The E-commerce Leader

[00:00:00] Michael: The other obsession, that’s a red herring is revenue. I mean, if you’re on Amazon, he doesn’t even touch your bike bank account. It is yours to start with. It’s such a red herring. It’s so irrelevant. And yet it seems so important, but profits, the only thing we get to keep and. It’s, if you are selling something at a 30% margin and you could double your conversion rate without increasing your ad spend, then you are probably going to be looking at, you know, a tripling of your profit,
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[00:01:25] Jason: but what happened if you doubled your e-commerce conversion rate, what would happen if you doubled it again, after that, in this conversation, we’re going to work through a strategic framework for pursuing radical conversion rate improvements to explore the bounds of what is possible for you in your situation.
[00:01:43] Welcome to the mini workshop. I’m going to call it a mini workshop on conversion rate possibility, frontiers. Michael, are you ready to talk all things conversion rate?
[00:01:54] Michael: I absolutely am. I just, I’m intrigued by this phrase, conversion rate possibility frontiers. It sounds very mysterious. So before we get into details, give us a bit more context.
[00:02:02] What is that all about? Yeah, sure.
[00:02:04] Jason: Of course. Yeah. This phrase is from the production management systems, you know, textbooks or whatever, production possibility. Frontiers is the concept and I’ve co-opted it. And, applied it to e-commerce thinking. And I think it really fits as a nice framework to just.
[00:02:21] This idea of exploring the possibilities of conversion rate, potential in your site. And so, if you’re just listening somewhere on your computer right now, and you want a Google, production possibility frontiers, just to see the layout of the type of graph or chart it is, that’s fine. I’ll show it actually here in a moment.
[00:02:36] I think it on our, live recording that makes the most sense because, it is a helpful framework and tool. And so that’s sort of the origin of the phrase itself. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:02:46] Michael: Great. I think you’ve got a really beautiful set of graphic says, have you listened to the podcasts? Obviously? You won’t hear that, but I guess we’ll put it in the show notes at the e-commerce leader.com.
[00:02:56] Do you mind sharing that graph? Because I think it might give us a bit of a visual. Yeah. Let me
[00:03:00] Jason: do that for the live audience or just look at it together. And then for the, the people listening, just imagine in your mind what I described here for you. So, so the idea here that we’re looking at. I imagine you’ve got a standard, you know, a chart like you’d chart a chart, something out with the left and right.
[00:03:16] Access. And then, on the, let me zoom in on it here. If I get an on the bottom left corner, I imagine drawing a little bubble that just fits in the corner of the chart and, and plug into that bubble. Your current conversion rate. Now Michael, I’m thinking about this, what’s the logic of a Shopify store owner.
[00:03:35] What’s your thought in terms of how this is useful for Amazon sellers? We’re gonna walk through that through before we move on to
[00:03:42] Michael: it’s even simpler. Yeah. I’m in the thing about Amazon is that we don’t get to see the bit where Amazon creates a brand, attracts people to the website and all this stuff that Shopify or direct to consumer store owners have to do.
[00:03:53] So it’s even more basic. I mean, the conversion rate is, if you like a more basic, one of the things we can see and control, we don’t get to see demographic data. We don’t get to see visits, all that stuff. We do get shared the conversion rate data by Amazon, at least some of it. And so there’s the exact same theory applies
[00:04:10] Jason: now.
[00:04:11] And in seller central, the what’s the phrase that you would, what would you poke it around? Yeah,
[00:04:16] Michael: so you’re looking at the business reports probably by, ACN, by parent ACN or by child ACE, depending on whether you have variations or not. And within that, you look for unit session percentage, which is basically the number of units sold in say a week or a month divided by the number of sessions in that period.
[00:04:31] That’s the standard one that Amazon gives us automatically.
[00:04:34] Jason: Yeah. And in Shopify, you look on your analytics tab and then you’d see in the bottom left corner, you’d see your conversion rate. And so, so let’s look at this for another moment. And so you’ve got your chart there and you’ve got your little bubble in the bottom left corner and you’ve plugged in what your current conversion rate in it is.
[00:04:51] And then what you do is just draw another bubble beyond that, up into the right, and then add the, the double, you know, like if you’re at 2% conversion rate, then that second bubble would be 4% and then do a third bubble. And that bubble would be a double again. The third one would be 8%. So you go from two to four to eight and whatever your numbers are, then just draw it that way.
