Speaker 1: 0:01

Yo, what's going on everybody? Welcome to the Unstoppable Marketer podcast. With me, as always, is Mark Goldhart. I got to figure out a way to say that different. I don't know why. Like every time I say it, it seems just weird.

Speaker 2: 0:15

But I think it's.

Speaker 1: 0:15

yeah, maybe lame Less weird, more lame. Maybe I need to listen to more podcasts to see how other people introduce their co hosts. If you're new to the podcast, mark Goldhart, who's always on his phone right when we start.

Speaker 2: 0:31

I mean not always 60% of the time all the time, but frequently right, yep, how are you Great?

Speaker 1: 0:39

You ready for an epic podcast? I am. What are we talking about today?

Speaker 2: 0:44

We could use a military analogy. You have like navy seals and, okay, you have elite military military units in the in each branch of military right, correct? Um, and the marines I think it's basically the snipers, but they also feed into the seals. Yep, they're right in the navy seals. In the army, they have the snipers, but they also feed into the SEALs. Yep, they're right in the Navy SEALs.

Speaker 1: 1:05

In the.

Speaker 2: 1:05

Army, they have the Green Beret, yep. So why am I bringing this up? It's because what do the Green Beret do? That's different than the Navy SEALs, because when you think about oh, a Green Beret and a Navy SEAL.

Speaker 1: 1:19

You kind of think they're the same thing, right? Well, yes, but I would. I mean, my general, somewhat obvious answer would be is like Navy SEALs are. I know they do a lot of land stuff, but they're.

Speaker 2: 1:32

But you'd assume, maybe some underwater demolition Right.

Speaker 1: 1:34

Primarily more stuff to deal with needing to travel via boat in some sort of stealth way.

Speaker 2: 1:42

Mission potentially yeah, like the commercials. So what do Green beret do? Well, they have. They are what they like to call themselves a force multiplier. So I don't know necessarily, I'm not an expert on this, this is just relaying some information. I don't know if they're necessarily better at hand-to-hand combat or anything like that, but what they do is like they'll plant green beret and embed them with communities. Right, and the green beret are always trying to establish relationships, to build up a coalition, let's say, with locals, or to establish intel with locals and even train they do a lot of training too with with locals to establish hey, we're not just like 10 dudes dropping off and we're going to raid a bunch of houses, like we're 10 guys that are going to get dropped off, build some alliances, get, get recon, but we're also experts at combat. So the force multiplier is you take 10, but they can turn it into 100.

Speaker 1: 2:51

Got it.

Speaker 2: 2:52

Because of the community that they're building, because of the community that they're building, the relationships, the networks et cetera, Got it Right. Where the Navy SEALs, from my understanding, are a little bit more of the battering ram. Yeah, they're the ones that got Osama bin Laden SEAL Team 6, right.

Speaker 1: 3:15

They're the sprint.

Speaker 2: 3:17

The Green.

Speaker 1: 3:17

Beret is the marathon.

Speaker 2: 3:18

It's more of a marathon. Yeah, cool, okay. So why do I bring this up in relation to e-commerce is because I think a lot of e-commerce operators and marketers try to approach everything in a sprint mindset, which has its place. They're the money seal. Yeah, like they just want to like bust in the door and get $50,000 extra of revenue.

Speaker 1: 3:46

Yes.

Speaker 2: 3:47

Okay, when in reality you have to figure out, like, if I move the right chess pieces, can I get a 2x, 3x, 4x effect?

Speaker 1: 3:58

That may not come now.

Speaker 2: 3:59

That may not come now, but 12 to 18 months from now. We're seeing some benefits of it, but it's 10% lift in three different areas rather than 200% lift in one area. Sure, so how do you create this compounding effect in your business without trying to just blow the doors down All?

Speaker 1: 4:20

right. I think you navigated that well enough into our topic.

Speaker 2: 4:26

I think I navigated it great.

Speaker 1: 4:27

I think so yeah.

Speaker 1: 4:30

So nicely done, so I give myself a B With that said. No, I will say B plus. B plus. Yeah, I will say B plus. Let me tie it in. So what we want to talk about today is there are generally in e-commerce, and, and, and in other businesses too. But we're talking e-commerce here is there are four ways. Generally, we we we call it what you know, we, we we think of them as four different buckets and we're always going to get people who are going to argue so shut up about it. Like you can say well, no, this belongs here. Over here, you get the point of what we're trying to make here. You'll understand the point. So there's four buckets that brands can focus on these compounding effects, if we will, and we want to talk about them. So bucket number one traffic. Increasing and decreasing traffic is going to increase or decrease revenue. Fair enough, easy.

Speaker 2: 5:28

Ceteris paribus. Yeah, okay, which means holding all things constant.

Speaker 1: 5:32

Yes, exactly, very good point. Conversion rate. Number two If you increase or that decreases, once again holding traffic constant, you're going to increase or decrease your revenue, revenue, yep. The third thing is AOV, or also known as average order value. Correct, If I want to take that one step further for those of you who are still not following, what is the average total amount a customer checks out with per order? Yes, okay, if that increases, what happens? You increase. If it decreases, decrease, holding conversion rates, traffic constant. And then the third and fire. The fourth, final one is lifetime value, or returning customer, however you want to you, however you want to define it. Look at that.

