What if I told you you could double your conversion rate in
three very simple steps and almost overnight, almost, but
not quite simply because it takes time to click buttons.
Well, that's what I'm going to be talking about today.
So welcome to today's Tuesday Tea Break talks with me, your
host, Nick Truman. Thanks for tuning in.
Hit the subscribe button if you haven't already, and let's get
cracking. So I'm going to talk through
both of these clients. But first of all, I'm going to
talk you through the steps we took step number one, and this
comes from some extensive audiobook listening, which I
love because you can put an audiobook on when you're at the
gym, in the car. And I think people should always
be learning. I often ask in interviews, what
have you learnt recently? What books are you reading?
What audiobooks are you listening to?
What YouTube videos have really inspired you to want to learn
more recently? And so I've been listening to
audiobooks and a lot of them have been about sales.
I thought that's one area I really need to brush up and
haven't really done any learning education in it recently.
And this applies I think perfectly to an e-commerce
store, specifically a Shopify store and one of the things we
need to do in sales, which was the first step.
Having now reflected on this, thinking about this over the
over the weekend ahead of today, the first step you need to
determine with your website if you're going to improve the site
and create some conversion rate doubling as as we've quite
literally done. And I have statistics to prove
that for both of these clients, we're pending a case study.
One of the tests is still ongoing, so when it's finished,
we'll get a case study out. But the first thing we need to
do in sales is work out what people's rejections are and the
rejection. What that means is why didn't
they buy this product? Why were they not keen to buy?
What happens? What question were we asking?
And the question, I'll come back to you a bit later, send in the
second example, what question are we asking the customer?
What are we asking them to do and what do they need to know to
buy this product coupled with what are their objections?
And what you do not want to do in sales and you definitely do
not want to do on a website is have anybody go away and say,
cool, that's great. Let me go away and think about
it. If someone goes away to think
about it, they're not going to buy where, whereas on an
ecommerce website, if they do need to go away and check things
like measurements or it's a big engaged purchase, you need to
get an e-mail address from them in that point of view.
So step one to to doubling a conversion rate is you need to
determine what your customer's biggest objections are.
Step 2, then once you've worked out what the objections are, you
need to do some AB testing and come up with some creative
solutions to break down those objections.
Reassure them that this is a fantastic product and they
should try it out. And I love using that phrase for
the right products, the right sales pitches of why don't you
try it out? It really is good.
We're not going to let you down. Why don't you try it out?
And I think that's a fantastic point with some products and you
can even find quite a cheap item somebody's thinking of
purchasing on a website and they just don't seem to have that
impetus to go. Why don't you just try it out?
And I think with marketing, sometimes we go too far down the
features route and not enough down the benefits route.
I say it a lot. It's very well known saying that
features tell benefits sell. This is going to improve your
life because this is going to improve your life.
How? This is the best phone case you
could buy. This is the best mug you could
possibly drink your morning coffee out of.
This is the best lighting for a podcast studio.
This is not, if you're watching doing this, we are currently
working on the structure. You'll notice some new plants
have appeared. We're working on the structure
thing. But that AB test you're going to
run is this is the current version.
And based on what we believe the rejections to be, this is the
new version, which then brings us back to .1.
Well, how do we work out what the rejections are to know what
to test, to know what to make a change on?
There's two ways to do this. And I, I love using the, the
phrase as well. The analytics will tell you what
happened, not why. And so the what happened Look in
the analytics use something like Microsoft Clarity or which is a
free version of a recording tool so you can see recordings of
people using your website. It does slow down page to be a
little bit to be a little bit careful using it.
Some clients, we turn it on for a week or two, get a ton of data
and turn it back off and leave it off for a few months or until
we next need some data. Hot Jar is a paid for version
not endorsed by them at all. But if Hot Jar are listening,
reach out. We'd love you to sponsor the
show and but we need to work out what these rejections are so the
data can show you that somebody landed on this page, like
product page or they're just on their collection page and
everyone seems to click on these products.
Why? And I'll come on to that.
My first example because that was part of the part of the
picture here. The other thing that you want to
think about though, is actually talking to customers to find out
the more qualitative why did they do something?
