think that kind of scrap what you used to think about YouTube. I think it started Hey, if pretend it’s a brand new social platform, then you’re like, all right, everybody’s moving there.

Let’s get excited. Let’s participate. You, every brand will be different. I’ll say that you’re going to have to establish it what makes sense for your brand because it’s probably going to be different than your next door neighbor’s brand, but you have to have a YouTube channel. You have to have, that’s just base practice.

If you don’t have it already, go get your YouTube channel claimed, get it designed, right? Have a plan for creating content. It’s what I talked about in Tik Tok, I don’t know, a couple of years ago, when we saw some really good success from some of our brands, you had to have a voice on there to participate.

You couldn’t just run ads on TikTok without actually putting some of your own content out there and being a part of the community. It was, it created a feeling of inauthenticity. Like you were just weren’t, you were there just with your money, not. to participate. I don’t think that’s as important on YouTube because of how ads run and it’s because you can run pre roll on your competitor’s sites if they haven’t [00:22:00] blocked or your competitor pages if they haven’t blocked it.

I just want to have a landing page that people can research you and make sure that you’re a legitimate brand more than anything else. So you don’t have to probably regularly create content. I think it’s a benefit if you do, but just at least have a presence there controlled. That’s you. And then for most advertisers, I’m going to say, you’re probably going to create a separate Google account for YouTube.

Not all the time, but for most of you out there, separate accounts going to make sense. Cause it keeps your tracking cleaner. Cause what happens is if you have YouTube as a separate campaign and where you’re running shopping and search and all the other various things you can run in Google, you will have, we’ll call credit stealing, where they’re going to have multiple touch points.

And Google’s data driven algorithm is going to say that hit shopping there and it hit a text ad here. And then YouTube was here. So it’s going to get 10 percent of the credit. It’s going to be more difficult to see the full impact. So the similar, the way you would have your meta account is separate from Google.

They’re both claiming credit for some of the same sales. And you realize that as an [00:23:00] advertiser, look at YouTube as a social channel, be able to be comfortable with it, measuring the full impact and then deleting credit where you see fit. But you’re going to be able to see a better holistic picture of.

What is it actually doing? All of our larger advertisers have separate accounts. When you’re doing some of the cool studies with Google, it’s helpful to have a separate account. Again, when you come to shopping feeds, I get this question. So I’ll address it now that you can have two Google ads accounts targeting the same website, one with YouTube, one with all the shopping and also connected to one merchant center.

Jon MacDonald: Okay.

Ryan Garrow: So you got one merchant center running all of your product feeds. And you can have that going to two, two separate Google ads accounts.

Jon MacDonald: Interesting. Yeah. I would have thought that wasn’t possible, but what do I know? Yeah. Interesting.

Ryan Garrow: And then I’ll say you’re going to have to go out and have a goal for it.

That makes sense. What is it? What is, what do I need YouTube to do? Look at some of the data and then make adjustments to either how you’re looking at it, if it’s not performing that way, not to say you have to justify it, but say, Hey, we expected it to do this, but in reality it’s doing. [00:24:00] This down here and maybe we just need to accept that and say hey, how is that benefiting the brand?

Let’s still continue to scale it But know that it’s accomplishing a goal slightly different than what we wanted it to be and keep testing You know, you’re gonna have the audiences can be again super creepy and awesome from a marketing standpoint like meta I would say you can’t give up on it that’s been one of the things you have to have a really hard head because It’s not gonna for most of you listening.

It’s not out of the gate going to be boom We spent 50 grand on youtube and our business grew half a million dollars that month. That was amazing Hopefully that happens but understand that it’s not and it’s going to be a commitment to making it work Just like for most of you meta wasn’t perfect out of the gate and it was a commitment to saying, okay I have to make this work, the eyeballs are there, I want to get first mover advantage over my competitors.

So we are going to make this work. Let’s keep trying, keep iterating, test the content, test the landing pages, test the algorithm, test all the things that can go into making the system work just like [00:25:00] you would if you were iterating on Meta.

Jon MacDonald: Awesome. So 2025 is the year of YouTube, I’m hearing. And.

Ryan Garrow: It’s as of now,

Jon MacDonald: as of now, Ryan is convinced subject to change on what actually happens

Ryan Garrow: always

Jon MacDonald: what he finds, but I think it’s really interesting. I would not have guessed that you would have come here today and say that. So

Ryan Garrow: two months ago, I probably wouldn’t have thought that either.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, I do think there is a lot of opportunities still out there and all this stuff goes in cycles. I remember years ago, they’re talking about adding clickable shoppable moments into YouTube videos with overlays, et cetera, to highlight products and be able to clip one click to a page to buy it.

And that never really came to fruition. Now they’re like, you know what, we need to do this because everyone else is doing it and it’s coming back around. But at the same time, e commerce especially has been really hurting this past year for some time now. And I think they’re all looking for this new place to shift their marketing [00:26:00] dollars to some degree that’s going to get them back to where they were.

And for no other reason, I think there’ll be some more investment in YouTube just to try something else, right? And see if they can be the first mover to take advantage of it and ride that wave. So this is really interesting. I appreciate you sharing that today.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Thanks for the time, Jon. Let me stand on my soapbox.

Jon MacDonald: All right. Thank you, Ryan.

Ryan Garrow: Thank you.

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

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 123): New Year, New Marketing appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

Aligning your online experience with user expectations is crucial. In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss how to leverage the priming & expectation setting heuristic to increase conversions.

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. what the priming & expectation setting heuristic is, and how it works.
2. how to determine if you are violating this heuristic.
3. examples of tactics that leverage this heuristic.

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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• Google Podcasts
• Spotify
• Castbox
• Castro
• Overcast
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• Subscribe via RSS

Episode Transcript:

Announcer: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better ecommerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon MacDonald: Hey Ryan, have you ever felt frustrated by unexpected fees when shopping online.

Ryan Garrow: No, never. That’s weird. Yeah.

Jon MacDonald: It’s a weird question, right? Look, it’s such a common experience and it so quickly turns customers away that I even recently encountered this while trying to purchase concert tickets.

I went through the long process of selecting seats, looking at all the views, doing all that stuff, got the checkout, had the countdown timer, I was all stressed out about it, finally got it done, and then I got hit with exorbitant convenience fees. It almost doubled the price, needless to say, I abandoned that purchase despite the time investment, et cetera.

And I’ll put in air quotes, [00:01:00] the convenience of having gone through that process that I was paying for. But I think this really highlighted a critical aspect of digital experiences for me, and that’s priming and expectation setting. Leave it to me to have a bad experience online and bring it to a positive psychological principles and make a

Ryan Garrow: podcast out of it

Jon MacDonald: and then make a podcast out of it. Nerd central here, but

Ryan Garrow: oh man, those expectations are the worst. Like I think almost everybody listening has done the same thing. I almost bought tickets to What was it last week? My wife wanted to go to book of mormon and it’s coming to portland I was like, oh, I got an adam metaphor.

Let me go find that click the ad got to the end and then I picked the seats and then they’re like Oh, it’s not even on sale yet. And these may or may not be the seats you get, but they’ll be as good. Or I’m like, I tried to find where the real tickets were instead of these secondary site that I accidentally, I felt embarrassed because I went to a secondary site thinking it was a real, I’m like, ah, man, some [00:02:00] expectations.

Meta did that. Is that his algorithm is really good. Because I’ve been listening to my wife talk about wanting to go to Book of Mormon. Love it. I’m assuming we’re talking today about priming and expectation settings to help drive conversions, I’m guessing.

Jon MacDonald: Yes, spot on. Look at your deduction capabilities are prime right now.

I appreciate that. Yeah, look, there’s nothing more frustrating than feeling like a company is giving you that bait and switch and user experience design. We call this poor priming and expectation setting. It’s really a violation of one of the six Heuristics of digital experience optimization. As a reminder here, heuristics of those mental shortcuts, the use to solve problems quickly and effectively, that we all take these shortcuts.

I know we’ve talked about it on the show a handful of times, but knowing that our brains are wired to take shortcuts and make these quick decisions. You can imagine how heuristics play that critical role and how customers navigate and just perceive digital experiences.

Ryan Garrow: [00:03:00] Yeah, just even saying the word heuristics, I go back to that podcast.

There’s a shortcut there that takes me there. But I’m priming an expectation setting. I understand expectation, but the priming piece, I guess you’ll have to explain that piece of heuristics and how that works here.

Jon MacDonald: The concert ticket buying story tells almost everything you need to know about that.

Because it can either set people up for success or complete failure. And it does that by clarifying how the interface will perform, indicating what actions users should take, and then managing those user expectations along that journey. So digital experiences that adhere to this may apply tactics like it.

Explicitly mentioning free shipping early in the journey or reducing cart abandonment rates or sharing estimated delivery dates to manage customer expectations, or just saying, Hey, you know what, you’re going to pay double for this ticket because we want to get rich too. Just say that up front and I probably would have been okay with your,

Ryan Garrow: I expect you to charge me 150 [00:04:00] bucks.

That’s great. So convenient. But something else stuck out just now, because you said that there were six heuristics for digital experience optimization. We only mentioned one. What are the other five? You might have told me before, but you don’t have to remind me. Yeah.

Jon MacDonald: When we talked about heuristics prior, we did talk about this briefly, and I’m not expecting you to have memorized all six of these by any means.

No, that’s your job. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That’s what I’m here for. So just call me next time you forget. But look, our team is the good has identified six of these shortcuts, right? And any site Whether it’s software as a service or ecommerce should be considering each step of these in their digital experience.

All six of those include, of course, priming and expectation setting. Easy win right there. You should get an A for getting that one because that’s what we’re talking about today, right? Trust and authority. Ease, how hard is something to do, right? Benefits and unique selling points. Making sure those are clear.

Directional guidance. Helping people through that journey. Making it easy for them to [00:05:00] get to the next step. And then six is incentives, right? So given them that little push over the edge, what that might be, I think in the future, we could probably do an episode on each, but today we’ll just focus on that primary expectation setting and we can fix those damn convenience fees while we’re at it.

Ryan Garrow: I sure hope so. Hopefully all your ticket companies listen to our podcast and then let us work on your sites.

Jon MacDonald: We have Taylor Swift on our side, I’m told. So that’s a positive. That’s

Ryan Garrow: true. Taylor, give me a call. We got to fix this. And my daughter’s won an autograph. So if I’m, if I’ve got my site, other than a convenience fee, that’s ridiculous, how do I know I’m violating this heuristic?

Is there some easy things I can see without thinking too hard?

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Before you can start to address any of these heuristics to improve that digital experience, you have to understand if. When and where users are getting stuck and to understand if your digital experience is violating this priming and expectation heuristic, a great place to start is in user research.

You probably could have guessed that one. It seems like it comes back. [00:06:00] I think I could think of a

Ryan Garrow: jar Starbucks line. I’ve got all of that, right?

Jon MacDonald: So start talking to your users or just observing their behavior. That’s a great place to start. And as you analyze that, look for patterns. So there’s patterns like rage clicking.

I know you love that name.

Ryan Garrow: Oh, this is the first time I’ve heard rage clicking from you, I think. But I know exactly what it is because I do it.

Jon MacDonald: Everyone does it, right? And usually this signifies that experience doesn’t provide enough cues, semantics, or even timely feedback to keep you informed.

You’re clicking on something and you’re like, why is this not working? And here it’s not a link at all, maybe. Right? Low directness is the next one. This is an interesting pattern because this can be a sign of unmet expectations, meaning your systems interactions, the navigation or the language don’t match the user’s mental models of the real world or normal site conventions.

Okay? So you want your site to be direct if you think about it that way, right?

Ryan Garrow: How do I notice low [00:07:00] directness? Like I can’t see that in rage clicks.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. So this is a very one sentence summary of the entire book. Don’t make me think. Oh, so read the book. It’s this one. Yeah. The reality here is make it easy.

Be direct in what people are supposed to do. We call it low directness because the idea is if I’m looking to do something, I should be able to go right there and directly do it because I have an expectation, right? I want your phone number. Yeah, I want your phone number. I’m going to scroll down to the footer.

I’m not going to click all over your site. And if it’s not there, I’m like, Oh God, I got to click around to find this. The worst is you want a company’s address. The hack for that every time, if they don’t show it anywhere else, it’s in their privacy policy because that has to be my law.

Ryan Garrow: Or they’ve used the Shopify template and haven’t filled it in. It’s all caps in brackets address. I’m like,

Jon MacDonald: Yes. Which case their lawyer should probably call them.

Announcer: Yeah. You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on ecommerce growth. [00:08:00] Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with ecommerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers. And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon MacDonald: The third is price sensitivity. Okay, so you’re looking for this in that feedback. It often indicates poor priming, right? Because it’s unclear or maybe missing elements in that interface that typically guide people to inform them of what to expect next around pricing. So just tell me about that darn convenience fee up front and I’ve been primed.

But the good news is once you identified all these patterns, you’re You can address them with tactics to improve priming and expectation setting. It’s not hard. And doing this is a [00:09:00] really ethical way to improve customer sentiment and increase conversions.

Ryan Garrow: Which is what we all want. Now, I obviously am a very visual person, and so in this, can you paint me a picture or give me an example you’ve worked on where this was obvious to you or became obvious to

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, I have two that come top of mind. First is with a company called eManual Online. Oh, that’s right. We share them as a client. They are the largest repair manual database online, right? Our research revealed that users were confused about how eManual Online delivers the manual. Some are digital downloads, some are physical editions. And because of this mixed delivery message throughout the entire site, customers just didn’t know what to trust when they confronted this issue on the website.

They were like do I have to wait for the mail? I’m going to get a download. I have no idea what I’m buying. And so we decided to test out highlighting the delivery methods to clarify that confusion, increase transactions, etc. Not a [00:10:00] surprise, but the clear delivery method language showed a 14 percent lift.

So definitely worth it. Now. To clarify access methods for offline downloads, this resulted in a person and a stronger purchase intent as well. So not only were people converting a higher rate, but they also went directly to purchasing as opposed to clicking around the site a lot more because they felt clear that expectation had been set.

So it’s a great example of priming and expectation setting at work. Yeah, the second is with residential furnishings company. No, you’ve probably heard of Herman Miller, Yeah. In Knoll, I think they’re now called Miller Knoll, they merged, and they also own Design Within Reach, or design not within reach, depending on your budget, your financial bracket. But I will say that Knoll has a range of uniquely crafted and handmade products that you honestly can’t find anywhere else. The care and detail that goes into each piece means a lot longer lead times. [00:11:00] Everything’s handmade and shipping and delivery just takes longer. So you don’t order something from them expect to have it tomorrow.

It can take months. So what we did is we went on the site and we wanted to prime and set that expectation. So we changed the wording from lead time. Eight weeks. Okay. So it was two months to get a product. And it said lead time, eight week consumers looking at that. Like I get what lead time means, but it’s very commercial also eight weeks.

Oh my gosh. And then we changed it to made for you ships in eight weeks. Very different. We turned a negative into a positive. We primed them with that. And we said, okay, you guys, we’re going to make this just for you. And yeah, it ships in eight weeks, but it’s made for you. That makes sense. Now, why it takes that lead time makes it think, wow, they have to just go get it from the warehouse.

It takes forever with somebody walking it to me. What’s going on here. But this change had the biggest test win of the year for them in terms of revenue. And it had the benefit of turning that challenge or really long lead time into a compelling conversion [00:12:00] booster around it being made for you or custom made.

Ryan Garrow: Transparently. It sounds like making your checkout button orange instead of blue. When you’re talking about that, those words. But is it as simple for a lot of brands to almost wordsmith some of the things on their call to action arena? Not as simple as changing a button color, but thinking through that, that seems like I could help in a lot of sites.

Jon MacDonald: Oh, without question I can. And I think the reality here is the intent behind the change. Right here. We are trying to set them up. So when they get further into checkout and they’re reminded of when this is going to ship to them that they aren’t surprised because we have clearly up front told them that it’s going to be eight weeks.

But what we did is we changed the language to prime them in a way that made it more beneficial for them, right? And set that expectation up in a positive light. So there’s a lot of psychology happening in one line here that we changed. And [00:13:00] so you can easily do something similar, I would look at all of the expectations throughout your entire site.

We mentioned the cost of no products. The reality is most of the people who are coming to know, understand that the cost is a little more. So it’s not so much about priming the price. Although when you say something is handmade for you or made for you, you expect to pay a little more. You feel like there’s more value there.

Okay. So it has that helpful effect there as well, too.

Ryan Garrow: Oh, 100%. And I think that if I could force a change to every Shopify site, it would be to leverage that, the bar above the header that you can put a message in, that almost everybody on Shopify uses it for their shipping callout. Yeah. If that was just standard, like even if you said, we charge you shipping on everything.

I’m like, okay, great. I’m here because I want to buy this. But now I know that when I get to the cart, there’s going to be a four 99 charge or whatever. Yeah. Rather than trying to figure out on the site, what am I paying for shipping? Cause I usually don’t even want to put it in the cart until I know I’m like, Oh, free shipping at 99.

Okay, great. This is a 79 product. There’s going to be something, but. I’ll probably add something to [00:14:00] get me to 99 because the shipping cost annoys me.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. That right there is a great example of priming. You’re priming people to spend more, increase our average order value, which is a big tactic that we use shipping costs for quite honestly, right?

Free shipping above a certain amount. Look at your current average order value. There’s two ways to do this. The first is look at your current average order value, and then set the shipping rate to be slightly above that. Okay. That will help increase it. I promise you. The second is to look at what your most popular product is and set free shipping just above that.

And that will mean people buy the most popular product, but they’re also going to add something else to their cart. Another way, do a bundle. Right there. We’ve talked a lot about increasing average order value. Bundling is a huge way to do this, just tax something else on, and then it adds up that price you can offer it to them.

And then even as part of that bundle, you can advertise it as free shipping.

Ryan Garrow: And even when this comes out, we’re in the midst of holiday season, but one of [00:15:00] my, favorites, but also frustrating, but it works well for me is you discount a product to just below the free shipping threshold. Like your free shipping is a 49 and this gets discounted from 60 to 45.

That’s I have to have the deal because I’m cheap. I always shop deals in my nature, but then I’m like, Oh, I’m not paying for shipping. So I’m going to spend another 5 at least. And I ended up spending 15 and I spent 60 for two things. So I essentially bundled myself, but really creative discounting like that gets me.

It’s a product that everybody wants at a discount, even if it was, you have a lot of games you can play right now with pricing with discount and free shipping thresholds and adjusting those for new file customers. So many cool things you can do there.

Jon MacDonald: We even talked about that method in terms of Amazon.

And their prime day, I think that we did a recap episode on prime day and you brought up, what is it called? The arrow garden? I think it was something of that name where it’s like a little mini garden that they had lowered their price and sold way more and then immediately raised it back up and it [00:16:00] was like, they were playing the same sales

Ryan Garrow: velocity.

Yeah, because people saw the rank was like, Oh, this is Amazon’s choice in reviews on Amazon. Don’t stay on Amazon. Say historical pricing. So it’s super easy to do there.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Expectations. If you just give me the right expectations, I do most thing. Most of life is setting the right expectations.

Jon MacDonald: That’s a great way to put it. If you come into something with the right expectations to been primed on it, it’s really hard to be upset. Yeah, it’s all about aligning this experience with user expectations. So companies that nail this, though, as we’ve talked about today they see improved customer satisfaction, higher conversion rates.

It’s a win for everybody. And those that aren’t doing this, they’re just damaging their reputation. Ticketmaster has made billions off of this while also damaging their reputation to the point where Taylor Swift refuses to use them whenever possible. The key is putting yourself in the user’s shoes.

And what information do they need? What might surprise them? What’s going to confuse them? And then address those proactively. It’s all you can [00:17:00] do. And you’ll create that digital experience that feels intuitive and trustworthy. And I don’t know about you, but that’s really all you want, right? You don’t want to be left guessing.