[00:05:12] That’s a very simplistic, I, you know, view of, the, the chart itself and, something that hopefully zoom in a little bit there for the people who are watching, they’re looking at this live. It gives you just a mental framework to think about. And of course, on the left-hand side of the chart, you could plot it as your conversion rate percentage.
[00:05:29] So it could go from 2% to 2.5 to three to 3.5. And on the bottom of the chart, you could plot your current revenue. So if you’re currently making, let’s just say your current conversion rate is 2% and you currently make $10,000 a month. Well, what would happen is if you doubled your conversion rate to 4% and you can just plot your money that way, going forward, and it’s a very simple concept, but as I like to say, big doors swing on little hinges.
[00:05:58] And if you can focus on your conversion rate performance, then it really unlocks a whole host of benefits for you that I think are important for us to work through and talk about for a couple minutes before we jump into some specific tactics about how to do this. Yeah. Yeah. I agree.
[00:06:12] Michael: It’s often, one of the things we’re talking about with our sort of parallel show, the new one for, for season three of the call-in show, we talked about the fact that, curation and deciding what to focus on out of there many, many metrics we get thrown up by any internet marketing system or any internet based system at all.
[00:06:28] What do we focus on? And I think one of the things we can do today is to sell people on the importance of really focusing on conversion rates. And I think you and I are both convinced, but tell us a bit more on this. Why is focusing on conversion rate really a top priority rather than just an also ran for?
[00:06:43] Yeah. Yeah.
[00:06:44] Jason: Well, you know, I’m in conversations daily with, you know, our clients that we work with, on their, on their e-commerce sites and. It’s just a fear frequent refrain that I hear, which is I need more traffic. I need more traffic and our minds as e-commerce sellers. Some for some reason gravitate toward that.
[00:07:02] I need more traffic. I need more customers, you know, top of funnel thinking. But as a practical matter, if you just focus on your conversion rate, you would actually, let’s just say, if you doubled your conversion rate, you’d be doubling your revenue with zero additional marketing costs. So think about that.
[00:07:22] No incremental marketing costs, but you’ve doubled your revenue. You’d radically transform the results of your marketing work that you do do. So, you know, if your current conversion rates a lot higher than any Facebook ad, you set up any YouTube ad, any email campaign, you do all of those perform radically better because your site performance is better.
[00:07:44] So those are two, two benefits, Doug, two more. And then we’ll just talk about these, but, you’d make more money from fewer customers and all things being equal. The leanest possible system to run is the one that makes maximum income from minimum customers. Not that you don’t want to serve the whole world, but you get my point.
[00:08:02] The fewer customers you have in your system, the, that gets you to your viable business revenue numbers. The better off you are because you’ve got fewer customer service complaints for your returns, refunds, drama, site traffic problems. If you know, to the extent there are good problems to have and when they break your site and that kind of thing.
[00:08:18] And then this fourth ideas, if you really plot this out a doubling of your revenue and your top line revenue in this manner without incremental expense, for advertising, that kind of thing will likely mean quite a dramatic improvement in your net profit. And so it’s not just a doubling of your network.
[00:08:37] Because you didn’t increase your, your, advertising related costs. So the power and beauty of a simplistic focus on conversion rate optimization is nothing to be like ignored. I mean, it’s literally, like you could spend years trying to get really good at this and it would pay off in spades over and over for you.
[00:08:59] And so there, there you go. I mean, that’s some of the reason in my mind why, and I’m sure there are many other reasons why it’s a good thing.
[00:09:06] Michael: I think this is just incredibly powerful. I just want to hammer home a couple of those points because I think they’re really critical. I mean, the first thing I want to say is more than doubling your profits.
[00:09:14] I think it’s really easy to blow past this one. It’s because we get somehow, as you said, traffic’s one of the obsessions. I don’t even know why, but we’ve all been trained to think it’s important if you’re on Amazon. I guess it’s because it’s all about traffic. It’s such a big traffic engine. That’s why people get obsessed with it.
[00:09:27] And then the other obsession, that’s a red herring is revenue. I mean, if you’re on Amazon, he doesn’t even touch your bike bank account. It is yours to start with. It’s such a red herring. It’s so irrelevant. And yet it seems so important, but profits, the only thing we get to keep and. It’s, if you are selling something at a 30% margin and you could double your conversion rate without increasing your ad spend, then you are probably going to be looking at, you know, a tripling of your profit, which is just not small.