So again, analytics, I think I just said why, but analytics
will show you what happened, but you need to talk to them to find
out why. How can you talk to them very
quickly and easily use an AI tool to scrape all of your
customer reviews? What are some of the biggest
reasons people were unhappy with this product?
What are some of the biggest reasons people bought from us?
Were there any soft objections in any of the review content?
It's a fantastic question to ask the AI or better than that.
Get yourself a glass. I call it a glass of wine
project. Get yourself a glass of wine one
night and sit there and just keep scrolling through customer
reviews and and start tallying up the themes.
What themes are there around things people said?
Oh, I was nervous, but I nearly didn't buy it.
But, and one of the things we found out for a client recently,
as people say, I don't really know who this brand are.
And that's example one, which I'll come onto in a second.
But you can also run feedback surveys and you get a focus
group together and ask them questions.
You could phone every customer 1 by 1 and say, hey, you bought
from a website 10 minutes ago. We're going to get that sent
out. And also, could I have two
minutes of your time just to ask about how you found our website
and our business and everything else?
And we'll put a free product in which might be one of those
products sitting in the corner of the warehouse that you can't
sell. Ask them about things like that.
You know what, what were some of your rejection reasons?
How many products did you browse before you bought the one that
you bought? Do you find our site easy to
navigate? Was it a little bit difficult?
Anyway, it's Tuesday tea break talks, quick cup, a quick sip of
tea and it's currently a heat wave in the UK, like it's
blooming hot here. It's like 32°C.
I'm drinking out of a Christmas mug to make me feel a bit
cooler, which might make me just look like a mug.
But you guys can decide and don't pay anything mean in the
comments. I am I am a person.
But anyway, the the other thing you can do now to get that
feedback from customers quite quickly and quite efficiently is
using a thing called agentic AI. So if you've got ChatGPT
premium, like almost all of us do now, it's the best Co
founder, best assistant. And as I put on LinkedIn
recently, very empathetic. There's I took the post down in
the end because I had a bit of hate on it, which I thought was
quite funny and I just thought I haven't got time for this.
Life's too short for hatred. But the but yeah, the agentic
AI. You can tell ChatGPT go onto my
website or assume you'd seen this image and take a picture of
an advert of your one of your ads and say assume you'd seen
this advert and you landed on this page on my website.
Go and visit that page and you put it in agent mode and it goes
on the site as an agent and tells you some of the things it
doesn't know, some of the things it thinks that customers are
going to struggle with bits of the site that don't work.
That button there doesn't do anything.
Or if I click this, there's a bug or a problem or a fault on
your site, and that needs to be needs to be sorted.
So that's how we can get some of these rejection reasons, which
then means we can get creative with the testing again.
I'm going to show you 2 examples of that in a SEC.
And then #3 this is one of the biggest opportunities, I think,
for brands that get completely missed purely because you don't
know what you don't know. When you run an AB test,
everybody gets the results and they get very excited about
them. It gets warm fuzzy feeling.
I'm looking at one right now where we've just over doubled a
conversion rate, which is quite exciting.
And I'm watching it every day like a hawk to be like, because
I've made the changes. So now I'm excited like, you
know, how much revenue we're going to get from this thing and
how much higher is the conversion rate?
And just to say as well, conversion rate's not the main
metric. It's revenue per user is what
you really want to focus on because actually, if people
spend more and you have a lower conversion rate, but they spend
more per order, that's actually a good outcome.
Less orders to dispatch more, more revenue and more profit for
you as well and less delivery cost if you're order offer free
delivery. But anyway, the third thing that
people completely miss in this process is retesting, which I
know sounds slightly bizarre because you're like, hang on a
minute, Nick, I've got this result.
Like I'm excited now let's just get on with the next test.
The reason you retest is because the philosophy of to not retest,
you just run something once and go, well, that's better.
Turn it on means you miss the opportunity to make it even
better. It was probably by chance.
Remember this is all hypothetical.
You're trying something, so it's all a little bit by chance,
whether it's worked or not. That version 1, or maybe you did
an ABC test and you had two new versions against the original
version, often called the control, and then you lose the
opportunity to go all right, the one with this particular feature
worked well. Let's try another version or two
of that. Let's go even harder on that.
