Success in business is largely predicated on process, resource allocation, and accountability.
After working with hundreds of businesses, I can personally confirm everyone’s goals are the same-
In other words, product market fit.
Note, I used “want” instead of “need” above. People that need things buy items differently than people that want things. We’ll cover this a little bit later. Need is not a big enough driver for you to find product market fit.
Once you’ve found product market fit the goals switch to -
At this point you’re optimizing for your processes so you can properly allocate your resources to maintain a high level of customer care while increasing your revenue.
The goal of any business should be to build amazing processes, properly assign resources to priorities, and build a culture of accountability.
Many if not all mistakes that have been made in business could have been avoided by prioritizing internal processes. The majority of this series will be related to internal processes that have been tested to optimize performance and give you the best chance of success.
Nearly all the companies we’ve ever worked with all one thing in common:
Most companies don’t need help making things, they need help selling them.
DTC v. Marketplace
Direct to consumer means that you design, build, or white label a product that you then customize and sell to the general public directly from your website. These are the most common types of eCommerce companies that you most closely align with being brands.
In fact, large companies function as direct to consumer companies on their eCommerce side. If you’re buying from Nike on their website, their website store functions as direct to consumer.
Advantages of Direct to Consumer -
Disadvantages of Direct to Consumer -
Direct to consumer with retail means all of the above but you also look to expand into traditional big box retail. This is done from a branding perspective to associate your brand and company alongside other larger brands which creates credibility. As a sales channel if your product fits into a specific niche this is a good place to increase your market footprint with the relevant audience that the store caters to. Example, if you create an electronics product, Best Buy is likely on your list of places you’d like to be sold. Once you’ve hit scale large enough to handle a retail store, you’re looking for a partner that you can work with to increase the reach of your product.
I’m noticing a trend though where larger companies are pulling out of retail to focus more of their efforts on direct to consumer as the profit margins are better once you have branded yourself out and enough people know about your company and products. Nike recently has made the move to do this. Other brands are vertically integrating and opening their own stores as another direct channel to cement their brand and experience.
Advantages of Direct to Consumer with retail -
Disadvantages of Direct to Consumer with retail -
Marketplace refers to selling your product in an existing marketplace. The best example of this would be selling on Amazon without selling on your own website. You can do both and most brands often do as they scale. But as a direct marketplace without a website there are some benefits and some disadvantages.
Advantages of a Marketplace
Disadvantages of a Marketplace
For the purposes of this limited series I’m going to focus on Direct to Consumer only. The approach that we’re taking is very data driven and tied to creating an owned audience, the other models would work but they would prevent us from acquiring the data needed to optimize our processes as early as possible.
The importance of an owned audience
This is going to be the largest theme of all the content you find on this website. We're so bullish on an owned audience that we view it as the number one factor that can define success.
What is an owned audience?
An owned audience is direct access to ensure that 100% of the time you’ll get your content to a place where someone has the highest chance of seeing it. Not only that, they have explicitly opted in to seeing it. In other words, permission based marketing.
In much simpler terms -
If I send an email, it’s going to get to the opted-in person’s inbox. If I send a text it will make its way to their phone. We’ll get eyes on it, even if they delete it they will see our brand name. Most sales are timing related, you are just looking to be top of mind when someone wants to purchase something that you sell. It’s rarely about an offer, but more about being top of mind.
No one can take away your owned audience, if someone follows you on Instagram then deletes Instagram you lose them. If your account is closed, you lose them. There is no guarantee that your post makes it in front of everyone that follows you either. This is the value of an owned audience.
Facebook - limited and throttled reach on your personal and company page, groups are the only redeeming part of the platform not throttled left
Instagram - you’re a victim of the algorithm if you’re a brand, everything is an ask to boost the post
Twitter - Not throttled, but highly dependent on the product, a place for conversations, not selling most of the time
Google - Bidding on words based on search, less ideal for eCommerce depending on your product and level of commoditization
Amazon - Want to rank, you’ll have to sell on their platform and pay for ads
YouTube - People need to subscribe then check on their subscription tab or sign up for notifications
I think that should start to give you an idea of why an owned audience is the only thing that is defensible. The bigger part of all this is the data. You don’t get data when you interact with potential and current customers on other platforms.
What it takes to succeed in eCommerce
To succeed in eCommerce you only need a few basic things -
No matter what stage you are in your eCommerce journey, whether you’re just starting out or you're running a $100 million dollar company, the above three things don’t change. At the end of the day if you make a good, solid, well-made product that people love, you can find other people like them, and you make money or have a path to be profitable on their purchase, you’ll succeed.
Unfortunately, this is easier said than done.
Go to market strategies a.k.a. The Launch Plan
It’s easier to launch with an existing audience. (Read this for my full thoughts)
There is a lot of debate about whether you need an audience before you launch v. reliance on ads to drive awareness in the early days. Personally, We're 100% in favor of starting by creating a community.
This applies to existing brands as well. Most brands these days are highly transactional which means they are constantly spending money to acquire new customers. This model worked when ads were cheap, but we’re noticing a trend where ad costs are going up quickly and repeat customers to stores are shrinking, the latest numbers show an average of around 25%-30% repeat customers with this decreasing.
So no matter if you’re just starting out or you have an established company, if you’re not working on cultivating a community via a separate website, blog, private Facebook Group, Slack channel, etc. start now.
Whenever you’re launching a new product the easiest way to gain traction is targeting an existing group of people that you have a relationship with. It’s always the cheapest as well.
Ad, Influencer, and Privacy Trends
For most eCommerce brands Facebook and Instagram are the go to properties to advertise on. It isn’t cheap given that the average sign up rate for an email list is 2% and the average conversion rate is around 2% as well. The best in class companies have a 5-7% sign up rate and around a 4% conversion rate.
If you don’t have an audience already, you’ll have to develop a go to market plan that leverages a community, ads, or more likely both.
This is the most recent Cost per Click data for 2020. (sorry for the old screenshots these have only gone up since 2020)
https://revealbot.com/blog/content/images/2021/01/CPC-2020--2-.png
When we look at cost per conversion things get a little bit bigger.
https://revealbot.com/blog/content/images/2021/01/Cost-per-purchase-2020--conv---2-.png
Your cart has an Average Order Value for first time buyers of $60 with 2 of the same products.
You provide free shipping and give first time buyers a 20% off discount.
Your product costs $3. You charge $30 per. (this is on the high end of margins)
The average cost to acquire a user for B2C consumer goods is $19 according to the chart above.
It cost you $19 to acquire the customer.
It cost you $12 in discount.
It cost you $5 in shipping.
It cost you $3 for each product.
So instead of the $60 it’s really 60-19-12-5-6 = $18 profit
So a product with a 10x margin you come away with 30% profit. This is best in industry for eCommerce.
In the above example if you only sell one product instead of two - the numbers are worse because your acquisition cost doesn’t change. Your shipping doesn’t change, your discount doesn’t change.
So now you’re at $30-19-6-5-3= -$3
The above is an illustration of an example, you might charge for shipping, you might not provide a discount for first time purchasers, but all of the above does not take into account any of the overhead you have as a company, salaries, office space, warehouse space, etc.
The point being illustrated is that a single purchase or optimizing for a single purchase per customer is not practically feasible for 2021 and beyond. It’s not sustainable via an ad only model.
The other trend that we’re following is the reduction in repeat purchasers. The best brands have a repeat purchase of around 50% but most brands aren’t as lucky. The most recent figures show that brands average around 25-30% repeat customers.
People are not as brand loyal as they used to be. As we’ve seen the ease of communication and manufacturing in this new global economy, the barriers of entry to create commodities have collapsed in on themselves. Even if you make the absolute best product, the amount of competition you face is 10x greater than it was even 5 years ago.
The majority of incentives are terribly misaligned with outcomes. For many smaller brands it would be more cost effective to just give away products and rely on word of mouth to spread the first purchase than it would be to pay for ads assuming a single item purchase.
This is unfortunately the state of most eCommerce businesses currently.
Influencer Trends
Influencer marketing has been around since the beginnings of time, gladiators back in ancient Rome promoted products. (source)
With the modern digital age of ease of connectivity it was only a matter of time before people made the shift to creating their own personas to build audiences with the idea of promoting products for a living.
As with all organic social media, algorithms are now massively preventing organic social reach. In the early days of influencer marketing, pre-influencer talent agents and agencies, the market was about combined growth with people that fell into the profession. Today, we’ve moved on to micro-influencers with smaller followings for more organic reach. The Federal Trade Commission has cracked down on influencers and even created a guide. (source)
Although a great source to promote products, there is a balance between posting content that is obviously an ad and things that original followers signed up for. In talking to larger influencers they plan for a dip in followers when they choose to promote products. Read that again, they plan for a dip when they promote products - this is largely because it comes across as being not organic.
This should tell you something about how important it is to align with the proper influencers, pick wisely.
With rising ad costs this has put a lot of strain on the influencer market, with less control over how a brand is presented and rising costs with less reach, the amount of effort required will likely swing to customer evangelists instead of influencers in the next few years.
Privacy
This is the one space that is changing the quickest. Although it’s arguably the most confusing as well.
GDPR, CCPA, iOS14, there are lots of changes on their way when it comes to consumer data, ads, and of course the death of 3rd party cookies (you can read more on my thoughts on this here).
All of these things will affect your ecommerce brand’s ability to succeed and will require a rethinking of everything around customer acquisition and data acquisition.
It’s not an if, it’s a when. The time to start building processes to survive is now.
We’ve had privacy on our map since GDPR was first announced, it plays into the larger trends around increased ad spend, the rapid growth of micro businesses, and competition and the importance of creating a brand identity that can out shine with multiple competitors.
There are smart ways to switch to an owned audience to avoid most privacy hurdles.
Predictions
There’s no crystal ball, but if trend analysis can tell you anything big changes are going to need to be made for brands to succeed moving forward.
These are a few I like:
Big focus on owned audience
More focus on partnerships around lifestyle
Hyperniche companies that focus on owning an overlooked space
More limited drops and collaborations
Smart growth through limited product selection
Focus on a repeat purchase before the first purchase
Wrapping Up
The combination of increased costs and decreased repeat customers is driving an important shift to how brands will look to grow and succeed in today’s market.
You’ll notice some themes in these excerpts. Understanding the entire business funnel, the importance of collecting meaningful data points. Customizing and personalizing communications to your community and customers. But the biggest shift will be in the approach to scaling growth with a customer focused shift on how we bring people into our owned audience.
There is a shift happening. Our goal is to make you aware of it, help you optimize to outsmart it by building a plan to create assets that you can withstand any changes the market will throw at you.
Everyone thinks and says they make the best product. Then products are given to “experts” who test and rate the products based on a variety of factors they have determined to be the most important. Then they give them a score based on their personal opinion which is given more credibility than normal people’s opinions because they test more of the type of good or service than the average person.
So anyone that has experience with multiple types of products can be an expert. There are certain ways to determine if a product is not quality - it breaks quickly, doesn’t function as advertised, has workmanship or craftsmanship issues or is expensive to maintain or repair. But most of these things require long term reviews of which most product reviews are not.
Case in point - people still buy Range Rovers even with their questionable reliability long term.
So barring any advantages over the existing competition, you can still come out ahead if you’re willing to spend a lot of money on marketing, but this will only get you to the actual customer review stage so instead we’ll look at ways that you can actually compete.
Nike, Adidas, Puma, Under Armour, New Balance, what really sets them apart?
They all use the same materials, are manufactured in the same factories around the world, they are all relatively the same price.
Great athletes from all sides are represented by all of those companies, top talents in basketball, golf, soccer, and more.
So what makes them different from one another?
BRAND
In a perfect world, your product has a feature that is new to the market or better than what is currently available in the market. It’s so good that everyone you give it to says it’s the best in the world and it spreads like wildfire across social media and everyone wants one. In reality very few brands have had the ability to do this, Allbirds, Tesla, and a few others come to mind as being the few to have pulled this off in the last few decades when it comes to growing true fan bases. Smaller brands like Topo Designs, Flylow, Hershel, Benny Gold, and others have also done really well by catering to specific audiences that they service, again though it all comes down to brand.
Does Patagonia make the only fleece in the world, no. You get the point.
These brands typically stand for something beyond just their good. Patagonia is all about quality and upcycling and the environment, Flylow is about keeping it small, Benny Gold is all about not selling out, Topo Designs was about making retro cool again - 70s The North Face style. It’s all about the feeling that these brands inspire.
So, invariably, once you find some success, people will start copying you.
Amazon has a nice Allbirds knock off that they sell biting into the core of what made them different originally. Pretty much all items are commodities that rely on building a loyal following through brand. There will always be copycats.
(I wrote this a few years ago, but Allbird's stock has cratered since going IPO with only 18% of people knowing about the brand.)
These brands will start spending their money to compete against you. A strong brand with a great go to market plan can win, but rather than just another company making a commodity, these brands have to inspire a movement, they need to stand for a cause, they need to be anti-establishment brands, they need to create that cult following. DTC has a long history of “disruption” by taking the approach of wanting to “stick it to the man” and finding ways to innovate on common goods with a modern twist.
This is capitalism for better or for worse. The reality is that most consumer products these days are commoditized.
The good part is when someone tries to copy you, they are usually doing so to undercut you on price in the marketplace or will make a play to out market you. Rarely the latter, if they are undercutting on price, this usually serves as the marketing.
As competition increases so does the cost of acquisition. So be wary when you start seeing other people copy what you’re doing. It’s good to have some competition because it shows that a market exists, it’s tough when there’s a lot of competition because this drives prices up and shrinks your market - all markets are finite.