Speaker 2: 6:27

Yeah, you could say lifetime value, but lifetime value is just aggregating A to B and returning rates. Yep.

Speaker 1: 6:35

So those are four ways that you can look at increasing your revenue. Okay, so let's break them down and talk about them. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 6:46

Let's break them down because, again, I think the mistake that a lot of people have is let's just spend more on ads.

Speaker 1: 6:52

Yes.

Speaker 2: 6:53

Or let's get 50% more revenue this year. Yes, without breaking it down it's like we talked about in the black Friday episode is you have to have? You have to define what success looks like and then work backwards. And this is how you can work backwards without saying, hey, we're going to define success as 50% increase in revenue. But a lot of people just say, okay, let's just spend more on ads, let's just get better at ads, or let's get better at organic or whatever it is, but that doesn't necessarily translate to real, meaningful metrics. So, yeah, let's jump into it.

Speaker 1: 7:30

Maybe what we should do is should we? If you're watching, if you're listening to this? I will try to do this. I'm going to create a Google Doc, a Google Sheet, and I will have the formulas in here. And I will have the formulas in here and you'll just be able to take your business and add your average numbers in there. On average, every month, we get this many sessions On average. This is what our conversion rate is On average. This is what our AOV is. We'll plug those numbers in and then you can increase the efficiency in those and see what happens to your numbers. It's super easy. Anyone can create it themselves. But I can maybe create something we will.

Speaker 1: 8:08

We'll create something fun that you can just download. We'll just, we'll just have a website.

Speaker 2: 8:12

Yeah, just build the website we'll just have a page on our website you can go to and it'll just be a calculator for you. I like that. So the reason why we talk about this is it's important to start understanding what compounding different things together does for your business. And it also makes things far more achievable because now they're in bite-sized bunches rather than just one massive effort.

Speaker 1: 8:35

Right, Increase revenue by 50%. It's like how do I do that? That's like, oh, that's intense. We got to sell more. My revenue is $100,000. How do I make a hundred fifty thousand dollars?

Speaker 2: 8:46

yes right so we're going to use really easy numbers for math's sake, and we're this is an audio program, I mean I guess you can go watch on youtube and we'll maybe have some graphics up, but we're just going to take a store with a hundred thousand visitors sessions sessions yep, we're going take the, we're gonna use the sessions because that's generally how a conversion rate is calculated is by sessions, not visitors on shopify especially so we'll take sessions, then we're gonna take a conversion rate of one percent, so 100 which is relatively average, which is relatively average, which is relatively average 1% conversion rate and an AOV of 100.

Speaker 2: 9:27

Because, again, easy math to convey the point. Love it Right. So if you have 100,000 sessions, 1% conversion rate and $100 AOV, you are making how much? $100,000. $100,000. Easy, a month. Great job, you are a seven-figure business.

Speaker 1: 9:52

Well, yeah, exactly, but you have to make 50% more money this year?

Speaker 2: 9:56

Yes, how do you do that? So you guys are diving into all kinds of fun games, right, and conceptualizations. Oh, products, let's release more products. Yeah, let's do this, and that's all part of it, sure, but first of all, what happens if you could just increase traffic by 50%, right, right?

Speaker 1: 10:21

It's not that easy, right? Well, yeah, I mean well, what mark means by it's not that easy, as it is that easy to increase traffic by 50?

Speaker 2: 10:30

but it'll probably end up dropping your.

Speaker 1: 10:31

But it drops your conversion rate or can very much, which is which is often what happens with companies like let's just increase traffic I spent fifty thousand dollars more. How come I or I doubled my spend, I doubled my traffic, how come my revenue didn't double?

Speaker 2: 10:46

and the answer for that is very simple. It's simply that you start pushing up like you're outside of your niche a little bit. Whatever it is, costs increase sometimes. So it's not. It's just not that easy and generally, if you're getting people more aware of your product, conversion rates are going to drop, because if you get more, your product conversion rates are going to drop, because if you get more news, then your conversion rate is going to drop compared to returners.

Speaker 1: 11:10

Yeah, exactly, new customers convert at a less rate than a returning customer does.

Speaker 2: 11:15

Yes, a returning visitor.

Speaker 1: 11:16

Yeah, so, especially in those first two months of you running a strategy like this, you're definitely going to see a yeah, but if you raise it 15% Traffic Traffic, it's a little different, right?

Speaker 2: 11:30

Yep, you can generally get 15% more traffic without totally breaking Seeing a whole huge shift.

Speaker 1: 11:38

Yeah, unless there's some sort of seasonality thing happening or whatever right or macroeconomical thing.

Speaker 2: 11:44

We're going to talk in economic terms right here. Like when you run an economic equation, there's always always more variables at play, so they they use a term it's called ceteris paribus, which is hey, we're just going to hold everything constant and see what happens when we, when we change one or two variables at a time? Yes, yes, okay, so we're not going to get into all the nitty gritties of of every possibility, but 15% increase in traffic. What does that do to your business?

Speaker 1: 12:13

Theoretically increases your revenue by 15, by 15% right, $115,000 now.

Speaker 2: 12:18

So you're now you're 115. So you still got a way, ways to go to get to 150,000.

Speaker 1: 12:23

That's the goal Yep 50% increase $150,000. So, what happens if we increase AOV by 15%. Now we're sitting at, but we have, we're talking, we've done traffic, traffic's up 100.