If that's a big thing for people, what's another way we
can get that same message across to our customers in different
wording, different way, different widget, different
design, different layout. Let's make it the first thing,
right? Right now it's the third thing
they see on the page on mobile, for example, let's make it the
first thing. Let's put it above the title on
the page, which could be like the price.
Let's just put the price up at the top.
Everyone loves our pricing and talk about it and reviews a lot.
That's what we tested. Let's make it more prominent,
OK? It's too prominent now.
And sometimes having a test that doesn't work does give you more
information than a test that just does.
If all your tests come out conclusive, great conversion
rate, revenue per user are going up, but you're not really
learning anything. And the more you learn about
your customers and you learn that doesn't work and that does
that's more insightful than just the stuff that does work.
You might find that you run a test once and get a 20% uplift
in revenue per user and you're thinking 20% more revenue
without spending any more. That's fantastic.
What if it could be 70%? What if it could be 90%?
I think our record test here was 140% uplift and that was 111%
uplift in SEO alone, which was amazing.
So again, and that's, that's total revenue per user, which is
awesome. So those are the three steps you
want to determine what the customer's biggest objections
are. You want to run some tests.
And the most important part, I would say after the test is you
now want to retest and rehash the thing that you believe one
to see if actually it was something else.
And also the thing we're testing, and this is the hardest
part we're testing, I think is when you're small, running an AB
test is difficult because you don't have much data.
And sometimes you'll run it and the tool you're using within,
there's lots of apps to do this for you, But the tool you're
running in Shopify to run the test, it says to you like, it's
inconclusive, I'm going to need to run this for like 8 months.
And so you're like, OK, eight months is a long time.
You really want to get at least sort of 2 or 300 transactions
through the site to get a fair output from a test.
Ideally 1000. A thousand seems to be the real
sweet spot. We've had some tests that have
started for the first week and it's like, wow, we're up like
100%. Week 2, we're down 40%.
So in total, now we're still up, but we're down.
You know, we're still up, but we're down from where we were
after week 1. Or you might find actually the
new version takes two weeks before it overtakes the old
version. Because if you're using a good
piece of tech, it will make sure returning visitors get the old
version because they come back to purchase, which is quite
exciting if that is part of the journey.
And again, you want to get them signed up to e-mail so you can
keep nudging them somehow, say come back and make that
purchase. Here's more reasons to buy from
us and try and again, breakdown those rejections.
Client 1 then some notes I'm going to read through.
The biggest thing we saw were in the reviews, especially it was
people and this on Trustpilot. People were saying like, not so
sure if these guys are legit or not.
Sorry, legit is a very British thing, say bit they're
legitimate, they're a real company.
I've never heard of them. I don't have any sentiment
towards them and a lot of e-commerce sites, let's face it,
they're quite similar. You know, there's white
background, there's products, there's some cool images of the
products, there's a bit of branding, but generally a
collection on Shopify looks pretty similar across all sites.
And so actually trust is really, really important.
And so that was one thing that we, we highlighted.
And the second thing as well was when people were on collections,
some products, it would say like 3IN stock, 2IN stock.
And we asked the client what's the highest stock level you'd
ever have on site, you know, in the warehouse.
And they said probably about 5 or 6, because as soon as we get
down to like one or two, if they sell quite quickly, our software
automatically gets a few more from the supplier and puts them
in. And we were like, you're always
really in stock, aren't you? Like it's only going to be 2448
hours, you're out of stock while more stocks arriving.
And even then, if they get a load of orders, some of their
suppliers can send direct to customer.
And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it was like, OK, when we looked at the data, people were
ignoring the ones that had like 2, sorry, ignoring the ones that
didn't have a like 3IN stock. And some of them they order in
and then send on to customer. They're big bulky items.
It's quite quick and customers are actually fine with it.
They don't mind at all. So we've got these two issues
then. So people, some people are only
clicking on the ones that are in stock, but all the bigger,
bulkier, more expensive items with bigger profit margins.