So set those clear expectations and watch your conversion soar.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, it’s just that easy. It’s actually not complicated. So it’s easy. But also you think about you’re paying money for traffic at any time. So that company paid for your traffic to get you to the cart and then to have you leave that’s just a waste of your spend and then it makes your

Jon MacDonald: agency look bad and we didn’t do anything wrong maybe it’s a waste of the skill set that you have hired let’s put it that way

Ryan Garrow: yes a lot of waste when you need to cancel expectations right well Jon thank you for this i’m excited to hear about the next five in the heuristics lineup As we get through this process, we will

Jon MacDonald: have you memorize them. There’ll be a quiz at the end.

Ryan Garrow: I’ll fail it. I stopped taking quizzes so many years ago.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan [00:18:00] Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 122): How To Leverage Priming & Expectation Setting appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

We’ve made it through Black Friday and Cyber Monday. In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss the benefits of taking a break post-BFCM.

Check out the full episode to learn:

• Why prioritizing time away from the business is important.
• When during the business cycle it’s most valuable to step back and think. 
• Tips for making the most of your time away.

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

• Apple Podcasts
• Google Podcasts
• Spotify
• Castbox
• Castro
• Overcast
• Pocket Casts
• Stitcher
• Subscribe via RSS

Episode Transcript:

Announcer: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better ecommerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Ryan Garrow: All right, Jon, it is an interesting time. In the ecommerce world right now, yesterday was Cyber Monday. We’re in it. This is the thick of it. If you’re taking time to listen to this on the date of its release, good job. You’re taking a break from something to not focus on the data in front of you. We had to record these before that, but I’m guessing some of you did not hit the expectations you had for Cyber Monday.

Some of you probably knocked it out of the park. I don’t know which ones they are, but I think either scenario, you’re at a point in the holiday season and the chaos of finishing 24, that the actions you’re going to take in the next day or two are probably not going to make or break you. It’s going to be what’s the plans and the strategy have been set.

Making one additional change may not be enough to push it one way or another. So it is what it is. And I think if you [00:01:00] can accept that, it can allow you to do some pretty cool things in 25. And that’s so rather than talk about traffic today, necessarily, I want to talk about how do we as business owners, marketers, Occasional podcasters, how do we allow ourselves to take a break?

Because I personally am, I’m terrible at it. I think I’m really hard on myself, honestly, if I take a break from business and I think it comes down to like the FOMO, the fear of missing out that if I’m not in front of my phone or computer, I mean, I might miss a call from a client. I might feel help them. I might miss a call from a company that wants to work with us or a partner that needs help.

And so I, I don’t give myself the opportunity to do that. Hardly at all. But if I’m using logic and I think about, okay, if I reach out to a company, I’m considering working with or partnering with or doing something and I get an out of office response. I don’t immediately pick up the phone and call a competitor in anger or email somebody else, but I got this person’s out of office and I can’t work with me.

It’s like, I provide grace to that business owner, that team member saying, Hey, they’re out of office. That’s I get it. That [00:02:00] happens. It’s necessary. But I don’t give that grace to myself. And I’m guessing I’m not alone in that. And on the flip side of that, I can look back and say, when I’ve taken the time to think, I find that I can think further outside the box or come up with ideas that in my role, a good or bad idea comes down to does my wife shoot it down immediately?

Or let me take it a few steps to see if it has legs. And many times I’ll get less shot down before getting off the ground. If I do take some actual time to dedicated to thinking and preparing. And so today, right after Cyber Monday, we’re not talking about predictions for next year or tactics to prepare.

We’re going to talk about stepping away to think. 

Jon MacDonald: So the first plot that comes up for me on this is I wonder. So for those who are listening to that, don’t know, Ryan ran a successful agency for years before a Logical Position acquired them. And that’s how he got folded into Logical Position. The question I have out of that is [00:03:00] I’m wondering, because what you’re talking about sounds very familiar to me as a business owner, I am wondering, do you think those traits are one related.

You still have that traits because that is what has gotten you to be successful throughout your career, including business ownership. And two, do we feel like that is what has led to your success or are there other alternative paths to success there? Right. I think we probably do a lot of thinking, but those dedicated days off to do the thinking and, and.

In mass, right? As opposed to, Oh, I’m having a cup of coffee and I’m thinking about this challenge and writing through scenarios, et cetera, right? You’re saying, Oh, no, I’m going to set a full day aside. 

Ryan Garrow: Yes. 

Jon MacDonald: Or multiple days,

Ryan Garrow: Well, it’s probably both.

Jon MacDonald: Take time off. 

Ryan Garrow: And I think you have to layer in different levels of breaks for thinking.

I think there needs to be those, you know, at a coffee shop thinking and not having [00:04:00] distractions from work. Right. You know, you can be distracted watching people, letting your brain wander. You can do like a couple of years ago, my wife and I went away for our 10 year reunion to Hawaii. No kids, no phone, nothing, just beaches.

And it was great. And that didn’t have a lot of business thinking there. And then there’s also days off. There’s nothing but focus on business, prepare, plan, insulate, whatever it happens to be. But there’s also a guilt that comes through. And if something gets has to be pushed off, it tends to be the thinking things like, Oh, I’m under pressure for, you know, we missed numbers.

I can’t possibly take time off because that would, it would show maybe that I’m not working hard enough, or if it fails, I would look back and say, Oh, if I would’ve just, I’m just taking that two hours where I went and took a walk and thought I could have been doing something productive. And so I don’t think that success has come because I didn’t take breaks or I pushed hard.

Like, I think that’s just, that’s a personality that you’re just going to push and you are who you are in that regard. I think it does require [00:05:00] somebody in your life that can recognize maybe when you’re redlining to be like, Hey, you might need to take a break and don’t know what that looks like, but just.

Maybe take a break. And there’s, there’s honestly not a lot of people in my life that can do that successfully. My wife can thankfully, and then one or two other people that can, you know, that I’ll, that are probably bold enough to say what’s wrong. Like you have, you’re not yourself or you need to take something there, 

Jon MacDonald: but I mean, paying somebody to tell you that.

Yeah. I mean, that’s. That’s, that’s essentially what therapy is for a lot of us, is to go pay a counselor to, to essentially tell you the things that you need to hear. Yeah, but you 

Ryan Garrow: can’t maybe, maybe you know them, but you’re not going to tell yourself to do it or give yourself permission. Whereas if a therapist gives me that permission, I’m like, Oh, I can do that.

You know, for you, cause you’ve had lots of success in business and all kinds of things. Where is it that you take your breaks? Is it something that you naturally do and you find time in your day? And you’ve gotten the habits or is it awkward and [00:06:00] frustrating to get to that point? 

Jon MacDonald: It is awkward and frustrating.

I have found that the reason even though my body is old and broken down in terms of basketball years, it is why I continue to play basketball and go through that pain because it is literally the one time of day that I don’t have a device in my hands, that I don’t have a screen in front of me. That I don’t have any space in my head to be outside of the moment.

Meaning I have to focus on what’s in front of me while I’m playing basketball. And the minute I don’t do that is when it starts to go downhill very quickly and downhill very quickly could be getting hit in the face of the ball. Could be whatever, right? But, you know, they talk a lot about in sports, like being in the zone.

I call, I’ve just had a great game. I just felt like, I don’t know what happened. I was in this zone. Well, that’s a state of consciousness that is really hard to get into, but you have to be Really [00:07:00] have all of your thoughts in that moment to get there. And that’s really where it’s gives me the time to step away and take a break.

Now I’m not doing a lot of thinking, right? I’m not doing a lot of thinking in terms of the business or what I should be doing next. I actually build those into my calendar and how I do that is, is I block out one day, a quarter and. My leadership team all does two days per quarter, and I do one day per quarter blocked out because I have a lot less on my calendar than they do.

So I’m able to find times here and there to work on, you know, larger items, but the team, I require them to book every quarter at our quarterly leadership session. They go through and they have to book two days, and we do that for, An interesting reason we do that because it gives them a time where they’re not going to be bugged by their team, gives them a time to go off and work on whatever they need.

It gives them a time to. You ever seen in [00:08:00] Parks and Rec on TV, they called them treat yourself days, treat yourself day. I love that show. Yeah. I don’t care if they go spend it as a treat yourself day, like have fun, go make it happen. Right. But my one ask is that they disconnect and they do, you know, if you’re going to do thinking you do it with a pen and paper or maybe writing on iPad.

What? The, not have everything turned on, you know, and 

Ryan Garrow: it seems to work. Folks seem to really, really like it. How do you measure the success of that for the team? Since it’s not necessarily a quantifiable, like we did this two days for everybody and we got this.

Jon MacDonald: What happens is, it’s not two days in a row, it should be two days spread out, ideally.

So at the end of that one day, the way we judge success is, are you coming back? We call them clarity breaks. Are you coming back with more clarity on something? So it could be that you have a client challenge that you’ve just been banging your head against. You don’t know what’s going on, why it’s happening.

You’ve [00:09:00] tried it. You think you’ve tried everything, right? And you take the clarity break and you get a little bit of distance and you’re just sitting on it. You know, sometimes people say I get my best ideas in the shower, et cetera, right? You’re taking a bit of a mental break. You’re focusing on something else for a minute, and then it’s like, oh, I haven’t thought about that.

I haven’t tried that yet. That’s what a clarity break can really do for the team, and all I ask is when they come back, That they share what, what clarity they had, what was that? And without fail, every time we’ve come back with some problem being solved. 

Ryan Garrow: Super valuable there. So for you personally, you do it once a quarter for the business.

And are there different topics that you want to think from a quarterly standpoint? Like for me, it’s, it’s all about the business cycle. Usually at different times of year, I can take better breaks, but how does it work in your world? 

Jon MacDonald: Well, I think, you know, for In short, we do quarterly sprints with quarterly rocks, so that we can do a business cycle, [00:10:00] right?

But I also think that it doesn’t need to be tied to any particular time period. Necessarily. One of the most reflective time periods for me is the break forced break between Christmas and New Year’s. So every year we shut down the good between Christmas and New Year’s, because like you talked about, we just had, you know, all the holiday sales going on with our clients.

They are burned out. They’re also to the point where, Hey, we hit Christmas. Return season is going to start, you know, we’re gonna have to process all I get through that season, but there’s this lull in between where everyone has who can purchase a gift has done it. And now you hit the 24th, 25th and you’re like, sigh of relief.

I’m here. Right. And so we’ve been able to take advantage of that. And that’s been probably the closest thing to a business cycle, but it’s, it’s. Paid time off that it’s just forced for everyone on the team. And it’s, that has been a great way to recharge. Yeah. I like that. How about you? [00:11:00] What, what, what are the periods you find more valuable to step back and think?

Ryan Garrow: I have similar things like in e comm like that last week of the year is it’s, it’s very easy in the ecommerce world just to be like. unplugged because almost everybody else is. Google shuts down for that, that period. Like there’s, there’s still advertising that happens. There’s still people making transactions, but at the end of the day, like it’s a pretty lights out, like take the time.

And so my wife has pretty much locked that down and said, you’re unplugged, whether you want to be or not. And we’re having family time. And so she has very strong guardrails around that. So that time is actually not great from a business standpoint to come up with ideas. That’s more about being present with kids and making sure I’m, you know, around for those important things happening.

This period of time right now, like in the thick of all the intensity, it’s actually a downtime for me in the business cycle because all the strategy is done. Like, there’s no companies thinking about moving or very few thinking about moving agencies. They may be angry right now. And if you’re angry, give me a call right after [00:12:00] this, but it’s the, it’s the execution time right now.

So our team that we’ve spent the months before planning all of this and getting into it, they’re now like in the thick of it. They’re not happy that I’m not working probably as hard. As they are right now, but looking back at September, October, that’s when a lot of our, our e com execution team, they are taking vacations and they should, because there’s a lot less time to do that between Thanksgiving and New Year’s for us as a team.

So now is a great time for me because Q1 is usually a really big hit the ground running. Yeah, you know this. There’s just tons of content that gets put out on what happened at 24. What’s happening at 25? How did holiday do great? How did it suck? We’ll find out soon But and it’s like q1 econ travel events.

I think last year there was like six weeks where It was just a gauntlet where every single person we work with in ecomm was like, Oh yeah, I got to be in LA this week and the next week I have Vegas and then I go back to San Diego and I go back to Vegas and it’s just, Q1 is not the time to be trying to set plan because it’s just draining the speaking and the [00:13:00] meetings, all that.

But so putting it, I think breaks in your schedule around that and intentional is important and understanding and giving yourself grace to do that. I think it’s even more difficult when the business is not doing well. To do that and say, Oh my gosh, like if you own the business and it’s down year over year, and the team is struggling to keep up or think of options, I think it’s probably the more important time that you as a business owner or head of marketing steps back and says, man, I got to get some, something’s not working and we can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.

Therefore I’ve got to. You know, take a break, step away, figure out how we’re going to think through this and how we’re going to brainstorm new ideas and do that. So that’s, and then when it’s going well, it’s like things are going great. Just keep redlining pedal to the metal and let’s keep doing it because it’s working.

Announcer: You’re listening to Drive and Convert a podcast focused on ecommerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate [00:14:00] optimization agency that works with ecommerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you. 

Jon MacDonald: Where are some of the places you do this thinking, right, because when you find the right time, where do you go? What do you, what do you do? 

Ryan Garrow: I have to find it. I can’t do it in the office or I’m normally doing all the work things because it’s too easy for me to like, think of like, Ooh, I could just flip the computer on or it’s a phone ding. I’m like, Oh, I got to get that.

Um, so I’ve got to separate myself. So thankfully I’ve got. I’ve got nine acres and multiple buildings. So I can do some of that on the property itself. But even then, because it’s, I work from home most of the time, it’s, you know, just going to the barn and doing a [00:15:00] workout, not quite going to cover it for me.

So some of it happens here, but I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Mount Angel Abbey, but I love It takes me about 45 minutes to drive there and they started, they started brewing beer. So I haven’t been there since, tried their beer yet, but in the next couple of weeks I get to go there and I’m going to go try their beer after I’m done thinking, hopefully.

But they’ve got a library there. And most people don’t go to libraries. And they’ve got a periodicals room right off the side. And these monks never come in there. I’ve been there so many times. And they have great comfortable chairs. I just plop down and I’m usually there for usually about eight hours.

And totally unplugged. I’ll have, you know, my notebook, some of my past notes of times there, what I’ve done, and I’ll usually come with some data preprinted out on what I may be trying to solve. And so I plan to go there in the next couple of weeks and it would be what worked, what didn’t work in 24. Um, what are the goals that I’ve hit and what did I not hit?

And then what are we trying to do in 25? And those would be the things that I’m [00:16:00] really trying to think through and Process during that day and try to come out with some clarity, kind of my version of a clarity day. 

Jon MacDonald: I think I just put two and two together that that is also when maybe the grow with Garo email comes out after one of those days, because it kind of sounds like the team that you’ve done it and sent out the email.

Ryan Garrow: You know, and my, my emails have gotten wordy lately. So I’ve had to like, okay, do I need to start splitting these up into multiple emails or the one right now that’s good? While we’re recording this, there’s one that was supposed to come out yesterday and ended up being way too long. So I’m trying to, is it a two part?

Is it, that’s a giant blog post and I changed it. Who knows? But yes, lots of thinking comes out and lots of emails and words. 

Jon MacDonald: Better to have more than this. Yeah. Well, bring the, the kind of floor topics that we’re here. We’ll talk about it. Maybe they’re a little too meaty for an email, but we could have a conversation.

I love that. I, I love that. As you were saying that. I googled Mount Angel Abbey because I need to go check that out. It’s a really cool place.

Ryan Garrow: and you can actually, there’s a great, a good German sausage place. It’s where they do, it’s right there around Mount Angel. They [00:17:00] have the big giant Oktoberfest in the Portland area, I guess in Silverton. Yeah. Love it. 

Jon MacDonald: Okay. Count me in next time I’m, I’m there. What kind of things do you, processes thinking about in that time, right? So we have a great location. We kind of, well, first of all, we set the time, you found a great location. Now, what are the types of things that you’re thinking about processing during that time?

Ryan Garrow: Well, I want to come out of these times with new ideas and things to try and to scale and build on what we’ve already gotten to. And so, you know, from a, from a brand standpoint or growing a brand, it’s going to be great. We saw these things that worked and where was the most valuable business? Like where was the, the, I spent, you know, minuscule amounts of effort for massive return.

I want more of that if I can, rather than even medium return for medium effort or little return for lots of effort. I mean, if I have a choice and I can, I’m brainstorming anything as possible. That is another thing I think about in brainstorming, like I, I have to approach it [00:18:00] from anything as possible.

Like you just have to, if you have a brainstorm like that, like you need to mentally get to a place that you can do that. I think that really get the most impact out of thinking clarity breaks. But it’s okay. How can I duplicate that? You know, what does that look like in 25? Like if I had this one great success that, and I’ve worked backwards on how I got to that.

Cause it’s usually not just a magically some deal came about and produced a ton of revenue and profit. I love those, but I still haven’t experienced one yet. So I want one. If you’ve got one, send me, send me a few hundred grand. I will take it. And, uh, I will agree that it can happen. But I want to see, you know, for somebody in ecommerce, it’s which products just converted really well.

Were there, can I duplicate those or expand on that product line? It was there an email campaign that stands out. There’s like, man, when we sent this one email to this audience, it was like an explosion of revenue and goodness that came out of that top influencers. There’s always going to be winners and losers in your [00:19:00] influencer realm.

So. Which ones just engaged and leaned into the brand a lot and provided you a lot of value? How do you find more of them? How do you maybe just deepen that relationship, too? How do you provide more value from them? And i’ll start to filter those down as i’m thinking through which one was more than likely a random one off And then which one maybe could be duplicated and that’s really where I start Thinking through and I like a mood board almost like okay.

I thought that I see this thing here I’m I don’t take mood boards to the periodicals room, but mentally I’m thinking through that.

Jon MacDonald: I thought the Abbey’s surely would.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Like, Oh, this guy brings like, Oh, it’s like dumb empties is giant SUV into our periodicals room and sits for 10 hours. But thankfully iPads have lots of storage and they can get lots of things in there.

So, so yeah, it’s about, uh, more with less effort so that I can test more things. So if I can duplicate this one big thing that lets me maybe spend more effort in nurturing something that may not pay off in 25 or may not work right, but it’s going to possibly be my [00:20:00] 26 or 27 payoff. Or maybe I need to invest in developing a product, but that’s two years out.

So I really have to manipulate product A right now to get me through 25. And how do I make that happen in a way that’s going to make my clientele excited. 

Jon MacDonald: That’s a lot of thinking about data sets. A lot of times people are going and they’re looking to brainstorm something new. What, what, do you have a process for how you kind of think about overall growth, more of a brainstorming, less of a beyond, you know, or beyond data, really?

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, there’s a couple things that I think it’s usually comes down to I’m solving a problem. So I’ve got a problem that I just haven’t been able to solve and so it’s like when your team goes out for those clarity breaks, like I can’t solve this problem. I need to step away and think about it from a different angle.

And so I think if you’re solid, like if I’m coming up with a new product, It’s man, my product doesn’t do this specific thing. And I don’t know how to make that. I don’t know how to make it happen. Maybe it needs to do X, Y, Z. Okay. Well, they may need to take a break [00:21:00] and start thinking about this from a different perspective.

Or, you know, one of the things you tell is like, okay, go to, go to Starbucks and buy somebody coffee and ask them some random questions. That may not be Starbucks, but there’s Slack channels. There’s. Reddit forum. I mean, there’s so many ways to find relatively intelligent people to ask questions to, and, and they’ll, they’ll engage, they’ll give you answers that they think some of them may be worthless and some of them might be really good.

But I like, so I like trying to solve a problem. If I’m coming up with a new product or new idea, like I really want to solve this and I think there’s potential because I see the total addressable market for this particular thing. Let’s think through that. If I’m expanding a current business, I almost always and you’ve seen this for, I don’t know, close to 13, 14 years.