Speaker 2: 12:41

Got it? Yeah, so traffic is up to 115,000 sessions. You're going to be around $130,000. Yep, so now you're all of a sudden up to 130. That's a 30% increase. That's a big jump. And then the last part is conversion rate. Can you increase conversion rate by 15%? And that puts you at $150,000. $152,000. Yep.

Speaker 1: 13:06

Yeah, just over $150,000.

Speaker 2: 13:08

And that's a 50% increase and that's a lot easier to conceptualize and actually make a plan of attack to say, hey, can we increase our AOV Realistically? Can you increase your AOV by 30% tomorrow?

Speaker 1: 13:22

That's hard, or that's really hard, or even 50%. I mean, yeah, 15% can be challenging too, but it's so much more palatable. Yeah, we're not saying 50% is easy.

Speaker 2: 13:32

No, no, no, no, yeah, but you can find a way to make that happen, yeah.

Speaker 1: 13:36

Easiest thing by far is traffic. I can increase my traffic 15% That's%.

Speaker 2: 13:41

that's a very easy thing to do, more ad creative you might spend a little bit more money, whatever you know we'll dive into more of those ways on like.

Speaker 1: 13:50

We'll get into tactics on how to do that in a second here. But, yes, so much more palatable to say sorry, hey, team, let's figure out a way to increase AOV.

Speaker 2: 14:02

Yes, so okay and in any of these categories. I think if you've been in ecom, if you're in marketing, if you're trying to reach these goals as a company, you know that it's not always easy, but, man, it's a whole lot easier to say, hey, how do I get my aov up 15? Well, if somebody's spending a hundred dollars with you already, or fifty dollars, like you can even go to a lower aov, let's say fifty dollars to get someone to spend an extra seven dollars that doesn't seem too crazy that's not crazy.

Speaker 2: 14:39

No, no, if someone's spending a hundred to get them to spend 115, yeah, it's not that crazy, right, easier said than done, but but very possible. And there's so many tactics to do that and, like trevor said, we'll talk about it in a minute. But and then you compound all three of those and you're at 50 and then you can now say, okay, okay, cool marketing team, how do we increase by 15%? How do we get our landing pages Like what? What offers do we not have right now? Do we not have a bundled like a like a bundle? Yeah, do we have different products? Or if we're only one product, is there a way to just say like? There's plenty of examples where people just increase their price by 10%.

Speaker 1: 15:20

Well, let's let's start talking tactics. Yeah, Okay, let's start with AOV tactics.

Speaker 2: 15:24

Yeah, let's go AOV first.

Speaker 1: 15:26

Yeah, let's go AOV. So I mean one which is very easy and obvious. Like Mark just said, you can increase your prices. Now, this is not always we're not saying to do that, like you know, because there's a customer relationship. But let me give an example of somebody who is using Bestie.

Speaker 1: 15:45

We're not saying to do that, but you probably should, yeah, or there's a really good argument to make that no one's going to actually care. And let me give you a real life example of this. So we had somebody using Bestie and they shared this data with us. We thought was so cool, but I won't give out the brand brand name. But it is a women's clothing boutique. Is that fair enough? Does this you?

Speaker 1: 16:06

now you can picture clothing brand, yeah, yeah, clothing brand, exactly, um, and they ran a post-purchase survey and I think it was just one question and the question was what motivated you to buy today? And within the let's say, they had five to seven different responses like oh, oh, I love the style or the quality or whatever it might be. One of those responses was like good pricing or something like that. Like I bought because your prices were good, we're so good, and something that maybe a lot of you don't know what Bestie does is Bestie. Will we have something called survey, like post ai insights?

Speaker 1: 16:44

And what that does is it aggregates all the survey data and then, kind of like we use ai to say, hey, like here, this, you know, x amount of people said this. Therefore, do this right, it's actionable insights. And so what happened? Was it said hey, of the, let's say, two thousand people who took this survey, less than 5% of people identified pricing as one of the main reasons that they one of their main motivating reasons to purchase. Therefore, you should increase your prices by 10% to 15%, because no one actually cares how low, like how low you've got your prices is not a motivating factor. So what they did? What?

Speaker 2: 17:24

did they do? They're buying because of the fashion exactly, so they increased.

Speaker 1: 17:27

I want to say, was it 10 that they did it? Yep and they just saw an increase in 10 in profits, like they didn't do any changes. But they said, hey, this is a quick way to take us from a hundred thousand dollars a month to $110,000 a month.

Speaker 2: 17:43

They also tried something else that was a big failure, and that was they took away free shipping, yep, and that test failed big time. Yeah, but the 10% increase in price, no one noticed.

Speaker 1: 17:56

So there's ways you can do it. You can just do it and see what happens. You can do it slowly. Maybe it's only 5% and that gets you 5% of the way to the 15% you know.

Speaker 2: 18:08

And also it doesn't have to be an every order increase of 15%. We're talking about averages here yeah it can be just to your hero product. So maybe it's also a bundle which is if you can get 30% of people to buy two of something or an additional product.

Speaker 1: 18:26

Let's, let's, let's use a real life example of the bundle you can.

Speaker 2: 18:28

You can increase also your aov by 15 so we love using examples.

