379: The Single Most Important Way To Improve Your Sales With Jon McDonald

00:00
You’re listening to the My Wife Could Her Job podcast, the place where I bring on successful bootstrap business owners and dig deep into what strategies they use to grow their businesses. And today I have John McDonald on the show and John is the founder of The Good and his area of specialty is conversion rate optimization. So in this episode, you’ll learn what it takes to improve your conversion rate and the best practices for an e-commerce store. But before we begin, I want to thank Claviyo for sponsoring this episode.

00:25
Always super excited to talk about Klaviyo because they’re the email marketing platform that I personally use for my e-commerce store and it depended on them for over 30 % of my revenue. Now you’re probably wondering why Klaviyo and not another provider. Well Klaviyo is the only email platform out there that is specifically built for e-commerce stores and here’s why it’s so powerful. Klaviyo can track every single customer who is shopped in your store and exactly what they bought. So let’s say I want to send out an email to everyone who purchased a red handkerchief in the last week. Easy.

00:51
Let’s say I want to set up a special autoresponder sequence to my customers, depending on what they bought, piece of cake, and there’s full revenue tracking on every email sent. Klaviyo is the most powerful email platform that I’ve ever used, and you can try them for free over at klaviyo.com slash my wife. That’s K-L-A-V-I-Y-O dot com slash my wife. I also want to thank Postscript for sponsoring this episode. Now, if you run an e-commerce business of any kind, you know how important it is to own your customer contact list.

01:17
And this is why I’m focusing a significant amount of my efforts on SMS marketing. SMS or text message marketing is already a top five revenue source for my e-commerce store. And I couldn’t have done it without postscript.io, which is my text message provider. Now, why did I choose postscript? It’s because they specialize in e-commerce stores and e-commerce is their only focus. Not only is it easy to use, but you can quickly segment your audience based on your exact sales data and implement automated flows like an abandoned cart at the push of a button.

01:45
Not only that, but it’s price well too and SMS is the perfect way to engage with your customers. So head on over to postscript.io slash Steve and try it for free. That’s P O S T S C R I P T dot I O slash Steve. And then finally, I wanted to mention my other podcast, which I released with my partner, Tony. And unlike this podcast where I interview successful entrepreneurs in e-commerce, the profitable audience podcast covers all things related to content creation and building an audience.

02:12
No topic is off the table and we tell like how it is in a raw and entertaining way. So be sure to check out the profitable audience podcast on your favorite podcast app. Now onto the show.

02:28
Welcome to the My Wife, Quitter, Job podcast. Today I’m excited to have John McDonald on the show. And John is someone who I recently met at Nick Shackelford’s Geek Out event in San Diego, California. And I’m really glad that I went. John is the founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization firm that has achieved results for some of the largest brands, including Adobe, Nike, Xerox, The Economist, and more. So basically he understands how to convert customers. So in this episode, you will learn what it takes to improve your conversion rate.

02:56
And today we’re going to talk about the best conversion rate practices for an e-commerce store. And with that, welcome to the show, John, how are you doing today? Great. Thanks for having me. So before we start, John, there’s probably people listening out there who don’t know who you are. Give me the quick background and how you actually ended up doing conversion rate optimization. Yeah. So the long story short is that started the good about 12 years ago, and I have a computer science degree and a visual art degree. did a dual major in college.

03:26
And I decided that I wanted to go into web development. I started working at agencies along the way and then eventually ended up starting The Good, as I mentioned about 12 years ago. We started out as a dev shop building e-commerce websites. Within about 18 months to two years, I quickly realized that that was becoming a commodity. Even back then, Shopify was just on the horizon. You could kind of see it starting to grow.

03:51
in terms of SaaS offerings, Magento was really the king of the Sahara at that point in time, but very few people enjoyed that. What I found though was that our clients didn’t really appreciate the code behind the site. They just liked that it worked. What I did was I built into every single contract a three-month optimization. I called it continual optimization at the time.

04:19
I did that for two reasons, The first reason was I wanted to set my team up for success. No e-commerce site launches without some bugs. I was like, I want to be upfront about that with you as a client and I want you to know we’re going to be here. So many agencies at the time and still to this day follow a launch and leave philosophy. They would launch a site for the client and then be like, hey, you want things fixed, you want additions, you got to pay us to do that. I would just bake that into our contract.

04:48
And then, you know, I realized pretty quickly that clients really appreciated that optimization more than getting the site built, as I mentioned. Yeah. You know, it could have been two tin cans with a string between as long as it processed orders appropriately, they were happy. And we’re talking about some big brands too. And I was just shocked to find that out. So I really went around the country interviewing all of our best clients and said, you know, what, why did you choose to work with the good? And

05:18
All of them said that it was because we had that three-month optimization. They all confirmed to me that development was becoming a commodity. They did not really care about the development quality as long as it worked and was maintainable. They really cared that we were going to be there for three months and that we were doing at the time, which was very early on, testing. A-B testing, were using Optimizely, which was the only tool at the time with their salt.