I think about it from a partnership standpoint, because I think coming alongside another company that’s got similar clientele or similar access to the people or groups that I want to target is so much easier than trying to You know, go out and fish for them individually. So how can I [00:22:00] make 1 plus 1 equals 4 rather than 1 plus 1 equals 2?

And I try to do that a lot of times with partners, both in a product based business and in a service based business, like Logical Position and The Good. And so I’ll think through, and when I’m brainstorming, it gets really weird and all over the place, but you know, it might be If I’m trying to target 5 million e com brands, I have to think really far outside the box because there are so many agencies trying to target a 5 million e com brand.

I would hate to have my phone on the internet as a 5 million e com brand. That would just be terrible. I mean, everybody’s every day, there’s probably 10 emails coming into, I want to buy a list of this or this or this. I’m like, ah. Don’t know why they can’t figure out another way to try to sell me a list.

Maybe that’s what I need to solve. Selling data lists to people that can buy them. I think that they’re selling it by putting you on the list. That’s what it sounds to me. They just make sure I open emails evidently, even though I take read receipts off. But let’s think through like if you’re thinking through five million dollar online e com brands, that owner, [00:23:00] yeah, may have kids, they vacation somewhere, they, they, eat food, I’m guessing.

They probably work out, they go to events, they go to concerts, they have their favorite football team. I mean, it’s not like they’re not humans and have different things they’re paying for. So it’s figuring out, okay, what’s an, a company that has them as a client that doesn’t compete with me and has maybe never thought about digital marketing ever as a partner.

And so I’ve done some, Just, I’ve got some really out of the box partnerships that we’re nurturing, but like some of them are like plugins for QuickBooks. Like okay, they’d probably hate marketing numbers. I’m like, Hey, you see them though. You see the credit card transactions. Let’s think about this. Or the bookkeepers that are working with all, like the bookkeepers see all these transactions.

There’s one. One company that I was talking to that has a, uh, they process most of the accounts payable, and they work with a company that you may know called Brex and process all of their rewards on the back end, like tons of data. Like I want to see [00:24:00] everybody that spends at least 10, 000 a month on Google.

You’ve got the data. And you’ve never thought about, what could I do with that? I’ve got an idea. 

Jon MacDonald: I think a lot of folks don’t know that part of your role at LP is, is partnerships and you’ve always brought creative ideas to partnerships between Logic Position and The Good. So that’s, that’s always been awesome to see as well.

We know based on the conversation today, you got to really dedicate the time to take the break. Right. And you can do it preplanned like I do it, or you can, you know, like, Hey, you got to have two per quarter or whatever, or you could do it more of like, Hey, I, you know, I’m redlining and you’re bright and let’s go make that happen.

A break could be two types could be taking that personal side or focusing on the business side, right. And trying to solve a problem or brainstorm. Got to have a great setting for either. Beach, no kids, just your wife, you know, awesome. Or that periodical room at an Abbey and Olympic Valley. You gotta have the right, right spot.

Right. And, and then there’s a lot to think about once [00:25:00] you’re there that I don’t think a lot of people. Realize until they’re in that moment. So really interesting. 

Ryan Garrow: And I think if everybody, you know, whether you can take the break now, depending on where you are in the marketing chain, if you’re the one actually pushing buttons, it may be more difficult to step away from your Google account for the next couple of weeks.

In the next month, you should take one because I think you’re 25 will benefit. The more people like Jon that you require to take a clarity day, say, Hey, at this point, I don’t know who the president’s going to be. We may, we may know later it, the economy is going to go up. It’s going to go down and the, your market will go up and go down.

And the key is going to be, how do you continue to scale and grow regardless of what that looks like? And if you take some clarity days, I think it’s possible. Even if you don’t have time 

Jon MacDonald: right now, the one thing you could do is open your calendar and block out that day so that nothing gets booked on that day in the future.

Ticks 30 seconds, just roll the die and pick that number of days away and see if it happens, whether it’s a couple of weeks or maybe it’s, it’s a month from now. But just picking that day, putting it aside, [00:26:00] and you don’t even have to plan it right now, but put it on your calendar is, is what you can do. So nothing else.

Ryan Garrow: Everybody can go put a calendar appointment on it. It’s all you do every day anyway, probably. 

Jon MacDonald: Well, thank you for sharing this, Ryan. I appreciated this, this topic that’s not necessarily about driving traffic or converting sites. I, I thought that was great, so thank you. 

Ryan Garrow: Thank you. Best of luck the rest of this year, Jon. Let’s make it happen. 

Jon MacDonald: Let’s do it.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe@driveandconvert.com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 121): Don’t Forget to Take a Break Post-BFCM appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

The benefits of experimentation are well-researched and documented. But that doesn’t always equate to an increasing conversion rate.

In this episode, Jon and Ryan explore why experimentation results don’t always map one-to-one with the real-world outcomes you expect.

Check out the full episode to learn:

• How post-launch variables make attribution less than clear.
• Why experiment segmentation means test results aren’t summative.
• The effect of false positives.

Experimentation done right is associated with increased overall performance across a number of factors. It can be a catalyst for better decision-making and can help assure your digital property is performing at its best.

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Drive & Convert a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Ryan Garrow: All right, Jon, we know that website or apps should always benefit from experimentation. It’s been documented, you’ve written books that have mentioned this multiple times.

At this point, if you’re episode 120 in with us and you haven’t realized this, we failed miserably. All right. So we agree that experimentation is great, but we know it doesn’t always equate to increasing conversion rates. And there’s some frustration that we’ve had people come to both of us and say, Hey, I’ve been doing this Experiments.

Why are my conversion rates not going up? And so today we get to talk about some of the why behind that answer some of these questions at scale, because two to many is much more efficient. You won’t always see [00:01:00] direct correlation across the entire website. Conversion rates go up every time you do an experiment.

So question one for you today would be, Jon, does having an experiment experimentation team guarantee better overall performance?

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I’ll say this. Selfishly, I just want to record this so I can send it to everybody who asks me this question because I think I feel like I get this every day.

Lead to come in saying, we’re doing testing. It’s not working. And we want to change providers and, or our clients who are saying, Hey, we have all these other metrics that look great, but conversion rates not increasing. What’s going on. And so I’d love to, selfishly just be able to send them a recording and say, to this, but here’s the reality

Ryan Garrow: can pull these out and we can get some LinkedIn snippets, all these fun things.

Jon MacDonald: Awesome. There we go. Let’s spread the good word. The reality, Ryan, is that all else being equal, once startups begin experimentation, they really see strong gains within the first few years, right? [00:02:00] It’s well documented, they see the gains, and they continue to see that growth for years to come.

I’m not just saying this, I’m not just blowing smoke here, this is actually according to Bloomberg, right? And they’ve done some research, and what they did is they formed a, what they call, experimentation index. So these are firms, large companies that are doing digital experimentation within their companies, generally at a high level A B testing, but lots of other validation techniques as well.

And they compared that to the S&P 500, okay? Now, we’ll put this up on our site at thegood. com along with an article around all this, but I’ll show you the chart. The growth divide is actually pretty large and it’s only getting larger over time. So the reality is, does experimentation guarantee better overall performance and, it’s really logical to expect that once experimentation engine is firing on all cylinders, you’re [00:03:00] doing an internal team, you’re running experiments often that you should really see a noticeable impact on the data. So a common question really is, if I run experiments, will my conversion rates go up? And you’ll hear this all the time, as I mentioned. So the reality is that after running thousands of experiments, we’ve learned that what happens after a release, Of what you tested is not a simple one to one outcome that mirrors the success of the experiment, but the story of why it’s not so simple.

That’s why I wanted to talk about this today.

Ryan Garrow: Fascinating that, it’s also surprising to me that people haven’t gotten to the point where they understand that there are so many moving pieces on a site that one metric doesn’t work in a vacuum yes, you’re converting your, you worked on your category pages.

Great. Okay. If you’re smart, you’re going to move up the funnel and push harder where conversion rates are lower. And so you get more traffic and your business grows, but you won’t necessarily work to expect [00:04:00] conversion rate. Wow. Okay. Sorry, I’m probably jumping ahead, but it’s, I have no, this is the reality of the

Jon MacDonald: conversations, right?

That you and I have every day where folks have become into these expectations. And this is why we’ve moved on from CRO to what we’re calling digital experience optimization, because. We’re not just impacting conversion rate, right? We are impacting the entire digital experience, which. Is we have a chart, in fact, I’ll turn it even in this article, there is this chart that we put together.

It’s a whole wheel of all the areas that experimentation can impact in time in the digital experience. And if you look at that conversion rate is a very small sliver of that by it just is. So it is one thing in a slew of metrics that provide a return on investment here. And if you just focus on conversion rate, you’re probably doing yourself a disservice in terms of the longevity, [00:05:00] it’s, et cetera.

There’s just a laundry list of reasons why it’s a bad idea.

Ryan Garrow: Okay. So why is it that we can’t see that? Cause ideally we’d like to see that. And maybe 10 years ago when somebody was. Promising results, somebody could see it in a one off, but why can’t we see that anymore?

Jon MacDonald: It’s funny you phrased it that way. And it’s funny in a good way, because if you’ve ever researched an experimentation partner, you’ve probably come across them that will guarantee conversion rate increases. And at the good, we have a phrase. Because we often have leads come in and say I talked to so and they guaranteed this lift.

If you can’t guarantee that, then we’re not going to work with you. And the phrase that we have is simply anyone who says they can guarantee an increase in your conversion rates is either really lucky. Or they’re lying. So you can choose which one do you want to be a part of the lucky crowd or do you want somebody lies to you?

I don’t know, but it’s one of those two. Okay. And there are plenty of reasons [00:06:00] why experiment results don’t map one to one with that real world outcome. that you would expect once you launch the variant that won in the testing. So let’s explore these really, I say there’s three key issues that prevent you from seeing the charts go up into the right.

Okay. There is that post launch variables. Okay. There’s experimentation, segmentation, and there’s the effect of false positives. So post launch variables, let’s just call it segmentation and the effect of false positives. Okay. So I want to talk about each of those three today.

Ryan Garrow: Got it. I love that. Jon, he simplifies things wonderfully, which I appreciate.

You’re also way more, probably political in your responses. Be like, would somebody guarantee something on my side of the equation on traffic? I’m like, if they’re guaranteeing your results on your traffic, driving on Google or Microsoft or meta, they’re idiots. I’m sorry. You can’t do that without looking at the account, understanding the nuances of a company and then guarantee [00:07:00] results like no, they’re idiots.

That’s me versus .

Jon MacDonald: And like you said earlier, it’s one metric in a vacuum, it does not work. So yeah, we’ll break these down. But yes, luckier line is as far down that, that non PC path is. Yeah, we’ll stay on the PC path

Ryan Garrow: with Jon and, he being the nicer guy in the, in this equation here.

Problem one with not getting a one to one result in your experiments would be post launch. And so what is it about post launch variables that muck up the results being extremely clear and like obvious?

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Yeah. So post launch variables, they really make attribution less clear, right? So metrics are influenced by much more than the website or app experience.

And I hate to say that because that’s the only part that we can affect is the website or app experience, right? Like directly direct and indirect influences really impact metrics, like your conversion rate. Obvious one, revenue, maybe [00:08:00] even as broad as customer satisfaction. In fact, we’ve identified over 55 of these variables that contribute to swings in your KPIs.

And this is that pie chart I was talking about. That’s that graph. There’s 55 variables on there. That’s, and then we probably should come up with more, but honestly, after 55, we were like, I think people will get the point.

Ryan Garrow: That’s a lot. That’s a lot of variables.

Jon MacDonald: But, there’s factors like traffic quality.

If you’re just not getting the right traffic, they’re not going to convert or seasonality. Maybe you sell winter coats and it’s a hundred degrees out, God bless you with global warming. You might want to look at t shirts. There’s competitor promotions, maybe your biggest competitor ran a 50 percent off sale and it just took away all of your customers for that time frame.

Even the greater economy, I keep hearing right now from so many e com brands. That are really struggling, and it’s not because of their [00:09:00] product or their marketing or any of these other factors. It’s just the economy has shifted. The COVID years are over, folks. People aren’t going to only buy on your website anymore.

These all play a really huge role in whether or not your website visitors will convert now or in the future. And, I’m here. As we learned during the COVID pandemic, right? Even the largest experimentation wins may not eclipse the outside influences. That can either gain or hurt your conversion rates.

A really good way to emphasize this is this true story from one of our clients. That we once saw a single social media intern drive so much new traffic that conversion rates fell by a whole percentage point. And this is on a very large frame, okay? The intern was like, yes, I did my job. Amazing for their portfolio, their resume to be like, here are the metrics of, what we did, right?

The [00:10:00] problem is, it’s really bad for conversion rates. Because the problem is that they drove all this unqualified traffic. It’s probably a great meme, they got everyone there, but they weren’t going to buy, right? And we couldn’t control that, right? Once a test period is over, we generally are unable to tell whether we’ve improved a metric that was already rising or already in decline.

Which really makes post launch attribution fuzzy at best. And again, this goes back to anyone who told you otherwise is either lucky or a lie.

Ryan Garrow: Dang. Love to be that intern that screws up all your work.

Jon MacDonald: It was good for them, I’m sure.

Ryan Garrow: But, yeah. Oh man, a whole percentage point. That’s massive. That’s really cool, dawg.

Made a great problem to have. You have too much traffic and they’re, the middle, upper funnel is buzzing about your brand. Man, that’d be great.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, it’s great, but it’s not going to significantly increase. It’s revenue right away, unless it’s really qualified traffic right now. [00:11:00] It’s great that the brand got out there, right?

It’s great that maybe the long tail of this is more revenue, but in the immediate future when we get a call and say, Hey, our conversion rate dropped 1 percent this month, what’s what gives you’re supposed to be in charge of that for us. We start digging into it. We’re like, wow, this one post got you several million visits.

Like good for that. That’s not qualified traffic.

Ryan Garrow: Got it. Okay. Then the next problem you mentioned was the test results weren’t summative. They didn’t, five plus five equals 10, except when you were doing an experiment. So tell us more about that. Like, how does that work?

Jon MacDonald: That’s just not math, right? There are many reasons that experiment results are not summative. And I just, let’s just focus on one of them today, which is segmentation. Okay. So many experiments only impact a segment of users. Can we agree on that? Like you’re not test, you’re not going to test with every single visitor that comes in.

And [00:12:00] even if you do, you need a control set who aren’t going to have it. So at the best, you have your control and your variable, and that’s the easiest possible test. It never works out that way. There’s always a sub, a segment of traffic, of sub subset, excuse me, of traffic that you’re gonna run a test with, right?

So a win with that segment or subset of users does not predict the same gains from the whole, right? It needs to be said. It’s obvious. I think a lot of brands don’t go in with that mindset. So as a practitioner you’re often running experiments that are only meant to impact that subset of an audience.

And the rest of the visitors won’t experience that same benefit. That’s just, that’s testing, that’s experimentation, right? And this is true for splits by device type, by Landing page by, I don’t know, and similar type of segments. There’s hundreds of ways you can segment, right? [00:13:00] And that’s why we generally don’t actually the results of a segment and apply them to the whole, right?

So a 5 percent gain with one audience and a 5 percent gain with another does not equal a 10 percent lift overall. That’s where the five plus five does not equal 10, right? Basically test results are not summative. They don’t add up in that way. Okay. And you need to have that on his view.

Announcer: You’re listening to Drive & Convert, a podcast focused on ecommerce growth.

Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with ecommerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers. And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes.

Ryan Garrow: so if I’m going to simplify it from my brain thinking about traffic, if we’re running an experiment on these [00:14:00] five product pages that we’re driving traffic to, but we’re also driving traffic to, let’s say 10, 000 other products on the site.

Just because the experiment does lift conversion rates on these five products, 5 percent each on average, doesn’t mean that the traffic on all 10, 000 product pages is going to increase at the same level.

Just because there’s so many different purchase attempts depending on the product and the price point. Okay.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Yeah. It’s the same thing. It applies to users, visitors as it applies to product pages. There’s so many ways to segment the testing. And so that, that’s another way to segment and definitely makes sense.

Ryan Garrow: Okay. Then the third piece of the whole issues you’re simplifying is false positives. Like you think something’s going to work and then it doesn’t.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. That’s a great way to to think about it. It’s false positives. Everyone in experiment data indicates that. The hypothesis is true, but when it’s actually not right, so false positives may sound like an atrocious error on the part of the person writing the experiments, but [00:15:00] they’re actually just par for the course.

You just got to get used to them and understand. And that’s why even rigorous and experienced experimentation teams really expect at least a quarter. I have a false positive rate, meaning one in four winning experiments is observed as the result of chance and not a true winner. And that goes with all of science, I think the question here is to be thinking about is, does this pervasiveness of false positives mean experimentation does not work?

And I think the answer is, of course, not. I’ll take the 75 percent any day, but it just means we need to approach these wins with an informed skepticism, right? I don’t expect a one to one relationship between the results that are observed during the test period and real world experience of performance.

I think that the best way to look at this is to say, okay, I’m going to run this test. And if it wins, I expect some lift on the site. There will be gains. I don’t know what that [00:16:00] gain will be yet. But we’ve proven out, I feel very comfortable saying there is a gain to be had here and not a loss.

Ryan Garrow: No, it’s, I like that.

And I am surprised that one out of four have false positives. That’s just me not knowing enough about DxO. But that also tells me you’re playing a numbers game like just everything else in Ecom. Yeah. Instead of doing just four experiments and getting frustrated. You got to do a thousand experiments and you’ve got 750 that actually did something right and are taking your brand to a better level.

And so I guess what’s your response then? I guess running experience is not going to fix all your problems. It’s not the one single thing, right? That’s your silver bullet for all of these problems on your site.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, look, It’s tempting to look at fuzzy post launch attribution and false positives and say experimentation is not really worth it.

I want to be clear, and I’m throwing all the negatives out here today, but I believe that it is very much worth it. And I want to be clear that, there are people much [00:17:00] smarter than myself that swear by a test everything approach, right? Because there’s simply no better or even a more rigorous way to.

Quantify the impact of changes in your bottom line. Now, I don’t think that there’s a test everything approach that is a good fit for any brand, but I do think that having that mentality can be beneficial. Now, problems, they do arise when we tout experimentation as a tool. This omnipotent growth lever, the magic bullet to success, whatever you want to call it, silver bullet, as you mentioned, right?

And that’s because like it can increase your confidence in decision making. Okay, you have great data to back up a decision. That’s really helpful in the boardroom and beyond, right? It can help you measure the discrete impact of good design. So you don’t just have a creative director, or I don’t want to pick on creative directors.

There’s a lot of great ones out there, or just some creative who says, This is beautiful. Everyone loved it, right? You’re able to put numbers to that, right? [00:18:00] And it can also settle internal debates about what’s direction to head, right? You’re able to say I love that your spouse thinks this is a great color, but our users who actually are paying us every day think this is the best color.

And here’s the data behind that, right?

Ryan Garrow: That’s a difficult battle to fight. Let me tell you,

Jon MacDonald: it’s a difficult battle, but one where I’ve had to fight before.

Ryan Garrow: Yes.

Jon MacDonald: Still have the battle scars, if you can’t tell, but I think, what experimentation won’t do is compensate for all of the external forces that are going to hamper your business.

If you’re looking for that confidence, the precision. Experimentation is just an incredible tool and it’s going to add to your toolkit. But if you’re looking for a silver bullet I’m still looking too, Ryan. So hopefully we can find it together.

Ryan Garrow: If it exists, we will eventually find it. I just have my doubts.

Jon MacDonald: Maybe episode 220 and we’ll have found it, but not by one.

Ryan Garrow: then we’ll be on a beach sipping margaritas and we won’t tell everybody because. It would ruin our margarita [00:19:00] life. Love it. I love you. What do you say then when somebody is frustrated that they’ve been running experiments? So what’s your response to your clients?