Speaker 1: 18:32

So mark and I used to be on the brand side for a company called fawn design and they were a big motherhood company like uh, primary product was a diaper bag. Yeah, they had kind of revolutionized back in 2016 what the diaper bag looked like, okay. And what we did is we had an aov. I think we were selling these diaper bags for like 170 bucks 150 I think at the time, maybe at the time okay, 150 bucks, but our aov was like, let's call it 120, okay, and we wanted to get the AOV above $145. And so what we did is we created what was called the motherhood bundle and at the time, we didn't have any of these products. So we introduced a pacifier case. So you like pacifier, the binkies. So, rather than that like a mom tossing it in the bag and it getting lost, it was like this you know, had some, you know, like microbial stuff so germs wouldn't grow in it, but a really cute case that matched the bag.

Speaker 1: 19:32

That was an accessory yeah we did a changing clutch which was a diaper bag or a pad, changing pad, yeah, so like I don't know if you've seen this.

Speaker 1: 19:43

If you have a kid, you put a pad on the ground so like their poop or their pee, just in case they start going doesn't get on your floor or wherever. And then we introduced a bottle, an insulated bottle, um, like baby bottle carrier, so that it could either stay cold or stay hot, um, and. And so we, we took that from like 150 bucks, just the bag, to.

Speaker 1: 20:10

I want to say it was like 220 or 215 or yeah, whatever so it was just above 200 and we immediately saw, I mean instantaneously, now that did not become our best-selling product.

Speaker 2: 20:22

No, but what happened was about 20 30 percent of customers wanted all that, wanted all of that it was a great uh like baby shower gifts right, you know a lot of people bought it for baby showers.

Speaker 1: 20:34

They'd go in and like this is perfect, like oh, they get everything they need yep, it's awesome and and our aov actually shot from like 120 or like 155.

Speaker 1: 20:43

So, like, we increased it $10 more than I think our goal was, if I remember right. So, bundling stuff, you don't have to necessarily now we added additional products to that to like really, you know, we did some surveying to figure out what would be best. We don't necessarily have to add like new skews to it. You could have products that look really good. We have a jewelry company and we have we do bundling where, like we have these, you know, gold studded earrings and we have a very small huggy and then a larger huggy, and so, rather than just selling both of those separately, we've combined it because a lot of people want both anyways yeah, and then you give a little discount obviously because they're buying more 10, 15 off is like, if you bundle, it's like the costco model, right.

Speaker 1: 21:34

So bundling, love it. Great way for aov. Um, another really good way forV. Unless you want to keep going on, bundling is you can no, but let's recap really quick.

Speaker 2: 21:47

So you can either just increase prices just flat out, or you can incentivize people to buy more through bundling Yep. One more thing with bundling and bundling also kind of includes some promotions, usually yes, Like if. Then if you buy this, then you get 50% off.

Speaker 1: 22:01

the one more thing with bundling also kind of includes some promotions.

Speaker 2: 22:03

Usually, yes, like if yeah, then if you buy this, then you get 50% off the second item, or whatever.

Speaker 1: 22:08

If these were all a cart purchased, you're going to save 40 bucks, exactly, yep, exactly, um. The other thing that you can add to that is like. You can also just like I'm just going to toss this one. This one's just obvious. This is not the one I wanted to bring up, but you can just create another product that costs more. So maybe you a lot of people will amplify their hero product and then and and justify a price increase with that. So, like, if you don't feel like you can justify the price increase for your diaper bag, you might add like what we? This is what happened we actually with. With the diaper bag, we ended up taking it from 150 to, or 160 to 170, and it was because we had added like, um, like reinforced backpack straps that people were asking for, and then we might have also added like a, like a handle to it oh yeah, remember that so that, like mothers you know, could lift it up instead of grabbing the strap. That was really annoying. This episode is brought to you today by Bestie.

Speaker 1: 23:06

If you are an e-commerce store on Shopify, stop and listen up. Are you surveying your customers? Do you know how they get to your website? Do you know what marketing channel introduced them to you? Do you know what motivated them to buy? Do you know what your MPS score is, if people actually like and love your products? If you don't know the answers to some of those questions, or any other questions you might have for your customers, you need to start using post-purchase surveys. Bestie is the only post-purchase survey provider that utilizes AI to not only help you craft your questions, but also takes the insights that your customers give you and creates actionable insights and steps for you to make as a business to help grow and scale your company.

Speaker 1: 23:49

Today, bestie just lowered their prices so you can be serving your customers for as low as $39 a month. And not only that they have a 14 day free trial in the app store. So go check them out right now. Test the 14 day free trial. If you happen to pay the $39 a month, you are not going to lose out on much and you are only going to be able to gather more data around your customers to help grow and scale your businesses. We love Bestie and we use it for every single brand we work with. Go check them out today at bestieai. Okay, okay, the other one I was going to say is this one used to work a lot more. So I'm not like I don't want to make it sound like, hey, if you do this, this is going to work. But you can say, hey, free shipping on orders over x amount of dollars yeah, that's true, right?

Speaker 1: 24:36

so if your aov is 60, um you know, you could say hey, free shipping on all orders over 75 dollars yeah, that that doesn't work as much anymore just because of the expectation that is there, which? Is most people just, and the reality is most brands have to bake that into their cost of goods now.

Speaker 2: 24:56

But from the consumer side most people don't want an extra $5 added.