05:47
And we were doing things like user testing and surveying after we had launched the site. And so all of that really turned into 18 months after starting the company, to me saying, you know what, that’s what people value. Why are we doing anything else? And so we did a hard pivot to focusing exclusively on conversion rate optimization as it’s become known over those years. And

06:11
It’s really been a wild journey to watch it kind of blossom and now it’s a buzzword everyone. It’s almost a commodity to that point. It’s definitely not a commodity. mean, I agree with you like buying a theme these days for any shopping cart like a Shopify or BigCommerce. It’s par for the course. What’s funny though is most of those themes that you see on there, they’re beautiful, but they aren’t necessarily optimized for conversions. So I want to make this episode as actionable as possible for the people who are listening.

06:40
So I figured let’s start with some low hanging fruit. What should just everyone be doing for immediate results, best practices? Well, I think the first thing is talking to your consumers. Very few brands, when they’re starting out, have enough traffic to actually be doing A-B testing. That’s where, when they talk about optimization, that’s often where they go first. Or they start looking at a laundry list of best practices that…

07:06
really is not going to be that helpful because it’s not tailored to them and it’s not addressing the concerns that their consumers are having. So the first thing they need to do is just start talking to your consumers. I’m not talking about putting pop-ups up that ask for survey online. I’m talking about actually emailing every consumer that makes a purchase or every abandoned cart and just saying, can you tell me about your experience? What’d you like? What’d you not like? One thing that even smaller brands could be doing is just

07:36
take a laptop and go to your local coffee shop and say, help buy you a coffee. If while we’re waiting for it to be made, you take a spin through your site, my site and tell me what you’re thinking as you do that. And I’ll ask you to do things like find the right t-shirt for you. Really broad generic prompts from there. to my listen to this by the way, because I actually used to call all of my abandoned car customers. It was kind of like stalkers, but I call them and I would ask them why they didn’t buy. And I bet you learned a lot, right? I did. In fact,

08:05
I’ll just give a quick example for the people listening out there when we first launched our aprons I noticed we had a pretty high abandoned cart, right and It was because we labeled these aprons by age like six to ten I think two to four I can’t remember the exact age ranges But people were it was ambiguous whether people who had larger kids or smaller kids whether they could actually fit in those evenings And so we changed the descriptions around and that fixed that problem, but I never would have found that out had I not

08:35
hauled a bunch of people. It’s funny you say that. We worked with Easton baseball, which you’re not familiar with Easton. They make baseball bats majority of their other revenue and about 99 % of Little League baseball swings are done with an Easton bat. And when they brought us on, they said, hey, you know, we’re having this huge issue with our online sales where we’re getting massive amounts of returns and B, we just aren’t converting as well as we should be.

09:04
So what do we do? We start talking to consumers and we found that it was the Little League players were going on the website and saying, mom and dad, this is the bat that I want. Or the Little League players are going on the website and just being overwhelmed with the choices. If you can imagine you pull up a bat website online, all the bats in the pictures look the same. It’s just a big wall of bats. You have no idea what the difference is between the colors, what the technology is.

09:32
And what we found in talking to people is the parents were even more confused than their children. And the problem was the parents were saying, know, I don’t know what this technology means. And Easton thought they were being, you know, really leading the pack by coming out with all this new technology, which was great, but they were giving it really technical terms. So they would use some branded term instead of just saying, hey, this technology reduces the sting in your hands when you hit the ball, right?

10:02
And so what we found was that we needed a way to guide these parents through the purchasing process. Now, the biggest issue that Easton was having was parents were returning these bats. And the reason they were getting returned is every bat is certified for the league the child is playing in. And parents didn’t know what certifications were allowed. So a kid would get up, would do batting practice and everything with their new bat, and they’d be really excited about it. Then they’d get up to bat and…

10:30
the umpire would not let them swing with the new bat. But it was already all dinged up and parents would get really, really frustrated, call Easton and say, hey, this isn’t a bat that my kid can use. Can I return it? So what we did is we put on the site a bat finder. Pretty simple. based on consumer research and just talking to consumers, we understood that parents need guidance in what bat they should buy their kids. We said, okay, let’s just ask four simple questions.

10:58
What kind of hitter is your kid? Are they swinging for the fences? Are they looking to bunt the ball, just get on base? Who knows, right? That’s going to alter the type of bat. In addition to that, what league are they in? Because then you can break it down by certification. Then from there, we were able to ask about height and weight, and that would help determine what size bat. From a handful of these small questions that are pretty obvious in hindsight, we were able to reduce the returns dramatically.

11:28
and increased conversions by over 240%. And it was just, you know, by doing little things like that, parents felt much more comfortable buying. They didn’t have to go to a retail store and they could whittle down this wall of bats online to three or four options that were different price points. So they could choose based on price, what would make most sense for them. Yeah, no, that’s a great story. So you recommend that anyone who’s just launching, just call the first couple of customers. I interrupted you when you were…

11:57
your thought there. Which questions do you ask exactly? Well, first thing is always just a brief, know, tell me about your experience, right? You’d be surprised is that if you leave it more open-ended, you’re gonna get better answers. Most people think you ask better questions, you get better answers, and well, that’s true. That happens further down the line. You really want to start broad and let people talk. Don’t interrupt them. Don’t, you know, take away from their thought process.