When at that’s the case Hey, we’re doing all this work. We’re paying you all this money. And my conversion rate is that’s got to be frustration.

Jon MacDonald: I totally understand the frustration if they are looking in it, just conversion and that’s why it’s really important to have this conversation up front.

And I try to make sure I set those expectations appropriately. And with every lead that comes in and every conversation I have. Because they really need to trust the process and use experimentation to its full potential. Which is not just for conversion rate increases. Look, one thing has been proven time and time again.

Experimentation, done right. Is associated with increased overall performance across so many factors. Experimentation can’t combat outsized economic and environmental factors. It can be a [00:20:00] catalyst for better decision making and it can help assure you that your digital property is going to perform at its best, despite whatever is going on the outside and.

That’s where optimization really comes in. And I think where it’s really valuable.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And I think that it becomes challenging, especially as we get into this, whatever this new economic time period looks like or how long it lasts. Top line shrinks, which generally shrinks bottom line, which generally shrinks experimentation budgets, which, and then it becomes a possible downward spiral that unfortunately you have to have faith that if you keep pushing forward.

You will, your product, your site will continue to get better and better, and you can better fight a shrinking pie because you can get more aggressive and capture more of it. But what I see happen often is you get, things are bad, cut marketing, cut all these costs. And I’m like, there’s probably some fat to be cut, but you can’t cut the core things that are helping drive your business because your [00:21:00] competitors are going to smoke you if they’re.

Still investing in experimentation allows them to get more aggressive on their marketing. Just

Jon MacDonald: think about the going back to one of the first points I made the experimentation index that Bloomberg put together versus the S& P 500. And that chart will show you very quickly the gains that experimentation teams are able to provide on top of a normal S& P 500.

And that gap is only widening. But if you aren’t doing experimentation, or you cut it because you feel like, hey, I need to cut the fat and you don’t see conversion rate gains immediately, understand that there are a couple things at play here, right? And it’s not the experimentation that’s causing those.

It could be the outside factors. And maybe we’re, you’re, experimentation is helping out with all these other 54 plus possible [00:22:00] metrics that are conversion rate and that those potentially are, Providing value and a good return on your investment.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, I agree with all of that. And thank you for enlightening me.

Is there a, is there anything you can do to help guide clients to have kind of a vacuum set within their data to say we did get, yes. It’s flat, but if you look at, this data in a vacuum, which is a very small subset, it did get better. Or does that even exist?

Jon MacDonald: This is why we came out with our five factor scorecard.

And I think we’ve done an episode on that in the past, but if you go to the good. com and click through the big blue button in the top right of every page, just go click on that. You can learn about it, but there are five areas that our team has determined that really benefit from experimentation. And should be the scorecard for, are you getting a return on this investment?

And it’s not about looking at just conversion rate or a specific metric. It’s about looking at more [00:23:00] holistic gains. And so I would, we really don’t have time today to go in the entire, into the entire scorecard, but I would say that is what we’ve done. At the good. Now, there are probably other methods out there as well, and I’m sure there are this is the one we found that these five areas really matter to brands that on that experimentation index, they’ve all done these and excelled at these.

And if you aren’t doing these and aren’t excelling in those five areas. Then, an experimentation program or optimizing for your digital experience can really help improve those. And that’s everything from getting buy in from your team on, okay, we’re going to continue to do optimization, or we are going to start doing it, to resourcing it correctly.

You could run, I’ve seen brands run a lot of experimentation, but never implement anything, right? Because they can’t implement or maybe they have some custom platform that if they implement anything it’s just, it’s like a ball of [00:24:00] yarn and they’re afraid they’re going to pull the wrong string and not everything up.

So there’s a lot of these types of things you got to consider and, again, If there’s any takeaway from today’s discussion, it’s purely that measuring your optimization on one metric alone. is unlikely to get you to want to do optimization. And if you don’t do optimization, you are at a severe disadvantage to all of your competitors.

So you really need to be doing optimization and you need to be paying attention to the right way to measure that success. I

Ryan Garrow: love it. Yeah. And if you want to have one metric that improves your site, I can do it within an hour by just cutting off all your non brand traffic and your conversion rate increases, and you did no optimization.

Jon MacDonald: See?

Ryan Garrow: And your business will go in the tank. It’ll be great.

Jon MacDonald: Or, you know what? Offer everybody 99 percent off or a hundred percent off. Just give your stuff away. Your conversion rate will improve. It’ll improve. It’s great. This goes in a vacuum. There are too [00:25:00] many ways. To make yourself lucky. Let’s put it that way.

Ryan Garrow: Got it. Anybody promising you anything is an idiot. I’ll go and say it for Jon, but

Jon MacDonald: lucky you’re like, we’ll work on it, Ryan, we’ll work on it for you.

Ryan Garrow: Jon. I appreciate the education. Thank you.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive & Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 120): I’m Running Experiments. Why Hasn’t My Conversion Rate Gone Up? appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

During Q4, new channels seem to become more attractive to brands, especially if they are missing growth targets. Amazon is the largest ecommerce channel out there, but simply having your products on Amazon doesn’t mean you’re going to boost sales or profitability.  

In this episode, Jon and Ryan discuss what brands need to do in order to have success on Amazon.

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. How to determine if Amazon is right for your brand.
2. How to get started on the platform.  
3. Tips for setting realistic expectations.

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better ecommerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. 

Jon MacDonald: Ryan, as we approach Q4, it seems new channels are becoming more and more attractive to brands, especially if they’re struggling this year and missing those growth targets that everybody wants to hit.

And, obviously, there’s TikTok, but Amazon is the largest ecommerce channel out there. I would say. I’ve heard 40 percent plus of online transactions.

Ryan Garrow: Kind of disgusting how big the number is. 

Jon MacDonald: That’s a lot of books to sell, right? But just having your products on Amazon over the years, I know you have had a lot of success there, but just being listed on Amazon doesn’t mean you’re going to boost sales or profitability.

So I’m interested because Logical Position is one of Amazon’s largest agencies. I know, as I just said, you have scaled brands to seven figures personally on Amazon. I [00:01:00] think you could probably shed some light on what a brand needs to do to be successful on Amazon. Am I accurate in that statement? 

Ryan Garrow: I hope.

There’s some people that have probably taken my advice and if it worked, great. Let me know if it didn’t. Nah, don’t tell me. It’ll just make me sad. 

Jon MacDonald: That’s right. When we hit episode 200, we can include that. Yeah. People 

Ryan Garrow: submit man, you really screwed my business up, Garrow. What’d you do that for?

Jon MacDonald: Love it. And we’ll just stop the show at that point, right? 

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. But it’s true with just Amazon, the sheer scale. Size of it. Brands can’t shouldn’t be ignoring it. And it does surprise me still that I come across a lot of brands that are still not leveraging the platform yet. And they’ll come at me and I’ve had a lot of questions over the last.

It’s probably two, three weeks about Amazon. I was like should I get on Amazon? When’s the right time? I don’t know what to decide. I’m like, you know what? We probably need to address Amazon. It’s probably been a little while as I scroll through some of our historical podcasts where we really dug into Amazon, what it’s doing and what people need to do to be on it.

Jon MacDonald: Well, with all of that ecommerce volume that Amazon has, and as you [00:02:00] just said, the kind of need to be on there or the questions that come up about that. I think the best place to start is should every brand be adding Amazon to their channel mix? I think it’s a valid question. 

Ryan Garrow: It for sure is. No matter who you are, you can’t ignore 40 percent of all transactions in the ecommerce.

That’s just an astounding number. Hundreds of billions of dollars being done through that platform. But I would caution if you are a sub segment of e com where you are a Sure play retailer, meaning you’re just selling other people’s products. You don’t have any of your own. I’m not confident Amazon is going to be a good place for you.

I actually look at Amazon as a retailer more than I do a channel or a marketplace necessarily, because they do take some of your margin. It’s not awesome often from a Martian standpoint. And so Amazon is not going to nurture them as a customer of yours. That is an Amazon customer, pure and simple.

What I look at as like a pure marketplace where it is your customer and you can do some things with that entity, that customer, even within that entity, then it’s a little bit different. But, it is an Amazon [00:03:00] customer. You can, you need a trademark as well. I think I would probably put that in there as, have your own products but also have a trademark.

So if you can’t go to Amazon and register something there with a trademark and get a brand, that’s Amazon. On Amazon, then I think you’re going to struggle a lot more than you would unless you have that trademark. 

Jon MacDonald: All right. That makes sense. That’s a good kind of guidepost in terms of where you should be headed.

And if it makes sense to even be on Amazon. So let’s suggest that you are have your own products. You’re not just reselling. And let’s say you have a trademark for the, for your name or products. How do you get started at Amazon? What do you recommend in terms of the first step? And if you’re already on Amazon, maybe double checking that these are done.

Ryan Garrow: Maybe you haven’t done some of these. So outline, the kind of the foundational aspects of success on Amazon would be use the Amazon brand registry. It’s not hard to find, go through the process. They basically verify that you are the trademark holder. And there are some scenarios in which you can act as the brand on Amazon.

So we have some of our [00:04:00] retailers that we work with that retail brands. They got permission to say, yeah, I’ll be the brand on Amazon because the brand just doesn’t want to do it. And so something to consider, but having a registered trademark, it does give you extra access to add inventory. You get your own storefront.

So like when I had Joyful Dirt, it was Amazon. com forward slash Joyful Dirt. I assume it still is. I haven’t been back to it, but you can brand it that way and use it. There’s a lot of value there. And then you’ve got to get your products on there. Depending on how many you have may not be easy. If you only got a few.

It’s not that hard to manually build them out, create it. It’s called an ASIN. That’s essentially Amazon’s version of a GTIN or a UPC code. It’s how they categorize a product says this is a unique identifier. Everybody that sells this particular product will reference this and we’ll collect all the reviews, that one number.

It’s a character series of alphanumeric characters. If you have a lot of products, it may make sense to leverage a feed system that can just [00:05:00] submit them all and create them in a batch and oversimplify that process. So we work with a company called Cetanomics for that. There’s a few out there that’ll do it.

Some of them more expensive, less expensive. Some have more. White glove service and others, but there’s, there are ways to get your products built at scale on there. . Occasionally you’re gonna have some struggles if you’ve had some retailers of yours that have created products on Amazon before you’ve moved in there, and you’ve gotta somehow either work with them to get it if they’re friendly, if they’re not.

And you sometimes have to work with Amazon to get that there and make it yours. 

Jon MacDonald: And that’s where having the trademark. comes in, I assume, right? Because then you can say, Hey, they shouldn’t have that. 

Ryan Garrow: Helps, but Amazon still has some things to work through in the process because Amazon is also the opinion that anybody can sell anything.

And so it’s not like what some trademarked companies have come to expect from Google, where you can say, I’m the trademark owner. Nobody gets to use my name in the ads period, unless I give them permission. If you sell iPhones and you’ve experienced that with Apple, you just can’t do [00:06:00] that. So just go in with The idea and the expectation that Amazon is not going to be easy to get to do what you think it should do.

Like it makes sense that if you own the trademark, you should own that product. That’s logic. That’s how the laws work. Amazon system is a little bit different. So just expect that. 

Jon MacDonald: I will say as a consumer, I find that really frustrating. It is one of the big usability issues I have with Amazon that it shows me that there’s several different stores selling a product.

And they all have different shipping policies and timelines and reviews of that store specifically. But also, I don’t know if I’m getting an authentic product unless I’m buying from the brand. So I always look like if I’m buying, okay, good example, I just bought a new Google Nest thermostat. That’s sitting over here, right?

They came out with a new generation. Mine’s the first one. I was like, okay, we’ll get it. And I went on Amazon to get it because they would deliver it in time for me to install this weekend. And I was looking around and there [00:07:00] were several different things, people selling that, but. I really only wanted to buy from the official Google store.

And so I had to do a little bit of digging to make sure I was doing that. And it’s not 100 percent evident when you search that’s who you’re buying it from. It’s not like 

Ryan Garrow: I’ve accidentally found that really interesting from the wrong company online better than probably the average person. And so I shouldn’t get sucked into that when I’m trying to buy from the brand, but I do.

And so it is a struggle on Amazon and there’s a reason, for example, we live in Portland, Nike, big Portland brand does not sell on Amazon. There were problems with fake products coming out of China and getting on Amazon that Nike couldn’t control and Amazon wasn’t gonna. Stop it. Cause they had no way of doing it.

There’s ways you could pay Amazon for this hieroglyphic sticker thing that you can put on every product you make and only products that have that sticker can get into Amazon. So it’s them attempting to get through that, but it’s also not cheap. It can get rather expensive when you’re adding stickers to every single product you produce.

So there are some areas there, but it is. It’s frustrating. As a brand too. [00:08:00] Like I, I prohibited my retailer from selling on Amazon in my agreement with them. The reality is they could easily go do that still. And it would be, it’s not always easy to find the retailer that’s doing it. Cause you can create up new brands.

It’s in the beauty space. It’s in particular, a very difficult one to control on marketplaces because certain beauty products are like, Hey, we’ll sell direct to consumer. But if you buy it for your store or your salon, you’re not supposed to be able to as a consumer, go buy that product, at the beauty supply store.

But I can go to Amazon or eBay or Walmart online and find it pretty easily at a big discount. 

Jon MacDonald: I have done that several times. 

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, but then, even that some of my, some of the shampoo I’d bought was fake. There’s like fake brands that are proposing is that so very big issue in the beauty space. Base and not as much probably in most other industries, but just as an example of what it takes.

Jon MacDonald: So you need a feed to be in the brand registry. Is there anything else when you’re getting started you need to make sure that you were doing?

Ryan Garrow: I would say if you’re trademarked, you need to have the a plus content, which is really [00:09:00] the section in the middle of your listing that is. The images, if you will, I find that a lot of brands get really hung up on, Oh my gosh, I’ve got to get a developer or a creative graphic designer to do all of this for me.

And Amazon made it pretty simple. Like essentially WYSIWYG editor in there. If you’ve got some pictures or you’ve got access to some images that on a system, we paid for a system to give us. Access to like kind of B roll video and just images that we can leverage for marketing and have the ownership up.

And I was able to create a plus content. And if you know me, I have very little creative genes going through me. And I was able to make a work and it’s really just there to people are used to seeing those when it’s a trademark product, if you will. And so just have it there. Don’t worry as much about making it perfect because you can always edit it and come back to it.

You’ve got to have the bullet point content and think through that at the top of the listing. You have the titles, which are important. What am I going to title my product? So that it shows well in the search results. And then a bullet points, I think you get five, maybe [00:10:00] you’re up to six now where you can say bold.

These are the five most important things about my product that you need to know. That people just skim it so that really you’re adding keywords after the initial bullet point that’s all caps or bold and I forget what you can do maybe both. It’s really just for making sure Amazon understands they could show this for.

And then images just like you would on your website. You need to have some good images. Make sure you have some lifestyle images. of your product and video, Amazon, just like everybody else on the planet, from an econ standpoint, video, people can’t get enough video. So I have something there. It doesn’t have to be really complex or professionally done.

It just has to be something because Amazon tends to reward people to have more of those images and videos when they’re, when you’re competing. 

Jon MacDonald: Okay. That’s all really helpful. It’s a lot to think about when you’re first getting started, but once you’re up there. It doesn’t get less complicated, I assume.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. 

Jon MacDonald: I assume also since you’re a traffic guy, right? And most [00:11:00] brands have to pay for traffic. Wouldn’t be a big deal. We wouldn’t be talking about it today. Probably not. You need to pay to get traffic on Amazon. Is that. Oh yeah. Just like 

Ryan Garrow: every other plot. Like you just can’t put your products on your website and expect to start selling.

It’s just, that’s not the way it works. So you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to start driving traffic to your listings on Amazon. And for the vast majority of you listening to this, it’s going to, you’re going to be spending on Amazon ads. And I think most people should start there because it proves a couple of things.

Is there existing demand on Amazon? From the majority view there, there is, I guarantee it. There’s this area. If your competitors are there and they’re selling, you can see the reviews. So you can see Hey, they’re selling. And I can see that there’s people buying. You can see the dates of the reviews.

So you can see when they’re buying. And some of the tools I have, I can see how many things are being sold per month, which helps. Not everybody will have access to those things, but at the end of the day, you’re going to pay to get your listing sold. And hopefully over time that will be.

If you keep paying an amount, there will be some organic sales that start happening, some repeat purchases that [00:12:00] happen that, you’re rolling a snowball up a big hill with these ads that hopefully the snowball gets bigger and then starts rolling downhill. Would be the idea.

Jon MacDonald: Okay. So how do you set that initial budget then to get that boulder kind of rolling? 

Ryan Garrow: Always a fun question, Jon. It’s going to be the answer I give everybody. It’s it depends. It’s going to be different for everybody. So it’s not going to be, Oh, everybody must spend 10 grand a month on Amazon ads where you’re never getting anywhere.

But I will give you some guardrails. Like generally speaking, I think you should go to Amazon and look at it as a percentage of your Google spend. If you’re not spending on Google, you probably should go there first because on Google, you’re driving traffic to your website. And you’re buying some customers to yourself and that generally is going to be a good idea.

Now, if you’re spending on Google, I will tell you, if you’re not into the five figures on Google, you can probably keep pushing there, but I say, and it’s, I would say about 25 percent of your Google spent. Look at that on Amazon. Now, the big, but in this situation. It would be if you are launching a brand [00:13:00] on all channels at once and you’ve not been selling on your site much and you’re trying to get retail space and you’re going on meta that you’re doing all the things.

Amazon can be a good place to launch a brand. If you haven’t launched aggressively on your website yet, especially if you have less views, you’re competing against large competitors. So the example would be from my own experience with joyful dirt. We were competing against some massive companies. You may have heard of Monsanto and all of their massively large miracle grow brands, and then there’s Dr. Earth, and then there, there’s so many very large established brands selling at home Depot and retailers that I was never going to get into initially. We, I went into it. And one of the reasons we picked plant food was because the competition was not doing a very good job on ads. And so I said, Hey, I think there’s an opportunity for us to spend on ads to get some pretty quick, easy, inexpensive conversions that we can build on. So that was my threshold of I didn’t really care what I was selling as long as I could get the ads in there and get it at a cheap price. So we did it. 

Announcer: You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a [00:14:00] podcast focused on ecommerce growth.

Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a Conversion Rate Optimization agency that works with ecommerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers. And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position,. A digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes.

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you. 

Ryan Garrow: And so we went on Amazon aggressively. First, and that was a good move because there was a ton of volume there and I didn’t have the trust on my own website from a depth of product or from a brand awareness that somebody was going to find me on Google and be like, never heard of this company.

I see Miracle Gro, heard of them, but I’ve never heard of this company. I’m going to go buy from them. We were able to do it on Amazon because people trusted Amazon that if I was a shyster in business or I was, selling a crappy product, they could go back to [00:15:00] Amazon and say, Amazon, this sucks, give me my money back.

And they would. So that’s one caveat I would bring up is you haven’t launched your brand already. Amazon can be a good place to launch it because you’re borrowing from their trust. Now. If I looked at the arena on Amazon from a plant food fertilizer standpoint, I probably wouldn’t pick that category. Miracle Gro has gotten so aggressive there and they’re going vendor to vendor means Amazon’s buying the product from them.

Massive quantity of reviews. Lots of competition. The skew depth is huge. Everybody in COVID decided they need to take care of a plant. And so there’s tons of plant food there. So I wouldn’t do it now 

Jon MacDonald: better than a dog, 

Ryan Garrow: but there’s less and less of those categories over time that you’re going to see on Amazon, where there is, some really low hanging fruit there.

So I don’t expect that to happen often anymore. You’re going to pay for traffic. So you got to have that budget. And if you’re starting with your budget you need to understand that Amazon is taking 15%. So you’re going to have your cost of the product. [00:16:00] 15 percent is going to Amazon. And then you’re going to have that cost above that.