Speaker 1: 25:01

But there are two different types of brands that I do see this happening a lot with that don't offer free shipping and there isn't the expectation. A lot of apparel brands still don't offer free shipping unless you hit a certain threshold, and that's just because the margins in apparel is so low. Well, margins and the weight, yep. And then the same thing is, I was going to say, anybody who has just a heavier product, yeah, golf bags, diaper bags, and that's why it's just the way, yeah, so they're like hey, we're not going to offer free shipping unless you spend 250 or more.

Speaker 2: 25:33

You know, I see that kind of stuff all the time. But so yeah, and then it can work. We've seen that work recently with someone who is in a heavier item space yep yep, so. So those are just a few ideas on AOV, on conversion rate, nice, how do we get people to convert 15% more of the time? Well, there's a lot of ways to do this, but the first and foremost thing that you need to start thinking about is are you selling your product on your website or are you presenting it?

Speaker 1: 26:07

Yeah, and that's about that.

Speaker 2: 26:10

That's what most brands, I think, fail to understand is you are. Most companies are just presenting products. It's window shopping. Yes, you are not convincing people to try to buy it, you are just presenting it. It's nice, you have a PDP, that's great, whatever Like PDPs do work a lot of the times, especially in the Shopify way Product pages but what are you doing to incentivize them emotionally that they need it or want it beyond just window shopping? Yeah, okay so. So what are some ways? Social proof is obviously a big one, so are you giving above the fold? So when somebody goes right to your page, your product page, is there any social proof verifying to them in their mind that you are a worthwhile product?

Speaker 2: 27:00

reviews five stars, actual visual testimonials yeah, so it could be reviews testimonials. It could be even, uh, as seen ons, as seen ons.

Speaker 1: 27:13

Yes, that's what I was trying to say I got you as seen ons yep so there's like another way of like selling is like doing comparisons on pdp pages. If you have that type of product, that can be that way. So like a good example, that would be maybe like a. If you're competing with ag1 or something like that, maybe you're talking about and I say AG1 because everyone knows who that is so if you're selling greens, that could be something very good to do is like hey this is what you're going to get with them.

Speaker 1: 27:46

This is what you're going to get with us, yep, and this is why we're so much better. Take a page out of software companies do this all the time. Ecom brands are so terrified to do that kind of us versus them, but software companies, like they, do it all the time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like nobody cares.

Speaker 2: 28:01

Well, speaking of software, I mean this is hardware, but remember those Apple commercials of I'm a Mac and I'm a PC? Yeah, totally With the guys. Yeah, it was that one actor, I don't remember his name, he was a new girl.

Speaker 1: 28:17

Yeah, it was that one actor. I don't remember his name. He was a new girl. Yeah, he was. Yeah, I can't remember what his name is. I remember what his name is a new girl but I can't remember what his name is in real life he's kind of geeky.

Speaker 2: 28:26

Yeah, the kind of geeky PC guy. Yeah, that's a perfect example of us versus them. Yes, that's not a landing page, but yeah, it's a marketing strategy.

Speaker 1: 28:36

Yeah, Another, I mean another way to do it.

Speaker 1: 28:38

What Mark just said is like you can actually create it like landing pages are oftentimes more designed to sell, where product pages are more designed to display yes, Right, and there's nothing wrong with that, because there are ways you can bolster up that to sell more on a product page, like we just talked about.

Speaker 1: 28:53

But there are like specific landing pages, you know so. For example, like these pants right here, um, like I love these pants. But if I remember when I bought these from standard issue or when I, when I was looking at these originally from standard issue and just on their product page, I thought I don't know, you know like they look cool but I don't know. But the moment I got them and like felt them, I was like holy cow. This could be talked about so differently, potentially. So creating an actual dedicated landing page that like sells that product, and so it's not necessarily an add to cart button right there at the top. It's selling people through a journey on why you should buy these pants, why you should buy a Mac computer, why you should buy that diaper bag and you should always be dedicating a small amount to testing that.

Speaker 2: 29:43

Yeah Right, most brands don't try any kind of conversion rate optimization, yep, and the reason why is because it's so easy to fail at it. I think a lot of people try it and then it's like, oh, we didn't really see anything Well, and it's so sometimes hard to understand.

Speaker 1: 30:01

Like in e-commerce, there's so many variables, some of the biggest ones being macro things that just like you can't control. For example, an election, the economy, gas prices, a war, I mean like anytime things like that happen, you always see hits, you know, in your website. Or if somebody talks about, like if, if elon musk or a joe rogan, these these voices that are like amplified amplified voices they could talk about, like what did I just recently hear?

Speaker 1: 30:35

Oh, was it when twisters came out? This has nothing to do with Elon Musk or Joe Rogan, but when twisters came out, did you see twisters?

Speaker 2: 30:43

and they did not see it now.

Speaker 1: 30:44

So the main character, glenn Powell, has this like Epic truck that allows him to. I'm not really given any spoilers like drive into a twister because he's a tornado. Yeah, he's a tornado chaser and a chaser and he's a youtuber. So he's not really giving any spoilers like drive into a twister because he's a tornado yeah, he's a tornado chaser and a chaser and he's a youtuber, so he's not actually doing it to like benefit research. He's doing it for the views, okay, for the clout, like he's he's. It's almost like he's an adrenaline junkie.