12:24
And this is where things like user testing really come in, where you just say, something broad like find the right bat for you. And just doing that, we were able to understand that they were like, I don’t know where to start. There’s a huge wall of bats here. Well, how do I filter these down? How do I find the one that’s right for my kid? So, you know, that’s the first thing is just start broad, then get more specific based on your products. Okay, now, you know what, you know, you don’t understand what bat is the right bat for your kids league.

12:54
Okay, let’s assume that it’s these four bats. Now what’s your next step? Right? And you just start going through that decision making process. And the whole point here is just to understand, you know, if your website’s a funnel, which most people get that concept, what are the steps in that funnel that you want your consumers to be taking? And then optimize that path by making it as easy as possible. Consumers are only at your website for two reasons. They have a pain or a need and they feel like your site or service

13:22
can help them solve that pain or need. And if they determine that it can, they want to convert as quickly and easily as possible and get on with their lives. So really anything that’s outside of those two is just adding barriers to the process. So you just really want to understand what those pains or needs are and then how to get them to find that product or service and then convert. For that Easton Bat example that you just gave,

13:51
Did they include that survey or whatever the questionnaire, guess, front and center, above the fold? Yes. So the BatFinder was the main call to action of what we put everybody into. In terms of an online survey, we didn’t actually have one online. I find that disruptive to the user flow and your participation rates can be pretty low. And what we also find is when you do an online survey, it turns into more of people asking questions that should be for customer service.

14:21
So the quality ends up being fairly low. Instead, we recommend just doing one-on-one or actually running user testing as opposed to running an online survey. Yeah, so just a quick plug for PickFu here. For $25, you can just ask arbitrary people to go do something and tell you about their experience. So I run this from my store. After every redesign, I say, hey, if you were interested in these products, would you shop at this store?

14:49
And sometimes I tell them to look for product just like you suggested and tell me about their experience. And sometimes they write these really long paragraphs, which are very helpful. Yeah, there’s some great tools out there for that now. the fact that you’re doing that customer research will put you in the top 10 % of e-commerce sites because not enough for doing it. would say out of the brands I talked to, even massive corporations, probably 90 % of them,

15:17
are not actively doing customer research in this manner on a regular basis. 90 %? 90 % we talk to. Even the big guys. mean, we work, you mentioned all those brands we work with. I’ll spare their souls right now, but I would say that the reality is, first thing when we come in is, here, customer research can you share with us? And they’re like, well, we haven’t done any for a very long time in terms of onsite research. Well, that’s good to know.

15:46
So if you guys are listening out there and you start doing this, you can probably beat out a lot of the bigger guys by being small and nimble. Exactly. So what are some of the common mistakes that you’ve seen people make then with the clients that you’ve worked with? Well, think that anything that interrupts that customer journey. So what do mean by that? Well, if I could eliminate two things from the internet, one of them is going to be email pop-ups. I knew you were going to bring that up. So yeah, let’s talk about that.

16:16
Yeah, so here’s the reality. So many brands interrupt the consumer’s journey right away. Now think of your site like a retail store. If I were to walk into a retail store and an associate would jump out in front of me with a clipboard and say, you know, give me your email address. I probably would have a pretty negative reaction to that, right? It’s not the journey I’m looking for. I’m coming to browse the store. I have a pain or need I’m here to solve.

16:46
and you’re interrupting me. Your first thing you’re doing is saying, give me your information. And it’s like, well, I don’t even know if you can help me yet. Why do I want to do that? And so I think that that’s the first challenge is you’re just getting people off of their shopping journey. The second thing is that the quality of emails you’re going to get, it’s going to go down dramatically, which has a long tail effect. It’s going to hurt your deliverability.

17:13
It’s going to start hurting your conversion rates overall. Most people look at these and they say, you know, John, these email signup forms work. And it’s like, well, okay, yeah. Do they collect more email addresses? Perhaps. What’s the quality of those email addresses? What damage are you doing else to your site? Right. Not only that, but most brands then offer discount. They do a dollar percentage off, which is the easy button.

17:40
They hit that easy button and say, I’ll give you 10 % off for your email address. The reality is you are now telling consumers who have just come to your site, have not researched your products, have not found the one that’s right for them, haven’t even seen pricing perhaps. And the first thing you’re telling them is our products aren’t worth what we list them in charge for. They’re worth 10 % less. And so you’re immediately putting people in that mindset of discount brand. And that’s not a sustainable place to play. It just isn’t.

18:10
Am I all for growing email list? Yes, 100%. I know you had Chase Diamond on the podcast and he and I have become good friends. know we all hung out at Geek Out. He is great at these email pop-ups and I agree with him. Emails should be your number one converting channel. It should be the highest revenue earner for you. But that assumes you have a quality email list.

18:36
And so you have to really think about where you’re collecting those emails and what you’re doing in exchange for those emails.