Very few companies are good at building quality products quickly when they are rushing to market to capitalize on a trend. So high quality at a fair price is a great entry point.
We’re going to look to subsidize the first group of purchases as is, so price is less of a concern. We want to be expensive, we want to be top quality and we want the unfair advantage when people move to copy us. That said, from the outside we need to build a high class brand and double down on building a long term strategy rather than a fast turn around profit machine. Fast almost never wins the race in consumer B2C – invariably you run into issues with supply availability among other things and this can rapidly sour an existing built up audience quicker than any competitor.
Without a discernible difference in product materials or performance we have to look to things that can provide an advantage.
The biggest advantage a company can have is it’s brand and owned audience.
Understanding brand and owned audience
A brand is something that defines who you are and what you do as a company. Tell a great story.
Your owned audience is the people that you can tell your story directly to that you don’t have to pay to reach.
The pay to reach part of the owned audience is important, because we’re increasingly seeing that audiences created across social networks don’t see any guaranteed reach, definitely not the reach that they used to. So a lot of brands are forced to pay to promote their own posts to audiences they’ve created. Awesome right?
An owned audience consists of direct access like email or SMS, communication channels that don’t require you to use another service in order to get in front of your customers.
Most brands fail before they start because of their go to market strategy.
The proper strategy takes about as much time if not more time than picking, designing, and packaging the product. It takes as much time as figuring out your website.
You should always be in a go to market strategy mode. This includes when planning for any new product or variation.
The absolute best way to ensure a great launch is to have a built in audience with a great brand.
The absolute most common mistake people make is saying their product is for everyone.
This is the starting point for a long, expensive death.
Your audience needs to be narrow, very narrow, when you think you’ve gone narrow enough, keep going.
Example: Underwear
We sell underwear.
We sell underwear in three different styles.
We sell underwear in three different styles made of a new material.
We sell underwear in three different styles made of a new material perfect for cold weather.
We sell underwear in three different styles made of a new material perfect for cold weather sports.
We sell underwear in three different styles made of a new material perfect for cold weather sports
designed for snowboarding and skiing.
We sell underwear in three different styles made of a new material perfect for cold weather sports designed for snowboarding and skiing engineered for guys.
So let’s break down the thought process around this – what does niching down allow us to do?
It narrows our target market
It allows us to plan for a focused go to market plan
It allows us to create an email list around our personas
It allows us to cater content to our desired audience
It allows us to compete with a smaller group of brands rather than taking on everyone
All of the above are absolutely essential to cultivating data and focusing a go to market strategy that will allow your brand to stick out against a sea of competitors. The bonus is that the further you niche down the more close knit the communities are which makes targeted word of mouth more achievable. These communities are also cheaper ways to get in front of eyes at a reduced cost. While everyone is chasing everyone and spending money, you can instead create content that resonates with your communities and work towards building up your audience independent of your individual product. More on this later and why this is a massive asset you should start building from day one.
Nothing beats word of mouth advertising. Nothing.
If you can’t sell to your niche you can’t sell to the general public.
Quality. Trust. Guarantees.
There isn’t a good answer to this question – if you’re a genuinely novel product that stands out for being new and different you can grab some early excitement but keep in mind your competition will be popping up soon after you launch. If not, you’ll be like everyone else, just a commodity which means the focus turns instead to how you speak to your audience.
What do you provide that competitors in your space do not?
This is the question on the minds of every single customer that comes to your website.
Once you’ve narrowed down above who your product is for and who your target audience is, the next step is to look towards people with stories that fall under your persona map. In short, people buy from people.
There’s no shortage of people with followings on social media these days – social networks are constantly growing and there is a complete micro economy around following your passion and living off your revenue via YouTube and other paid sponsorships. Go ask anyone if they would like to make more money doing the things they love doing, they’re all going to say yes. If you told me I could make money just playing golf and snowboarding for a living, I’d jump on that.
There’s lots of amazing products out there, but there was a reason you decided that you wanted to create your own. You didn’t like what was in the market or there was a company that was actively looking to solve the same problem but you couldn’t find out about them. Ironically, the likelihood that someone has built something pretty similar to what you’ve created is pretty high. In fact, a lot of great companies are created after people work for other similar companies and think they can do something better.
Remember back to the introduction, the quickest ways to do better come down to process, resource allocation, and accountability.
So if people buy from people, how do we get them to buy from us and our people?
We talked early in this chapter about how reviewers speak to their audience and we trust them because of what we see them doing. This is the same thing with a brand. Sell to people like you.
When you’re starting out, the line between you as the creator and the brand needs to be very blurred. You as the creator need to be the brand, you need to embody everything that the brand is about. You picked the name, you picked the colors, you picked the design, you did everything, so make sure that your story is told alongside the product’s story.
Your business should be more akin to a media company that happens to sell a product rather than a product company that creates content.
It’s not about what your product does, it’s what it helped someone else do or accomplish.
It’s not about features, it’s about how people use those features to accomplish something.
Why your product? Why right now?
Is it something new and unique, is a twist on an old favorite, is it geared towards people that work from home during a pandemic?
In all reality, none of those specific things actually matter.
People buy for only a few reasons – want, need, or desire.
Understanding Want, Need, and Desire
Success for brands happens when your products fall under the “want” category.
Want is aspirational.
This is the prime category that we position our products and brand into.
People that want things will stop at nothing to get them. They view these things as being the keys to them doing something better, bringing them a sense of better self esteem, or being the key to them accomplishing something great.
Need is the basic “there’s a gap in my life and this item will fill it” people need basics, so there will always be a market for basics, but people also fall on a spectrum of what they are willing to pay for things that they “need”. For instance price plays a role as well as generic vs brand name. If the effectiveness is essentially the same does the brand name warrant a larger price tag? Is the item something that is visible that would cause someone to feel judged if they were seen using it (this is a crazy argument but people are definitely nuts in this area at least in the USA) this moves it into the want category rather than the need category. A need will get it done.
There is a caveat to the want and need bit. If someone needs something and is looking to make a change this is where want can play a huge role. If someone needs something and they are doing research about it or looking into it, this is where you can turn a need into a want. For the right products this should never be price determinative.
Speaking from experience there are things that I’ve wanted, that I’ve spent months looking at, then looking at competitors, then looking for a price that I could justify paying. I’m a patient shopper. We often don’t give shoppers and consumers enough credit. The goal of all marketing isn’t to make people purchase but to be top of mind when they are looking to purchase. The only way to do this is to attract them, captivate their interest and build a customer journey that focuses on relevant information to stay in contact with them to ensure that you are top of mind when they are looking to purchase.
The last is desire. This actually isn’t a good thing, we desire lots of things but usually when we get to the point of desire it’s more aspirational like, “one day I’ll be in a position to be able to purchase this thing.” These people need more coaching to get into the want and possibility stage.
We’re seeing a rise in a lot of technologies looking to split up purchases into payments rather than lump sum, alarmingly on some pretty low cost items as well. This is an interesting trend to watch as it’s doing exactly as described, it’s moving things that were previously in the desire stage to the want stage which is really close to top of mind when you need something to fill a void.
BREAKING DOWN THE ELEMENTS OF A CUSTOMER JOURNEY
Awareness – Curiosity – Research – Social Proof – Purchase
There isn’t one customer journey, but no matter what direction or path a customer takes, it has to be about them, not the company’s goals.
The truth is no two customer journeys are the same - people come to your brand at different times during different periods of consideration.
Awareness
This may be the most often overlooked step of all six.
Have people heard of your company? What have they heard? How will you generate awareness?
If they hear your company name will they understand what you make, who it’s for? Or do you have to go a little bit further to describe all the things that you produce?
How easy is your domain name to spell? Is it easy to remember?
Do you have a presence online?
In other words, people are talking about your company. If I was to search for your company what would come up? Do you have a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn account?
Do the links work on the bottom of your webpage? Are they mapped correctly?
Do you post often and respond to comments?
If you can’t manage all of them, DON’T. This is a huge mistake for brands in the beginning, I would strongly urge most brands to just do Facebook and Instagram to start as that’s where the majority of most brands will be doing advertising.
Let’s break these down a little bit farther –
Facebook – Create a page, then start a group for your brand - you’ll probably start a few groups for your brands based on likes, interests, purchase history etc. Groups have higher penetration when you share things with them, more people are notified. If you just have a page, it’s likely you should keep it active but the reach is continually being suppressed in exchange for brands having to pay to reach their customers, the only way for organic reach these days is virality – aka quality content that appeals to your audience. This is tough to maintain and even tougher to do consistently.
Instagram – As demographics shift from platform to platform Instagram has become the darling of attention grabbing. The shift to visual as the focus for a social network works well for most brands and will be important to build a vibe or culture around the brand.
For all of your networks, it’s not about posting, it’s about interacting with other users, brands etc. 99% of social media is getting noticed for your activities that aren’t around your content creation.
If someone comments, comment back.
The quickest way to gain a quality following is to find like minded brands and people to interact with. The overall reach on these networks is not high and engagement isn’t super high either, but it’s a necessary evil.
Will people find you if they Google you? What will they find?
Will you be confused with other companies or offerings, are you buried to the 5th page of results, if someone searches for terms they believe to be relevant to what they are looking for, do you come up? This is a nod to the point above, it’s not what you think you are, but what customers think you are or do.
Are people aware that a product like yours exists? This touches on the previous chapter of the importance of a differentiated product or brand. If they know products like yours exist, how do you stand out as quickly as possible?
Curiosity – High-Level Browsing (Credibility Check)
The next step is what I like to call “High-Level Browsing” or a Credibility Check.
High-Level Browsing is when someone clicks on an ad or manages to find their way to your website.
Does it impress? Does it look professional? Is the layout easy to follow? Does it tell a story? Does it hold someone’s attention? Does it look good on mobile?
With the majority of traffic coming from mobile phones and searches happening at more random times when people have a thought, most of the time they aren’t near their computer, but rather, their mobile phone. In today’s world, your site should be optimized for mobile first.
Short punchy copy. Visuals that are optimized for mobile.
Do I have a simplified version for mobile to minimize scrolling?
How easy is the menu to access, is it clearly laid out?
Is the company faceless or can I see who comprises it?
People like to connect with other people. Show some personality. Digital agencies tend to do this best being unique and memorable, your people should match the image of your company. Focus on the people that make up your brand.
So you’ve passed the test of being credible, what’s next?
Research
If you’re credible, you’ve made a list. The next step for people is to look up reviews of your product, preferably from 3rd parties not related to your company. Go with me here, there is a 99% chance they are going to leave your website and type “[your product] reviews” into Google.
You have to know what is going to come up here, most people will go immediately to YouTube if possible, fake reviews are harder to pass off on YouTube. People also again like interacting with other people and YouTubers really try to speak to their audience.
They want to hear from people that have used your product, are actively using your product or people that just enjoy your brand. Don’t make it hard for them to find this out.
Social Proof
The best brands have raving fans. The best of the best have people that can’t stop talking about their brands. Tesla comes to mind, they’ve sold cars, flamethrowers, tequila, and have raving fans that talk incessantly about their products.
This is what you’re looking for in your first audiences. In fact, it’s what’s required for brands to succeed in the beginning but very required for them to continue succeeding over the long term.
Social media is the gateway to people talking about your brand, private circles, word of mouth, all of these are free advertising channels. When you’re looking to purchase a product consumers will check their social media channels (it’s frequently where people go to rave or complain) and look to see people using the products or in general talking about them. A lot of people use social media to get other people’s opinions on products. Give them something to point at.
If you pass social proof, the next step is Purchase.
Purchase
Do not get in the way of purchase.
If someone is brand new you need to de-risk that last moment to push them over the line.
Bonus Step 6: Referral
The best way to build a business is through stellar word of mouth. Referrals are gold (see social proof above). Nothing will help you close someone quicker than when their network is already doing it for you. Evangelize your network, don’t think of your needs but rather theirs, how can you help them. If you can succeed in helping them, they will feel the strong need and desire to be reciprocal. Give them every excuse to say cool things about your brand.
Rarely do you see a product and impulsively buy it. Oftentimes when people say they decided to make an impulse buy there was some degree of consideration that went into the purchase, usually a pre-existing thought about the type of product, research done on another website, the passing idea that you’ve wanted something for some time.
Simply put, impulse buys rarely exist. I’ll put a caveat in here for people that are drunk, when drunk people sometimes make purchases.
Side note to this if someone invents a way of monitoring people that might be drunk to target them to buy stuff, let me know. Looking at all the AI people that can detect a drink in someone’s hand or locations that are bars.
Once you realize that impulse buys are actually influenced purchases it changes the entire game. It is really hard to create an impulse buy but it’s much easier to create an influenced purchase.
An influenced purchase usually comes down to a few small things, right time, right place. As a brand your goal is to create content that your audience enjoys and to be consistent enough where when someone is looking to make a purchase you are top of mind. This is the entirety of business summarized nicely and neatly.
The customer journey is not linear. No matter what people say, the human brain doesn’t work that way otherwise we’d all be astronauts. That fact is though everyone thinks and operates in different ways.
So rather than fight this we need to change our thought process to generalize a customer journey in relevance to a purchase and work towards data collection to personalize the experience a step farther.
Personalization is talked about a lot, but I’ll share this with you. It works pretty well for content consumed, YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, Google, Amazon, all websites with massive amounts of data on customers who maintain a lot of data points and attention span of users. This drops off immensely if you can’t keep up the amount of time spent on a website.