Speaker 1: 31:09

Yeah, it's almost like he's a rodeo guy but for for twisters, and so what he does is he like drives his like epic truck that's like decked out, crazy, and he like can drill augers into the ground so it like holds them into the ground when he drives into the twister. And and I heard I haven't researched this, but I heard that truck sales skyrocketed like for like 30 days after that movie came out. Truck sales, truck sales. I need to look that up, but it's it whether it's true or not. You get the example.

Speaker 2: 31:39

What I'm trying to say Maybe, maybe it's just season, you know, I don't know. Sure like. Maybe, like ice cream sales go up.

Speaker 1: 31:45

So there's these macro things in the summer.

Speaker 2: 31:48

I'm taking way too long to explain why sometimes there's other people because there's other things impacting your.

Speaker 1: 31:53

You might see a lift, and it might actually not be because of the landing page or you might be a see, a decrease, and think, oh well, we failed, that never worked for us. When it's like, actually just the economy like took a really big hit.

Speaker 2: 32:04

Gas prices went from 350 to 420 and that's why I I personally recommend for everyone to when we talk about defining success, most people are looking at success as like a 30-day window. You have to look at things month over month and year over year. That'll help you start seeing if there's seasonality quarter by quarter quarter by quarter.

Speaker 2: 32:29

So when you run these tests, don't just look at it as hey, we ran this test and we didn't really see an impact. Run it as hey. Here's a verse b and then a verse b verse last year yeah, at the same time at the same time, yeah, or last month? Sure, right, depending on your business. But yeah, try to look at different time frames. So, yes, that's a good point so conversion rate optimization?

Speaker 1: 32:52

what mark is saying? And that 15.

Speaker 2: 32:54

If it's statistically significant, a lot of people might throw that out as like that wasn't really that big of a lift and it's kind of hard to build out landing pages and whatever. But hey, a 15% conversion rate lift across the whole store and sometimes you're going to see that lift. And what I want to emphasize is with conversion rate, very rarely are you going to see a 15% lift just because you moved social proof above the fold, but you might see a 5% lift on your PDPs by doing that, or maybe a 2%.

Speaker 2: 33:27

Or 2% and once again.

Speaker 1: 33:28

That's going to get you closer to that 15%.

Speaker 2: 33:30

Yes, but by sending your top funnel traffic or your new traffic to a landing page that sells, you might see another 5% or 6%. Right, by doing something as they add to cart or some kind of whatever increases another 5%. So it's not, hey, we have to strike 15%, 20% increase just from one. Pdp change increase just from one pdp change. Yeah, it's. How do you segment your?

Speaker 1: 34:02

traffic and put them in the right categories and to the right, yeah, placements. I think another um, you know cr and cr and conversion rate optimization of anything. We're not just talking about changes on your pdp page, we're not just talking about changes on your landing page. We're talking about there's like there's a conversion rate optimization like formula and it's if you can minimize friction, minimize anxiety and maximize offer and timing. Those are kind of these four, four levers you can pull with conversion rate optimization. So anxiety you also might just be like is your website hard to navigate? Does your, does your ad promise?

Speaker 2: 34:48

and sometimes match the incentive on the website and sometimes I want to. I want to emphasize this because this is just a common mistake. Sometimes what brands think are beautiful changes make your website harder to navigate.

Speaker 1: 35:01

Yeah, totally Amazon, think Amazon Like.

Speaker 2: 35:05

Amazon doesn't change anything. For a reason they're not just not changing anything.

Speaker 1: 35:12

Not a pretty.

Speaker 2: 35:14

It's not that pretty of an experience. But people use it. They know what to expect. So just remember like sometimes beautifying something in your mind is making it harder to use for your customers yeah, yes so by minimizing anxiety doesn't always mean beautiful, pretty, yep on brand, okay.

Speaker 1: 35:37

The other thing, the friction piece, is like friction is something broken. Hey, this isn't working. This isn't what this is like. And a good example of this is like I think I brought this up before, um, one of my very first, like you know, maybe second or third year into my marketing career. Um, we were spending millions of dollars on driving one somebody to one specific landing page and I was brought in to do like conversion rate optimization for this. This company and I spent maybe two to three hours I mean, this happened like within a week of the job and I noticed that on this landing page, no one was putting in they were asking for a country as their lead gen and, um, no one was putting in united states of america. Like everyone was figuring like, hey, if I'm putting in utah or florida or california?

Speaker 2: 36:30

I don't need to fill out. Why do I put in my country too?

Speaker 1: 36:33

yeah, but what was happening is they would click submit and nothing would happen. But because that field was left blank, it wasn't letting the person move forward, but there was nothing, helping that person know. That that was the problem so it wasn't.

Speaker 2: 36:47

There's no reason for them to have it in.

Speaker 1: 36:48

Yeah, so yeah one, you didn't need it too. There wasn't a box like that said this field is required or anything like that, and so I just went to the dev team. I was like, hey, can you guys just get rid of this? And they're like, oh yeah, sure, and we saw a million dollar monthly increase in sales. There's a 12 million dollar annual increase in revenue from that one thing. So it's just stupid. There are some stupid things. That's friction, okay, I'm clicking, and it's not working.

Speaker 2: 37:17

I'm trying to add to cart it's not working and fresh eyes can find friction too, totally, which is why don't don't hesitate to have your whole team go through an experience totally, because it might be the intern who finally discovers it, because she's not the one, she hasn't been looking at things, she's just going through it as like a new customer.