18:45
If you sell on Amazon or run any online business for that matter, the most important aspect of your long-term success will be your brand. And this is why I work with Steven Weigler and his team from Emerge Council to protect my brand over at Bumblebee Linens. Now what’s unique about Emerge Council is that Steve focuses his legal practice on e-commerce and provides strategic and legal representation to entrepreneurs to protect their IP. So for example, if you’ve ever been ripped off or knocked off on Amazon, then Steve can help you fight back and protect yourself.

19:13
Now, first and foremost, protecting our IP starts with a solid trademark and Emerge Council provides attorney-advised strategic trademark prosecution, both in the United States and abroad for a very low price. And furthermore, the students in my course have used Steve for copyrighting their designs, policing against counterfeits and knockoffs, agreements with co-founders and employees, website and social media policies, privacy policies, vendor agreements, brand registry, you name it. So if you need IP protection services, go to EmergeCouncil.com and get a free consult.

19:43
And if you tell Steve that I sent you, you’ll get a hundred dollar discount. That’s E-M-E-R-G-E-C-O-U-N-S-E-L dot com. Now back to the show. So a couple of questions on that. So the average conversion rate is 2%, right? And unless you have someone to bring something to or some way to bring people back, that means 98 % of your people are leaving and probably aren’t going to come back, right? So how do you mitigate that? So what do you recommend instead then? Well, I think that

20:11
you should be really focusing on under, first of all, understand that it’s okay if 98 % leave as long as you convert those 2%, right? It doesn’t really matter if what your conversion rate is, as long as it’s always improving. So yeah, there’s an average out there, but you know, really just focusing on your own conversion rate and saying, what can I do to increase that? You know, day over day, month over month, et cetera. That’s really where you’re going to see gains. But the reality here is,

20:41
It’s okay to collect email addresses, just collect them within the page, right? Have it in your footer on every page. But you don’t necessarily need to have it be a pop-up that interrupts the flow as soon as somebody gets to your site. I’m all for exit intent. I think that works extremely well. know, people are showing intent they’re gonna leave. Okay, hit them up with something. But I would do a promotion, not an offer. So what I mean me an example. Yeah. Okay.

21:08
maybe you have free shipping orders over $50 for everybody. Say, hey, you know what? Give us your email address. We’ll give you free shipping on any dollar value for your first order, right? Doesn’t cost you anything. Doesn’t degrade your brand, but gives them a benefit, right? So it does cost you something, It costs you something. Excuse me. Yes. Very little comparatively, right? Uh, you could do free gift with purchase.

21:32
Right? So you could do something around bundling. So, Hey, if you want, here’s a special price on this bundle. In a sense, you’re giving a discount, but you’re not doing it in the same psychological method as just a dollar percentage off. one thing we do with our site and just, just kind of commenting on what you just said, we offer a free handkerchief for anyone who gives us their SMS number. And that actually works really well.

21:59
You can’t fake an SMS number like you can an email, which is why I’ve been leaning more towards that avenue. Is that generally what you’re talking about here? Yes, exactly that. And I do see the same trend. I see a lot of the brands we’re working with having a lot of success with SMS. And I agree, it’s because you can’t fake it. You could go get a Google voice number or something, but it’s a lot harder to do that.

22:27
then everyone has a Gmail address. Everyone has that extra junk email that they sign up for all this stuff just to get the discount and then never open or read those anymore, which hurts your deliverability, right? So it’s one of those things where really just making sure that you’re offering something that is of value to the customer likely doesn’t cost you any more than what you were doing with the dollar or percentage off. But…

22:56
is not that same psychological trigger. Right. Here’s just my general philosophy on discounts versus giving away free product. When you give away a free product, chances are your margins, like if your margins are pretty good, like the perceived value of that product greatly exceeds what you’re giving away. Whereas if you give away a percentage discount and your margins are pretty high, you’re giving away a lot more money than just giving away a free product.

23:22
Plus a free product just sounds better to me psychologically as well. A hundred percent. That is very, very accurate. I always say that discounting is not optimization. It is margin drain. So many brands default to discounting to increase conversions when they don’t need to and they’re artificially hurting their margins. So do you recommend, okay, so you said Exit and Ten pop-ups are acceptable for you.

23:52
And then emails in the footers, no one really ever signs up there. Like I have one in my footer too. mean, if you don’t use pop-ups altogether, then it seems like the only way to get an email is through checkout, right? I think that card abandonment and getting that email in that way is extremely effective. baking the form into your page where people have intent to purchase or interested in your product is something that can work extremely well for you.

24:22
Yes, I agree, very few people are gonna do it in your footer. The reality is you want it there for those high intent signups. And so that it’s on every page makes it easy. But I agree with you, most people are going to do the exit intent. They’re going to do something where it’s along their journey perhaps, or exactly when they’re leaving. But again, there are lots of ways to grow your contact.

24:49
list, right? You could do it through ads on a specific landing page. Hey, you know, give us your email address, get a free handkerchief as you mentioned, and we’ll, you know, just be very open to what you’re going to do. We’ll email you once a week and we’re going to send you, you know, promotion once a week, or we’re going to send you the latest product launches. Just be really upfront about how often you’re going to email people, what you’re going to email them about, and that you respect their privacy, aren’t going to, you know, sell their email address, et cetera.