For you as the smaller company is likely reading this, these guys still aren’t doing it properly for eCommerce so there’s a lot of room to provide a slightly better experience.
So what are the basics of any interaction with a website, company, daily life, etc.
The definition of innovation is reducing friction and increasing transparency.
You should write this down because this is how we’re going to formulate how an eCommerce website should work. This will never change. It’s a constant. When you think you’ve gone far enough, go further around these two anchor points.
If you don’t know about a product, you won’t buy it.
If you can’t articulate how the product is different from its competitors, you will go for the lowest price option.
Your website is a map, but before you look at a map you need to want to go to some place.
So the journey actually takes place while you’re doing research, research is usually reading and looking at pictures about a place.
This should start to sound like a store, because you read about something or see pictures via an ad, then arrive at a store. Now it’s the store’s job to lead you down the path of understanding and sell you on the idea of becoming part of the community. People buy experiences, people buy goods to unlock experiences and feelings.
Knowing the difference puts you in the top 1% of all stores.
All the advice that you’ve been given or read about is actually all about the company journey rather than the customer journey. You’ve been lied to.
Let’s break down some examples:
Email Sign Up Forms (aka Popups)
Company Journey: Popup as soon as possible with a one time offer to use on a single purchase that drives conversion and allows us the ability to email people things we think they want. They will of course sign up and then purchase and come back because we make the best products and purchase more of them. All we need is an email address and we can start printing money. Or maybe we can delay the popup a few seconds so they can see the screen first or an exit intent because they really want to provide us data before they leave.
Customer Journey: Let me browse in peace, if you’re going to give me an offer, you should make it something that I can use multiple times because if you’re a new company the first purchase I make is likely to be a single item to see if I like you. Also please don’t send me multiple emails a week with your products asking me to buy your products - I’m not signing up for that but how would you know, you never asked why I signed up. I’d really love it if you asked me why I was signing up and how often I’d like to hear from you. I really wish this was done right when I subscribe.
Real world results of a Company Journey: The customer signs up using a different email address or on another device to unlock the coupon code or they use the same generic coupon code you provided with another email address and the same address so they can get the discount again. They leave your website and look for another coupon code to use.
Logically, a company thinks it’s in their best interest to limit the use of a coupon code to a single purchase so they can maximize their revenue because it’s all about the transaction. Basic math in a spreadsheet actually shows that if 7% more people return to your website to purchase again it’s better business just to provide the customer with a coupon they can use multiple times.
Here's a link to the math: Google Sheet Link
But the current model is to chase a customer and try to bring them back with a discount or offer.
Don’t believe me? This is straight from the Shopify App.
So when we decide to force a company journey what we really end up doing is misaligning and forcing users to naturally circumvent our processes that better benefit them. Which does nothing but dirty our data and causes a nightmare from not only the reporting side of things but also detaches any meaningful data to the customer’s journey.
Short lesson - build an experience for the customer from the first touch.
Email Campaigns
Company Journey: Someone signed up which means they want to hear from us a few times a week and they want to know everything we’re up to and all the products and offers we have for them. If we didn’t include the coupon code in the popup we’ll force them to leave our website to check their email for it so at least we have a high open rate.
We’ll really know if someone likes us if they open our emails and they click on them. I know that’s only going to happen 25% and 4% of the time respectfully, but we’ll just keep segmenting and sending them until we get good results.
Maybe we can progressively profile people by asking them questions or having them click through on parts of the email to add some custom properties one at a time so we can get to know them better.
They signed up, they want to purchase, we’ll just keep giving them an offer until they do.
Customer Journey: Why do they keep sending me random stuff? I’m getting multiple emails a week now about products I don’t really care about. There’s a different sale coming in nearly every week, if I decide I want something, I’ll just wait for the next email but I wish there was a way for me to just mute these. Else, I’m so glad I gave them my other email address so I don’t have to see these emails.
I really just wish people would know what I was interested in and asked for my feedback before sending me a bunch of worthless crap. I want to unsubscribe and I might just do that, but that requires effort and it’s easier to just delete things on the off chance that they decide to send me something that I might be into.
I’m fully OK with emails that come as a result of an action that I took on their website, if I left something in my cart, if I checked out a product, feel free to send me something further about it and bring me into a conversation about the product. But keep the communication two ways so I feel like I’m part of something on a journey rather than just dollar signs you’re looking to convert.
Real world results of a Company Journey: A really bad customer experience. Low engagement, artificial segmentation needed to unlock higher open rates.
The only engagement happens when they contact support because they need something or are having a problem. Emails don’t inspire, they just get lost in the inboxes hoping to resonate at the right time. This is the real result of bad email campaigns.
Text Campaigns
Company Journey: We’ve got your digits, thanks for joining the club, now we’ll send you text messages based on some of your actions with our emails as follow up plus on special offers that we want to send you but don’t worry we’ll only really message you 8 times a month or less, because well it’s phone. We should try to make this channel more personal but we haven’t totally figured out how to do this quite yet. Thanks for letting us do this with the double tap so we got the email two, two for the price of one. People love giving us their phone numbers. It's so Gen Z.
Customer Journey: “What’s the harm in giving a phone number” - no one ever. The fact that I want to purchase something but in order to get a discount I need to provide both my email and phone number isn’t ideal, but I don’t want to pay full price either. My only hope is that they use text only to send me super amazing deals and or my order information. Actually, how about a special every once in a while and just my order information.
I just wish my phone allowed me to put this in a new folder or bucket so I can keep any offers all in one place so they are easily searchable. I’m cool with a brand sending me texts maybe but they really have to be relevant to something I’m doing or want. It’s a little intrusive.
Real world Customer Journey: You’ve got less than a week to show me that you won’t abuse this new power to be able to reach me on my phone. There really isn’t a good way for me to tell you what I want to hear about via SMS much like email so I’m kind of on your whims. I don’t know if I like this, I’m not sure about your brand quite yet, maybe wait until I purchase something and then ask for a phone number down the road?
We've run tests on the SMS collection and only 20% of people opt-in when it's optional, those 80% that didn't opt-in still provide data relevant to their customer journey.
Abandoned Cart flows
Company Journey: They want to buy, they really do, what do we do, ooooo I know let’s send them email reminders, then text reminders, then what? Ummmm are we charging for shipping? Let’s give them free shipping! But we already had free shipping, well, maybe it was a pricing thing, should we give them a discount, maybe a small one just to push them over the line?
But if we give them a discount we lose on margin! But we want the sale!
Customer Journey: I found something I liked, I added it to my cart just to see if I’m feeling like making my purchase today. If the price works out I’ll transact. If I’m on the fence, I want a coupon code. If the shipping has a minimum and I can’t reach it because I only want one item, I don’t want random crap, if I can’t find something I’ll abandon the cart. Hell maybe they’ll send me a coupon code if I just let the cart abandon, lots of brands do that. Why can’t I just buy a gift card for the exact amount to get me free shipping so I can come back another time and spend it either on myself or use it to buy someone a gift?
Sometimes I really wish that someone would just reach out to me and see if there was a way to work out my issue with checking out. But then again, there are lots of options and Amazon has nearly everything.
Real World Customer Journey: So I went through this process and entered all my information and bam fees that I didn’t know existed for something that I’m not totally sure about, I was just adding it to see if I wanted to purchase it at the end of my journey. What I really need to know is what’s the return policy, what’s the shipping cost and how much do I need to spend artificially to feel like I’m getting a bargain. I really just want to feel like I’m not paying full price because I might have to pay shipping and taxes.
Subscriptions
Company Journey: Recurring revenue baby! Let’s operate more like a SaaS company so we can get people stuck into an experience and be able to make money on them on a regular basis. Does the product matter? No, everyone needs a new mattress every 3 months or bedsheets or whatever else is out there, we’ll be fine, just think about the valuation we can drive with recurring revenue. Not to mention it might actually help us forecast a bit better.
Customer Journey: I don’t know this brand, not sure a subscription is the right way to go, what are the cancellation terms, what happens if I get something I don’t like? Can I configure things differently down the road? Basically all I have is a lot of questions based on someone asking me to take a chance on something long term and I don’t really know the brand that well. What if I just started slow at the subscription discount price then if I like the things I can just order them to come to me via automatic delivery - yeah I think I like that idea better. Then I could just be automatically charged and get things delivered after I’ve had a chance to try the product.
Real World Customer Journey: I don’t need another subscription in my life unless it’s something that I consume on a regular basis that I won’t want to ever mix up. Yeah so that’s just about everything that I don’t really want a subscription for, why not just give me a discount code I can use multiple times and actually ask my feedback for what I’d like to see in your store. I get that you’re all about recurring revenue but I’m not into making a commitment before I try the products and have a guarantee that they won’t all be the exact same. There are too many options out there. Last thing I want to do is to subscribe to something and have to remember to cancel it and a big f*ck you if you just automatically charge me for the next period.
Leaving Reviews
Company Journey: We need people to leave reviews, can we just give away products with draft orders and have people leave reviews? Yeah, let’s do that to start so that the products are seeded with great reviews, how do we get people to come back and leave more reviews, let’s bribe them! People love our products, they will be jumping at the opportunity to come back and leave a review and then we can give them a discount.
Customer Journey: Everyone asks for a review of their product after I get it. But most of the time there is little incentive provided for me to spend the time. I don’t write reviews for a living. Typing things out can be pretty tough without specific questions. I mean I read them, but I don’t really know who is writing them, so it’s a bit of blind trust. If something is off in my experience I’m more likely to write a review.
Real World Customer Journey: I don’t need to write a review, they are time consuming and people have already done that, there is a good chance that I’m not going to come back to this website and buy something else so any bribe they give me is nice but needed. In terms of reading reviews, I tend to look for typos and longer written reviews as they come off as more authentic like someone took the time.
Loyalty Programs
Company Journey: Costs are going up exponentially, how do we get people to come back and purchase from us over our competitors? What if we create a loyalty program and customers can earn points for leaving reviews, purchasing things from us, and sharing things to social media in return for rewards. I think this could totally work and it will drive people back.
Customer Journey: So they want me to sign up for a loyalty program, shouldn’t I just get automatic credit for doing things? I mean if I go shopping at a grocery store the smart ones just give me the automatic discounts anyway. They don’t ask me about anything relevant to my customer journey so I think they just want me to give them free marketing in exchange for a discount.
Real World Customer Journey: Loyalty programs only work for customers who have already decided they are going to buy multiple times from the same brand. Most commonly found with websites that are marketplaces where they can serve multiple customer buying behaviors. Loyalty programs are the same as rewarding your best customers who were already going to buy from you with multiple preferential treatment as a result of what they have already spent with you. Why do I need a separate account to get the benefits by just providing the same information they already have about me? Is it really worth it?
Return Policies
Company Journey: How do we create a fair balance between minimizing returns and de-risking purchases? We can do free shipping over a certain amount and maybe free returns or flat rate returns, should we extend it more than 30 day? We don’t want them to return it so what if they can only return certain products but not others? It’s expensive to pay return shipping, what if we charged it to the customer.
Customer Journey: Is this product worth paying a return on, what kind of guarantee do I have, how troublesome is this going to be to return, will I have to pay return shipping or a restocking fee?
Real World Customer Journey: Amazon gives me free shipping. Is this product or another brand I was looking at available over there? They have a 30 day no questions asked return policy and I don’t have to pay for shipping.
A great website for ecommerce homepage must accomplish the following:
Hero Image that shows the product in use
Depending on what you’re selling, this is your chance to have an image or a slide show or looping video, the goal is to have people understand what you’re selling and how it works within 5 seconds of hitting the page. Some people call this above the fold and it holds true.
People don’t like to think. It should be clear what you make and who uses it.
Mantra – Introduce what the brand stands for – NOT THE PRODUCT
Nike did it with “Just do it.” When you’re starting out you are looking for a lead mantra or phrase that you can layer on top of your hero image that is short, sweet, and embodies what your brand stands for. This should be an action phrase, something that prompts action when possible.
If you do this right you’re just really proposing a question – for instance Just do it. Led to a lot of people feeling like they weren’t doing something they should be doing, it promotes action.
Under Armour similarly has “I Will” which prompts the future of aligning yourself with the brand and allows you to feel confident to do something. Affirmations are great catch phrases, when comparing these to other slogans like “Best Basics on the Planet” There is nothing aspirational about this it falls flat. It doesn’t tell you what having the best basics on the planet enables. It’s not about the product, it's about what the brand stands for and what you can do with the product.
It’s basic and simple but most brands miss this crucial point, it’s the difference between being a brand and being a collection of products. It also describes what they do, not what they stand for.
Product Features with a focus on Differentiation
How are you different, what makes you unique? So there are two camps on this – the first is sometimes you have nothing that actually makes you unique or different. You might use the same materials as your competitors, you might actually have the same exact product as someone else. Even if you have something you think is unique it’s usually not enough to hang your hat on it as in a lot of industries things are easy to copy.
If you are lucky enough to have something that allows you to stand out against your competitors, then this is the time to leverage it, if you don’t, use this space to list features to let people know you are on the same level as your competitors, we’ll use the next section to differentiate ourselves from everyone else.
Differentiation beyond a feature or material – the intangibles
This goes beyond brand. But this is the fundamental of what kind of brand you want to be. Focus on what you can offer or do that allows you to stand out against everyone else.
How do you do this?
Look at all your competitors in the space, look at how they are presenting things, look at the personas they are targeting, then look at a persona they are all ignoring. Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of brands that outwardly ignore personas that can be quite lucrative and instead chase the same personas as all their competitors.