Speaker 1: 37:38

Yeah, new eyes, couple of your mom, dad.

Speaker 1: 37:41

Whatever go through your experience a couple other things to raise conversion rate, because I want to move quickly here uh, because we got to get over to traffic, which is, um, creating special offers.

Speaker 1: 37:51

Um, a lot of people have an issue with creating, like, special offers because they don't want to be deemed as a discount brand, meaning like, hey, I'm constantly having a 30% offer, therefore it's not going to be. There's no FOMO, there's no anything like that. I think there are really interesting ways that you can have unique promos happening, either randomly or just special offers around, kind of like what you do with your bundle right, hey, you get 20% off when you bundle all this together. I know there's a lot of brands who introduce things like hey at any given time. I know we do this with our jewelry company. Like, anyone who buys two pieces of jewelry automatically gets the third for free, and we have that promo running all the time and it works really really well for it. And it's not because it doesn't turn us into a discount brand, because we're asking a lot of people like hey, you got?

Speaker 2: 38:40

to buy two pieces here, not just one. Sometimes your AOV solution helps your conversion rate Exactly so think of special and last thing with conversion rate, reducing friction, make your pricing easy to understand Totally so. So look up, there's all these psychological factors that that, if you just understand as a company, just Google it, just Google marketing psychology and like, start digging into it, start learning about it, you'll just find out that there's all these little tricks that you can add that will.

Speaker 2: 39:11

It's not going to go up 20, 30 percent overnight but, you add them all together right with a plan and you can get to 15 percent yeah, so traffic.

Speaker 1: 39:21

Can I say one more thing? That's going to flow into traffic, but it also does conversion rate. If you just get your returning customer rate up to that will increase your conversion. Yes, right, so send more emails, segment themgment them, offer them special, unique things, send text messages out.

Speaker 2: 39:36

And don't be scared to email more. They're not seeing your emails, no.

Speaker 1: 39:40

I saw Jimmy Kim, who's the founder of Sendlane, and they're not unsubscribing either.

Speaker 2: 39:45

Yeah, like just send more emails.

Speaker 1: 39:54

This is the guy who owns Sendlane, who's kind of like trying to take on Klaviyo right now. He just comes out on Twitter and, straight up, is like every good brand, who's succeeding emails once a day and everyone's like what it's like. I have insights into some of the biggest brands, but I was told in 2015 not to do that. I don't want to annoy people.

Speaker 2: 40:07

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 40:07

It's like, hey, you know what Email's been annoying for the last 15 years of our lives.

Speaker 2: 40:13

Yeah, we are to the point where email is the equivalent of your mail. Yeah, you get so much crap that comes to your house.

Speaker 1: 40:20

It's just expected, but it's still such an efficient way to do things because it's a numbers game.

Speaker 2: 40:25

Yes.

Speaker 1: 40:27

You can make things more efficient. I think you can segment. You can have better hooks and better subject lines and better offers and reasons to. You can have better hooks and better subject lines and better offers and reasons. There's plenty of things you can do, but no, like people aren't hitting spam on your stuff, they're just unsubscribing and unsubscribe If they're not going to buy. Like cool, get out. Like I don't want to waste one of my email sends.

Speaker 2: 40:44

And guess what? Most people aren't even unsubscribing.

Speaker 1: 40:46

Exactly.

Speaker 2: 40:47

They're just yeah, it's like they'll glance and unread 0.1% per email.

Speaker 1: 40:52

Yeah, maybe two to three.

Speaker 2: 40:54

Send more emails. All right, traffic. Okay, I like it Traffic.

Speaker 1: 40:57

We already said, the easy one Increase budget.

Speaker 2: 40:59

We're not going to spend a lot of time on traffic, because I think we talk about this directly and indirectly every episode. Yes, we do, because this is marketing. Yes, right, how do you increase your traffic by 15%? 15% in Facebook isn't a huge jump.

Speaker 1: 41:19

So if you're going to spend 15% more, In fact, you can do that in one day, Of course hopefully not all of your traffic is coming from paid ads.

Speaker 2: 41:27

Right, right, but to get 15% increase of traffic through paid ads is very manageable if you have the right creative mix and the right offer. Right, and if you understand what is resonating with with the audience Yep, so if you, if you know those things, then increasing your budget realistically, that's going to be probably like a 30% increase in your budget, because Meta's probably not driving 100% of your traffic. Yeah, but don't increase your budget too fast. Most people just launch through their budget or they increase it once and then say it didn't work. Yes, understand again, define success. Understand that when you're driving traffic, how many of it is new? How many of it is returning? How long does it take these people to convert? Make sure you're giving this enough time. So, increase it 10, 15%. Let it run for a week or two or three, depending on what your variables are as a company. Yes, increase it again Once you start compounding these percentages. Right, if you increase 10% and then another 10% and then another 10%, that's not a 30% increase. That's like a 45% increase, right, Approximately.

Speaker 1: 42:38

I'm not doing the math right now, right, but I get what you're saying and I want to bring up Mark's original point, or his original metaphor of the specialization of a Green Beret versus a Navy SEAL versus ranger versus a whatever. You know, this is like a traffic thing should be your marathon, like, yes, there are sprints with traffic, but there's a sale, exactly sometimes, yeah, sometimes you're just gonna it's either a sale or, hey, it's buying season.

