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

Podcast: Download (Duration: 51:33 — 59.3MB)

Improving your ecommerce conversion rate starts with talking to actual customers rather than applying generic best practices or running A/B tests you lack the traffic for. Jon MacDonald estimates that 90% of the brands he speaks to, including major corporations, do no ongoing customer research at all, which means doing it puts you ahead of most of your competition.

In this episode I sat down with Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization firm whose clients include Adobe, Nike, Xerox, and The Economist.

Below is his full framework: how to run customer research, why email popups and percentage discounts hurt you, the homepage and navigation structure that converts, and which tools to use.

Key takeaways

• 90% of brands do no ongoing customer research, including the largest ones.
• A bat finder quiz cut returns and raised conversions 240% for Easton by asking four simple questions.
• Email popups interrupt the shopping journey and degrade list quality, which hurts deliverability long term.
• Percentage-off discounts tell shoppers your product is overpriced before they have even seen it.
• Offer a promotion rather than a discount: free shipping, a free gift, or a bundle price.
• Cap your navigation at five items. Eye tracking shows attention drops off after that.
• Keep blog and About links out of the main nav. Blogs are the lowest-converting section of any store.
• Put address, phone, and email in the footer. Jon calls it the trust trifecta.

Why customer research beats best practices

Talk to your customers first, because generic best practice lists are not tailored to your store and do not address what your specific buyers are confused about.

Most brands lack the traffic to run meaningful A/B tests, which is where people usually start when they think about optimization.

Jon’s low-budget method: take a laptop to a coffee shop and offer to buy someone a coffee in exchange for walking through your site while narrating their thoughts. Give broad prompts like finding the right shirt for them.

His higher-value method is emailing every customer who purchases and every abandoned cart with an open question about their experience.

The scale of the opportunity is the surprising part. Out of the brands Jon speaks to, including massive corporations, roughly 90% are not doing this research on any regular basis.

How to ask customer research questions

Start broad and let people talk without interrupting, because open-ended prompts produce better answers early in the process.

The common assumption is that better questions produce better answers. That becomes true later. At the start, specificity narrows what you learn.

The sequence Jon uses: ask them to accomplish something general, watch where they get stuck, then get progressively more specific about the decision they could not make.

His caution on online surveys is that they interrupt the flow, get low participation, and mostly collect customer service questions rather than usable insight. One-on-one conversations and user testing work better.

My own version of this is calling abandoned cart customers, which everyone thought was strange. I say I noticed the item in their cart and ask why they did not check out, offering the free product regardless, which makes people happy to explain.

That is how I learned our apron sizing was the problem. We labeled them by age range, and parents could not tell whether their child would fit.

PickFu is a cheap alternative. For about $25 you can ask people to attempt a task on your site and describe the experience, and the written responses are often detailed.

The Easton bat finder case study

Four simple questions cut returns dramatically and raised conversions by over 240% for Easton, the baseball bat manufacturer behind roughly 99% of Little League swings.

Two problems brought them in: heavy returns and weak conversion. Research revealed the cause in both cases was parental confusion.

Every bat photo looks identical online, producing a wall of bats with no visible difference in color, technology, or purpose. Easton had branded its technologies with proprietary terms rather than saying plainly that a feature reduces sting in your hands.

The returns problem was more specific. Bats are certified per league, parents did not know which certifications were permitted, and kids would take batting practice with a new bat before an umpire refused to let them use it. By then it was scuffed.

The bat finder asks four things: what kind of hitter the child is, which league they play in, and their height and weight. That narrows a wall of bats to three or four options at different price points.

Why email popups hurt your conversion rate

An immediate email popup interrupts the shopping journey and collects low-quality addresses that damage deliverability over time.

Jon’s analogy: walking into a retail store and having an associate jump in front of you with a clipboard demanding your email before you have browsed anything. You do not yet know whether they can help you.

The list quality problem compounds. People supply junk addresses to get past the popup, those addresses never open anything, and your deliverability and conversion rates both degrade.

The measurement trap is that popups do collect more addresses, so they look successful. The question is what those addresses are worth and what damage the interruption caused.

Jon is emphatically pro-email-list. He and Chase Diamond are friends and he agrees email should be your highest-revenue channel, provided the list is high quality.

The alternatives that work: an inline form in the footer of every page for high-intent signups, exit-intent popups when someone is already leaving, and dedicated landing pages behind ads.

Why percentage-off discounts damage your brand

Offering 10% off before someone has seen your products tells them your prices are inflated by 10%, which positions you as a discount brand immediately.

The visitor has not researched your products, has not found the right one, and may not have seen pricing yet. The first message they receive is that your listed price is not the real price.

Jon’s summary: discounting is not optimization, it is margin drain. Brands default to it to lift conversions when they do not need to.

The math is worse than it appears. A 10% discount comes off the top, so a store with 40% margins gives up a disproportionate share of profit, which Kevin Stecko worked through in detail in an earlier episode. He eventually stopped discounting entirely, roughly doubled prices, halved his sales, and came out substantially more profitable.

What to offer instead of a discount

Offer a promotion rather than a discount, since it gives the shopper a benefit without repricing your product in their mind.

Three that work: free shipping at any order value when your normal threshold is $50, a free gift with purchase, or a special price on a bundle.

The bundle is technically a discount and does not carry the same psychological signal, which is the point.

My own version is a free handkerchief in exchange for an SMS number. The margin math favors it: a free product with good margins has perceived value well above its cost, while a percentage discount gives away far more actual money.

SMS also solves the list quality problem, because phone numbers are much harder to fake than the junk Gmail address everyone keeps for signups.