So the intangibles. You’re looking to match your offerings with those that your personas value. This can take on a number of different forms. But in the back of your mind you must always be thinking about how to de-risk the first purchase.
This could be calling out a warranty, a guarantee, or something else that builds trust. A lot of brands were built by aligning with social causes, that’s great and all, but it’s largely played out as well. It’s like the analogy, we’re funding other countries yet 1 in 5 children go hungry in our own country. Seriously, if you take a local stance to improve conditions around you in your locality, something that can be felt by those that are likely to be your customers, you’ll probably do a little better. Tangible benefits.
Overview of your available Products
Keep it simple stupid.
High quality images, clear pricing, and a quick overview of the item categories if applicable. This should read with the complexity of an In-n-Out burger menu. If you have a lot of products, you do this by doing categories. Just omit the prices.
When you’re starting out let’s assume you have less than 5 products but multiple variants of those products, spotlight the best selling variant and invite the user to click through to the product page. It should be clear what the product looks like. If it’s available in multiple sizes and colors and a price if applicable.
This serves only to let people know what you’re selling, they should have already got a good idea by your hero image and you should have built trust through your features and differentiation and even through your intangibles differentiation.
Origin Story if you’re just starting out
This should be front and center on the homepage if you’re just starting out, later we’ll move this to the About Page, but when you’re starting, you want to give a bit of background. Remember, it’s all about the story. In the early stages of any company you’re looking for people to buy into your story. People buy from people, they don’t buy from companies, when they first start out with a new company they are usually introduced to the company because of a story whether through news or through social media or through your own website.
Give people what they want, make it genuine, don’t over productionize it, look to connect with the personas you’re targeting. Be relatable. Video works well here, but isn’t required.
Keep it short, if you’re writing, it should be less than 100 words.
Links to stories of people that are using your product and tell their stories
The first question nearly everyone has when they are buying from a new brand is: do people like me currently use the product and how do they like it? We all look to belong and fit in. Our brains are trained to seek out tribes of people like us that do the activities we do and form bonds around those things.
Brands do the same thing, they look to connect with people that do the same activities, enjoy the same things, have the same style, etc. If you don’t stand for something then you stand for nothing and you never really make it to the status of brand, you’re just a collection of products.
A few years back we ran some tests with a company, in some of our emails we focused on products and features or sales. In another series though, we only focused on our customers and how they were using our products, who they were, what they did for a living, what they enjoyed doing in their free time, what they were passionate about etc. Then we just asked them for links to their social accounts and a few pictures of them using our products or doing things involving our products.
The result, these were the highest revenue driving emails we sent out other than massive sales by a landslide. Again, people buy from people, they aspire to be like others they can relate to and they form a bond based on seeing people like them enjoying or using the products that you are selling. (more on this in the email strategy section)
I can’t stress this part enough – this is the basis of building a brand is telling stories about the people who do cool things that others want to do and it doesn’t need to specifically be about your products, only what people were able to do in connection with them.
Social proof – these should be reviews with photos that all focus on multiple purchases
We know that social proof is all about handpicking a few reviews that sound really good from people that know how to write. It’s still necessary. See the above section for how we blew that out of the water with a more advanced technique, but if you’re going to do social proof, make sure it’s from people that are repeat customers that bought in after making an original purchase.
The person that says you make the best product ever is cool, but it lacks emotion.
The person that says they have purchased multiple times and are glad they did, that’s your golden goose, those are also the people you want to talk to because they are approaching their Life Time
Value and should be turned into advocates. More on that later.
So for social proof to be excellent, it’s not about the product again, it’s about what the product enables people to do, enables them to be etc. Some products are completely utilitarian, but even those enable great things; it’s all about perspective.
Empathy for the shopper, it’s about putting yourself in their shoes
The last two elements go hand in hand. Trying a new brand or product is tough, it’s a leap of faith into the unknown, even if someone else has vouched for the product themselves, short of a person giving you the product to test (only works for certain products), it’s a commitment to purchase from a new company.
This is why your website needs to be on point, it has to spend the time to build trust, not bombard people with sign up forms (for first time visitors) and build a relationship that makes the person want to connect on a level because they enjoy the type of content that your brand shares.
If done correctly, every customer should reach their Life Time Value spent with you, you wouldn’t send them offers and sales on things they’ve already bought would you? Then the same goes with over the top methods trying to get people to convert.
Ditch the Spin-to-Wins, ditch the countdown timers, get rid of all that. With customers there are only really two points that matter, collecting an email, then guiding them down a journey to let them know that you are there, when they are ready to purchase.
Scarcity and urgency don’t work nearly as much as people think they do when you have so many competitors in a commoditized market.
People haven’t quite figured this out yet. Because people still haven’t figured out a way to figure out “why” someone actually purchased.
Alarmingly, this is a huge gap for all ecommerce stores.
De-risking the first purchase
The last bit for the homepage is to think of ways that you can de-risk a first time purchase.
The key ways are:
A Discount
If you’re a new brand, starting out and you don’t have a great presence a discount is a must, there’s a debate on how often discounts should be used. For new purchasers you should offer a discount. For a repeat purchaser you shouldn’t offer a discount.
All sales should be provided to your email list only. Give people a reason to trust you with communication. More on this to come, lots of people don't email properly.
You should use sales strategically to clear inventory and add people to your email list. That’s it.
Throwing seasonal sales and everything else shouldn’t be needed. Patagonia is a great example of a brand that only throws sales to clear inventory and they sell out quickly.
A good brand doesn’t need to use sales as a crutch to drive revenue. If you see a brand doing this it means there isn’t a good enough understanding of the customer journey or enough data to understand who is purchasing and why they are purchasing.
Free Shipping
I pay for shipping, when I get a discount or if there is a large enough sale going on for the item. From a psychological perspective shipping is only a detriment if it goes above a percentage of the item I’m purchasing. Rather than free shipping you could experiment with $2 flat shipping depending on your goods.
I watched though as shipping costs of a past company’s goods were really cutting into profit margins. You need to be strategic about when and how to use free shipping. The notion of doing free shipping over a certain amount is great, it works on me a lot of the time. But only if I’m close to the amount needed for the free shipping, if I’m not then I’m happy to pay for the deal.
I don’t like paying shipping when an item is full price. This is a killer.
If an item is full price and you can’t do free shipping because of the cost, give me a flat rate shipping charge that is offset by your side. Like the above, if I don’t qualify for free shipping make it easy for me to know how much shipping will be rather than being surprised at checkout.
Ironically, this is a leading cause of abandonment and yet most stores would gladly pay part of the shipping in order to generate revenue.
Free Returns
Again psychology. If you expand your return policy to be 60 or 90 days the longer it goes the less likely people are to return things, they simply forget to do it, or depending on the price it’s not worth their time to do it. Doing free returns can be a double edged sword. For a lot of products you can return or exchange them, some people will take care of the costs for exchanges but not refunds. This is usually a store by store basis in terms of how to handle this and what your cash flow situation looks like. It also depends on the product itself.
In a commodity market, though, your competition has something similar on Amazon and provides really great service, it may be time to think this one through.
The goal of any store is to work with the person to prevent the need for a return for a lot of items. The cost of putting the item back into stock vs its actual cost in comparison to shipping can make the whole process simply not worth it.
It’s really important when possible to understand why they want to return and make the appropriate changes on your website or workflow to prevent this reason from becoming a pattern among customers.
If there is a defect always request the item back.
Warranty
Warranties are pretty great, just exchange the product, they allow new customers to know that you stand by your product, they are something that allows people to purchase with confidence around workmanship and quality. Things that people want to believe are hallmarks of any brand that they buy from.
Guarantee
I separate these as a Guarantee goes more to branding than the practical nature of workmanship and product defects.
A guarantee says that we believe in our product so much that we make it part of our marketing.
It also allows you to get creative with copy while letting your actual warranty legal language spell out the details.
What’s covered?
The Role of a Product Page
A product page will make or break your website. It's the one point in a customer journey where someone has made the commitment to take a deeper look at what you're selling.
Your product pages should read like in n out burger menus. Simple, elegant, and straight to the point. Limit the amount of options, limit the number of colors, create simple steps well outlined for any options and make the entire experience as streamlined as possible.
Choice kills decision making and often leads to paralysis.
Our job as brands is to lead people by the metaphorical hand into making a decision with the confidence it’s the correct one. The key to great sales is convincing the person to forget about all the reasons they shouldn't purchase and move them into the pure category of wanting to purchase.
Understanding how people browse is really important. Remember from earlier, we’re looking to move people from need to want. How do you move people from need to want? A baller product page that allows you to create an amazing experience.
People typically visit a website for few reasons:
The need something
They want something
Something caught their attention and is worth some time to browse
Statistically speaking, your goal should not be conversion. Conversion is an event that happens that is a combination of the right time, right place, and being top of mind.
People are going to hate me for saying this, but you have to take a step back and remember, it’s very rare that people make impulse purchases and banking on impulse purchases is not a business model worth pursuing, way too many variables to allow for proper scaling.
A tiny percentage of people convert at any given time. Instead, your goal should be to move people from need to want or desire to want or in most cases curious to need or curious to desire. This all depends on where in the customer journey the potential customer is. The good thing is, the approach is 100% the same.
It’s really hard to move someone from curious to want without going through the mental checklist of do I need this thing and can I justify my desire to purchase it.
When we convert our attention from trying to convert to instead focusing on the internal psychology of a page built to move the mental status to want, we can change the way we handle objections from those that are stuck in the curious, need, and desire questioning areas.
Your goal is to create an experience that moves people into the want to buy mindset and de-risks the factors that can prevent someone from getting there.
We have to get rid of our preconceived notions around adding to cart and check out as being the only measures of success.
Reddit has a great feature where people can be reminded of posts after a certain amount of time. I’d love to see this on a shopping website. As most decisions are not impulse, the flexibility of being already subscribed and opting in to receiving a gentle reminder x number of days later without all the other mass emails is actually exactly how I’d like to shop.
For now the closest we have is an add to cart where we then get hit with emails upon emails within the first 3 days then never again related to that product.
Wish lists also exist but are better for marketplaces.
I like the Chrome Extension Carrot - Add to Carrot
It's closing the gap a bit.
The customer journey leading to the product page
So you followed all the rules, you built a great homepage for your website and now someone has navigated to the product page. This is a huge accomplishment. It means that you’ve passed the trust test and people are interested in looking at what products you make and sell.
I’d like to say the hard part is over, but we know this not to be the case. The human attention span is less than 4 seconds and dropping, thanks to social media. So when we get to the product page, we have a few seconds to let people know what they are looking for.
When people get to a product page they have a mental checklist that they don’t tell you about but everyone goes through it.
Does it look good?
We are visual. Instagram proved that to Facebook pretty quickly and TikTok and other platforms that focus on video like YouTube dominate in the attention span competition.
Get your pictures on lock. Not sure if they look good, hire a professional. Product pictures are the first thing people look at, make them detailed, high resolution where possible and ensure that you can get up close on the stitching, texture or anything else that allows your product to stand out.
Have a picture of the product by itself, have one of the products in action, and include a video if you can as well.
Is the price right?
Pricing is one of the most difficult things for people to wrap their head around and with good reason. The cost of a good is highly dependent on the person spending the money. It’s all a perceived value. Most people look for the best price.
Ever been out with friends and you mention that you like something someone’s wearing, it’s usually always a response of “I found such a good deal on it” or some variation. People love throwing in that they purchased something for less than it originally cost. It’s a feeling of success and justification for making the purchase.
This is part of a discounting philosophy and why so many stores seem to constantly use them.
As a brand we want to be able to show enough value that we don’t need to put things on sale. We also want to weigh the options of catering to a clientele that can afford to spend money with us.
We’re looking to change the above phrase to “they are expensive but totally worth it.”
If we cater to customers that only purchase with discounts in the long run it reduces our ability to make sales without running campaigns which actually puts more stress on our marketing teams, acquisition teams and everyone else down the line. The cost of sales is never actively factored into the cost to the business of having to support the efforts needed to drive them. Factor in that you’re working on reduced profit margins it starts to call into question the idea that sales are a good way to go at all. Designing launch strategies around limited discounts is a perfectly normal behavior but it must be limited.
If you pay more for something, there is a psychological effect that it is better than something comparable just because of the price.
Will this product do what I want it to do?
Is there enough information about the product or the types of products to drive my attention to check them out in more detail? This is a big question. This largely depends on the categories you support and the sheer quantity of the products available. This is a great spot to do a mini FAQ checklist. If anyone sends you questions about your product more than once, put the Q&A section on the product page.
How can you cut through the noise to make sure that you can answer the questions of is this product right for me?
We’ll tackle this in the anatomy of a product page itself below. But keep in mind as you’re creating the products the reasons you made certain design choices, if that’s another part of your company, go talk to them.
Some people put live chat on a website - you shouldn’t need it.
I mean this honestly, if you need to create a means for someone to ask you questions about your products on a product page you haven’t done a good enough job anticipating the questions.
Stop looking for tools to solve everything - just keep things clean and clutter free.
Is it a good size for me?
This goes beyond just clothes. But you’ll want to make sure that all the dimensions are clearly listed, that things are easy to size and that things are available in the size based on the styles/color that people select.
Consumers are weird like that, they want specific styles in their color and size. There is no worse feeling than finding what you’re looking for in the color combo only for the brand to not have it in your size. In most of these situations I’d rather only see what is currently available in my size.