25:19
Okay. So that was your first point, which we talked about 10 minutes on already. What was the second thing if you had your druthers? Well, I think that the other thing that I would I would look to remove would be the discounts, which we already talked about as well. pop ups and straight dollar and percentage off discounts. By the way, on the order of discounts, I recommend everyone listen to Kevin Steckos episode on my podcast, we did a breakdown, like if you give a 10 % off coupon, you have to make

25:47
significantly more money to make up for that discount. Like we did the math on that episode. I know math isn’t that attractive, but it was something surprisingly high. Whenever you, what seems like an innocuous discount can really drain like the profitability of your store. It’s impressive when you, when you start doing the math. And I think that’s the thing most people don’t, right? They see 10 % and they’re like, it’s just 10%. My margins are 40%. Yeah, but it’s 10 % off the top. That math really doesn’t work out in the same way.

26:15
So I’m glad to hear you doing the math for folks. That’s awesome. It ended up being a good episode. I don’t want to detract anyone listening from the math aspect of it, but just do a search for Kevin Steckow on my site. He did a whole analysis and you know what he ended up doing? He stopped doing discounts and I think he almost doubled his prices. he like halved his sales, but he ended up much more profitable than he was before. It was a pretty interesting episode. I’ll have to listen too. That sounds great.

26:45
Okay, so I know during your geek out talk, I saw you show pictures of all these tools that you use to help with the conversion process. Can you just kind of talk about your process for your clients and what tools you use? Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a handful of tools that we use. Some are more enterprise level, um, and some anyone can, can really get access to, but there’s really four key types of tools and data that every brand should be considering. Uh, the first is just.

27:15
Analytics right you can use Google analytics But really just want to have a good understanding of the funnel and how people are engaging with your site What paths are they taking through the site most people look at GA and they say oh traffic levels, etc I mean that’s fine But what we use it for is more What are the paths that people are taking through the site and what steps are they dropping off at? That’s really just a high level. Where should we start looking right for optimization?

27:45
Just where on the Google Analytics can you find that information? Yeah, so there’s a great view, and it’s changed a little bit in GA4 that recently came out. it’s still there. It’s just buried now. There’s this great view that looks like it has a vertical column step out of each page.

28:06
And then it makes like a, we call it the octopus view here because it has all of these views that kind of show you how people are going through the site and then where they drop off. So it’s a, I’d have to look at GA4 to figure out exactly where it is now. I’m not in there every day, but that is the best view. it’s, my understanding is it’s a little more buried now, but it’s really just the paths that people are taking through your site. So I know which view you’re talking about.

28:34
but I’ve never actually analyzed that before. So what are you looking at in particular? I’m looking at what steps are people dropping off? Because it shows you the bounce rate from each of these steps, right? And the abandonment rate. So I’m saying, okay, well, obviously homepage is going to be the highest. Always is, you know, that’s where the most people are going to bounce and that’s okay. The whole goal of your homepage though is just to get people to the next step in the funnel. That should be it. Shouldn’t be to convert. Shouldn’t be to even get an email, sign up.

29:04
That could be secondary. Really the whole point of the homepage is just to get people to that next step. understanding how many some guidelines by the way? Like when should you be worried about your bounce rate on your homepage? Like at what level? Well, I think that if you’re going to put a percentage on it, you’re likely going to see upwards of 60, 70 % of your visitors bounce off the homepage. Okay. And that’s okay as long as they’re spending…

29:34
10, 15 seconds on that page, that’s okay. If they’re only spending a second or two, then something’s wrong, right? And the reason is, is we do a lot of what we call five second tests, which is another bit of data we can get into around some of the more, know, qualitative pieces of data. The five second test is where we send people to a homepage, a landing page, product detail page. We show it for five seconds and then take it down and ask a set of questions.

30:04
Those questions are things like, what was the first thing you noticed? What do you recall about this page? Again, high level questions. And then it’s things like, asking specific things. Based on this page, what type of bat was best for you? Just go back to that example. And so then now we’re helping people understand how well are these pages being absorbed? And if it’s not being absorbed in that first five seconds, you’ve likely lost them.

30:33
So that’s a great place to start is just what sticks with people. What are they noticing? We see this all the time on homepages where people are promoting a single product upfront at the top of their homepage, right? That massive banner area, marketing teams get a hold of it. Next thing you know, it’s some marketing messaging about a new product launch or a blog article or all these things that aren’t helpful to the consumer. The consumer wants to know in that first five seconds,

31:02
What pain or need are you solving for me? And how am I gonna, how is it gonna help me? What’s the benefit here for me? And so often that’s not done in one product. Often that’s done more of a branding messaging. What do you offer that is a little bit different? How does it help them? And if you can communicate that in that main marketing area very quickly, you will convert more people and you’ll see your bounce rate decrease.