And the vast majority of brands, let’s say you’re going to be at 50 percent or greater. there’s And then if you’re going to have a little bit of cost going in before ads, you’re going to need to adjust goals based on what you would do differently on, on Amazon, on Google, for example. 

Jon MacDonald: Are you saying 50 percent including that 15 that amazon is taking?

Ryan Garrow: I think most brands are going to have 50 percent or higher margin direct to consumer. And so the Amazon 15 percent and then you have the fulfillment cost, which if you’re starting out, you’re either going to go I would say most of you starting out are probably going to sell through your existing channels.

So you’re going to do probably seller fulfilled prime, where you just fulfill quickly and make sure you’re transparent to Amazon about what your shipping is. They have a company called Zico, which allows you to print labels very quickly and do. A self fulfilled prime, which means you fulfill it, but they still let you show that prime badge.

So it’s, I don’t necessarily like it as a consumer now, cause I think of prime, like I can get it same day or tomorrow. So it’s still prime. It still shows the badge, but it says yeah, [00:17:00] you’re going to get this in three to five days. That doesn’t feel like trying to be, but Amazon is doing it. So I can’t fight them.

I’m not going to just know that it’s there. And so as you’re figuring this process out and the value and the volume you’re going to get. You’re probably not going to ship a pallet of every skew to Amazon until you know what kind of volumes available there because you don’t want to pay warehouse fees. That’s not fun for anybody. 

Jon MacDonald: So do brands find that they’re liking Amazon better than going DTC? 

Ryan Garrow: It’s it’s kind of apples and oranges really to the day. There is so much volume on Amazon that part can be exciting and you can’t deny when you see just a bunch of sales there, the top line’s fun to see, but your margin is smaller.

And in Denner, we, as I said at the beginning, it’s not a new customer it’s Amazon’s customer. So you don’t get to email them once they buy from your company, you don’t get to send them an SMS. You don’t get to put them in your loyalty program. That’s an Amazon customer and they are doing that on their own behalf.

Cause Amazon doesn’t care if they ever buy your product again, it’s there. They don’t care that if they buy my plant food and then they [00:18:00] go buy Miracle Gro next month, Amazon doesn’t care. They’re still an Amazon customer. 

Jon MacDonald: They still make their money. And I see all of that and I understand that to me, that is the biggest reason to not be on Amazon early in a brand cycle, but I assume there are some things you can only learn by being on Amazon and perhaps by growing your brand there. Is that true? What are the things that you 

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, there is, there’s a lot to be learned on Amazon. So I like seeing quick reviews. And so the reviews that you have on Amazon, because there’s so much volume there, if you’re collecting them appropriately, usually you’re going to use a third party because manually doing all that is challenging, if not difficult or impossible based on what Amazon allows you to do, but there are some companies that let you scale review volume.

If you do it right. And seeing those responses, like at Joyful Dirt, we were able to solve certain issues within our product mix. Like we didn’t know, for example, in certain climates of us, where there’s a lot of humidity in the summer, [00:19:00] we were going to have problems with our product clumping together in those markets.

Like we’re very dry in Oregon. Most, it rains, but it’s very dry air here compared to Austin’s just down there last week with big commerce, just sweating profusely. Because it’s gross in August in Austin, but that causes certain ingredients to clump. So we had to change some things up to make sure that we weren’t experiencing that customers weren’t experiencing that because we’re like, this doesn’t clump.

What are you talking about? We’ll leave it outside for days. Yeah. That. It’s a problem in humid climates. So reviews are helpful there. And it also helps you scale. And once you start getting the volume of reviews going competing, like we were able to accelerate beyond a lot of brands bigger than us because our review collection was quicker.

I had a good partner for reviews and allowed us to appear bigger than we were because a higher percentage of our customers were reviewing us. Which helped us scale up and conversion rates, increased all the good things that come with positive reviews. Amazon has also realized that there’s a review problem on Amazon because it’s discouraging to [00:20:00] small brands to go onto Amazon when your competitors have a hundred thousand reviews, 

Jon MacDonald: That wasn’t the reviews problem I thought.

Ryan Garrow: There’s also a bunch of fake reviews, which pissed me off. And I’ve had to uncover some of those some things to competitors that were lying about my product, that they’re, they regret ever lying.

Jon MacDonald:  I was going to say if I had no morals. A great business idea would be to just set up an agency that does nothing but leave false reviews for your competitors.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, there are. 

Jon MacDonald: I’m sure there are companies that do that. Amazon. I’ll bet you there are too, but they hide pretty well. At least I don’t play in that circle, so I have no idea. But I would say it is a challenge. I have, it’s hard as a consumer when you’re looking at reviews and some of them are like best product ever.

And some of them are like. This product is actually horrible. Don’t listen to these reviews. They have to be fake and you don’t know, okay, who do I pay attention to, right? Yeah. 

Ryan Garrow: I uncovered a lot of the nasty underbelly of Amazon reviews trying to solve for like, where are these reviews coming from that we don’t understand.

And. [00:21:00] They’re lying about the product and there’s reddits about it, about groups that say, Hey, this is how you get free product from companies. Here’s how you hold them hostage by bad reviews. There’s a Facebook group entirely dedicated to Hey, we get bad reviews here, but if you should get product, just we give good reviews here.

Here’s how we do this. It is, it’s like a mom, like a bunch of monsters under there trying to get product from Amazon. Or brands on Amazon. So Amazon’s realized that to a degree that there are fake ones, but also that there’s a high volume of reviews for a lot of products that can discourage more products from coming, which Amazon wants more products on there and needs more products to continue scaling.

And so there are tastes you’ll be there testing placements now. Where you’ll see no reviews being shown on the search pages, which is interesting because I think that reviews are important as well. I go to Amazon to see how people reviewed a product before I buy, even if I’m not going to buy from Amazon.

I will go say I see that there are 4. 6. Great. I want to look at the one star reviews. I want to look at the three star reviews. I know people are putting five stars up, I can see by the ratings, but what are they saying about the three [00:22:00] stars? Which is usually a more honest review. Somebody that had a problem, did the brand respond?

Many of the things you talk about constantly about conversion increases and responding to reviews. 

Jon MacDonald: This is so true. And I’ve argued for ages. So it certainly isn’t a change and that’s happened recently. But Amazon is one of the larger search engines for shopping. I don’t go to Google when I’m looking for a product.

I’ll start on Amazon because I know all the product information should be there. And if I can’t find it on Amazon, that’s almost a red flag to me. 

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. If your brand isn’t there, you need to be there. I think that’s, I think you’re dumb for just not even having a listing. Even if you don’t do seller fulfilled, we just do something super simple, just to have a presence, if nothing else, to keep retailers or competitors from putting products up that could take your brand identity.

So again, got to click reviews. It’s going to keep evolving and changing. I think quite quickly over the next year as Amazon tries to figure out how to deal with All the review issues, Amazon, SEO and I say SEO usually when I’m doing air quotes. So if you’re listening to it on a podcast with no video here you’re, it’s [00:23:00] Air quote SEO because there’s a lot of companies that say they do Amazon s and the reality is that’s a bunch of crap.

Amazon. SEO is based on sales velocity and how much money is Amazon making. They’re not going to give you a ranking number one on a product category because you put the right keywords and the right images and the right descriptions on your page. They don’t care. They are there to make money and they’re going to take 15 percent.

If they make 15 percent and it’s more on this product because it sells more, it’s going to rank higher than you. It’s not complicated. 

Jon MacDonald: And so focus on sales velocity. Is that where the Amazon’s choice badge comes from? 

Ryan Garrow: Yes, and that’s the holy grail on Amazon is you want the Amazon’s choice badge.

And the only way to get that is to have a lot of velocity on sales, and it’s around a keyword. So Amazon knows people search this, these are the top sellers, and this is the actual top seller, and we want to sell more of that, and if it keeps selling, great. So once you’re in that, you can really keep velocity because, I’m a sucker for that too.

Amazon’s choice okay, it sells a lot, and The reviews are pretty solid. All right. I’ll take it. And the price point’s okay. You will also [00:24:00] see, if you get that, you do have some price elasticity on there. So let me finish the Amazon SEO and then I’ll jump into price elasticity. But Amazon SEO, you want to be aware that sales velocity isn’t just from traffic on Amazon.

There’s a limited number of people searching for something on Amazon. You can drive traffic from other channels to convert on Amazon. And so I did that from Google. I took traffic from Google. They were searching for a non brand keyword. I knew they weren’t going to convert at a high rate on my website. Cause I only had four skews and I didn’t have the brand awareness to compete against a miracle. 

Ryan Garrow: But if I sent them to Amazon, I had the whole Amazon ecosystem there where they could trust okay, it’s going to work, but also here’s other options that if I wanted to go somewhere else or see something else, I could see that.

So brands will get a discount when they send traffic there and get conversions on the Amazon fees, which is helpful. TikTok is a big one. Amazon and TikTok are getting very close so you can leverage TikTok traffic and get some additional benefits there. To rank higher for a keyword, you need to tag the traffic with that keyword.[00:25:00] 

You need to have that keyword on your listing, but it’s all about, how much are you selling based on that keyword. And then when it comes to the other things that you can see on Amazon or experience on Amazon, you can’t do other places. It comes down to what’s the perception of your brand. So when you’re on Amazon, people trust you more.

And what I found out accidentally, because I, the order I did, it didn’t have a lot of consideration, but we did Amazon first. And then we went out to retailers. We found out that the physical storefront retailers, including people buying from us on fare. They weren’t going to go to our website to check us out.

They weren’t going to Google us and see what our reviews are. Our Google My Business page was going to say they went to Amazon because they knew that they could see sales velocity on Amazon. They could see reviews on Amazon. And it’s much more difficult to fake at scale on Amazon where I could upload a thousand fake reviews on my website because I own the website and I can do whatever I want to it.

And they can’t do anything about that. Most [00:26:00] retailers aren’t sophisticated enough to go use the tools I have access to, to see how big is this brand? Where’s the Google keyword planner to see how many people search for this brand. I can go on Amazon and be like, Oh, they’re advertising there. I can see these big brand pages, right?

I trust them. So that was an accidental win that I didn’t know about or expect, but I’m glad I did it and had a bunch of reviews on Amazon talking to them because they could see that I was big. retailers on fair would specifically say they don’t they only buy companies that don’t sell on Amazon i’m like you’re buying my product so I sell on Amazon and but I protected the price point so I wasn’t going to undercut them on Amazon so they respected it and they knew that they weren’t gonna have somebody at their store googling it and finding it for half price on Amazon.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah interesting, so okay so I’ve Dirted out my brand. I’m looking to move to Amazon. What expectations should I have? 

Ryan Garrow: You’re going to have some patience because new brands are I like to say you’re upsetting homeostasis. There’s a bunch of brands existing, they’re competing.

[00:27:00] And then you saw another competitor in there. It’s going to shuffle and mix things up before it settles again and everybody figures out where they are. And so have patience and expect to have to test and measure a lot. You have to test and measure your images. You’re going to have to test and measure your titles.

Description, which ad, which keywords make sense. A keyword that makes sense on Google may not make sense on Amazon. There may be lots of volume for this keyword on Amazon, or on Google, and not very much on Amazon. So you’ve got to see how people are searching Amazon a little bit differently. You can put ads on your competitors on Amazon, which is something you can’t do on Google.

If your competitor allows AdSense on Google, you should just do it, but that’s very rare now. On Amazon, you can get a listing right there on there. On their product page and take some of their brand traffic and then to go into some of your stuff. DXO or CRO is necessary on Amazon. You need to be testing these things.

Jon MacDonald: And saying, Hey, it’s interesting. We’ve been getting a lot of inquiries about that. 

Ryan Garrow: As you should. I think it’s a huge thing. I think brands similar to Google, they just aren’t usually as sophisticated on looking at the traffic patterns. [00:28:00] Again, you can manipulate conversion rates very easily, but you want to find non brand traffic.

What does it convert at? You can’t just take your conversion rate as a whole. So we had to get pretty sophisticated when looking at non brand traffic. Where’s it converting? Cause we did some math problems when we were investigating this traffic to our website would come cheaper on Google than it would on Amazon to our store.

But Amazon was converting it five to six times the rate it was on Google. So it was worth it from a business profitability standpoint to sell on Amazon, just because the conversion rates were so high, like Amazon, there was such a trust there that people will go just click buy, where the price point is very impulsive, under 20 bucks, very simple for somebody, yeah, I’ll take that, it’ll be fine.

You’re going to be doing a lot of testing and measuring on the Amazon. It’s just not, you’re not going to be able to put it up and then assume it’s going to work and run ads and be done and then go to the next channel or next marketplace. 

Jon MacDonald: Then maybe I’ll do an offshoot of the good that’s just sunk because I think it’d be interesting.

Ryan Garrow: Amazon, the good or the good Amazon. He’s probably in trouble. He’s using the Amazon name. 

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, I was just going to say, we probably can’t do that, but [00:29:00] this has been a really interesting topic regardless. And I feel like I know a lot more about Amazon now. Where to go, how to start it. I’m still cautious.

I still think that I probably, if I was starting a brand, I wouldn’t go to Amazon first, but I now know what I need to do, so thank you, Jon. 

Ryan Garrow: Let me know when you start that brand up. 

Jon MacDonald: I will.

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

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 119): Amazon Growth – What Brands Need To Do To Succeed appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

This week on Drive & Convert, Jon and Ryan discuss how to quickly validate ideas so you can launch site updates with confidence.

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. The process of smoke testing (and where the name comes from).
2. The benefits of using smoke testing for quick validation.  
3. The 5 steps of the smoke testing process.

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better ecommerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. 

Ryan Garrow: All right, Jon, you know me fairly well. And you know that my default is to come up with really cool ideas and move fast and break things and figure it out as I go.

I build the car as I drive it. And it doesn’t work all the time. And for most of my ideas, my wife shoots them down from the very beginning. And I don’t even get a chance to go work fast and try to break it because she’s it’s a bad idea. But I’ve learned if I can quickly bake something up and be like, I think it’s a good idea.

Let me, I’m not executing the idea, but I’m just going to do this really quick thing to prove that it’s not dumb. I have a much better shot with my wife to get an idea through the system and get approval in the family business ideas. And I thought I was pretty unique in this. And then you are, you’ve told me about this cool idea you have about or this new thing that I’ve never heard of about how companies do this on their websites all the time.[00:01:00] 

And there’s even terms for it. Something about smoking and, but it lets us get, you can do it with less data. You don’t have to go through the full A/B testing to prove an idea. It’s quicker. I, at the end of the day, it appears that we get to move fast on websites with this cool idea of yours with a lot more confidence.

And I, for me, that is I’m all in on this. And so how do we do this? Tell me what I need to smoke to get this thing working. 

Jon MacDonald: Yeah there’s a lot of options for what you could smoke for sure, but we’ll leave that for another day. Especially in Oregon. Yes, exactly. Look, whether you’re building products or marketing campaigns, time and money are just precious commodities.

So I hear you. It makes sense. You want to move fast with confidence, right? There’s so much pressure these days to make the right decision the first time. And that is something that we haven’t really seen a lot over the years. It’s always been something in entrepreneurship and businesses, but lately we’re finding that experimentation is important. Nobody wants to try [00:02:00] things and fail for a year until they find something that actually moves them towards their goals. And I don’t think this is a generational thing. I hear that quite a bit, but I do think it’s because marketing and the technology stacks around that has been moving so quickly that everybody expects to be able to optimize their site quickly now too.

And A/B testing can take some time. It really can to do it right. I think this is where a term I’m calling smoke testing becomes really invaluable. And I say I’m calling, we should talk a little bit about what it is and where it came from. We’ll get into that today. But it’s not a term that I invented or that The Good invented.

It’s a commonly used term in optimization. Actually a lot of different fields, but smoke testing is providing a quick and early feedback on your ideas, the functionality you add to your website, your products. It allows you to validate concepts without really just jumping into full scale development.

So it comes from lean methodologies [00:03:00] to some degree, right? Helps you make informed decisions and reduce the risk of costly mistakes. That’s the best way to think about it. 

Ryan Garrow: I think that sounds amazing. I would, I probably want to use this in a bunch of other areas, but what does it, what does smoke testing mean when you’re speaking about website and DXO?

Jon MacDonald: Yeah, so smoke testing is a process where you would test the basic functionality of an idea or a product before you implement it fully. The goal is to capture valuable feedback. Before you spend time or money or any other resources in developing something for real. Normally we would have done this with A/B testing, right?

But in A/B testing, you often have to develop both options, right? It does require development resources, right? Here, your goal is. To run a smoke test and if it passes, you move forward with confidence. If it fails, you just abandon it without having spent a lot of time and money. Smoke testing also goes by the name of confidence testing or validation testing.

So in short, it’s gonna [00:04:00] help you validate your idea And smoke test can even preempt the MVP, or in lean, what you might call minimum viable product concept. 

Ryan Garrow: Got it. I don’t want to call it confidence testing because that’s not nearly as cool as saying, Hey, we’re going to go through some smoke tests and figure out what works.

Jon MacDonald: And in reality, if we’re getting super technical, which I know we probably don’t need to do, but confidence testing is a completely different thing as well. 

Ryan Garrow: Got it. Okay. So what, so give me an example, so I can put my brain around this. What is, what If you’re going to do smoke tests on a site, what does that walk me through that?

Jon MacDonald: Okay. Let’s use maybe hypothetical online media site. I’ll just throw that out there. And they want to implement a snooze my subscription feature. So I subscribe to the economist who’s one of our clients and I want to snooze my subscription, but the economist doesn’t really know if it’s going to stop people from canceling, right?

They just say, Hey, this might be a downgrade opportunity, or, Hey, I’m going on vacation for a while. I’m not going to use this, [00:05:00] whatever it might be. So what they could do is instead of building out the full functionality on their site, they could add a button that says, as part of the cancellation process, offer the option instead, I want to snooze my subscription.

And they would measure how many clicks they’re getting on that. 

Ryan Garrow: He’s put an event tag on there like a GA event tag. 

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Whatever tracking you’re using, GA, et cetera. Yes. Now there are two ways to look at this. Maybe the button doesn’t really do anything but take you to a simple page that says this features.

Okay. Coming soon. Thanks for your interest or in this type of situation, what I would probably want to do is have it connect you to a customer service, right? Something that they can help you implement this, but it’s not a fully automated process at this point, right? It might be something like, Oh, great.

We’ll pause your subscription. We’ll be back in touch to confirm. You can just do something that simple, right? Okay. 

Ryan Garrow: Got it. 

Jon MacDonald: Where it’s very manual, because you’re not sure if people want this. Don’t build out the functionality. Just do whatever is the [00:06:00] absolute minimum. 

Ryan Garrow: I can even imagine that you would just even put like a an email button like snooze at and it would just go to customer support and be like, Hey, this isn’t quite ready or to manual process.

And you’d be like, Oh, I can still pause their subscription for three weeks. Exactly. 

Jon MacDonald: The idea here though, is not what happens after they click the button. Really it’s the number of clips on that button. That’s going to help you understand how many people would consider using such a feature. Because there’s a whole optimization you can do of that feature later, right?

You could go out and say, Hey what are the different, you could test the different pause lengths, right? You could smoke test a hundred different things after you test that people even care about this. So the goal here is what’s the smallest thing you can test that’s going to give you the right direction to head in.

Then you’re going to continue to run a ton of these smoke tests at each step. 

Ryan Garrow: Got it. Cause what in theory you could be. testing this. So snooze subscription. And in reality, 100 percent of them are going to cancel anyway. So why delay this way for [00:07:00] whatever reason? 

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. So why even offer it then? You’re just like, okay, instead I’m going to focus on smoke testing ways, other ways to get people to not cancel. 

Ryan Garrow: Okay. So why do we, I guess before I asked for a why, where did smoke testing come from? Cause it doesn’t, he don’t smoke. Seems a weird analogy in my head at least.