Because if it’s not I’m off to the next website to find my size.
Ok so what goes on a product page?
Head over to Nike.com and look at a shoe. Patagonia also has a more long form product page.
One of the best product pages I've seen lately comes from Ten Thousand.
Check it out here: Ten Thousand Foundation Short Product Page
All product pages should have the following:
High Quality Images/Video
The make or break of any product is the quality of the images. When buying a product online customers need to trust that they can get a feel for what it is they are purchasing. They want to see the product up close and see the stitching, they want to see the colors, they ideally want to see it on a person that is like them. As good looking as models are they rarely are the proper size for most consumers. Take this into consideration. Big pictures with all the possible angles and 360 product shots if possible will allow the customer to see the product in all its glory and be able to make a decision as to whether it checks all the boxes for them.
Nike does a great job of this on their pages - big clean layouts. Tailored product descriptions when necessary. Patagonia ups the ante with huge photos of all the varieties with easy scroll before going into up-close pictures complete with a gif of a model walking in and turning around wearing the item.
In an online first world it pays to spend the time and money on great product photography. Video adds a new dimension to product displays.
Description
The product description is secondary to the photos and videos, people have already made their snap decision into whether or not they like the product, but the description should be written like you would talk to your target audience. For most founders, it’s how they talk about their product to their friends, family, or someone they meet at a bar. The point is that it should be natural, not forced and should be used as an extension of the brand to connect with a potential purchaser.
This is largely product dependent, but take a step back and leverage what people are saying in your product reviews to ensure that you’re talking to the appropriate audience. This isn’t your time to try to be funny. If you’re funny, be funny, have the product description match your personality in the brand, not what you think would sound good. Be genuine.
Many founders overthink the product description and try too hard.
Don’t be this person or that brand. Write like you would tell your friend about the product. There is a whole other section that can be created for the nitty gritty details and features and things you absolutely need to know like tech specs. This doesn’t belong in your description.
Materials
You have a price attached to your product. Materials are what usually allows you to determine the price. If the materials are more expensive then the price is more expensive. More and more with hybrid materials and the movement towards more eco-conscious choices, people look at this part of your product description. If you use something unique, tell the customer why you decided upon these materials, how they work together, and the advantages of using them together.
Sell the process you took to decide that these materials were the right combination for this product. Work in parts that would incorporate other materials that competitors are using and justify why you’ve decided to go a different direction.
If this is a big section of the reason for the product follow the Patagonia model and break out the reasoning behind it.
Sizing
You know that feeling where you find something you like and you’re just not sure what size is right for you in that brand and there’s very little you can do but just ponder, which is going to be the right one for me?
Well yeah for a lot of these products like clothes for instance, the first thing people do is go to the reviews to learn about fit. This is the hardest part of buying online, the in-between sizing, the sizing that has you wondering what would be the best for my body.
You shouldn’t have to scroll to reviews to get a sense of the fit. A size chart is great but where possible some real feedback is better.
Have a couple of examples, with common size people. (see Ten Thousand Link Above)
Grab these from the existing reviews, make it really easy to understand fit, have the same model where items with different fits, regular, fit, etc. Far too often we see multiple models with different products in different fits, it makes things very complicated.
Most people aren’t models. So clothes look different on different people. If you have a space for people to post their pictures from social media with your products and the sizes they purchased, this is super helpful as well.
User created content will nearly always outperform staged content or overproduced content. Again from above, not everyone is a model but we want to feel like we’ll look good in the clothes too.
Care instructions(if applicable)
How long is this thing going to last me and how do I take care of it?
Tell me how easy it is to take care of, emphasize how you designed it so I really don’t need to worry about it.
Shipping Information
For the love of all things good and holy put the shipping information and estimation right on the product page. Hello people Amazon crushes this part of the product page, it always tells you if you order by a certain time when you can expect to receive it. This is priceless. Yet most smaller ecommerce companies bury this in the FAQ section. WHY??
This is really an honest question. Amazon doesn’t have the sexiest product pages, but they have spent more time than you and I ever will on analyzing this stuff. Yet brand after brand after brand just doesn’t list it. If I’m buying something online it’s a considered purchase, if it’s a considered purchase I need to have transparency added to the purchasing process.
Having done a bit more digging into this it looks like this could be a result of not having a good distribution network. A lot of companies use distribution out of Ohio in the US for this reason, basically 3 days to most of the US as it’s centrally located.
Even adding some degree of time around when things will be shipped is useful though.
This is a massive hole on most product pages. It’s not a hole for Amazon. Take cue from the best in the business and see how you can add transparency into the shipping process.
Remember the name of the game here, too long of a shipping time will kill the sale if it’s available somewhere else or you're a commodity. If you’re a product that isn’t a commodity because of the way you make it, people will always be willing to wait a little longer for shipping, just make sure you do your best to under-promise and over deliver.
Warranty/Guarantee
Everyone has one, few people actually break it down in a way that makes sense. We’ve turned into an us vs them when you have competitors on Amazon where shipping is easy and returns are free for 30 days.
In the fast fashion world of buy then get rid of when you’re competing with other products having a warranty or guarantee can go a long way, brand around it, market around it. Do the best you can to make sure that you stand behind your product especially when your brand is younger.
Even if your brand is more mature, the number one thing that will slow growth is not paying attention to your customer’s experience post purchase. People are more likely to share when things are not going well than they are to rave about when they are going well.
Check your social media regularly as if you are having issues with customer support, this is the first place people will go to complain. So all your posts that are trying to sell more product and engage a community will be overrun with comments about their personal experience.
Quick tips -
Extend your return policy to 60 or 90 days. The longer you extend it the less likely someone is to actually return something. Bring comparative reviews to your website. Brands don’t like featuring reviews that include other competing products on their website, but it’s the main reason people leave to do more research.
Find ways to integrate useful research into your website and don’t be afraid of finding articles or better YouTube videos that compare your product with other products.
Reviews
Do everything you can to get as many reviews as possible. Getting a review is often less than your conversion rate. Find creative ways to appeal to people to make sure you are able to collect feedback from right after purchase, to first use of the product, to 6 months down the road. Always be looking to tell stories of how people are using your products.
I can’t stress this enough, the best reviews follow the same format. (this is a format that should be followed whenever possible)
I (love, like, enjoy) the product because (before I was using blank) and (this is what it was missing) but after switching to (your product) my life has changed for the (better). It has allowed me to (do something that other people would aspire to do or accomplish or want a feeling of). I’ve gone on to (buy more/recommend) it to all my friends and family who (share the improvement). The only downside is (something small but relatable to add authenticity if there is a down side).
When I’m looking for reviews to feature, my goal is to find reviews that talk about people that were skeptical then purchased, then as a result purchased more.
I’m looking for people that have a built in trust factor that relates to someone that hasn’t decided to purchase yet. It’s not about a great review that says your product is the best thing ever, it’s about understanding that your potential customer is in a place where they are wondering, is this right for me? Is this brand right for me?
Always be looking to design an experience that focuses relentlessly on the customer’s mindset. NOT what you think makes you look good as a brand. They aren’t the same thing.
A quick note here about fake reviews. Most people think they can spot them a mile off, the truth is they can’t.
Find your early group of “beta product testers” and seed your reviews looking for people that are mapping to the format above. I’m not saying create fake reviews - this is fraud - not good. But what I am saying is that offering products at a massively reduced price for authentic genuine feedback that you should be taking down over the phone is a really great way to understand how to position your product and ensure that the highlights you’re receiving as feedback are prevalent in your top or featured reviews.
We’ll get to this a bit later on, but your marketing strategy cornerstone should be about sharing stories of your current customers with other customers. You can build out social proof in new ways by also providing people access to where to get in touch with them on social media.
People trust people, make it easy for them to reach out and talk to people that have purchased your products. They are a million times more trustworthy than the same message coming from your brand directly.
Beyond all this, put yourself in the customer’s shoes.
Transparency and Clarity is all people are looking for.
Price with Tax and Shipping
Shipping times
Return policy
Make sure all of these are present and in favor of the customer.
There are a few things that will kill a sale from a customer perspective
The majority of the time stores don’t even know why people don’t checkout - they assume it’s all price - but often price only plays a small role all of the standard reasons only encapsulate a fraction of what might deter a purchase.
Though a baseline, there needs to be a blend between price and margin.
Find out where you fit and shoot for the above that is more customer than company.
If it could hurt you as a company, make it an option for a customer.
The longer you extend a return period the less likely someone is to return something.
So let’s take these one at a time.
This is an instant no purchase, this is too high no matter your ability to have the one product I want, it’s just not happening. I wish the upcharge was worth it, but nearly 100% of the time that tax is just too high.
Amazon hey! This is just the nature of this current world, if you sell your products on amazon and they have a better delivery period then boom, I’m gone. To pretend like I didn’t check is a joke, of course I did.
If I go to a store I can return something. The very fact that this is an option means it’s an option.
I need to have the option to return something especially on a first purchase.
Sizes, qualities, a lot of different factors can decide if the product is right for me.
This is the worst, I feel obligated to make a decision in a certain amount of time. Most people need to wear something or experience something multiple times before making a decision. The idea that you’re capping a return policy only applies to people that don’t fit the product, most of the time this is known within 2 days of having the product. Expanding this doesn’t hurt the return policy nor the amount of returns.
Looking for revenue, look no further than your email list. It’s a cost effective way to reach out to people that have made the decision to hear from you. Use this built list to effectively target your audience with relevant content related to their relationship with you as the brand.
In ecommerce email is often overlooked, given little thought, and lacks cohesion when it comes to setting up flows that can impact the bottom line. People try, but really the basics are usually all that’s needed to start seeing success.
Email addresses with data are priceless, they are easy to profit off of, allow you to offer deals outside of your website, and allow you to directly reach an audience that cares at one point about your brand.
You’ve heard of the need for good email marketing, well it goes beyond that, most brands that we come across in the early days put off email marketing and start with ads.
Don’t be one of these brands. There is a reason that this chapter comes before even data collection. It can be automated, should be automated and is the second part of a conversation with your visitors when they choose to take a deliberate action with your brand.
If someone signs up for a discount but then doesn’t get an email welcome series, you’ve lost out on a potential customer. If you only send one single email as a welcome series you’ve lost out as well. If people don’t open your emails in your welcome series, then you need to figure out how to get back in front of them.
Statistically speaking more than 50% of people who knowingly took the time to sign up for an offer or your newsletter will not open your welcome series at all.
Acquiring emails costs money, do your best to build flows that give you the highest chance of having people open your emails.
Let’s do this in reverse - why do people unsubscribe from emails?
Email cannot be looked at in a vacuum. It’s part of the broader puzzle that makes up the customer journey but it is an incredibly valuable part of the overall brand strategy and serves as a reminder to visitors that come to your website and sign up to come back and take action.
There has been a common shift in marketing over the last several years that has separated email from ads and in fact they really need to work in tandem.
This split has caused a lot of friction internally and led to a lot of inefficiencies throughout the process of acquiring and guiding a visitor from visitor to customer.
Nearly 100% of people are guessing when they send out emails.
Guessing on the subject lines, guessing on the send times, guessing on the preferences of those that have signed up, and the list goes on.
Don’t believe me, talk to any email marketing agency and see how many different welcome flows they have. Hint, it’s usually just one.
There are a few reasons for this, it takes a lot of time with a lot of different testing and writing to build something that actually works well and takes into account data that is collected. Most agencies try to collect data from those that open emails and click through them. Well when those rates are at 3-4% it represents a 96-97% failure rate.
I’m not saying you should fire your email marketing agency, I’m just saying you want to be able to ask them what their approach is to create different journeys via automated emails for everyone based on meaningful data points.
We’ve identified 13 key email flows that you should automate.
*Only applies to stores with multiple categories that can be mapped to specific outcomes if there are many products
You do not need to have all of these set up.
Why should you automate these emails?
There is a difference between emails that you send to a client without them taking action and emails you send to clients in direct response to them taking an action. People expect the latter of these. In today’s world where the attention span is down to less than 4 seconds and dropping, a little help goes a long way. As I type this I have four windows open and 24 tabs alone in this window. The point is people are busy and forget what they were doing a lot.
Putting these emails on autopilot is a great way to keep constant contact with customers when they reasonably expect it and it frees up your other emails to be sent less frequently switching the sentiment from “Oh god another email” to “I forgot about this brand, I wonder what’s new, let me go check out their website again.”
There is a lot of advice out there about how to approach emails – sadly a lot of it is bad. A lot of it is very vague and over generalized. Most people don’t actually tell you the “why” behind doing certain things, only that you should do them.
Email has become bastardized. Below is less than four days of emails – you can browse the list but it’s pretty easy to see who the big offenders are, for reference this snapshot was taken at 5:45am so we’re not even through the fourth day and I didn’t scroll down all the way.
The word “our” is used at least 11 times. The word “you” without a combination of “our” only 2.
Don’t do this, it’s not about your brand, it’s not about what you sell, someone already signed up for your list, they know all that, it’s about them. The customer. What are you sending them that they will enjoy?
This isn’t about sales campaigns, this is simply about creating content that resonates with your audience.
We’ve run multiple tests over the years including sending emails with zero links in them – they make money.
We’ve run campaigns where we focused entirely on a customer and shared their social media profiles rather than our own. Those emails out performed normal sales emails in terms of revenue every single time.
So what happened? Where did we go wrong? How did it come to this?
In the early days of AOL the idea of hearing “You’ve Got Mail” was amazing, people loved the idea that they may have an actual letter from someone they knew. Now 99.9% of all the emails that come into someone’s personal email box are from companies and brands. It kind of sucks.