They, they didn't stay out of stock, but they don't have the
stock label on collections. People aren't visiting them
anymore and looking long term. Then average major order value
had been coming down over time and it certainly dropped when
they turned on that feature within Shopify.
So we got that and we got trust. So what we did is we we tested
more prominent Trustpilot widgets.
We also made sure on mobile. And this was something that we
had tested previously and it had really good results.
But the way the widgets had changed, somebody had made an
update to the theme and now the widgets weren't showing how many
reviews they had on mobile and they had thousands.
So when it comes to that whole trust issue, it's like, right, I
don't trust this brand. Oh, look, they've got thousands
of, you know, 4.84 point 9 stars on Trustpilot.
I trust Trustpilot and they've got thousands of verified
reviews. This is fantastic.
That's, that's one of my rejections or objections to
buying this product. Ticks like that's sorted now and
we see conversion rate lift and the stock levels as well.
Having taken those out, those two things alone doubled
conversion rate in the first week.
We're now in about week 8 of that.
And we just wrote out two other clients that are doing similar
things as well. But we're in week 8 and it's
going so well. Like conversion rate is just
over double. It's about 110% higher than it
was on the original version. Why haven't you just rolled it
out, Nick? Well, we're still getting data.
And actually when we look at it by channel breakdown, 1 channel,
which is e-mail has actually dropped a little bit, which
doesn't surprise me because we've made the, if you don't
know who we are messaging more prominent, but you do know who
we are if you're subscribed to e-mail and coming in.
So we're looking for a solution to that next as Step 3, which is
going to be the the retest bit. So that's number one.
So people didn't trust them. And when the stock levels were
there, it just created confusion.
And I love using, I love using this question as well in sales
when you're trying to sell a product or a service to somebody
and it's like you're asking the wrong question.
Like questions are powerful, but you're asking the, the question
is, do you want one of these ones with these these stocks?
I mean, the people only want to buy one item generally anyway,
but this one's got 3 in stock. This one's got one in stock.
Which of those two do you want? It's the wrong question.
The question is, which product do you want to buy?
Like let's choose the product you want us fantastic product,
great choice. Let's talk about the benefits of
that product. Put that in your home, it's
going to look amazing. You put this on your body, it's
going to feel awesome. You're going to use that on your
skin. Your skin's going to feel
incredible. And here's the proof.
And so again, wrong question that we're asking with them.
Client #2 this one's fascinating.
So this was a prescription product.
It was a few years ago, but these guys, we found that there
was only one product somebody could actually buy from them,
which was interesting. So you had to buy the product
based on what your doctor or medical professional had told
you. You need this exact one.
So there wasn't really a decision making process, but the
way the hierarchy of the site was geared was like go into this
category and then into this subcategory and then into this
one. And it was like a very kind of,
I don't know, clothing boutique experience, right?
Let's find the one that's perfect for you.
The right colour, the right fit, the right.
So that's not this item. And what we found was the search
box was hidden under a little magnifying glass that was really
faint. But when somebody had clicked
the magnifying glass button, we had 10 times the conversion rate
than if they didn't 10 times. Yeah.
So for everyone customer that bought trying to find the item
themselves, clicking through multiple pages, everyone sale,
we got 10 if they clicked on the magnifying glass.
So what do we do? We made this search box more
prominent sales. They didn't go up tenfold, but
they went up pretty quick. And then what we did is we and
we we eventually again managed to double the conversion rate in
total. We converted the home page into
a search engine, so we still would like the main NAV and
everything, but the main thing on the homepage was not this big
banner going, hey, we've got this new stuff or buy this or
try this. The homepage was like, find your
item right now. And as you started typing, one
of the things we made sure is that search results came up as
fast as possible and it told you how many products were there on
the site. And that counter would keep
every time you added another letter, it would count down
until they were like there's 8 items, there's two items.
There's we found your item and it would go green.
We found your item which was awesome and you just you click
on the item, it was had a short add to basket.
And when you click add to basket, then asked, do you want
this size, this size or this size?
And what is your quantity? And you just go, I want that one
quantity 5 bang. And then as soon as you added it
to cart, it said would you like to start a subscription or check
out now? And you went straight into check
out. You start a subscription, save
10%, etcetera. We made it so quick and easy.