Jon MacDonald: I hear you. And I agree. The first time I heard it, I was Oh, that’s interesting. Okay. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard. I went to, have you ever heard of, there’s a website out there called HIGHdeas. It’s a hilarious site if you ever just want to kill some time, it’s people who basically it’s like ideas they came up with while they were high.

Okay. And I was like, so is this just like coming up with random ideas and testing them? And you’re just like, Oh, whatever. And it’s a fun play on words or whatever. And it turns out, no, it’s got much more boring kind of background to it. 

Ryan Garrow: Dang it. I’m going to probably go with that as my original idea though.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. So we don’t really know where the term came from. If you do, I did research on this. Natalie on my team has written an article about this. It comes out this week at the [00:08:00] good. com. She did a ton of research on it. We don’t know where it came from, but there are two origin stories that popped up more than once.

So one is that it comes from the plumbing industry. This is because they use smoke and to test for leaks and cracks in pipes, so it’s a quick way to identify a problem. So another possible origin that came up multiple times was from hardware testing, like hardware, like electronic devices. where they are initially switched on and tested for signs of smoke in their components to make sure that everything’s wired together.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Smoke is bad. Okay. 

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. So it’s a quick and easy way to be like, was everything wired? Okay. Oh yeah. Okay. Nothing smoking. We can move it along in QC. But nothing’s going to blow up. We’ve already tested to make sure it’s not going to blow up right away. So I would hope that now that I think about that, that every single device that plugs in that I’m using has gone through smoke testing.

Probably not the case, but I would hope that would be the case. 

Ryan Garrow: There’s probably some things on Amazon that haven’t gone through [00:09:00] that. 

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Don’t go to Temu or whatever that is. So it’s hard to say if either of these are true, but I think they are potential smoke testing origins and they are feasible uses of smoke testing is a larger type of context, but it really has evolved into a widely used term in software development, and I think that’s what’s cool about this. It’s a subset of tests used to assess if a software build is stable enough for the next development stage. It identifies bugs that kind of just block the release of a product pretty quickly.

However, In classic marketing fashion, because marketers like to latch onto everything, growth teams have really adopted and redefined smoke testing as a quick tool to validate ideas. So that’s how we’re going to talk about it or I’m talking about it. 

Announcer: You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on ecommerce growth.

Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with ecommerce brands to help convert more of their [00:10:00] visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes.

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you. 

Ryan Garrow: Okay, I get the concept. , but in a basic Shopify store. Why even use it? Just find an app, try something. Is there something Yeah, that makes it more applicable than other things.

Jon MacDonald: Oh, for sure. Look, as I mentioned earlier, the beauty of smoke testing is that it provides quick validation without requiring significant resources. And that’s where I think for midsize or smaller e comm sites, it really can make sense, right? So you get to find out if an initiative has genuine interest or demand before you invest anything into that, right?

That means smoke tests, save time and money. But feedback is also another benefit. So if you put out a preliminary [00:11:00] idea, you get to quickly learn what potential users think and feel about it. So that’s also really valuable, right? And third, they’re just great tools for prioritization of functionality and features.

If your resources are limited, it’s important to focus on what’s going to bring you the most value. And that’s where smoke testing can really come in. 

Ryan Garrow: No, I am, I’m a big fan of this. I assume I can’t go smoke test five things at once on a site because that would be a lot of buttons that probably don’t do what you intend for them to do.

Yeah, you don’t want to. 

Jon MacDonald: The idea here is to not. have the consumer know that you’re smoke testing something. That should be your goal. What is the minimum you can do without making it so obvious that you have, are putting up a facade? That’s what I would look at. 

Ryan Garrow: Okay. I think that’s a great goal for this then.

Okay. And I love it because, we work with a ton of small businesses that don’t have traffic. For full A/B tests on a lot of things where the finance is to jump into the deep end with a DXO organization like yourself. So it’s in my mind, this is really [00:12:00] helping somebody say, I got to do something, but I don’t, and I have some ideas, but I don’t know yet what it’s going to be.

So I’m going to, I’ve got these few, like list of smoke tests I want to test rather than try all of them all at once. What are the steps I would take on the first one to say, okay, this is the smoke test I want. How do I know that I’ve gone through the process to either say it’s a good idea or a bad idea?

Jon MacDonald: Yeah fortunately, I think there’s simplicity in smoke testing. So setting one up is really straightforward, right? I think what we could do is break this down into a handful of steps because I like to make a process of everything, as you 

Ryan Garrow: do, yes. 

Jon MacDonald: I think there are five steps that I would do here and look at this.

The first is, of course, start with the end in mind. So establish your acceptance criteria, right? Okay. If you understand what your go, no go decision is, you’re going to have clear terms for how the outcomes of your tests will determine what you do next. Okay. So for example, just have a definition of what success is.

So if we generate x dollars in preorders for the new product within the next month…great [00:13:00] question, right? So I think this is a great way to test if you should even launch a new program, right? Or a new product or anything like that, right? You just basically say, Hey, we’re going to put up a product detail page, not have the product, and then just say it’s pre order. And how many pre orders can we get before we launch the product?

What do we need? You can always say, We won’t charge your card until we ship. And then just email people and be like, Oh, really? Sorry. We canceled that because there just wasn’t enough interest. If you are super interested in something similar, here’s another product. So the first step is.

What’s your acceptance criteria? Then second is design that simple experiment. Keep in mind though, that this should be really simple, right? You might create a landing page for that product and collect pre orders like I just talked about, or build something that’s just quick and dirty, but still presentable like the pause my subscription functionality that I mentioned, right?

And I’ll use functionality [00:14:00] with air quotes because you’re, again, you’re not building the functionality. The third step, I would think, should be to drive traffic to the experiment, okay? If you don’t have traffic on your site, I would find other ways to put it in front of your audience. And how you do this depends on the nature of your test and, of course, who you’re trying to get to interact with it.

But if you’re building an online experiment, excuse me, online service or experience of any type, and you don’t test that with fake AdWords campaigns ahead of time, I think you’re crazy. So you really should be trying to drive traffic and you’re going to have to pay for that. But AdWords is a great tool for that.

You’ll see how many people click on it and go in. Yeah. I feel you. Speaking my language. All right. And he’ll help you set up that fake AdWords campaign and get fake. 

Ryan Garrow: And fake means that you’re. You’re going to buy some keywords and measure interaction rates and see if it has potential to convert and drive revenue, right?

Because this is something that’s going to be important. Yeah. 

Jon MacDonald: It’s not something you’re planning on doing for the longterm right up front. It may be an optimized campaign for instance, [00:15:00] right? You may be spending more than what you would want to spend because your quality score is low or whatever. You’re just trying to get something quick and dirty done, right?

And then you really are going to want to work to optimize that campaign and make sure you’re spending appropriately. Once you say, okay, yeah, I’ve validated this. So far we have established the criteria, design the experiment, drive traffic to it. Once you’re ready to drive traffic, launch it and then track that engagement, right?

Let it run and collect data according to that success criteria we set up in step one. But while you’re tracking, you may come up with new ideas. This is almost always what happens. You’re going to have that idea, be tracking it and get some data and you’re immediately going on, shut it off and say, Oh, I’m going to do this instead.

Resist that temptation. The first thing you should do is document those ideas. You can run additional experiments or adjust it to inform better decisions, but give it a little bit of time. How much time is really up to you. This is a smoke test. After all, you don’t want to do. a ton of invest a ton of time, [00:16:00] but don’t run it for a couple hours.

Don’t run it for a day, right? Give it a, a little bit of time there. Lastly, what you’re going to want to do is make your decision pretty cut and dry. But the reality here is you need to understand whether the results warrant you going forward with the idea. And that’s really it. So hopefully at this point you’ll have as much data as possible to support your decision, but that won’t always be the case, right?

Sometimes you just need to make a judgment call and that’s okay with smoke testing. If that’s the case, you might also decide to do an additional test with a little more effort. But again, don’t spend a lot of time making your decisions. This is really all about being fast and decisive. 

Ryan Garrow: And I think for, if I’m looking at this, there’s a couple of things like it, my decision making would come down to the amount of data I have would be like, would my life, what is that enough data for my wife?

Can she say, we could do this over here in the business world? Like my business partner, the executive team, is this enough data to say, yes, we can invest in this. And I do that a lot, actually, logical position. I’m like, Hey, we got to do something [00:17:00] quick. We can’t, we’re not going to put a bunch of resources behind something that may or may not work.

So Garrow’s going to go do some, thing I’m over here that. Maybe it does something, maybe it doesn’t, but it doesn’t break anything to do the test. And that’s really been one of my overarching goals for a lot of things, but I can say I have really simplified this process into one step, Jon. Ask Jon.

And then it’s much easier. You just, I just have one step. 

Jon MacDonald: Love that. If I’m a user, you’re, the goal here is to get user feedback before implementation, right? So yes, I think before diving into development, it’s always smart to gather feedback, whether that’s a smoke test or a Jon test or whatever you want to call it.

I think smoke testing, what we talked about today, I think it’s practical. I think it’s efficient. Let’s you test the waters before you really commit any resources. And I think that’s just a great ethos for optimization in general, right? Too much stuff with CRO over the years has been flooding the market with things that are [00:18:00] either too simple, like just do this checklist, whether or not you know, it’s going to work for you or too complicated.

Like you got to run all these A/B tests are going to take months. and a lot of resources and development and everything else. This, I think, is a great medium. It’s a great way to get quick feedback with data backing it and move forward. And it doesn’t take building out your ideas to give yourself proof or your wife proof that it will work.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, this is honestly one of my favorite ideas because it can work across an organization of any size, which tends to be some of the limitations with a lot of the things you and I know is as out there in the market or available to companies, because we work with a lot of large ones that says, man, this is a super cool program, but if you’re doing less than 20 million a year, it’s just not going to work or not.

You’re not gonna be able to afford it. Whereas this is, man, if you can just get a simple thing on a site, which, Upwork for 50 bucks may get you enough development talent to get something done on your site for a smoke test. So I love it. 

Jon MacDonald: And with Shopify, a lot of these things can be done in the editor without you really [00:19:00] needing to do anything, hire a developer at all.

So something to consider. 

Ryan Garrow: Nope. I love it, Jon. Thanks for telling me about smoke tests. It had nothing to do with what I originally thought about when you said smoke. 

Jon MacDonald: Me neither. I was, my hypothesis was quickly shot down by the team as well. Yeah. All right. 

Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 118): Launching Site Updates With Confidence appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

This week on Drive & Convert, Jon and Ryan discuss preparing for holiday 2024 and the recommended tech stack for success. 

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. What companies like Google and other industry leaders are predicting for the 2024 holiday season.
2. Why it’s critical to start planning earlier than ever.
3. Ryan’s recommendations for building a holiday tech stack.

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer: [00:00:00] You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon MacDonald: All right, Ryan, it seems like we just did this a couple of weeks ago, but it must mean we’re getting old. It’s a holiday prep time again, right? Every year it hits so quick, and here we are on entering Q3, it’s time to start thinking about this, and your team at LP, they’re in the thick of it, I assume, right?

Ryan Garrow: Oh yeah, it feels like it almost doesn’t end actually, because we’re so quickly into the holiday prep. Meetings with platforms and clients and yeah, 

Jon MacDonald: I know you had your, you call it a partner connect event last week, sadly, and I was super disappointed when I heard of the dates because I already had family travel scheduled.

So you got to give me the rundown. How was it? What were the highlights? Let me know. 

Ryan Garrow: It was fun. I did miss [00:01:00] having you there. The value add on our stage is always good. So we missed that for sure. We’ve always adjusted as we’ve done these things. This is, I think, our third one in this format. We’ve been doing kind of partner connect events since man, 2017, maybe, but we had a bunch of clients come in, we had some partners come in and we challenged our speakers this year, more so than in the past to really do more of a keynote, like thought leadership presentation.

And they were. Solid. We had, this person, Matt Dornfeld was on stage for feedonomics and he’s good. That guy is a phenomenal speaker. I’ve seen him on stages around the country at Ecom events, and he’s just, it was impressive. The one that he was willing to come out and do this for us, but also talk about the numbers around growth in marketplaces.

And it’s crazy. He even had some data around TikTok and the growth there and how TikTok and Amazon are working together. And it is 

Jon MacDonald: that seems lethal to have those two together. 

Ryan Garrow: It does. And that’s, we have the political thing playing out with TikTok. And so if they are forced to whenever that [00:02:00] deadline’s coming, I forget when it is.

But if that deadline ever comes up, I foresee some type of thing with Amazon happening, since Amazon’s driving so much of their off Amazon traffic from TikTok right now, if you’re driving traffic to Amazon right now, and you’re listening to this, make sure you’re doing some stuff with tick tock because that integration is getting, slash awesome from a marketing standpoint.

Jon MacDonald: I love it. 

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. So 

Jon MacDonald: speaking of very large corporations that might get split up, you had a day, you had a day at Google, right? 

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. Yes. 

Jon MacDonald: What are they saying about holidays that doom and gloom, or is it? Bigger and better. What should we be thinking about? Because the economy, depending on who you talk to, is either amazing or in a hole.

And I can’t figure out which one it is right now. 

Ryan Garrow: I can’t either. It feels like there’s issues, but then you read a lot of the data and business publications, and it doesn’t seem that bad. I think it’s been over 15 years with Google that I’ve been working with them. I have yet for them to ever say this period is going to be smaller.

Like it never in a holiday period is it ever Oh yeah, it’s going to be [00:03:00] smaller. So prepare for that. It’s always going to be bigger whether it is or not. Google’s going to tell us it’s going to be that way. So they’re painting very rosy pictures and helping the strategy, which is good. But our day at Google was pretty good.

They are really jumping in all in on YouTube. And they have been for a while. I’ve talked about this before, but every earnings call, they it’s always YouTube is not doing great from a numbers perspective from the analysts. They’re just always upset about YouTube numbers. But. They are really doing a lot.

We talked about vertical videos before. There’s a lot of really phenomenal things they’re doing to help improve tracking on YouTube and push people from the top of the funnel through. So make sure you’re doing video period. And we did see some cool data though. So 2023 holiday with Google, it was up 17 percent ad spend was up 17 percent year over year, which is a lot considering the growth of e com and online sales and even retail sales was only up I want to say 5%.

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. And so you could infer that has maintained what people were [00:04:00] spending over COVID has maintained if it was up 17%. 

Ryan Garrow: Yes. And that’s basically CPC increases. So what will, Google’s world, they’re going to be up, even if search volume is down and sales volume is down because CPCs are going up and there’s.

Some, tinfoil hat people that believe that Google’s manipulating CPCs, which, maybe in this, it is in their benefit to do so it is, so there’s probably some of that. Google’s estimating that CPC is going to be up 5 to 15 percent this year. So if we have flat search volume, You can see where the 10 to 15 percent growth in ads.

Jon MacDonald: Don’t they control that data? They know the number that they’re going to aim for, right? 

Ryan Garrow: What we are seeing is as the pie is maintaining or shrinking, you have other advertisers coming in or advertisers need to get more aggressive to hit their growth goals. And so if the pie isn’t up 10 percent in size, You’re going to have to get more aggressive with your ROAS targets, your bidding algorithm, like you’ve got to push harder.

And those that push harder will get the customer [00:05:00] because if you don’t show, you’ve got no shot. So you’re going to need to be aggressive just like every other holiday season. But I would say if you look at Google trends, which is a cool site, if you haven’t been there, go play around on that. We are seeing less search volume in a lot of our clients industries.

So if you’re seeing that. And you want to grow, you have to get a larger piece of the pie. So get aggressive. And then this year, I mentally wasn’t prepared for this. I should have been, but Cyber Monday’s in December this year. So we have, it’s actually working out to five less shopping days this year in the calendar of holiday, like Thanksgiving to Christmas.

So that’s a problem for a lot of companies. You’re going to much more condensed. Pay 

Jon MacDonald: more and have less time to, to spend. 

Ryan Garrow: I’m guessing very high. Volume sales day. So that’ll probably be the message that comes out of all the people like adobe and all the people watching Revenue online, but we say oh we have the biggest sales days ever yes, because we’re in such a condensed period of time people are going to be buying more often during this [00:06:00] condensed time period So it means your opportunity to recover from mistakes Like if you miss on this tuesday a revenue target or sales because you weren’t pushing hard enough You’re not gonna have a lot of time to make that up So you’re going to need to be watching very closely on your data.

The bigger you are from a spend standpoint, the more often your teams are gonna need to be meeting and connecting. So slack’s gonna be important. We have some clients that meet, 7:00 AM and then they’re gonna meet again at 11:00 AM and then there’s probably gonna be a post day meeting, late east coast to say, Hey what do we need to pivot for tomorrow?

And if you’re spending six figures a day or higher. We have some clients spending seven figures a day during holiday, that’s going to be important. And smaller spenders, maybe you’re meeting daily with your team. So just be aware. It’s also an election year. Yay. While that won’t impact holiday search shopping stuff, the lot of the lead up to holiday is building those lists and capturing people that are going to be, for example, Amazon prime day in October will have an impact and people will be [00:07:00] buying holiday gifts there.

And we saw that. election year, we went back to 2020, a lot of that mid to upper funnel is going to be impacted a lot. And so because those impressions on meta, YouTube, display networks, the DSPs, if you’re on the trade desk, things like that, a lot of inventory is going to be going to election ads. So even if you’re not competing directly in the election space, that ad can’t on meta can go to a candidate or it can go to you.

And the candidates have a lot of money to spend in a very condensed period of time. Local politics ads are usually Two to three weeks out where they get aggressive, we’ll see presidential campaigns, senators, those will probably be back in the late September, early October, when they start getting a little more aggressive, that’s going to be something to be aware of and watch performance max campaigns in Google do use YouTube and display ads.

And there’s a remarketing component. Those ad slots will likely get more expensive. So if you’re using your performance max outside of just shopping, It’s something to be aware of. You might have to adjust your target return on ad [00:08:00] spend because of the mid and upper funnel being more expensive. 

Jon MacDonald: Knowing all of this, what do you think is going to happen this holiday season?

Ryan Garrow: If I say it, you can almost bet on it being different than what I say. So my motto is always plan and then pivot because I think something’s going to happen and then it’s going to be different. So 

Jon MacDonald: well, look, you’re just adding fodder for our recap episode 200, where we’ll say like we did in episode 100 where we were wrong and go back and play the clips and then comment.

Oh, yeah. So 

Ryan Garrow: I’m of the opinion that many brands are going to be slower this year than 23. And we’re already seeing that happen, through Q3. I don’t expect some magical search volume to come back in Q4 to save the day. The date on the platform is going to tell us that holiday sales grew like that happens every year, but then we see the individual.

Merchants seeing not that data some of it’s going to be, inflation based like sales volume, you know They can adjust for inflation, but it’s not always there I don’t think click cost inflation on both meta google probably some TikTok increased in costs. They’re going to be there So I think the [00:09:00] smart sellers are going to get aggressive in September And there’s a real cool data point that google brought out that there are A large percentage of holiday buyers that have done all of their shopping before Thanksgiving and they start buying that 20%, I believe, start shopping in September.

I am the weird one in that none of my holiday shopping gets done before December. Like it’s just December 23rd. Yeah, I am that guy on Christmas Eve or 23rd, like at the store. It’s usually, generally speaking, a bunch of other men and we move quickly and are impulse buying. We probably all overspend. So just what I’ve seen over the years.

Yes, I am that guy. Start earlier to be successful. I think if you’re planning all your spend to start on Thanksgiving, yeah, I think you’re going to be in trouble and build lists and plan for sales. So you’re going to need to have a few different sales periods. Likely, like there’s going to be that prime day in October.

You’re going to want to layer on Halloween is a big shopping day. Not all of it is Halloween based. So you might need some promotions around that. Companies that are effectively using SMS and email are going [00:10:00] to grow a lot more. We had attentive speak on stage at our event last week. It blew me away, their numbers.