We took a channel that was pure and bastardized it into something to send junk too that people didn’t really ask for.
We know this because of all the annoying popups with promises of savings that are sent out only to assume you want to get all the emails all the time from people. The relationship is one sided where they bribe you for access to your inbox. We’ve covered this before, the results of not using the tools provided and available can quickly spiral down into what we currently see across the market. A lot of junk mail with no personalization, no targeting and just throwing stuff at a wall.
So in all these different emails that flood my inbox for research purposes, something has jumped out at me. The email teams are working really really hard on creating campaigns and looking for me to purchase based on one of those campaigns.
Before we jump into templates think about this again –
Currently, the only time we ask people why they are subscribing is when they are unsubscribing.
Brace yourself. This is about to be long. Calculating and a lot of information.
Some of this has been generalized but will be easily modified for your own distinct brands.
All emails should have the same elements:
Goal: The purpose of sending the email
Tone: The approach to talking to your subscriber
Content: What elements should be present in the email
Questions: What questions the customer will have prior to a purchase based on customer journey
A clear goal for sending the email (this shouldn’t be revenue every time), an established tone, content that serves to answer customer questions depending on the part of the journey they are in, and a structured format that layers in value propositions in a smart cohesive manner. We’ll go over all the parts, why they were chosen and how to keep things organized.
All of these parts are available via full Google Docs and Google Sheet templates.
We're not quite at a good Q&A format for emails, but we see this as being something that would make things a lot easier for copywriters.
The welcome series is an introduction to your brand, it’s usually a series of around 5 emails sent over a time period of 14 days. Welcome series account for a large amount of revenue only second to that of abandoned carts. There aren’t details into how much of this is related to providing a discount code, but it also has the highest open rate on the first email of upwards of 80%. Again, this isn’t separated to include the variable of “is there a discount code enclosed”.
You’re going to notice a trend here, where the email structure will map the customer journey that should be present on your website as well. We’re answering and instilling the same messaging through all of our communications and customer facing copy.
What happened to get us here?
Someone came to your website, browsed around, is digging what you sell, and you’ve tempted them into giving you their email address either via popup or embed. Likely popup.
Why did they sign up?
I can tell you why I sign up for emails:
People are lazy, so if we like something we’re now in the habit of following brands to have them create content that we can see. Signing up for an email should function the same way as following someone on Instagram. Position your email content the same as you would content you share on Instagram but in a more long form.
If I sign up for a coupon code it’s usually because I want to use the code immediately. But it’s very highly likely that I’ve already done my research into the product they are selling. For DTC it’s more likely that I would sign up to reserve a coupon code as discussed in the last section and want to ensure that I would have it waiting for me when I did decide to make a purchase.
It’s very rare that someone signs up for a newsletter outside of these reasons. Most people aren’t signing up for newsletters for the reasons that brands write all over their websites. We covered approaches to fix this in the last section.
Part of the reason is the training of the onslaught of crap that fills our inboxes.
Rather than go through all of those email flows, a spreadsheet is a bit easier to follow.
Everyone likes a good spreadsheet.
View it here: Email Spreadsheet
Make your copy here: Email Spreadsheet
Looking for revenue, look no further than your email list. It’s a cost effective way to reach out to people that have made the decision to hear from you. Use this built list to effectively target your audience with relevant content related to their relationship with you as the brand.
In ecommerce email is often overlooked, given little thought, and lacks cohesion when it comes to setting up flows that can impact the bottom line. People try, but really the basics are usually all that’s needed to start seeing success.
Email addresses with data are priceless, they are easy to profit off of, allow you to offer deals outside of your website, and allow you to directly reach an audience that cares at one point about your brand.
You’ve heard of the need for good email marketing, well it goes beyond that, most brands that we come across in the early days put off email marketing and start with ads.
Don’t be one of these brands. There is a reason that this chapter comes before even data collection. It can be automated, should be automated and is the second part of a conversation with your visitors when they choose to take a deliberate action with your brand.
If someone signs up for a discount but then doesn’t get an email welcome series, you’ve lost out on a potential customer. If you only send one single email as a welcome series you’ve lost out as well. If people don’t open your emails in your welcome series, then you need to figure out how to get back in front of them.
Statistically speaking more than 50% of people who knowingly took the time to sign up for an offer or your newsletter will not open your welcome series at all.
Acquiring emails costs money, do your best to build flows that give you the highest chance of having people open your emails.
Let’s do this in reverse - why do people unsubscribe from emails?
Email cannot be looked at in a vacuum. It’s part of the broader puzzle that makes up the customer journey but it is an incredibly valuable part of the overall brand strategy and serves as a reminder to visitors that come to your website and sign up to come back and take action.
There has been a common shift in marketing over the last several years that has separated email from ads and in fact they really need to work in tandem.
This split has caused a lot of friction internally and led to a lot of inefficiencies throughout the process of acquiring and guiding a visitor from visitor to customer.
Nearly 100% of people are guessing when they send out emails.
Guessing on the subject lines, guessing on the send times, guessing on the preferences of those that have signed up, and the list goes on.
Don’t believe me, talk to any email marketing agency and see how many different welcome flows they have. Hint, it’s usually just one.
There are a few reasons for this, it takes a lot of time with a lot of different testing and writing to build something that actually works well and takes into account data that is collected. Most agencies try to collect data from those that open emails and click through them. Well when those rates are at 3-4% it represents a 96-97% failure rate.
I’m not saying you should fire your email marketing agency, I’m just saying you want to be able to ask them what their approach is to create different journeys via automated emails for everyone based on meaningful data points.
We’ve identified 13 key email flows that you should automate.
*Only applies to stores with multiple categories that can be mapped to specific outcomes if there are many products
You do not need to have all of these set up.
Why should you automate these emails?
There is a difference between emails that you send to a client without them taking action and emails you send to clients in direct response to them taking an action. People expect the latter of these. In today’s world where the attention span is down to less than 4 seconds and dropping, a little help goes a long way. As I type this I have four windows open and 24 tabs alone in this window. The point is people are busy and forget what they were doing a lot.
Putting these emails on autopilot is a great way to keep constant contact with customers when they reasonably expect it and it frees up your other emails to be sent less frequently switching the sentiment from “Oh god another email” to “I forgot about this brand, I wonder what’s new, let me go check out their website again.”
There is a lot of advice out there about how to approach emails – sadly a lot of it is bad. A lot of it is very vague and over generalized. Most people don’t actually tell you the “why” behind doing certain things, only that you should do them.
Email has become bastardized. Below is less than four days of emails – you can browse the list but it’s pretty easy to see who the big offenders are, for reference this snapshot was taken at 5:45am so we’re not even through the fourth day and I didn’t scroll down all the way.
The word “our” is used at least 11 times. The word “you” without a combination of “our” only 2.
Don’t do this, it’s not about your brand, it’s not about what you sell, someone already signed up for your list, they know all that, it’s about them. The customer. What are you sending them that they will enjoy?
This isn’t about sales campaigns, this is simply about creating content that resonates with your audience.
We’ve run multiple tests over the years including sending emails with zero links in them – they make money.
We’ve run campaigns where we focused entirely on a customer and shared their social media profiles rather than our own. Those emails out performed normal sales emails in terms of revenue every single time.
So what happened? Where did we go wrong? How did it come to this?
In the early days of AOL the idea of hearing “You’ve Got Mail” was amazing, people loved the idea that they may have an actual letter from someone they knew. Now 99.9% of all the emails that come into someone’s personal email box are from companies and brands. It kind of sucks.
We took a channel that was pure and bastardized it into something to send junk too that people didn’t really ask for.
We know this because of all the annoying popups with promises of savings that are sent out only to assume you want to get all the emails all the time from people. The relationship is one sided where they bribe you for access to your inbox. We’ve covered this before, the results of not using the tools provided and available can quickly spiral down into what we currently see across the market. A lot of junk mail with no personalization, no targeting and just throwing stuff at a wall.
So in all these different emails that flood my inbox for research purposes, something has jumped out at me. The email teams are working really really hard on creating campaigns and looking for me to purchase based on one of those campaigns.
Before we jump into templates think about this again –
Currently, the only time we ask people why they are subscribing is when they are unsubscribing.
Brace yourself. This is about to be long. Calculating and a lot of information.
Some of this has been generalized but will be easily modified for your own distinct brands.
All emails should have the same elements:
Goal: The purpose of sending the email
Tone: The approach to talking to your subscriber
Content: What elements should be present in the email
Questions: What questions the customer will have prior to a purchase based on customer journey
A clear goal for sending the email (this shouldn’t be revenue every time), an established tone, content that serves to answer customer questions depending on the part of the journey they are in, and a structured format that layers in value propositions in a smart cohesive manner. We’ll go over all the parts, why they were chosen and how to keep things organized.
All of these parts are available via full Google Docs and Google Sheet templates.
We're not quite at a good Q&A format for emails, but we see this as being something that would make things a lot easier for copywriters.
The welcome series is an introduction to your brand, it’s usually a series of around 5 emails sent over a time period of 14 days. Welcome series account for a large amount of revenue only second to that of abandoned carts. There aren’t details into how much of this is related to providing a discount code, but it also has the highest open rate on the first email of upwards of 80%. Again, this isn’t separated to include the variable of “is there a discount code enclosed”.
You’re going to notice a trend here, where the email structure will map the customer journey that should be present on your website as well. We’re answering and instilling the same messaging through all of our communications and customer facing copy.
What happened to get us here?
Someone came to your website, browsed around, is digging what you sell, and you’ve tempted them into giving you their email address either via popup or embed. Likely popup.
Why did they sign up?
I can tell you why I sign up for emails:
People are lazy, so if we like something we’re now in the habit of following brands to have them create content that we can see. Signing up for an email should function the same way as following someone on Instagram. Position your email content the same as you would content you share on Instagram but in a more long form.
If I sign up for a coupon code it’s usually because I want to use the code immediately. But it’s very highly likely that I’ve already done my research into the product they are selling. For DTC it’s more likely that I would sign up to reserve a coupon code as discussed in the last section and want to ensure that I would have it waiting for me when I did decide to make a purchase.
It’s very rare that someone signs up for a newsletter outside of these reasons. Most people aren’t signing up for newsletters for the reasons that brands write all over their websites. We covered approaches to fix this in the last section.
Part of the reason is the training of the onslaught of crap that fills our inboxes.
Rather than go through all of those email flows, a spreadsheet is a bit easier to follow.
Everyone likes a good spreadsheet.
View it here: Email Spreadsheet
Make your copy here: Email Spreadsheet
What's Covered:
In their most common form, popup sign-up forms are typically used in ecommerce to collect contact information from visitors of a website. In the context of ecommerce, the most common example is a popup requesting an email for a discount.
Multi-step popup forms follow the same structure as existing forms but ask follow-up questions to collect data between the subscribing step and providing the discount code step.
Questions are typically asked one at a time with individual answers, no open-ended answers.
This modern practice of collecting multiple data points from a subscriber during sign-up effectively drives data collection.
The additional steps are made possible by using “live data collection” on a per-step basis. Live data collection eliminates losing data if a visitor drops out during a multi-step sign-up flow.
This technology is game-changing and has not been widely adopted. However, changes in the world of privacy are likely to lead to an increase in the use of “live data collection forms” over the next year and beyond.
There are four widely used examples of the popups:
Step 1: Provide an email address
Step 2: Get a coupon code.
The single opt-in with radio selection.
Step 1: Provide an email address + style preference
Step 2: Get a coupon code.
The micro opt-in starts with a question, “Would you like a discount?” then goes to the next step to provide contact details in exchange for the discount.
Step 1: Micro Opt-in
Step 2: Email Collection
The double opt-in asks for an email address on the first step and a phone number on the second step.
This one has become the most popular one in light of iOS 15 changes.
Step 1: Email Collection
Step 2: Phone number collection
These popup types have been working for years. Why change?
The privacy shift currently underway requires a change to prioritize zero-party data collection.
Apple’s privacy announcements have spurred a need for the faster adoption of these changes.
What began with GDPR and CCPA now includes Apple as a catalyst.
The fallout has left most ecommerce brands scrambling to compare Facebook Ads data with Google Analytics data and other sources in Google Data Studio to create custom dashboards.
With the reduced browser tracking, though, even those numbers are turning into approximations.
Marketers' ability to rely on previous sources quickly turns into a game of which numbers are correct.
A technology shift is also underway.
Prior technology for forms and data-collection required that a user provide information and click submit at the end of a series of questions. If the “submit” action on a form was not clicked, then all data would be stored locally but not sent anywhere until the “submit” action was clicked.
This is where the debate on how many fields to put on a sign-up came from, a technical limitation.
If you see a multi-step form that requires you to click a button to go to the next step, likely, their technology is a few old forms linked together.
You’ve experienced this previously first-hand. If you’ve ever taken a survey, the results usually aren’t sent anywhere until “submit” is clicked at the end.
This technology shift, in combination with privacy changes, has increased the need to collect zero-party data, data directly collected from your visitors.
Brands now require this data to increase the relevance of messaging to subscribers, but more importantly, to understand data patterns that lead to finding the best quality audiences, ad creatives, and messaging.
In a world of rising acquisition and advertising costs, data is becoming even more critical.
Not all zero-party data is created equal; savvy marketers are focusing their energy on zero-party intent data.
Zero-party data generally is information provided directly from your customer or visitor.