How to structure your homepage

The homepage exists to move people to the next step in the funnel rather than to convert them or capture an email.

A 60% to 70% bounce rate on the homepage is normal and acceptable, provided visitors spend 10 to 15 seconds there. A second or two means something is wrong.

The five-second test explains why. Show a page for five seconds, remove it, then ask what they noticed and what they recall. If the page does not land in five seconds, you have lost them.

What has to land in that window is the pain or need you solve and the benefit to them. Marketing teams typically fill that space with a single product launch or a blog promotion, neither of which answers the visitor’s question.

Jon does not want a call to action in the main banner area at all. He wants people to absorb the message and keep scrolling.

Rotating banners are worse. A Notre Dame study found about 1% of people click them, dropping to 1% of that 1% for each subsequent slide.

Keep the marketing area to roughly a third of the visible frame rather than a full-screen image, and get into products below it. People scroll now, especially on mobile, so above the fold matters less than it used to.

Below that: major product categories with wayfinding, then a brief section about the brand for people who want it, then the footer.

The trust trifecta in your footer

Your footer needs a physical address, a phone number, and an email address, which Jon calls the trust trifecta.

The behavior driving this changed during the pandemic, when people who rarely bought online were forced to. They were comfortable with Amazon and wary of unfamiliar direct-to-consumer sites.

What those visitors do is scroll to the footer looking for evidence the company is legitimate. Contact information answers whether you are hiding behind the internet.

The rest of the footer layout: product navigation on the left, help and utility links in the middle, contact details on the right.

How to structure your navigation menu

Cap the navigation at five items and make every one of them product-focused, because eye tracking shows attention drops off sharply past five.

Western readers scan the top left corner first, then move right across the navigation in an F pattern. Eye tracking shows a clear drop-off the moment brands start talking about themselves.

That means removing About Us, Our History, and Our Founders from the main nav. None of them help the visitor solve what brought them there. About belongs further down the page and in the footer.

Blog is the other one to remove. Blogs drive traffic and serve SEO, and they are the lowest-converting section of any ecommerce site, so a nav link sends people back up the funnel.

The better placement for blog content is on the product detail page, summarized with a link for anyone who wants the detail.

Generic labels fail too. A nav starting with “Shop” tells the visitor nothing about what you sell or whether they are in the right place.

Why every product needs a visible button

Add an explicit call-to-action button to every product in every category, because new visitors do not know that clicking the image works.

Jon’s phrase for the underlying problem: it is hard to read the label from inside the jar. You know your site, your products, and your pricing, and a first-time visitor arriving from an ad has none of that context.

This happened to me three weeks before Jon’s talk. Someone clicked an ad, landed on a category page, thought the category images were the products, and complained they could not find prices.

Which CRO tools to use

Four categories of data matter: analytics, heat and scroll maps, eye tracking, and direct customer research.

Analytics. Google Analytics, used for path analysis rather than traffic volume. The user flow view shows which paths people take and where they drop off, which tells you where to start optimizing.

Heat maps and scroll maps. Hotjar, which Jon considers the best data quality available for heat maps, click maps, and scroll maps.

Eye tracking. The Good owns VisualEyes, an AI eye tracking tool trained on years of real eye tracking studies with about 95% accuracy, priced around $50 a month.

The distinction between mouse tracking and eye tracking matters. Mouse data shows where cursors rest and creates false hotspots when someone parks the cursor while reading. Eye tracking shows what draws attention, how much of a paragraph gets read, and how long people spend on it.

Why you should ignore competitor conversion rates

Compare your conversion rate to your own previous numbers rather than to competitors or industry averages, since you have no idea what anyone else is actually measuring.

Jon’s experience is that brands publicly citing their conversion rates are usually not lying and are looking at inaccurate data or calculating it differently than his team would.

My own confusion has always been about what is included. Blog traffic converts far worse than product traffic, so an aggregate number is close to meaningless. When I studied conversion on my own site I isolated Google traffic specifically for consistency.

Whatever your number is, what matters is that it improves month over month.

Frequently asked questions

How do you improve an ecommerce conversion rate?

Start by talking to customers rather than applying generic best practices or A/B testing, which most stores lack the traffic for. Email every purchaser and abandoned cart asking about their experience. Roughly 90% of brands including large corporations do no ongoing customer research.

Do email popups hurt conversion rates?

Immediate popups interrupt the shopping journey and collect low-quality addresses that damage deliverability and conversion over time. Use an inline footer form for high-intent signups and exit-intent popups for people already leaving, rather than interrupting arrival.

Should you offer a discount for email signups?

A percentage off tells visitors your prices are inflated before they have seen your products, positioning you as a discount brand. Offer a promotion instead: free shipping at any order value, a free gift with purchase, or a bundle price.

What is a good homepage bounce rate?

Between 60% and 70% is normal, provided visitors spend 10 to 15 seconds on the page. A second or two indicates a problem. The homepage exists to move people to the next funnel step rather than to convert.

How many items should be in an ecommerce navigation menu?

Five, and seven at absolute maximum. Eye tracking shows attention drops off after the fifth item. Keep every item product-focused and remove About Us and blog links, since blogs are the lowest-converting section of any store.

What should be in your website footer?

A physical address, phone number, and email address, which Jon MacDonald calls the trust trifecta. Visitors unfamiliar with your brand scroll to the footer to verify you are a legitimate company rather than hiding behind the internet.

Should you compare your conversion rate to competitors?

No. You do not know what they are measuring or whether their data is accurate, and blog traffic versus product traffic makes aggregate figures close to meaningless. Compare your conversion rate to your own previous numbers and focus on improving it incrementally.