It borderline thought they were lying. If they weren’t actually pulling the data out of their system. They said that their advertisers The people using attentive email and SMS were up 58 percent year over year versus holiday 22. That’s an astounding number. I think they have some good brands, which helps, but the simple fact that they are seeing that companies that are using their technology grow much more than average, the holiday was up, I think 5.

9 percent in revenue. And you have a group of, they’re pretty large. So a very large group. We’re up 58%. That’s enough data to say something is working in email and SMS for companies. Pay attention to that. 

Announcer: You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers [00:11:00] and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering paper click management transcribed search engine optimization and website design services to brands of all sizes.

If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon MacDonald: And those are owned channels. They cost a lot less. To reach then that 17% rise at Google 

Ryan Garrow: for sure. As we’ve taken on more email and SMS clients over the last few months, what we’ve seen is most of these brands some of them were managing internally. Some were working with another agency. They were.

Under emailing and under sending text messages. They didn’t have a good cadence around it They didn’t have enough granularity in their audiences There is some significant room for most brands to push harder and you’re not gonna annoy you. Hopefully you don’t get to the annoyance level But you can be more consistent and probably get a little more aggressive in how often you spend, send those messages.

A cool thing that’s come up more [00:12:00] recently, and I expect there’s probably going to be some blowback, but a lot of companies are looking for that monthly reoccurring revenue that they can bank on. And so a lot of them are doing that with subscriptions, which is good. You’ve got to be looking at that. But a new one that I think has more value is paid memberships.

Kind of like that loyalty program, but. And you’re paying for access to stuff 

Jon MacDonald: like the Costco model. 

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And the, and you could, some companies do it for free. Like I’ve seen Liquid IV has a free membership program that gives you benefits to certain things. And I think that, so it’s like a loyalty program, but they’re calling it a membership.

And there’s another company I saw the name is escaping me, but they did a, maybe was it laundry sauce? Maybe I’ll have to go back in my notes and look, but they did a paid membership where you’re paying either monthly or annually, and you’re getting access to special sales and promotions. They give you some free product, free, you’re paying for it, but they’re giving you something in return for that.

I think it was in this case, the one I saw today was a candle that they’re giving you and really big. And one of the companies in that space, I dug into their tech [00:13:00] yesterday pretty heavily with one of the people in their company. And they’re saying that of your database, they’re going to get five to 6 percent of them to Take this membership and that’s going to be a, a large percentage of, it’s going to be a large profit number when you’re charging 5 percent of your email SMS database that they’re going to message this out to between 100 and 150 a year, they think it needs to be under 150, but Every company should probably test memberships.

I think that would be the punch line. I think there’s a lot of opportunity. So I love that. Paid memberships. 

Jon MacDonald: That’s a great tip to take away. Continuing on this with the actionable stuff, I also have heard that you have assembled a recommendation for tech stack of apps for holiday success. 

Ryan Garrow: I have. So I’m moving a little bit out of my lane here and going instead of talking just traffic, I’m like, 

Jon MacDonald: You’re really selling it, right?

Ryan Garrow: There’s a group of companies that I think most e-commerce brands need to be aware of and add into their tech stack before holiday, because I think it’s really going to drive revenue. Some of [00:14:00] these won’t drive necessarily traffic, but they’re going to bring that traffic back or just help you do more.

Some of it will be conversion. But one of the coolest ones that most of you haven’t heard of is a company called Vive Recover. This company seriously kicks ass. They have a great couple of founders, super smart. And what they have figured out is how to recover abandoned carts outside of the city. Email and SMS channels.

So email and SMS, you’re going to send somebody a text. They have to be double opted in to an attentive or a Clavio or one of those systems email. They’ve got to be in your email list with permission to email. That’s very few people coming to your site for the first time. It’s a library cover actually has the ability and it’s legal to text abandoned cart people.

Because you can manually text people one time without getting in trouble. And they recover an astounding amount of revenue. Like we had a client test it. The first month they added six figures of recovered revenue on one site. That’s an insane amount of money [00:15:00] in a test. And so I highly recommend every company get this on there.

I’ve worked a deal. So if you reach out to me, all these companies, by the way, I’m talking about, I have a deal for. So just reach out to me because you can get a no setup, No contract. You only pay if you get sales from this company. Oh wow. It’s phenomenal. They were Shopify only, but by the time this recording gets to you, they will have built out BigCommerce version for me, because we have a lot of clients on BigCommerce as well.

And then soon after will be coming Woo and Magento. So reach out to me if you’re not on Shopify, but if you’re on Shopify, reach out to me. Super simple as of when we’re recording this. It’s already done. It’s just unbelievably easy. Second one would be Triple Whale. So we’ve talked about them before.

They’re a great reporting system for those of us that are just disappointed in GA4. And they just released, I think it’s called their 3. 0 version, but it got way better. So I liked it before, and now I love it because they’ve, what they’ve built into it is so awesome. And they’re on BigCommerce and WooCommerce by the time this podcast released.

And so you’ve got the three biggest [00:16:00] platforms for e commerce out there that TripleWhale now works with. And they have this really cool, I’ll highlight three things. They have an AI system built into it. It really helps you with analysis. And being able to find information so you can actually just type what you’re looking for into the system and it’ll help pull that data to you without having to go try to find a certain report because I always hate taking for reports.

They have a creative analysis so you can go into your system specifically good for meta. So if you’re not advertising on meta you probably wouldn’t use this much but you can see in this campaign here’s the five ads I had here’s the audience I’m targeting which one was winning. from an ad standpoint.

Okay. And then in the system, you can actually start iterating on it. We’re saying, Hey, we like this one. Let’s get rid of these four, put four more in a super, super cool what they’ve done there. And then they’re allowing you to build custom reports, very similar to Looker. And so if you’ve done a lot of stuff in Looker, which we have a logical position, we’ll see, we can take this report and basically build that in triple whale.

And have all these connections already built in. Anyway, if you’re on Shopify or [00:17:00] BigCommerce or WooCommerce, we’ve got a discount for all of you. If you’re small, sub 500, 000, and revenue, last 12 months, we’ve got you for 99, and that takes you to a million. That’s a super discount when you’re doing stuff like that.

I think it’s only 67 percent off or something. And if you can’t 

Jon MacDonald: spend a hundred dollars to not be flying blind, I don’t know what you’re doing in business. So please do, you gotta have some of these numbers and triple well, I agree deal, no deal, whatever. They’ve been around forever have known them from very early days when I met the founder and he was literally just building it.

There were a couple of guys that built it together, but, and they started out of Columbus, Ohio where I grew up. So there we 

Ryan Garrow: go. Hey. Something good. A couple of things good coming out of Ohio now, Jon MacDonald and Triple Whale. 

Jon MacDonald: Yeah we’ll see if Ohio says that about me. 

Ryan Garrow: I can say it for Ohio. Yes, you have to have Triple Whale.

I think you’re crazy if you don’t have it. There’s a company called No Commerce. It’s, I can’t even say they’re flying out of the radar now. Like they only, they have very few employees. They’ve done a ton. They punch way out of their weight class as far as what they’re able to impact. 

Ryan Garrow: They do post purchase surveys and post purchase surveys are so [00:18:00] simple.

But they just work. It helps you understand where’s traffic’s coming from. You can’t see in triple well as easily because there’s a lot of impression things that happen that you’re not going to be aware of, especially with all of these influencers on meta tick tock, all these things happening. And so it works on almost every platform.

It’s now free forever. Like they have a free system. That will give you two questions forever. If you start on TikTok and you like create an ad account there, it’s really simple. Just click a button and get it and it integrates with triple whale and integrates with your platform, integrates with attentive play, all the things.

Jon MacDonald: And I always love these because as a consumer, I almost always just click the button and answer the question. Part of that is I’m sympathetic to their ROAS and to try and help them understand where they’re getting the best money. But I would also say I love the. data because the analytics can tell you where people came from, probably that last touch attribution, but no comments is going to tell us what people remembered the first touch was.

And that’s really so important as a [00:19:00] brand. If you’re going to dump your marketing dollars somewhere, you might as well dump it where people remember they learned about you, whether or not that was actually the first touch or not. Yeah. Yeah. Doesn’t really matter to me. It matters. What touch does the consumer remember?

Because that’s where I should be spending the money. 

Ryan Garrow: And I think, as we know, like people are getting touched all over the place for brands to make it work. You can’t just be one channel, one channel company. You have to go all over and no commerce makes it so easy to just get the data. And so reach out to me.

I’ll make sure you get it for free. The final one is Shopify only. So this is why it’s at the end, because it doesn’t apply to all of you out there in e commerce world, but there’s probably things if you can’t get this system, then you need to be thinking about how you do it for your system. But a company called wonderment, they handle post purchase stuff.

So they’ll build, they’ll easily let you build a post purchase landing page for tracking shipments. giving information. So what they do is they proactively communicate dates that things are going to happen. Hey, we got your order. Hey, we shipped your order. Hey, it’s going to arrive tomorrow. Hey, it arrived.

That [00:20:00] proactive things that you’ve talked about often around just allowing people to have the expectations that are right. Wonderment makes it very visual and they allow easy cross sell upsells. So another thing you’ve talked about is the post purchase cross sell upsell being so important. This is somewhat of an easy button and you can start it for free.

And it’s just super cool. It works on all the devices and just they, and they talk about an ROI. So they focus on the fact that you’re going to eventually you’re going to pay for this system, but we’re going to let you do it for free to test it. And once you’re paying for it, it’s like a guaranteed ROI, like I love 

Jon MacDonald: this because yeah, this is great.

I love this because as I said, in behind the click, too many brands forget that post purchase optimization opportunity. They just neglect to do anything at all, or maybe just send one or two emails that are asking for reviews. That are ill timed, et cetera. So this is a great way to stay in front of consumers once they’ve clicked, check out them. 

Ryan Garrow: Very high open rate. They’re going to [00:21:00] send the emails through your provider, Klaviyo, attentive, whatever it happens to be, because people have bought. So they’ve given you money and permission to communicate about that order. So it’s just, there’s no reason you wouldn’t. No. 

Jon MacDonald: It’s such a good opportunity.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. It’s going to be for you, even if you don’t get more traffic because it’s slower this year. So do it. 

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. 

Ryan Garrow: All right. It’s not hard to find me. Find me on LinkedIn. Email me at garrow at growwithgarrow.com or find me on Slack if you’re on Slack mates. I’m not hard to find. 

Jon MacDonald: Yeah. Ryan’s easy to find. So all right, buddy. This has been awesome. Thank you. Thanks for catching me up on partner day. I can’t wait to get back in the saddle and participate in that next year.

Ryan Garrow: Next year it’s going to be bigger and better than ever. 

Jon MacDonald: I heard the number 2, 000 being thrown around.

Ryan Garrow: Yeah. We’re hoping to get a few thousand people to Portland.

Jon MacDonald: If you can do that, I will happily grace the stage and share anything and everything. So let’s do it. I look forward to that. And thanks for sharing about that. Telling us where we need to be for holiday and getting us get the engines revving for that because we’re in [00:22:00] as we’re recording this in mid August and you need to start thinking about it now. 

Ryan Garrow: Yeah, it’s very timely, whether it seems like it or not, if you’re listening to this and you haven’t started your holiday prep, you’re way behind because you should already have some ads in September when this is coming out. Yeah. Preparing and your plan is already in place and you’re going to pivot when it’s wrong.

Jon MacDonald: I was trying to not be so dire, but I agree. The situation is dire. If you have not started your holiday planning, please do this is a great place to start. So thank you for that, Ryan. I appreciate it. 

Ryan Garrow: Thanks, Jon.

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

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 117): Holiday Prep & the Tech Stack for Success appeared first on The Good.

About This Episode:

This week on Drive & Convert, Jon and Ryan discuss how to convert free trial users to paying customers. 

Check out the full episode to learn:

1. The importance of optimizing the free trial experience for SaaS brands.
2. How to gain an understanding of the factors that motivate your users to buy.
3. Proven strategies to encourage your users to convert from free to paid.

The resource Jon mentions in the episode can be found on thegood.com here.

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, connect with us on LinkedIn. We’re Jon Macdonald and Ryan Garrow.

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Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] Announcer: You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine with Jon McDonald and Ryan Garrow.

[00:00:15] Ryan Garrow: All right, Jon, you have given me a topic that you want to talk about today. That is something we’ve not done a ton of on this podcast. We’re going to, we’re going to dabble in talking more in the SaaS side of the world than the[00:00:30] e-comm side of the world today. And, I mean it probably could be some e-comm stuff, I don’t know how it would work as well, but you get to give me some insight today on how to move a free trial customer to a paying customer.

[00:00:42] Ryan Garrow: Isn’t that, is that something, did I understand correctly? 

[00:00:45] Jon MacDonald: Yes. Thank you for humoring me and letting me talk about this today. today. And I do think it applies to some degree to e-commerce brands as well, because there are brands who offer free trials or, and there are different methods of doing that in e [00:01:00] com.

[00:01:00] Jon MacDonald: The ones we’ll talk about today could, with a little bit of adjustment, be used for e-comm, but. The home for these is really in SaaS. That is where most free trials have started and been utilized over the years. And some e-comm folks have taken that and run with it since. 

[00:01:18] Ryan Garrow: Yeah, I think a couple of things, like I don’t know as much about SaaS as I do e-comm.

[00:01:22] Ryan Garrow: And so I’m actually really interested in a lot of how these work, because as my brain will probably go right to how do I apply this to the [00:01:30] Thousands of e-comm customers we work with in looking at how they do trial subscriptions, how they do memberships for free that they can move into a premium price point.

[00:01:39] Ryan Garrow: So that’s how my brain’s going to be thinking through a lot of this and some of you out there maybe as well, but Jon does handle some of the largest. lead gen companies out there and helps with their conversion and optimization. So his brain is well tuned to success in this for sure. 

[00:01:55] Jon MacDonald: I appreciate that.

[00:01:56] Jon MacDonald: It is all my team’s doing here at the good. So I [00:02:00] will say that I know what’s going on. I, there are way smarter folks here than me at this point, which is a good area to be in. But yeah, let’s talk a little bit about converting these free trial users into paying customers, because I think that it’s really important.

[00:02:15] Jon MacDonald: There’s no secret that free trials are the, where the most SaaS organizations mess up in my opinion, right? And this is because no one signs up for a free trial unless, they want to learn more about your product, but these free trials get pushed [00:02:30] off to the side a little bit. It’s a great lead gen tool for them, but not necessarily something they optimize.

[00:02:36] Jon MacDonald: We’ve had a lot of success doing that because we take a unique perspective on this. And that’s that most customers are signing up to, to learn how your product benefits them. They’re not looking to just get a free trial. They couldn’t care if you offer one feature or 50 features. They want, just want the product to solve their problems and make their life easier.

[00:02:57] Jon MacDonald: So that’s very similar to [00:03:00] Ecom and a very similar problem, right? Again, it’s only two reasons people are at your website, because they have a pain or need and they think you can solve it, and then they want to convert and accomplish that as quickly and easily as possible and get on with their lives. If you want to convert these free trial users, your task is to show them how your product meets their needs.

[00:03:20] Jon MacDonald: And that’s it. If you can’t help them achieve that desired outcome, it’s They’re just simply not going to buy, doesn’t matter how much of a trial or whether it’s free or not. 

[00:03:29] Ryan Garrow: [00:03:30] Interesting. I like how that’s been put there around how you’re solving a problem rather than, it’s I feel like I get sold a lot of features on these.

[00:03:37] Ryan Garrow: So hopefully I can go back to these-commpanies and be like, no, go listen to this podcast with Jon cause he’ll solve all your problems and I’ll give you my money. Yeah. 

[00:03:43] Jon MacDonald: SaaS, even in pricing with SaaS is a traditional thing. three up table pricing, and that’s a checklist of features under each table.

[00:03:50] Ryan Garrow: Further down it goes, the more value it has to me, supposedly. The 

[00:03:53] Jon MacDonald: more features, not necessarily the benefits to the user all the time. It’s a good way to focus on that. [00:04:00] What’s the old adage in advertising that nobody’s buying the hammer? They’re buying the ability to basically nail something together, right?

[00:04:09] Jon MacDonald: That’s their goal. So it’s the same adage here with your SaaS products. 

[00:04:14] Ryan Garrow: Okay. So as we dig into the data here that we do have to look at some of the normal metrics that I think of without thinking a little bit differently, like the conversion rate is not as a SaaS company necessarily focus on the how many people sign up for a free trial.

[00:04:27] Ryan Garrow: That’s nice, but the real important metric is. [00:04:30] How do they go from my free product to a paid product? And that is a slightly different conversion rate than what analytics tracks, for example. 

[00:04:37] Jon MacDonald: Exactly. Now, if your marketing’s job is to get more people into a free trial, and that is considered a lead, then it is your job as a product owner, conversion person, to make sure that they convert from free to paid.

[00:04:51] Jon MacDonald: And so that is the conversion rate that matters, in my mind. It measures the percentage of users who transition from a free version of a product into a paid [00:05:00] version, right? And a lot, we’ll talk about different models, if you don’t convert this, it can cost your company a lot of money and not just in customer acquisition costs.

[00:05:09] Jon MacDonald: It can cost you a ton of money in server fees and everything else to service those folks. Think about All of these AI apps that are out there right now, they’re not, they didn’t build their own AI. They’re using open AI or chat GPT’s API calls, right? And those add up so quickly. And so [00:05:30] you really need to be conscious of giving people too much free runway.

[00:05:34] Jon MacDonald: without focusing on converting them. So if you want users to upgrade to these paid tiers, there’s really an important metric to track. And it’s also important for these freemium models where users can access some of these features for free and are encouraged to pay for more premium features. And we’ll get into those models, but there’s a formula that I think we need to start with just to level set.

[00:05:57] Jon MacDonald: And this is a free to paid conversion. conversion [00:06:00] rate. That is the number of users who convert to paid divided by the total number of free users times 100. Okay, so total number of users who convert to paid divided by the total number of those free users times 100. So not too dissimilar from a conversion rate.

[00:06:18] Jon MacDonald: But okay, let’s do an example. So let’s say a SaaS company has 10, 000 free users, 500 of them upgrade to a paid version. The free to paid conversion rate would be [00:06:30] 500 divided by 10, 000 times 100%. And that gives you 5%. Okay. 

[00:06:35] Ryan Garrow: So it’s interesting how you could turn off lead gen marketing and not get any new leads, but you could still be working on increasing your conversion rate, even without that new traffic, cause your free users are still 10, 000.

[00:06:47] Ryan Garrow: And then you just pick, a timeline to figure out your conversion rate. Oh, we had 200 this week convert, so our conversion rate this week was 2%. 

[00:06:55] Jon MacDonald: Exactly. And it’s interesting because so many SaaS brands [00:07:00] focus on getting more people into that funnel when really what they need to do is focus on converting the folks that are in that free trial already.

[00:07:07] Jon MacDonald: And a lot of them offer, free trials that last a very long time six weeks, a month. Three months, whatever it might be. The challenge with that is you’re now extending that window, right? So as you can imagine, you’re going to really want to push that number as high as possible as more conversions to paid account.

[00:07:26] Jon MacDonald: That’s when you get your revenue. Want to focus on the revenue and then the profit, [00:07:30] that is where you need to look. 

[00:07:31] Ryan Garrow: Yeah, I can see how a marketing team would like a really long free trial to be like, Oh no, we don’t need to change that. Just keeping the free trial. So we have a chance to sell them moving forward because I would be worried about, losing the opportunity when in reality, it’s probably not likely that person is going to convert if they’ve been a free user for so long.

[00:07:49] Jon MacDonald: Let’s talk about how to convert these free users before we do that, because I really want to level set on a couple of things. One of them I want to talk about is what I mean by a free trial. Okay. [00:08:00] And let’s come back to that point though, because I really want to talk about why that’s a misnomer for these marketing teams.