The common ways that zero-party data are collected are via quizzes, surveys (including post-purchase), progressive profiling (via email and SMS), and other data entry points like a checkout.
These are all examples of zero-party data but not zero-party intent data.
The difference is when the data is collected by what action and which questions are answered.
There are only two intent-based actions for a customer on an ecommerce website: when the visitor types in their contact information in exchange for a discount or when they type in their contact information when checking out. That’s it.
A sign-up in exchange for a discount or the willingness to be contacted by the company is a major sign of intent.
This is a traditional contract where there is an offer and acceptance by providing data.
These don’t exist across other types of data collection.
Quizzes are pre intent actions. At this stage, someone is in the curious but not usually committed step to making a purchase.
The data collected is often useful for marketers to understand general sentiment about the buying journey but questionable to be used to model larger data sets on because of the early stage of the customer journey.
Surveys and Progressive Profiling happen post-sign-up, making them examples of post intent data.
Anything that happens after that interaction is the post intent stage, where someone has likely made a decision to try your store out via purchase or keep you on the radar because they want to keep you in the running for later.
Post Purchase Surveys are post-intent. They only fire for people that have already decided to purchase from your store, and the value serves only to clarify their decision-making progress during their journey.
The goal is to understand the advantages of collecting zero-party data during sign-up as it changes the data to intent-based. Timing and questions are the two main factors to make data “intent” data.
Most marketing teams don’t know how to or have the resources to work with zero-party data.
Traditional zero-party data requires additional work and a strategy to be created. Then the information is integrated into email flows, email campaigns, SMS flows, and SMS campaigns.
Additionally, the data can be used to identify trends to update website copy, advertising creative, ad copy, etc.
All of these take resources to create.
The problem is the non-intent data is a mix of different parts of a customer journey so creating based on these elements becomes harder to use in practice or relevance.
Most of these efforts won’t have a massive impact on revenue when leveraged. You may increase relevance, but the gains aren’t likely to be mind-blowing.
People have already shown signs of intent. If the rest of your customer journey is well mapped out and your trust elements exist in your brand, post sign up the rate of conversion is pretty high.
To spend time expending resources to tailor custom journeys at scale is time-consuming work and incredibly tough to keep up consistently without a large dedicated team.
The big push from large players across ecommerce is a focus on asking for more personal details, names, birthdays, or defaulting to quizzes in which long processes aim to provide product suggestions. Most of these questions do not relate to the actual customer journey.
A name, birthday, or other like information is not a buying signal.
By focusing on zero-party intent data, smart marketers are unlocking instant insights that can be applied to future intent signals and apply them to paid ad channels.
Intent data is actionable data when applied to other parts of the business, whereas other zero-party data serve only to augment stages of the customer journey that are typically too early or too late.
In the pre-purchase customer journey, the sign-up for a discount is the main driver of intent.
It provides the most relevant information about the customer when they have decided to exchange their contact information for a discount. The customer is CHOOSING to exchange their data for a reward. They are showing INTENT of taking a forward action towards a purchase.
This is an amazing time to collect more data from your customer as long as it relates to their customer journey.
When done correctly, we see a 95% completion rate of the entire form. With a staggering 99.96% of people providing at least one data point beyond an email address. (Data taken across Formtoro Clients)
“Show the popup right away!”
“Show the popup after 7-10 seconds!”
“Show the popup after the visitor sees three pages!”
We wish we could say that there was a golden rule with these, there isn’t.
“You should have two popups, one when you hit the website and one if they try to leave, exit intent!”
Again, these best practices have been repeated ad-nauseam for years. What works well for one brand or audience might not work well for another brand or audience.
In testing, we found exit intent to be the worst-performing. Notice the word “intent” being coupled with “exit” if the goal is to leave; the quality of the responses also lagged in comparison to other popup locations.
The intent of the visitor wasn’t to remain on your website.
The vast majority of marketers follow the same advice. It’s why you see company after company follows the blueprints of pretty much everything mentioned above.
The biggest misconception with the popup is the obsession with a conversion rate from someone seeing the popup and signing up.
The root cause of whether or not someone signs up isn’t up to the popup primarily.
It’s the audience quality.
In fact, we see more than 50% of sales coming from people that don’t sign up to use a discount, even when offered multiple times throughout a journey. (Source: Internal Formtoro Data)
It’s a combination of the quality of traffic being driven, the stage they are in on their journey, and the offer that the popup provides.
If you’re driving traffic for a giveaway, you can attract a lot of sign-ups. The problem is they might just be for something free; they may not even be interested in purchasing your products.
Assign up here would be considered low intent, even using the highest intent when and where.
If you want a high sign-up conversion rate - just throw a competition, people love free stuff. Just don’t complain when no one on that list ends up converting at a rate as high as a simple discount.
Statistically speaking, a 40% discount is usually the breaking point (common around Black Friday) for people to consider making a purchase. After that, most brands offer 10% - 20%.
If your brand offers less than 10%, it doesn’t cover sales tax in many states, but it also depends on your average order value.
So, again, it depends.
What is consistent, though, is if you’re trading a discount for just an email or phone number and not collecting zero-party intent data, you’re missing out on free information.
You don’t need all these to get started, but it’s what we’ve found to work for us.
We have five separate popups:
Location
Any page other than Product, Landing, or Cart
Purpose
Let people know there is an offer. On average, visitors need to see a form 1+ times before they decide to sign up. Popups have a 100% open rate; take advantage.
Preferred Format
Full page forms work particularly well on mobile devices. Again, the idea is to grab attention and not to give someone an option to avoid seeing it.
When you use a full-page form, it moves the “X” to the top right of the screen, which requires people to move their thumb on mobile or their cursor on desktop further on the screen; this provides them more time to actually read your offer and message.
Preferred Settings
Delay of between 7 - 10 seconds.
Remember: these are built for people that came to your website organically or directly.
They searched for you; they are already warm leads. Let them see a little of your webpage, then hit them with an offer.
Location
Any page containing “product” in the URL
Purpose
People that come in organically have seen the offer on the front page if they lingered for more than 7 - 10 seconds, but for many, this is too early in the journey to just subscribe, but they know there is an offer.
The purpose of the Product Page Slide Out is the “double-tap”.
It is delayed upwards of 30 - 45 seconds on the page when someone has shown enough interest in the product to warrant showing them the offer now that they are further down their journey towards a purchase.
Preferred Format
We use a slide-out. It’s less intrusive than a complete page takeover on desktop but works well on mobile. One form both formats. Because of the delay and the short attention span of most shoppers, it’s not overwhelming and won’t fire for everyone.
Preferred Settings
Delay of between 30 - 45 seconds.
We don't use scroll on these pages because often people scroll to find reviews.
There are only two main ways that people make it to a product page - they get there via the home page, or they get there by clicking through on a landing page. Either way, if they have spent enough time on either of those pages, they know that an offer exists.
Location
They are directly embedded on a landing page a little more than halfway down.
Purpose
This is where we drive all our paid traffic. Make it easy to see an offer while avoiding a popup to disrupt the browsing experience.
The purpose is to build a journey and story so strong that someone is ready to subscribe right on the page.
Preferred Format
This format is a simple form embedded into the page.
Preferred Settings
Comes on page load, should be around 50-60% of the way down the page.
Location
Any page containing “lp” in the URL
Purpose
We just said that people don’t like popups on the landing page, and yet we have one, the irony.
We put the embed halfway down the page. Rather than repeat the embed at 90% scroll, we switch to a slide-out.
Preferred Format
We use a slide-out. It’s less intrusive than a complete page takeover on desktop but works well on mobile as well. One form both formats.
Because of the scroll, many visitors will never see this popup, but it serves as a catch-all when someone scrolls past your embed.
Preferred Settings
It is triggered on scroll of greater than 70%.
The only way to hit a landing page is via a paid ad.
They clicked on a product or collection image, so we want to continue telling that story of what they clicked on and build up that journey before promoting an offer via popup.
That is the role of the embed; it functions to let visitors know that there is an offer.
The popup at 70% is just in case someone scrolled past that offer and missed it by the time they got to the end of the page.
Any page containing “cart” in the URL
The worst feeling someone has is when they see a popup, but it is too early for them to want to sign up. So, they waited, browsed, added a few things to the cart, checked out their cart, then decided they wanted to purchase, but in the back of their mind, they knew there was a coupon code out there.
Zero-party intent data is more valuable than any discount you're providing.
The last thing you want to do is give someone a reason to leave your website; this is precisely what’s going to happen if you don’t present a known offer to a customer when reviewing their cart.
We use a slide-out. It’s less intrusive than a complete page takeover on desktop but works well on mobile. One form both formats.
Trigger right away on page load.
The only way to hit the cart page is by actually “viewing cart” with the advent of slide-out carts. This slide-out can’t be triggered without a direct view of the cart.
These are visitors that have added items to the cart and have decided to click on “view cart” in order to see what they’ve added, usually right before making a purchase.
With up to 69.57% of visitors abandoning their carts (Source), a slide-out on the cart for those that view it is an easy way to encourage conversion.
Miscellaneous notes:
You should block URLs that contain any of your service emails, order emails, welcome series, abandon cart emails, or segments that share a common name.
The funny thing about popups is that if people use a different browser, device or clear their cache, they show up again. With people discovering products on mobile and checking out on desktop, little things like this add to the customer experience.
The most essential part of building your first multi-step form is understanding what you can do with intent data and finding a software partner capable of helping you use the intent data.
Today the most advanced multi-step forms have logic mapping built-in, can recall previous answers, can create unique coupon codes on the fly, collect data live, and send that data to multiple places at the same time.
The even more advanced multi-step form companies take that data and build algorithms that find patterns in the data and can combine it with other sources of data to provide insights and advice on actions to take.
In Formtoro, for example, a specific data combination that is driving revenue can be tied back to the exact campaign, ad set, and ad that it came from and look for patterns to identify which ads are likely to be the most profitable in the future.
Entire businesses are able to optimize their paid advertising channels by taking an intent data approach that allows them to scale without worrying about privacy changes.
Decisions are made using a combination of raw data provided by 3rd party advertising platforms and zero-party intent data provided directly by subscribers in combination with all the 1st party browsing data captured by Formtoro.
Any multi-step form builder can collect zero party data which can help you:
These are the bare minimum requirements.
But all of these require a team of people to customize all those touchpoints, and as was covered above, most of the zero-party data collection isn’t intent-based.
The biggest struggle brands have with zero-party data is knowing how to use it and having the resources available to use it.
For a lot of brands and agencies, zero-party data is nice to have but requires intensive staff resources to create the necessary content, updates, and communications for all the segments that have been created.
Zero-party-based marketing strategies will always lag in adoption because of the manual hours needed to implement them.
Most of the data currently being collected relates only to the person that provided it at times that aren’t related to intent to conduct a purchase.
The real power of zero-party intent data happens when you aim higher.
The largest expense outside of salaries that most ecommerce companies have is their marketing budget; your zero-party intent data should become a brand’s roadmap to revenue.
The intent should influence how you spend your marketing dollars and create your marketing strategy.
Unlock optimized processes, allocate resources to where you need them most, bring accountability to the table by focusing on measurable data.
As marketers and product designers, the goal was always to find patterns in zero-party intent data to automate paid ad optimization and decision making.
There were some basics that we needed from a builder to accomplish the data collection part, the workflow portion, but when combined, it would unlock the ability to combine zero-party intent data with paid advertising.
When we built Formtoro, we focused on a few key parts; then we built it to spec to tackle things that no other company was considering:
Data Collection Functionality
The bare minimum requirements for us to create the forms we need when asking the questions required to capture zero-party intent data.
The ability to live-collect zero party intent data
What it is
A visitor should be able to fill out a form without clicking “next” or having to “submit” the form at the end. A brand should collect all the data by stepping up to where someone drops off if they do drop off.
Why it’s important -
Prior forms had been all or nothing, many brands use services like Google Forms or Typeform for surveys, and unless someone completes the survey and hits “submit” at the end, the information isn’t saved.
To create a true frictionless form experience, we needed to change this.
Live data collection removes this requirement.
It’s a win for marketers and brands.
The ability to ask questions in any order
What it is -
A visitor should be able to provide information before providing an email address.
Why it’s important -
Prior forms required having an ID to save the data; when you see quizzes, they always ask for an email at the end so they can link the information. However, as we covered above, the quiz usually comes at a time prior to intent. The pre-intent behavior is about discovery.
Separating the data collection journey without asking for an email and instead of asking for an email at a more appropriate time allows you to connect the data in a more customer-centric manner.
To create a truly frictionless customer experience, a visitor should be able to interact with two different forms and have their data combined.
The ability to logic map to another question or result
What it is -
Not all journeys are linear.
For example, if a visitor answers a question as part of a form, we should point them to a further question or result based on their answer.
Why it’s important -
A lot of forms, including the examples of sign-ups above, are linear. You go one question at a time. With multi-step forms, not all questions may be relevant; the more questions you ask, the more variations and paths emerge.
To create an actual frictionless customer experience, a visitor should be able to interact with a form and be directed to questions that are most relevant to their journey.
The ability to logic map to another question or result using multiple answers
What it is -
Similar to above, but the result can combine multiple answers when logic mapping.
If someone says their favorite color is red and they like Ferraris, we can show a red Ferrari by combining those data points to present the next step.
Why it’s important -
Combinations of zero-party intent data are roadways towards personalization, if you can’t use all the elements to navigate the road, your experience becomes impersonal, and one size fits all.
The form is the experience; when it comes to a sign-up, it should feel tailored.