31:31
because people will continue to scroll and they’ll go to that next step in the process, which is really, again, all you’re trying to get them to do from the home page. So if you sell a lot of different product categories, you’re above the fold. Let’s say you do a really good job of saying what you’re about. What’s that action button? Where should it go to? Typically, I want that to go… First of all, I’m not a huge fan of having a call to action in that main area. Interesting.

31:57
I want people to get the message and continue to scroll down and have some other options. The reality is most people aren’t going to click that, at least not intentionally. And it’s even worse if it’s a rotating banner, because what we find there is that that decreases the clicks dramatically. Notre Dame University did a big study where they found that 1 % of people click those banners and then it decreases to another 1 % of that 1 % for each slide.

32:27
after that. So your odds are really, really low of getting people to click those to begin with. And, you know, there is no, you know, again, what do most people do there? They have a button there that sends them to that one product where they really are limiting how they can help that customer. Cause they click on that, they see that one product that’s not the fit for the pain or need they have. They’re going to leave. Interesting. So what I do is I have a button above the fold. Most people actually click on it. The last time I did a heat map test,

32:57
I take them to another set of categories where they can choose the category and filter their way down. So from what you just said though, it sounds like you want people to just scroll down and not click on anything and continue reading the page. Right. And they will scroll down. People scroll now. We look at hundreds of heat maps a week, scroll maps, and I can tell you that people scroll. There’s no more of this above the fold. We’re becoming a much more mobile society with mobile devices.

33:27
what’s the first thing we do on mobile devices? We start scrolling, right? And so it’s just inherent anymore that we’re used to doing that. But if you have a marketing message that takes up the entire, let’s just say the first frame you see in a desktop web browser, you’re losing out. It really shouldn’t be a massive image. You should just have it be maybe a third of that page at most. So I recommend limiting the size, the height of that.

33:55
and then really getting into the products below. Interesting. So in a hypothetical layout then, so you have your value props and exactly what you do kind of in that first two thirds, it sounds like, of the page. And then what is the rest of the flow on down the page? Well, the rest of the flow needs to be hitting on their major product categories and kind of doing some wayfinding there for people, right?

34:22
And then helping them understand a little bit about the brand, ideally, right? So if people are interested, but they just wanted a little bit more about the brand, they can keep scrolling down for that. And then just go straight to the footer. And in your footer, you really need to have, again, your product navigation on the far left, ideally, some of those help utility links in the middle. And then on the right needs to be all your contact information. And I’m talking a physical address, a phone number, and an email address.

34:50
We call that the trust trifecta. You need to have all three there. The reason being is that a lot of folks were finding are scrolling all the way down, especially during the pandemic. What happened was a lot of people who weren’t ordering as much online were now forced to, right? My parents for one, right? A little bit older generation. They were comfortable buying things online, but…

35:13
They weren’t as comfortable just going to every single direct-to-consumer site and buying things, right? They were more comfortable going to an Amazon, something of that sort that they had some trust in. But now what they’re doing is they’re scrolling down to the footer and they’re saying, okay, is this a legitimate company? And the first things they look for are that contact information. Is this company hiding behind the internet? If they’re not, by giving all this contact information, then they immediately feel a little bit better and they trust that brand.

35:41
I think that the whole point of the homepage is again to help people get to the next category, right? Understand to start filtering their way down and to say, this is how we help you solve that pain or need and you can trust us. If your homepage hits on those three things, people will take the next step in that funnel. So one thing that I remember you saying in your presentation was in regards to the menu, the nav menu. And I remember you saying you recommended removing everything.

36:11
pretty much except for the product Nav. Can you elaborate on that and why? Yeah, so the first thing and especially in Western cultures, right? We look in the top left hand corner and then we followed that F pattern, right? So the first thing you do is look top left hand corner and then you look over to the right and you start seeing that navigation. What we see when we do eye tracking studies is a big drop off in the navigation when brands start talking about themselves.

36:39
So it’s links like about us, our history, our founders, all these types of things that brands love to put up there. The problem is it’s not what the consumer is there for, or it’s not helping the consumer answer those questions, right? How is this going to help me solve my pain or need that I’m here for? So if you focus on the product categories and make your navigation product focused, people get a very

37:05
quick understanding of what you’re selling and are they in the right place. And so then that’s where the branding message that comes right below that in the marketing area can really be a beneficial help to, yes, we sell these products and now I can tell you what makes us different, how we can benefit you. And then you can get down into the product categories again below that. So it does all need to work together. If your navigation starts off with something that just says shop, for instance,

37:34
that doesn’t give the consumer any information about what it is you’re selling, how you can help them. And they’re not there to read your blog, right? So many brands put blog in the navigation. The problem is the blog is great for driving traffic. It’s great for SEO. Horrible for converting, right? A blog is always going to be the lowest converting section of every e-commerce site. But that content could be really helpful on a product detail page.

38:01
right, where you call it out and say, hey, here’s a blog article. has a lot more information about this feature. If you really want to dive into that and click here and read more, here’s a little summary, but it’s not really great for your main navigation where you’re sending essentially people back up the funnel, right? The blog is very top of the funnel. I always would suggest putting that in a funnel above your homepage because it really is going to convert less than your homepage.