And again, it's the opposite of what we would normally be trying
to do on another website. But the reason we did that again
is we we saw the data and we didn't even need to speak to
customers. But we knew from the reviews, we
know from the customer service and we know from that website
analytics immediately that people need to find that one
exact item. If they don't find that one
exact item, then they are not going to buy from you because
they can only buy that one exact item.
So we did loads and stuff. So the search box as well, you
could search by SKU specific codes like prescription numbers
and things like that. And they were different in
different countries as well. And then we also tried to kick
start a consultative discussion. If it didn't know, and this is
before the before AI really boomed over the last couple of
years, we tried to start a consultative discussion through
the search box to basically say the thing you're looking for, we
think is this. We don't stock that, but we do
stock these. Would you like to check if this
matches your prescription or not?
And you could send them a message on live chat and there
would be a doctor at the end of that live chat ready to say yes
or no. That doctor could rewrite a
prescription for you to allow you to buy.
That doctor was super. There were about six or seven of
them just working on live chat. Very expensive as sales went
through the roof. But you see how we solved a
problem with all the things that you would normally hear on a
podcast, like they're saying, like add more information, give
people a why buy, add a 123 on how to use the products that
doesn't work, doesn't work for prescriptions.
And so that was incredibly powerful for them.
And we did so much retesting for that as well.
The other output that came out of that client as well is we, we
then started looking beyond the website and said if someone's
found this product on Google Shopping, they wouldn't find it
on Meta ads. Meta ads didn't really work.
Meta ads was like a come sign up to our newsletter and then when
you need a prescription, come buy it from us, come buy it
online, etcetera, etcetera, which was great, fine.
And but one of the things we found massively with the, the
customers is they needed to be able to search to find the item
or it didn't work. So Google search, Bing search,
so important. But then we also realised that
when someone's product came up, because they use the, we made
sure that we could be searched for when the product types
everything by the, the SKU, the prescription number, the name of
the product, the brand of the item, because you'd, there'd be
multiple brands you could buy for that one prescription.
And so with all of that, we realised that when people landed
on the site, having a more traditional page, trying to sell
that item didn't really work. We completely minified the page.
There are only three piece of information we want people to
find out before we then it just explained the very bare bones of
things like the delivery times and how you can get it tomorrow
and click and collect because again, it's prescription.
Somebody's unwell or they want to improve something so they
need it quickly. So that product page, we
basically just had the title, the price, the image and the buy
button. There's pretty much nothing else
about that item on there. And then we even split tested
and sometimes they work, sometimes they didn't.
So we used a a little funky tool that would decide where, if they
thought people would dwelling. And I mean, and I'm about buying
it, it would pop up saying here are three or four alternative
items to this that do the same thing, have the same
prescription on them as well. So then there were alternatives
that did exactly the same thing. And again, you could say add
this one to basket or send a message to our on site doctor
about this old pharmacist about this item them as well.
So determine why people are not buying from your site.
Find out what their rejections are and do not be scared.
So many people are scared to understand that information.
Be brave. Find out better.
The devil you know #2 run some AB tests and try and determine
which output, which piece of content, which design, which
flow, which navigation on your site, which search box,
etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Which output is actually going
to work for you. You might be wrong first time,
but don't give up. Run that test and then once.
You're getting some results, run another test and another test
and another test and keep testing this thing until you're
like, we have no more creative juice for this test, right?
What's the second rejection reason and start that flow
again. I hope you've enjoyed today.
Please hit the subscribe button if you haven't already.
And if you understand, like if you haven't enjoyed it,
subscribe. If you haven't enjoyed it, it's
fine. Send me your rejection reasons.
If you want to reach out and get any help as well, check out my
agency Spec dot Digital, SPEC dot digital.
And we'll be back again on Friday with incredible guests.
Got some amazing guests coming out this week.
I believe it's John and Ben from Sub Summit who interviewed 2
CEOs who are absolutely Titans of the subscription space.
And we had a chat Sub Summit in Kansas City, which was super
fun. Thanks, tuning in.
See you on Friday.