[00:08:07] Jon MacDonald: So there’s actually three different types or models around free trials. And there’s a whole bunch of tactics under each of these, but there’s three main groups and that is the freemium model, which most of us know about, right? There’s the reverse trial, which is probably new to a lot of folks. And then there’s a trial with payment, which once I tell you what it is [00:08:30] you’ll know what it is already.

[00:08:31] Jon MacDonald: But a freemium model is a two tiered model with a free tier and a premium plan. Pretty simple, right? This is the traditional SaaS model. We’ll grant you free perpetual access to a restricted version of our product, hoping that by limiting the accessible features, maybe giving you four out of six or something of that sort, and.

[00:08:53] Jon MacDonald: Placing caps on the features. Maybe you only get X number of downloads a month. This is the [00:09:00] hope that you will upgrade to a paid version to access all the full features that you’re going to hit that wall with usage. And you’re going to say, you know what I want to level up. I’m going to pay.

[00:09:08] Jon MacDonald: You can also think about this in some cases, freemium users can. get charged in a la carte for usage, meaning that you could say if you, maybe it’s the platform’s free, but every time you download it to dollar, right? Something of that sort, right? So there’s a couple of ways you could do freemium here, but this is what everybody knows.

[00:09:26] Jon MacDonald: Oh, I’m going to get your platform. You’re going to let me do a [00:09:30] limited subset of items. When I need more, I’m going to have to pay make sense. I’m paying for my usage, but this is where marketing teams can really mess up because they’re trying to get everybody into a free model. And the expectation is it’s going to perpetually be free.

[00:09:44] Jon MacDonald: That costs the -commpany a lot of money in the end, right? To service those folks. Just think about all the support alone when somebody has a challenge and they’re not paying. The second model is a reverse trial. This is one that I mentioned might be new to some folks. It’s a time based [00:10:00] approach and this was actually coined at Dropbox.

[00:10:02] Jon MacDonald: And users start with a full access to the features for a limited time during a trial phase. Okay. Why is this a reverse? They get moved to a freemium plan with limited product features after that time is up. So for a limited time, they’re getting the product’s maximum value at the beginning of that trial experience.

[00:10:21] Jon MacDonald: And if they want to regain access to those full features, at that point, they’re going to need to. Okay. purchase a paid plan. 

[00:10:27] Jon MacDonald: So I like that one.

[00:10:28] Jon MacDonald: Yeah. If you think about it, this [00:10:30] works really well at products like Dropbox because once you have all your files uploaded to the Dropbox and you want to access those later, you got to start paying.

[00:10:37] Jon MacDonald: It works really well when you have that hook, that mechanism that hooks people in and they’re not going to want to give up that access later. The third is trial with payment. Now in a trial with payment, users are required to provide their payment information upfront. You’ll see on SaaSs a lot of times, or even e-commmerce subscription products that say no credit card required.

[00:10:58] Jon MacDonald: That’s because a lot of people [00:11:00] have grown tired of trial with payment, meaning I’m going to give you my credit card. You’re going to give me 30 days or whatever limited period of time, free access. And that trial is free until specified date until agreed upon date, at which point you’re going to charge me a recurring subscription for that full suite of products.

[00:11:19] Jon MacDonald: So you’re basically. I’m giving you the authorization to charge me in the future unless I cancel beforehand. Now the number one problem with this is that brands make [00:11:30] a ton of money on this by people who forget to unsubscribe, right? We’ve talked about this before. I’m guilty 

[00:11:36] Ryan Garrow: of not unsubscribing and then being mad at myself.

[00:11:39] Jon MacDonald: And this is such a epidemic that there’s TV commercials for services that do nothing but look through all your transactions and alert you to what you have for recurring charges and then let you push a button to cancel that service. So it’s really interesting that this has become so frowned upon and it’s become such a [00:12:00] problem that people are willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to advertise.

[00:12:04] Jon MacDonald: To get you to use their product just to solve this problem. So it obviously works. It gets people to convert, but it also creates a down, downward effect. 

[00:12:14] Ryan Garrow: Yeah. So I know which one I don’t like the best because I fall in prey to it. Is there one of these that you think works better than the other two? 

[00:12:22] Jon MacDonald: Yeah, I think it really depends on the product itself.

[00:12:26] Jon MacDonald: Okay. So like that reverse trial I mentioned. You have to have a [00:12:30] product like Dropbox where you’re providing a lot of value that creates lock in, right? If you don’t have that lock in, at that point, you’re really gonna, just, everyone’s gonna flee you when that reverse trial happens, okay? The freemium model, great, but you better have a really good product that people are like, yeah, this is free and I want I need more access.

[00:12:50] Jon MacDonald: It’s impeding my workability or my personal life, whatever it might be. 

[00:12:54] Ryan Garrow: Yeah. And you’ve probably got to have a good enough product to get me like, so I get some value out of that, [00:13:00] but then I can, Whoa, I can see how my life gets so much better with this. That’s probably not an easy one to pull off.

[00:13:08] Jon MacDonald: It’s not, unfortunately, because. First of all, there’s always the consumers who are going to try to hack their way around it, right? I know people who use Dropbox and always are downloading their files and only uploading what they have to the maximum space just so they can share files with people.

[00:13:25] Jon MacDonald: So they’ll go in and they’ll upload whatever they need and then store it there and then when [00:13:30] they’re, done, they’ll download it and delete it off of Dropbox so they keep that space. It’s a pain in the butt for those users, but they don’t want to pay. So they’re willing to stick within that limited time frame, right?

[00:13:41] Jon MacDonald: There’s people who go out and just create another account and get a whole nother free trial or whatever it may be, right? So you, there’s a lot of ways that consumers will try to hack this and you need to understand what is the model that is going to provide so much value for your consumers that they won’t try to [00:14:00] hack it, that they’ll just pay because it’s easier to do that and keep all their, data together, their preferences, whatever it might be.

[00:14:06] Jon MacDonald: And they’ll also say, Hey, you know what? You’re giving me so much value that yeah, I’ll pay for more access. Like it’s worth it. 

[00:14:13] Announcer: You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commmerce growth. Your hosts are Jon McDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commmerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, [00:14:30] a digital marketing agency offering pay per click management search engines optimization and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you. 

[00:14:47] Ryan Garrow: Because certain things I am a hundred percent guilty of. Like new emails. Like I’ve done a lot of that personal hacking in business.

[00:14:55] Ryan Garrow: And so sorry for all the SaaS companies out there that you’ve got a lot of my [00:15:00] accounts in there, but for some of them, there was probably a price point that I would have assigned that value. And it was probably to me. Yes. Okay, fine. It is worth five bucks a month for me. And I don’t have to go through the hassle of.

[00:15:11] Ryan Garrow: Creating a new account, but maybe they wanted 30 bucks and I’m like that for me was a threshold that it’s better off for me to hack around it. 

[00:15:19] Jon MacDonald: Yeah pricing is a whole nother game, right? For sure. And there are commpanies that do nothing but focus on SaaS pricing. It’s that complicated of a challenge.

[00:15:29] Ryan Garrow: [00:15:30] Got it. Because I assume it’s sliding scales like, okay you could go to 5 to get Ryan, but then you’re actually making, two pennies per user and nobody wants to SaaSs with 0. 1 percent margin, 

[00:15:40] Jon MacDonald: right? Otherwise you might as well be in the agency business, right? Yeah. 

[00:15:44] Ryan Garrow: Come work with us.

[00:15:45] Ryan Garrow: It’s great. 

[00:15:46] Jon MacDonald: The reality on this too is. You have to understand that in SaaS, the less support, the less people or accounts you have to support, the better, because that is going to be a big portion of your margin, [00:16:00] is people talking to people about their problems, right? If you have someone who converts at 5, You could also charge 25, then you don’t want to deal with the extra four people, right?

[00:16:13] Jon MacDonald: Five times five is 25. So it’d be five users at 5 or one user at 25. If I’m thinking about it, the margin is going to look a lot better at that 25 probably not even because I’m getting 20 extra dollars a month out of that user has more to do with the fact that. that I’m not [00:16:30] servicing five people.

[00:16:31] Jon MacDonald: Now I don’t have to worry about five accounts. I have to worry about one, and that’s really where I think a lot of the margins will end up. 

[00:16:37] Ryan Garrow: Yeah, that’s, I love that. A great example of that is to help make it clear for me. But what we’re talking about really is not pricing. Cause that’s a different conversation.

[00:16:44] Ryan Garrow: We want to know how do we actually move these people from free to paid because that’s not a simple process. Because people like me make it difficult. 

[00:16:53] Jon MacDonald: Cheaters like, like us, right? Converting free trial users to paid users is really, goes back to just [00:17:00] demonstrating your product’s value, right?

[00:17:02] Jon MacDonald: This is what I was saying up front where, how is it benefiting your consumers that sign up for an account, not what the features are, right? So you can do this by strategically placing messaging throughout your site and or your app. But keep in mind that your free trial signups already know the product is good.

[00:17:20] Jon MacDonald: What I mean by that is. You got them to sign up in the first place. So there’s some hope of benefit there for them, right? Cause getting them to sign up, whether it’s a free trial or not still can be a [00:17:30] pain in the butt. It still takes some effort. Okay. No matter how one login you use, or if I can log in with my Google account, whatever it is that, yeah, that kind of makes it easier, but it’s not perfect.

[00:17:41] Jon MacDonald: No, no sign up is so your job is to convince them that the value they’re going to get from the product is worth the price. And there’s several ways to do this, right? So you can highlight benefits. Pretty simple, right? We’ve talked a lot about benefits. You offer social proof. You give benefits. Product tours, right?

[00:17:59] Jon MacDonald: What are [00:18:00] all the functionality and features you’re missing? I actually just onboarded for a tool that gave me a seven day free trial. But if I went to their weekly product onboarding webinar that they do, it was a live webinar, and if I got on there. registered and attended, they would double it to two weeks.

[00:18:18] Jon MacDonald: And they did that because they were confident that if I figured out how to use the product effectively within that two weeks, I would subscribe. And so I was really interested in [00:18:30] this and I started chatting in the chat during the webinar, like I didn’t know who else was on this webinar.

[00:18:35] Jon MacDonald: It turns out there were dozens of people on there, which was awesome. So the offer. Of extending the trial obviously works, but the information was great. But I also started asking them like, how’s this work for you? Does this convert? I’m really intrigued by this model. I haven’t seen someone do this before.

[00:18:51] Jon MacDonald: How’d you get this idea? And they were very cool and answered my questions. But at some point during the webinar, they’re like, look, Hey, Jon, we see your questions. That’s [00:19:00] awesome. Hit me up on LinkedIn. I want to chat about this. It sounds a lot about what we’re trying to do here, but that’s not what we’re doing.

[00:19:05] Jon MacDonald: We’re here to talk about the onboarding.

[00:19:10] Jon MacDonald: But I was also, this is how I nerd out and I thought it was interesting. So give those product tours maybe with some incentive and boost your users engagement, right? So they were doing both of those with that example. I don’t think you can invite this kind of thinking unless you know your customers right?

[00:19:26] Jon MacDonald: Once you know what triggers them to buy, then you can build [00:19:30] your user experience around that. that will convince them to convert. So you can’t just put banners up everywhere that says you’re in free trial. Click here to convert. You have to understand where the value is and then add that notification where the value might be missing for them.

[00:19:44] Jon MacDonald: But if they paid, they would get that, unlock that extra value. 

[00:19:47] Ryan Garrow: Got it. Okay. And so what are some of the strategies you leverage them when you’re trying to move these people through? Because you’ve. You’ve got to have, areas in that you can test and measure, I assume, because it’s Jon McDonald.

[00:19:59] Ryan Garrow: You’ve [00:20:00] done this. 

[00:20:00] Jon MacDonald: Always down to test it, right? We actually have this really great resource up on thegood. com. So if you go to thegood. com, click on insights. There’s a search box there. It’s the encyclopedia of our content from 15, almost 16 years. Search for free trial in that box. It’s right up there.

[00:20:18] Jon MacDonald: And the article and resource will come up. It’s got, I think, nine or so specific detailed strategies with examples that you can use. If you really want to dive in, we’ll cover a couple of those [00:20:30] today, but that resource article is way too long to talk about all nine of these on a podcast. So, I’ll highlight a couple of them.

[00:20:38] Jon MacDonald: But I highly recommend checking out that full list. Now you should use some, or you could use these in conjunction with each other, right? So you don’t have to just stick to one of these options. These are just ideas that there are several different ones and you can test and combine them and experiment really to find the ones that are going to produce the best results for your brand.

[00:20:58] Jon MacDonald: Okay. So I [00:21:00] talked a lot a minute ago about putting up notifications. You really need to remind your users to upgrade early and often, right? Don’t make the mistake of waiting until the end of the free trial to prompt users to upgrade. I can’t stand anything more than I go to log into an app, and I had no idea that the free trial was going to be up soon.

[00:21:21] Jon MacDonald: They didn’t send emails. They didn’t tell me in the app. I go to log in, and it’s Oh, your free trial is over. And I was ready, primed, trying to get work done [00:21:30] aside on my calendar. It was just a really frustrating experience. So don’t make that mistake, right? Prompt your users to upgrade from the beginning of their experience and remind them that they aren’t getting that full feature.

[00:21:42] Jon MacDonald: You can do CTAs. You can do this in app notifications, tooltips. pop up overlays, onboarding videos, support messages, right? So if they’re looking for support, you can, in the reply to that, you could mention the upgrade and just the general email marketing flows. So you have a lot of options for [00:22:00] where you can do this, but don’t wait till the end to do that.

[00:22:03] Jon MacDonald: That’s where you end up with problems. 

[00:22:04] Ryan Garrow: And I, and if I’m in a free trial, I get it. You’re going to try to convert me. So I’m not going to be mad that you’re messaging me like you can do it too often. I assume just like most things, but you probably also have to assume that not all of your emails are hitting my inbox or I automatically put them in clutter or something like that.

[00:22:22] Ryan Garrow: So test and measure likely those different calls to action and different areas to hit me 

[00:22:26] Jon MacDonald: for sure. And this is the next one, which is. It’s to present [00:22:30] gated features near free features, okay? So what I’m saying here is strategically place these prompts or highlight these premium features adjacent to free ones.

[00:22:40] Jon MacDonald: So you create this opportunity for those free trial users to envision how the paid ones We’ll enhance their experience, right? So this also has serves the benefit of consistently reminding what they’re missing. It sparks that curiosity and it demonstrates the tangible benefits of upgrading. So in the same vein that you were just talking about, I’m not going to [00:23:00] be upset that you’re reminding me I’m on the free level.

[00:23:03] Jon MacDonald: I’m also not going to be upset that you’re reminding me that there’s potentially a better world over here. If I pay, I can get access to, I know I’m not paying. Thank you. I know that I’m on the free trial, so it’s okay to remind them of what they need to do there. The next one is to offer great onboarding experience.

[00:23:20] Jon MacDonald: I gave that example a minute ago, but the onboarding process is really, it’s that first impression that they’re going to have of your product or service. And [00:23:30] a positive experience here is significantly going to influence the decision to upgrade. We have for SaaS brands, we’ve worked sometimes on nothing but that onboarding experience.

[00:23:39] Jon MacDonald: And there are actually companies out there that focus exclusively on onboarding experiences. It is that important. If you. Go in and you’re going to provide this clear, concise step-by-step guide. You can use things like tool tips, interactive tutorial, walkthroughs to highlight these key features and even demonstrations [00:24:00] on how to use everything effectively.

[00:24:01] Jon MacDonald: There is a tool out there, a sales tool, it’s called Clay, C L A Y. That’s a sales automation tool. That’s really taken off right now. They are the masters at this. They have done nothing but. On LinkedIn, they have people who are just creating one to two minute videos of how to use specific functionality that is really interesting.

[00:24:22] Jon MacDonald: And you start getting, planting that seed of, Oh, wow, you mean I can create this flow to do this specific task? [00:24:30] Specific action. That’s really cool. I bet I could combine that with these other ideas I’m now having or man, I saw this other video last week that can combine with what I’ve seen right now. So that type of onboarding and awareness can go a really long way to converting people.

[00:24:46] Jon MacDonald: This last one is to use paywalls to demonstrate these paid features. Now, we all hate paywalls. I get it. Everybody hates a paywall. Nobody wants to be hit with a paywall. It’s called a wall for a reason. Now, the value that it demonstrates, [00:25:00] though, is that it entices users to upgrade to unlock the full access because they were trying to do something that they wanted to do.

[00:25:07] Jon MacDonald: It’s a great time to tell them, you don’t have access for this, but you just pay and you get access. And if you design it really thoughtfully, they can drive conversions without causing a lot of frustration. Now, we did this, we’ve done at the good. We’ve overhauled paywalls for The Economist, for The Telegraph, and a few other publications.

[00:25:26] Jon MacDonald: And that’s been really great because [00:25:30] everybody hates hitting the paywalls. And they try to go use other browsers, incognito mode, whatever, just to continue their experience. So how can you make it really easy for them and what does that look like? Now, each paywall should clearly articulate the benefits of upgrading to a paid version.

[00:25:48] Jon MacDonald: Okay? We really want to persuade people through that messaging, highlight the key value propositions and make sure they know what they’re going to get. Now, one of the coolest paywalls I’ve ever seen that worked extremely well [00:26:00] was I hit the paywall and then it said, you know what? We will give you access, if you just give us your email address, we’ll continue to give you access to two additional articles a day.

[00:26:12] Jon MacDonald: So I got the three free that everybody gets, but if I would get up to five, if I just gave them my email address now. That felt like a great exchange of value because they now know who I am. And what that meant was every once in a while I was getting a reminder that was tailored for me, [00:26:30] right? Because it had, they knew they were able to track what I read, what I liked, and they were able to then, Taylor, the messaging, Hey, you would like more of this type of content or, Hey, this article is coming out, or did you miss this article, et cetera, to try to show me how much value, but personalize that, right?

[00:26:48] Jon MacDonald: So there are a lot of ways to handle this. And. Those were just four pretty simple paywall or excuse me, conversion strategies that were the paywall, the great onboarding experience [00:27:00] present gated features next to the free ones. And then just remind people early and often there’s five more, at least up on the good.

[00:27:07] Jon MacDonald: com if you wanted to get more of those. 

[00:27:09] Ryan Garrow: Dang, SaaS can get complicated. And trying to get people to part with their money. E-comm seems simpler many times. 

[00:27:16] Jon MacDonald: I was going to say we all thought e-comm was difficult, but the SaaS world is, can go really deep. And so it’s part of why I love it. I 

[00:27:24] Ryan Garrow: imagine it’s likely difficult to move your Strategy around [00:27:30] from, free trial to, doing the reverse trial to doing the trial with payment.

[00:27:35] Ryan Garrow: Like it doesn’t feel like that’s going to be an easy thing to move around. So you probably have to be very intentional and test small early on. Before you go 

[00:27:44] Jon MacDonald: big, once you have the wins behind a solution, it can be hard to change that because all your marketing is going to be done on it. You’re the way you’ve built your product marketing and product management teams are all going to be geared up for those specific methods.

[00:27:58] Jon MacDonald: Without question, yeah, you [00:28:00] really want to make sure you have this settled in, and then you can tweak it from there, but you probably don’t want to change the entire methodology that often. 

[00:28:08] Ryan Garrow: Jon, I appreciate the education today. Now I’ve got to go re listen to this a few times, probably try to figure out how I can apply this to some of these things I’m thinking about in Ecom.

[00:28:18] Jon MacDonald: Yeah maybe that’d make a great episode sometime we can how to convert free. Free to pay trial and how that works for e-Comm as well. 

[00:28:25] Ryan Garrow: Yeah, I’m definitely gonna come up with some stuff to test and measure. For sure. Love it. So [00:28:30] thanks for the time. 

[00:28:30] Jon MacDonald: Alright, thank you Ryan.

[00:28:38] Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon McDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at drive and convert com.

The post Drive and Convert (Ep. 116): How to Convert Free Trial Users to Paying Customers appeared first on The Good.