[00:09:54] I mean, that could take your business. If you could add a three X multiplier to it, let’s be modest and just sell an Amazon based business, which is not as valuable as we know, as a direct to consumer Shopify based one, then you’ve probably nine. You could have added. Another two, $300,000, your business value, just in one gut, which when you extrapolate over the, you know, the period of the business value, and if you sell it, a lot of people do sell up their businesses.
[00:10:17] Now is one of our mastermind. My members just in that, that is massive in its impact, all from one metric, the conversion rate. So that’s the first thing to say. The other thing I would say is this, if you sell on Amazon, Amazon understands this. That’s why you cannot separate getting your conversion rate good from SEO.
[00:10:34] Why organic quotes, free traffic farmers, and Amazon is not going to grace. You with ranking IE, getting visibility. If you have a lousy conversion rate, because it sends a pretty obvious and probably pretty obvious signal that it’s accurate people aren’t buying your stuff very much. They probably don’t like it either.
[00:10:50] They like the image or they don’t like the review rating, or they don’t like. Thanks. It’s not something you can get away with anyway.
[00:10:59] Jason: Yeah, I totally agree. It’s one of those things that I think that new e-commerce sellers don’t understand enough until they have put some mile mileage on their vehicle. In essence, in terms of just spending years going around the laps, a few, you know, or whatever the metaphor might be.
[00:11:15] And then you realize, dang man, if I increase my conversion rate, you know, it really has a radical impact. So there you go. So that’s the reason why this is so important at the 30,000 foot view. And there are obviously then, you know, specific things that are possible. How to do it, before we move on, Jacob mentioned that yes, people do.
[00:11:34] In fact, like to triple their profit, I, I’m pretty sure that’s a positive sentiment amongst all e-commerce
[00:11:42] Michael: people do want to triple for their profit. They’ve just been distracted by revenue. They’ve kind of got profits important, but right now I’m focused on revenue as opposed to revenues everything profit is sorry, revenues, not everything, profits, everything in revenues, just a metric that leads to that.
[00:11:55] I think it’s a reversing of priorities. Isn’t it? Okay. So we’ve established, it’s really important. So what goes into actually improving our conversion rates? How do we actually do it? Yeah.
[00:12:04] Jason: So the, the shortlist that I’m going to share here is just, you know, my thinking on this, I think, added to this list.
[00:12:11] And so the first thing I would say is the highest quality traffic you can get to. Listing on Amazon or to your Shopify store. It is a central driver to conversion rate. And if you just think about it, 30,000 foot view, again, the, the people who are coming to your site, you know, if you look at your analytics, sometimes you can see, oh, they’re, they’re on my site for 15 seconds and they leave, you know, I mean, that’s not good.
[00:12:37] And, and so the quality of the customer or prospect that you send to your site is really, really a determining factor. And that’s a whole universe of topics. I mean, there’s a lot there to poke around in and think about, but suffice to say it’s something to put on the list and then ask yourself the question, how do I get the highest possible quality traffic to my product or my on my website, a few specific tips in that regard is, if you improve the number of return visitors or repeat by.
[00:13:10] If that number goes up, your conversion rate number will go up. That is corollary, like all, all the way, just straight corollary, the higher your, returning customer rate, the higher your, conversion rate. And, and I have example after example of this, because I work with people every single day in their Shopify sites.
[00:13:28] And you can just look a super low returning customer rate number in Shopify analytics, and it’s in the top right corner. It’s the third box on the right that number. If it’s insanely low, the conversion rate will be insanely low. And that number, if it’s insanely high, the conversion rate would be insanely high.
[00:13:43] So for example, I know of Shopify sites that have a returning customer rate in the 75 to 95% rate, meaning only 25% of the customers visiting or prospects visiting are new to the site. And the conversion rate is in the. 15 to 18% range. Now that’s those numbers, most Shopify sellers would be like, I never heard of anything like that.