38:27
I just wanted to let you know that tickets for the 2022 Seller Summit are now on sale over at Sellersummit.com. Now, what is the Seller Summit? It is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. And unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level BS, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. And in fact, every speaker that I invite

38:55
is deep in the trenches of their own e-commerce business. Entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet. The other thing I can assure you is that the seller summit will be small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets will sell out fast and in fact we sell out every single year many months in advance. Now if you’re an e-commerce entrepreneur making over 250k or $1 million per year in revenue,

39:22
We are also offering an exclusive Mastermind experience with other top sellers. Now the Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 4th to May 6th. And as of right now, we’re almost already sold out of Mastermind tickets and we’ll be raising the price every month leading up to the event after Cyber Monday. For more information, go to sellerssummit.com. Once again, that’s sellerssummit.com or just Google it. Now back to the show.

39:47
Actually, my philosophy on the blog is the traffic should be one way. You’re driving traffic from the blog to the store, but they shouldn’t go back to the blog from the store. Yes. And if there’s information there, you should just incorporate that into the product description if that’s helpful. Exactly. What about the About page? I think an About page is helpful further down on your site. It’s definitely helpful in your footer. It’s not helpful in your main navigation. Again, if people…

40:16
understand you can help solve their pain or need, then secondly, they might be interested in who are these people, how can they help me? So is the goal to make your menu just concise or are you suggesting just like literally breaking apart your product categories and replacing some of those other elements with more descriptive product categories in your nav? Well, I think it’s a combination of both and I say that because we really don’t want more than

40:45
five to seven items in a navigation and seven’s really pushing it. When we do eye tracking on these and click tracking, we find that over five and people stop looking at the navigation. Okay. And so we can see altogether, stop looking at the Yep. So they get to that about fifth item and then their eyes just dart right down because they’re like, okay, I kind of get it. I’m going to go down and start looking at the rest of the page. And so…

41:12
Really, if you keep it to five, you’re going to have their attention on those items. And anything that comes after those five is likely not going to get as much engagement. Interesting. By the way, what software do you guys personally use to check all of these things? So a couple of different options. We’re fans of Hotjar. It’s the best data quality out there for heat maps, click maps, and scroll maps.

41:40
For eye tracking, we own a company called VisualEyes, visual, E-Y-E-S dot design. That allows you to do artificial intelligence eye tracking. So it’s a great tool that has about a 95 % accuracy rate, meaning that we have been training and fed that IP and that artificial intelligence for years with eye tracking studies and things of that real eye tracking.

42:10
And what that has done is train that AI pretty efficiently at this point. So you can get an artificial intelligence eye tracking study instantly on a page that gives you a heat map of where people look that is statistically significant for the most part. Is that tool available to smaller companies? Okay. Yeah. Intentionally, we have a price point at, you know, I think it’s like 50 bucks a month.

42:36
something that is extremely reasonable for brands of all sizes. Just to make the distinction in case people are listening out there, what he’s talking about is eye tracking, not mouse tracking. I remember asking you how it worked exactly, but I think you obviously you don’t have cameras tracking someone’s eye, but supposedly you use statistical analysis to determine where people are looking at based on how they’re navigating the page. Is that accurate?

43:00
That’s accurate, right. Yeah, so HotJar will give you mouse tracking, right, which is going to tell you in aggregate where people’s mouses are out on a page. Now, that is great data in the sense that on a desktop, most consumers don’t recognize it, but your eyes are following your mouse around the screen. So there’s some relevance there, right? But it doesn’t tell you how far people are reading on a paragraph.

43:28
where they’re dropping off in that content, how long they’re looking at something, because often you’ll leave your mouse while you’re reading a paragraph, you’ll leave your mouse in one spot. So you’d see a hotspot there for the mouse tracking. Eye tracking will tell us what gets people attention. How much are they reading of that content? How long are they spending reading that content? So it gives you an extra layer of data. it is the way, you you can get actual eye tracking studies that track people through a camera.

43:58
And we do feed that into our algorithm. Quite often we do. We update it at least once a quarter with studies. So we continue to evolve with the trends that are out there. But yeah, the reality here is the goal with the artificial intelligence version is to be able to have those eye tracking studies immediately. So within seconds, you get that back from an algorithm versus having to wait.

44:27
days to weeks to get a true eye tracking study and compensate people and they know they’re being watched. So their behavior is a little bit different typically. You know, the other takeaway that I took from your talk and I’ve yet to implement this on my side, but it’s on my to-do list is to make buttons for every product in every category. Just having the images there, it might not be obvious for some people. You know what the kicker here is? Like as soon as I went to your talk, like literally like

44:56
three weeks before your talk, I had someone come to my site after clicking on an ad and go, hey, I couldn’t find your products or like I couldn’t find prices of your products. And it turned out they were looking at my category layout and they thought those were the products, but they couldn’t find the prices because you’re supposed to click further to find the products. Yeah, it’s one of those things that, you know, I like to say this often, but it’s really hard to read the label from inside the jar.