Speaker 1: 43:11

We're selling swimming suits, so, yeah, crank your traffic from fe traffic from February to June, because that's when people buy swimsuits, correct, right, so, um, so yes, so ignore that piece. But what I mean by that is like traffic should be a marathon, because there are so many other ways that you should be outside of paid search and paid social that you can be getting your traffic up right, and that's things like organic distribution right, your organic strategies in content creation and content affiliates affiliates and influencers, creators.

Speaker 1: 43:50

It's um. You know, there, I hate to say it because you know that I'm not like, this is not my favorite thing, but there is, for some people, an seo play that works. Yeah, there there is an seo play for some people yeah, and for those of you for context, I'm not a huge believer in ecom seo, unless it's a specific type of brand. There are certain brands that it works great for and there are other brands that it just doesn't.

Speaker 2: 44:14

But there is another play with SEO. That isn't just this hey, somebody's searching and your articles showing up. It's using affiliates, right, getting on people's like if there's blogs or articles or whatever and getting your name out there and increasing traffic that way. Right, you're not going to increase 50%. It's usually kind of spotty doing this, but a consistent increase of traffic. But if you're consistent with it and getting a new publications, and it can be.

Speaker 1: 44:42

The other thing is uh, this goes into kind of what I was just saying is like the type of content you create and put into your ad strategy can also help with increased traffic. And what I mean by that is, right now, the dynamic of being able to pick a new audience or gamify how you media buy it's. It's like not as it's not what it was in 2018, right To be able to say I'm going to test this new, lookalike audience and it's going to skyrocket my, my impression. You know my CPMs or whatever, but you're creating good content that people click on, watch, spend time on, engage with. That is also going to help just increase. Right, you don't have to increase your budget to see an increase in traffic.

Speaker 2: 45:32

True, and again harder, totally easier said than done a hundred percent.

Speaker 1: 45:37

But. But creative is the number one way to move the needle in the paid ad game in the paid and organic, yes, yes.

Speaker 2: 45:44

and again we're talking 15 total increase in traffic. So do the math, break out where your traffic is coming from and say, hey, is it realistic to get 15% more in organic? Yeah, 15% more in paid, 15% more in affiliates Yep. Or do we have to get 50% more in paid?

Speaker 1: 46:11

and 10.

Speaker 2: 46:11

And 10% more in organic and 10% more in Totally. Just do the math and if you start doing the math you'll understand really fast, like how to make the right moves, yeah, but good luck everyone.

Speaker 1: 46:24

Yeah, we didn't really talk about returning customers and the only reason we didn't talk about LTV returning customers as much is because, factoring in that piece of the overall equation that we like the very simple equation we did is it gets a little bit more challenging. But a lot of the things that we talked about today, like are you can take several of those insights and that is going to help boost um returning customer, right?

Speaker 2: 46:49

yeah, retention is just a different. It's not a different game, but it's we're that we're going to have to go into email marketing a lot deeper. We briefly talked about it, but maybe in a couple of weeks I do want to emphasize if you're trying to increase conversion rate we said this before, but we want to reemphasize, reiterate Sometimes the easiest way to do that is get returning customers by far, because a returning customer is often going to convert at a high, a higher clip, or returning visitor significantly than a first timer yeah, like it.

Speaker 1: 47:19

Like if I've done the math right and this is gonna I it's usually five I'm gonna, I'm gonna butcher this right better yeah, if you're. If your average conversion rate is one percent, then you have to remember your average is taking your returners who are up here and your first timers who are down here, so it's like you have outliers bringing up.

Speaker 1: 47:38

Yeah, so if you've got like a 30% returning customer rate and a 70% new customer rate. You might be at a 0.7% here, but likea 3% on the returning side yes, so if you just get more of those, that'll bring the average up. Yeah, exactly. So if you take, if you get your returning customer rate to go from 30% to 40%, then that 1% jumps from 1% I'm not doing the math right here but maybe to 1.3%.

Speaker 2: 48:06

Yes, and when you are doing the math, don't average averages. No, no, no, no. Always Average averages no, no, no, no. Always aggregate, yes, and then.

Speaker 1: 48:14

Meaning orders divided by sessions. Don't do. This is what my conversion rate was December 1st, December 2nd, December 3rd what?

Speaker 2: 48:27

is the average? What is the average of 1.7, 1.8 to 1.8?

Speaker 1: 48:30

Yeah, because you're going to get the wrong answer. Okay awesome.

Speaker 1: 48:33

Okay, I love it. Cheerio, Episode 100,. We are going to do some fun giveaway. We need to spend more time on that, but we're going to do some fun stuff. Very excited for that. We're going to be highlighting favorite moments of the podcast, favorite one-liners, favorite value props, things that happened. So it's like if you haven't listened to the last 100 episodes, we're going to give you some of our favorite pieces of that one. So thank you so much for listening. We will see you guys. Go listen to 100. We'll see you guys on episode 100. Thank you so much for listening to the Unstoppable Marketer podcast. Please go rate and subscribe the podcast, whether it's good or bad. We want to hear from you because we always want to make this podcast better. If you want to get in touch with me or give me any direct feedback, please go follow me and get in touch with me. I am at the trevor crump on both instagram and tiktok. Thank you, and we will see you next week.