[00:14:10] That’s like cuckoo for cocoa puffs. And so this is, this is the idea that the higher quality traffic, the higher the conversion rate. And so that’s something to think about. So the other thing that correlates directly to quality of traffic is, improving the number of times or the number of a percentage points that you can get on any type of win-back retargeting for abandoned checkout, many e-commerce, Shopify sites that we work with in the last year or two have benefited tremendously by implementing text SMS, abandoned checkout, follow up, you know, the, the core functionality of Shopify now does an abandoned checkout email.
[00:14:47] And that’s cool, but text abandoned checkout through a tool like SMS bump is a direct. Benefit of your computer conversion rates, a direct benefit of that effort. So those are just two ideas related to quality of traffic. I know that I’m sure that there are many other things as you think about Amazon selling situations, Michael, but just the quality, you know, is the first thing that camp on a bit.
[00:15:09] Yeah.
[00:15:11] Michael: Yeah. I, I think, again, after a, an obsession with traffic per se is just an obsession with traffic quantity, isn’t it. And, and again, it’s differentiating between quality and quantity because in the end, I can understand it from a simplistic point of view, why, it seems to translate because, you know, in the end, profit is a number, but, but numbers that number.
[00:15:31] Weirdly, not just a number. It hides the fact that there’s a small number of people who love your products, driving a big percentage of that number. And I think that’s why the quality thing gets lost. Cause I think it’s harder to measure and I guess the, I love by the way, cookie for cocoa puffs, I guess what they’re saying is 18% conversion rate on Shopify sounds like completely CAD cloud cookie
[00:15:52] Jason: land or something cuckoo for cocoa puffs.
[00:15:55] It’s an American thing. Oh. Commercial for cereal cocoa puffs cereal in the, this Coco,
[00:16:03] Michael: Coco post five. Never heard of that, but yeah. So in other words, it sounds like it’s complete rubbish, but how is that achievable? And I guess you’ve answered, you know, it’s, it’s about that return customer rate now, sadly in the Amazon world, I think it really does matter.
[00:16:15] We don’t get to see those metrics as easily, or they gradually, Amazon is sort of opening the kimono gradually reluctantly eventually to, to people with brand registry, particularly. And there’s probably so much that they’ll bring out next month, which I’ll have missed for this podcast. But, we can, of course gets things like subscribe and save, and that comes down partly to type of product choice.
[00:16:33] There’s certain products that lend themselves to that, famously the dollar shave club, made a huge, you know, business out of that. And you can do sort of Amazon equivalent to some degree. I was buying some surgical quality face masks cause I’m traveling to Germany on Tuesday and they demand that.
[00:16:45] And, I could have a subscribe and save off an option, actually took me a couple of minutes to navigate around. So listing to find the, no, I just want it once option. So they obviously making it more of a default that’s right. And that’s one way you can build in returns. But the other thing I wanted to talk about is, as you mentioned, a bounce rate, and obviously not something we get to see on Amazon, Amazon, do you see those metrics that would share us with, with us as third party sellers, but what are the metrics could you use to indicate quality of traffic if you’ve got your own website?
[00:17:12] Jason: Yeah, the, the old school equivalent, I’m just putting on this in our notes is the old school equivalent for brick and mortar stores is time. I heard this, this, statistic ones that the there’s a direct corollary between time. Someone spends inside a retail store, a brick and mortar store and the amount of purchasing that they do.
[00:17:33] So it’s a direct corollary. So if they’re in the store for a minute and leaves, they’re not buying anything, if they’re in the store for. They’re buying some quantity. If they’re in the store for an hour, they’re buying a certain multiple of that. So, just straight time on station time on site in a, in a Shopify store experience or on your listing, equates to higher conversion rate.
[00:17:55] That’s why you want to have long form descriptions and information. You want to have as much there as you can for people to consume videos, multiple photos, infographics answering all their questions. You don’t want them leaving. You know, you want to create a way in which that you keep them there as long as possible, that absolutely correlates to conversion rate.
[00:18:18] And it’s in our notes here, Michael, I think that’d be like a fourth thing. And it’s a really, really powerful thing to think about. How can you keep people on your. For maximum amount of time. And usually that gets to things like, creative videos or, you know, kind of, ways in which they, you know, they, they might consume something longer, like a long form copywriting.
[00:18:38] So you get the idea, but that’s definitely one a specific metric. And you know, the, the bounce rate isn’t necessarily the most important thing to me that the bigger issue is the, average time on site. And I don’t know an Amazon analytics if they give you that information, but on Shopify, it’s something to behold and, and of course on the Shopify site, you can install, you should have Google analytics plugged in, and that gives you a lot of detail in that regard.