45:26
Right? We as e-commerce site owners, you’re so close to your site. You’re on it every day. You know the ins and out of your products. You know the pricing. You know the answers to all these things, right? But a new to file customer who clicked on an ad comes to your site, has no clue. They have no context. So to them, it’s a whole new world and they have challenges like that. So while it seems…

45:53
Like, do I really need to put a button on this? They can click on the image. Yeah, I get that aspect because you’re on your site every day. But a new to file customer, you need to tell them where they can click and what they should be clicking on. And the best way to do that is consistent call to actions throughout your entire site. mean, just basically make it super obvious for anything that you want people to do on your page, like super obvious. Yeah, tell them what you want them to do. Exactly.

46:22
Exactly, kind of like what my wife does. Although she makes me think about what I think she wants me to do. that’s different trap for a different answer. Well, cool. John, we’ve been chatting for quite a while and there’s a lot of great takeaways here, which I would say the biggest one is to actually talk to a real human or talk to your customers, I should say, about your products. mean, that’s the best way to get feedback. it’s, you know, what’s funny is like

46:49
When I first started calling abandoned car customers, everyone thought I was crazy, right? But the way I did is I’d call them up and I’d say, hey, I noticed you inserted this item in your car, but you didn’t check out. Would you mind telling me why? And don’t worry, we’ll just send you the free product regardless, right? And by giving away a free product or a major discount, it depends, they’re gonna be more than willing to tell you why and everything that you wanna know. And that’s such a return on that investment too, right? You think about how much that cost you versus

47:18
the information you gathered and you would have had to pay to get that, it’s well worth it. And the other thing I took away is best practices are really not best practices. Like your own store is going to be unique and you got to figure out what your own best practices are going to be. So true. And it goes with conversion rates too. You know, so many people are looking at their competitors and saying, what’s their conversion rate? I think I can do better or

47:44
I don’t need to optimize my site anymore because it’s better than the average. The reality is we work with hundreds of brands and I can tell you that I’ve seen a lot of these brands we work with out there touting what their conversion rates are and their data and then we get in there and I’m like, that’s not really what it is. So you just don’t know what the competition is saying in terms of their conversion rates, if it’s accurate, if they’re looking at the right data and you don’t know if what they’re doing is going to work for you.

48:14
So definitely want to focus on your own conversion rate and the growth of that and the iterative approach of just day over day looking to improve it a little bit. See, I never actually understood the concept of a global conversion rate because it depends on the quality of traffic, right? I did a conversion rate study on my blog many years ago when I did the redesign. And what I did is I only looked at Google traffic because that’s consistent. It’s a consistent conversion rate before. But when people start telling these conversion rate numbers, do they mean like aggregate?

48:43
like including the blog and everything. It was always very unclear to me. Yeah, that’s exactly it. You just don’t know. And that’s what I’m saying that, you know, when the customers come to us, they’re not lying about their conversion rate. They’re just looking at inaccurate data or they’re calculating it way different than we would. And so I’m with you on that. It’s really hard to compare numbers. You just don’t know if it’s apples to apples. Hey, John, so where can people find you online? What types of brands do you work with? Tell me about the tool as well.

49:12
Where can people find you? So the good.com T H E G O O D.com. Great domain by the way. I don’t know how you snagged that one. That’s a story for another podcast that involves a gentleman on a yacht that I kept bothering for months until he gave up. yeah, the, you know, I think the website at the good is, a great way to get familiar with our

49:36
conversion optimization offerings. have products for SMB, smaller side includes things like our conversion growth assessment that will come in and assess three pages of your site, give you video teardowns of those and eye tracking data, et cetera, like I’ve mentioned today, very actionable all the way through our conversion growth program, which is our most popular product that is an ongoing month to month optimization of your site, including things like AB testing.

50:05
Et cetera. So lots of good options there. But if you have questions, feel free to just email me. I try to respond to every email. It’s just John, J O N at the good.com. Cool. Well, John, I appreciate your time and come on the show. I’m sure the listeners learned a lot. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

50:26
Hope you enjoy that episode. Now conversion optimization is one of the best ways to grow your sales because it affects every aspect of your marketing. For more information about this episode, go to mywebclearjob.com slash episode 379. And once again, I’m going to thank Postscript, which is my SMS marketing platform of choice for e-commerce. With a few clicks of a button, you can easily segment and send targeted text messages to your client base. SMS is the next big own marketing platform and you can sign up for free over at postscript.io slash dv.

50:54
That’s P-O-S-T-S-E-R-I-P-T dot I-O slash Steve. I also want to thank Clavio, which is my email marketing platform of choice for e-commerce merchants. You can easily put together automated flows like an abandoned card sequence, a post purchase flow, a win back campaign, basically all these sequences that will make you money on autopilot. So head on over to mywifecoderjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Once again, that’s mywifecoderjob.com slash K-L-A-V-I-Y-O. Now I talk about how I use these tools in my blog.

51:22
And if you are interested in starting your own eCommerce store, head on over to mywifequitterjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send you the course right away. Thanks for listening.