Workflow Functionality
Everything comes down to how a tool can be incorporated into or improve an existing workflow.
The ability to create one form that works across desktop and mobile
What it is -
From an operational standpoint, creating multiple forms to accomplish the same thing, as is the case with many sign-up forms and popup makers is a tall ask, especially if you’re making changes or testing things.
Why it’s important -
Too many services require you to manually make two different forms for different formats; once you do this, the reporting is done separately, so your results can’t be easily combined.
Formtoro combines these; one builder that lets you create all formats at the same time is fantastic.
The ability to create unique coupon codes on the fly
What it is -
There is an ongoing debate about unique coupon codes; everyone would love to have them for every event or offer, but creating them and uploading them into Shopify or your other ecommerce platform is tedious, and you need to ensure that you create them before issuing them.
They are better for attribution and amazing to prevent Honey and other coupon scrapers from leaking them and existing customer bases from double-dipping.
Shopify allows 20,000,000 of them.
Why it’s important -
We should create a sign-up and have a code auto-generated to specs or route subscribers to a different offer that can be created on the fly based on answers.
This would open up personalized coupon codes to prevent leaks without the need to manually create them ahead of time in bulk or run them through your email service provider.
Instead, they are only made when they are issued and automatically added to Shopify and your email service provider as a custom property.
The ability to create unique coupon multi-use codes on the fly
What it is -
Brands chase customers with discounts when they haven’t shopped from them in a while.
Meanwhile, they constantly offer XX% off your first purchase to anyone with a unique email address.
The average person has more than a few; we covered earlier how an incognito window would just yield another popup offer.
Being able to create a coupon code that could be used multiple times would allow us to market directly to the person with their specific code without having to issue a new one and/or chase.
Why it’s important -
It removes bias. If someone has a coupon code they can use multiple times, they tend to buy with confidence and remember they have a code waiting when they are looking to purchase again. It’s built-in loyalty.
Brands currently already chase customers with sales, offers, bundles, and deals to persuade them to come back - a multi-use coupon code allows a brand to nurture the relationship rather than chase.
This is everything.
Where most zero-party data collection methods don’t account for intent-based data, none of them use data patterns and analysis to rank and recommend optimizations within ad accounts.
Formtoro is about zero-party intent data and being able to use that data without having to create new content from day one.
Optimize instead of creating from scratch, create a strategy leveraging data that goes beyond just the data provided but how it relates to your bottom line.
The ability to understand which data combinations are driving the most revenue
What it is -
Data combinations that lack intent are not useful in predicting which combinations will result in revenue. Data combinations with intent that can be tied to revenue can inform marketers about which data points are likely to be predictors of future revenue.
This is all done for you in Formtoro. No extra software is needed. No exporting, no spreadsheets, no manual analysis required.
Why it’s important -
Data on its own isn’t useful.
Data that is combined with other data to tell a story is invaluable. When we look at trends across businesses, we look for patterns in data that can inform direction and decisions.
Knowing the intent data combinations that result in revenue is a fundamental building block when building out a data lead marketing organization.
This informs trends related to subscriber-provided data as it relates to revenue generation.
Smart marketers know how to read data, but their time is more valuable when they have the analysis presented to them automatically.
The ability to understand which campaigns, ad sets, and ads are driving the most high-quality subscriptions
The power to optimize your ad spend based on intent data. Subscriptions are near guaranteed sales when implemented correctly.
The goal of most brands should be to collect emails with intent data; it’s OK to ask multiple questions, for those that finish the forms, 95% are most likely to purchase.
Not all traffic is equal.
Up until now, the best we could do was look for where subscribers were coming from, a very superficial metric. In fact, it’s hard to get a full view of more than one level at a time in most programs.
Quality traffic is all that matters.
It’s not just about which ads are driving the most traffic. It’s about which campaigns, ad sets, and ads are driving the right traffic. The only way to measure this is by collecting zero-party intent data, identifying combinations that bring in revenue, and isolating which ads are driving them.
Formtoro does this for you automatically.
The quality of campaigns, ad sets, and ads up until now has been determined by KPIs that only show partial intent. We review things like Click Through Rate, Cost Per Click, Cost Per Thousand Impressions,
Cost per Action, Cost per Acquisition of a Customer, Return on Advertising spending.
None of these alone can tell you if an ad will be successful in the future or if you have potential in an ad that doesn’t convert right away.
Not everyone purchases within the period that your ads team is looking at ads.
The hardest part is to be able to combine zero-party intent data tied into revenue patterns with raw ad and sales data to score ads with greater accuracy than just comparing sources like Facebook and Google Analytics.
Key Performance Indicators without context are worthless. Media buying has been based on reading numbers and making best guesses with multiple variables in play.
Audience, copy, creative, viewing stats, that’s just the ad side, it doesn’t take into account landing pages, brand authority, product pages, and descriptions, etc.
The need to score ads beyond just conversion and Click Through Rate has never been more critical in this new post iOS privacy world.
The current data set being used isn’t complete enough to drive consistent success.
At Formtoro, we’ve seen brands making decisions based on incomplete data and information for years. Advertising isn’t an exact science, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t seek to augment your data sets with more relevant data to make better decisions.
It’s the only way to stand out and succeed as markets become more competitive.
A report in plain English that can suggest actions on your ad management by combining all the data points listed previously, KPIs, zero party intent data, intent data combinations resulting in revenue generation, future predictions based on timelines, all in one place.
Formtoro combines all this for you, so you don’t have to.
Digital Ad Spend is expected to hit over $400 billion dollars a year next year.
In the last year, analytics have become less accurate; data sets have remained the same.
All solutions on the market serve to aggregate and compare data rather than combine it, and those that do combine it aren’t able to use the most valuable data set, zero party intent data.
As things become more complicated and require more resources, software like Formtoro redefines value across spaces that have historically needed a data analyst.
Zero-party intent data is the answer to leveling up in this new environment.
Deciding what questions to ask is the most crucial part of creating your forms. It’s what powers your zero-party intent data advertising machine.
Beyond the functionality, the bells and whistles, etc., if you’re not asking the proper questions that relate to intent at a time the form is being used to collect zero-party intent data, the results will be meaningless.
Here’s the exact framework we use when we’re creating questions to ask during sign-up.
Question for the Company:
What do you sell? Who do you sell it for?
Interest by product offerings/activities that are for offer
What are you interested in from [store name]?
Example Questions:
Why do we ask this question?
People come for different reasons, the larger the store, the more options that someone might be interested in.
This one narrows down what kind of products or categories people are interested in, and helps with presenting content to them throughout their journey that is relevant to them.
Question for the Company:
Is there a preference from question 1?
Why do we ask this question?
This one is usually optional, depending on the breath of your inventory and what you stock.
Don’t go into too much detail here. Remember: it’s the customer journey, not the company asking for more information that isn’t relevant to the customer journey.
E.g., Fit, Materials, Cost, Color
Question for the Company:
What are the elements that you would like to know about how people view your product offerings/activities?
Why do we ask this question?
Benefits matter. Every marketer preaches that you should talk about the benefits or results of using your products rather than the product’s features.
It’s a positive way to ask about the customer’s pain points or the problem they are looking to solve.
When we ask what matters to people most in the product, they tend to answer with feature-related.
Once we have the feature mapped out, we can create the corresponding benefits and social proof that highlights the features and their benefits.
It’s a double whammy of knowing exactly what to send someone via email, retargeting, etc.
This is personally one of our best questions that we like seeing the answer to. It helps brands to create great content at scale and provides directions on a marketing strategy.
It also works to redo landing pages, product pages, and other touchpoints on the journey.
Question for the Company:
What quantity/frequency would give you the best value in an answer?
How many pairs of underwear do you own, how often do you play golf
Why do we ask this question?
Life in ecommerce is largely dependent on the repeat customer. If a customer owns a lot of something, a lot of brand of something, or frequently participates in an activity, it tells us the potential assuming a good customer experience of how often or how much of our goods we can sell someone.
It’s their capacity for purchase.
Question for the Company:
Would you like to know where people are in the funnel?
Why do we ask this question?
Because too many marketers assume that everyone is looking to buy today, and the data shows that only half the people that complete this question say today, and of those, only about 40% go on to purchase between days 1 - 12. (Internal conversion data from Formtoro)
It’s not bad, but it means that not everyone is ready to purchase for a few weeks or a few months, but they signed up anyway.
A few weeks usually means days 13 - 35 depending on your product offering, some are shorter some are longer.
We don’t keep data on people that say a few months because a good rule of thumb is if someone doesn’t purchase in the first 45 days, it’s not likely they are going to buy.
The response “In a few months” is statistically super small and you run the risk of someone losing interest.
All brands that have an email list benefit from using multi-step forms, they have a higher completion rate to data ratio of any other form of data collection. They allow brands to ask questions during one of only two intention points throughout the customer journey, an intention point being where a visitor types something in on their keyboard.
As we’ve outlined in great detail, zero-party intent data collection during sign-up is an absolute no-brainer for anyone looking to optimize their entire ad strategy effortlessly.
Data is worth more than the discount you provide in exchange for it. Marketers and Brands can leverage data across the entire stack; instead, a discount can only be leveraged on a purchase for one person.
When fully baked into your strategy, there are TONS of advantages from both an operational and organizational perspective.
Do me a serious favor, log onto Facebook, then screenshot the first 30 ads you see. It should take about 15 mins. Then take all those ads and put them into the same folder. You should notice some trends. They are all on brand, all earth tones, and all blend in.
Our goal is to stick out.
The whole point of an ad is to capture attention and be relevant or curious enough to cause a click to happen.
There are three things we can do to make this happen every time.
Movement
Whatever your ad is, make sure there is some movement. The human eye responds to movement, so if your ad is stationary expect low interaction. The movement should be subtle but enough to draw attention to the actual product.
Product Image
Colors make all the difference, showing the product on a contrasting background. Most people put products on black or white. Don’t. If everyone else is doing it, you can do better. The goal of an ad is to stand out, to gain attention, to get a stop during a scroll. Secondarily is a click and traction to a website. Without the first, nothing happens.
Words over the product image
No one reads the copy of ads, they move directly to the pictures. You are missing out if you don’t have text overlays on the visual creative you create. Instagram is all pictures, tiktok is all video, there’s a reason for this, the human eye is drawn to images, not words.
People will stop to watch the visual creative on an ad, they will not read the caption with the ad. So whatever the meaning of your ad you were going for be sure to put it over the ad itself.
Ok so we have the basis of what our ad is all about now with a little bit of direction on what it should look like, so now what?
Understanding how we’re measuring success!
Let’s define some key terms:
ROAS - Return on Ad Spend
This is expressed to the second decimal point and usually when full reporting is done has an “x” at the end.
Example if I spend $5 and make $20 in sales my ROAS would be $20 divided by the amount spent $5 to get 4x.
CAC - Cost to Acquire a Customer
This is the actual cost to bring in a new customer from the source or ad.
CPM - Cost per 1000 views
This tells you how expensive the audience is that you’re trying to reach.
CTR (outbound) - Click through Rate to your website
This tells you how many people are clicking on your ads and coming to your website/landing page.
CPC - Cost per click
The amount you spend per click to your website.
Other things people track, time spend watching a video etc.
These things tend to be less important from where I sit because you need to have some degree of differentiation to get people to stop, then a hook in the first 3 seconds to get someone to continue to watch etc. This part is fairly well known and table stakes for any ad.
So we build some nice creative, people love our ad, they click on it, and they purchase all our products. Done and done right?
Not quite.
In the hierarchy of how the customer starts their journey the ad creates the awareness and the interest portion, someone sees something that you’re selling and they are taken by the way it looks or the story you’re telling relevant to their interests to click on the ad.
From there they are usually directed to one of three places, product page, homepage, or a landing page.
The way to go for all ad traffic is a landing page. We’ve covered off in previous posts about how you should optimize your homepage and your product pages, but the landing page is something special, it’s like a homepage but with actual intent on a specific product.
A great landing page is a blend of story, product benefits, social proof, all wrapped up into something that captures attention. It’s also the best place to A/B test things because you can control for audience, ad content, ad copy, and a variety of other variables that you can’t do on a homepage or product page.
With iOS 14 launching, tracking has changed the way we look at running ads, gone are the days of run and gun throw up a bunch of creative, see what sticks and optimize.
Today, a more calculated approach is needed, the modern customer journey should be factored into every action we take when we run ads. Quality markers have to go beyond the quantitative acronyms used above and we must embrace a hybrid model of zero party data combined with quantitative data to bridge the gap.
Statistically, from our testing a little less than 50% of people who purchase will use a coupon code.
When we run our sign up the goal is to collect data prior to purchase, aka intent data. Intent data provides markers for us to use when looking at patterns relevant to buying behaviors.
This is covered in more detail on the left in more detail across our Ad Testing Framework, UTM Framework, Audience Checklist, and Creative Checklist.
It all goes together.
Ultimately, the most successful ads tend to focus on just a product on a plain background that stands out with words over them. People don't hate ads, they hate it when they spend time watching it not realizing it's an ad. There's a difference.
If you think about what people do when they get to a product page, you realize that they go straight to the pictures, product, product, product, that's how they start.
In your ads, don't hide the product.
Up to this point we've provided you with a good overview of ecommerce, it doesn't go into the details of how to do things but instead serves as an overview of what needs to be done in order to position yourself for long term success.
There's so much more to ecommerce strategy that we'll add to these guides as we go.
We're always learning and working on building as many time saving things as we can directly into our platform so that all stores will have the best chance to succeed.