[00:19:02] Michael: Yeah, my experience is Google analytics is it comes down again to talking about curating a really needed at some point, probably to do a deep dive into how to not deep dive. If you see what I mean, which five metrics actually matter in Google. And this is because they just overwhelm you with data that they Amazon’s the opposite.
[00:19:18] They don’t really give you any of that stuff. But what I could say is what you were just saying. It’s a reminder to us, if you, even if it’s some of your businesses on Amazon, to really create long form content, because we tend to assume, and it’s right to assume in a sense that everyone’s shopping on a mobile incredibly quickly, and you have to hit them over the head in your very first image and your, you know, and you’re not wrong to do that because the majority of people that’s probably true.
[00:19:42] But I would say that, that it’s a good reminder that just because we’re not able to see the analytics for that, that is probably true, is a best practice that we want to give people that opportunity to consume more on that listing if we can, because you know, that that correlation is very, very well established.
[00:19:59] So it’s a very good reminder. We’re
[00:20:01] Jason: we’re we’re riffing off each other here. Cause you just gave me this an additional idea. And that is that I think what happens in the consumer’s mind is they want to make a quick decision and we want them to make a quick decision. And we know they’re going to make a quick decision.
[00:20:17] And the question is what satiates their questions and allows them to make a quick decision. And it’s not quick info. It’s not like one sentence, one sentence. Isn’t a precursor to quick decision long form copy with a lot of great information about all things related to your product. And so that people can scan it.
[00:20:42] You know, some people use the Colby assessment tool that Michael, I know you’re not like some people are super quick start people. They can pull the trigger on something as fast as it can just pop into their mind like, oh yeah, I’m comfortable. Okay. Let’s go. And those people they’ll look for, does this have all the signs.
[00:20:57] It’s a good quality product and boom, I’m ready to go. And so long form copy helps them visually, even if they don’t consume every word. And then you’ve got the other people who want to obsess and stress over a decision. And in that case, you still want the long form copy. So long form copy and videos, and those kinds of tools, infographics, all of that.
[00:21:19] They satiate people’s need on both the quick decider and the long slow decider. And so, yeah, I think that’s a key part of this.
[00:21:26] Michael: Yeah, just a couple of reflections on that. I think, First of all, a really great point that people scan and the fact that they’re scanning super fast doesn’t mean that its absence wouldn’t affect your conversion rate.
[00:21:37] The other way of putting it is that you might scan and then latch on to the one thing you actually care about. But if they were 20 classic objections that most buyers might have, that would be a resistance or a barrier to buying them or just make them say no. You don’t necessarily know which of the 20 is marketing, not sales, right?
[00:21:53] Even sales you’d ask them. And then you’d hone in on that in marketing, you have to. Catered to everyone, but that doesn’t mean that they’re going to read everything. They might just read the one thing. So that’s, that’s one thing that strikes me. The other one is, get the jest because only maybe 20% of people shop more slowly and more carefully.
[00:22:08] It doesn’t mean you don’t want to sell to them because over time, even if it’s only a sort of 5% bump in your conversion rate, if you do the maths of how much effort and money and time you put into putting say videos or answering questions versus the additional profit, profit, not revenue you’re going to get back, I would swear that you probably find a huge return on investment.
[00:22:28] Jason: I totally love that. Okay. So there’s one wrinkle here between Amazon and Shopify. That’s it on Shopify, you get to control, quite a bit of the checkout mechanics and in Amazon, as a seller, you don’t get to participate in any of that work. And so. Let me just talk through that for a moment for those who are listening, who are Shopify sellers?
[00:22:48] I’ve had many, many examples when I’ve worked with people on their websites. I do cite critiques for our, you know, as part of our introductory work for coaching clients. And we go through their site and sometimes people really, really struggle with sales or, you know, conversion rate. And then we go through their store, we check out, we buy something and we, what we find is there’s, because of the theme they used and the setup steps involved, sometimes a tangled mess of complicated checkout.
[00:23:19] And, some themes are structured in such a way that checkout as simple and. Something’s themes are, two smart by half or whatever the phrase is, where they just give you too much functionality. And if you set it up wrong, there’s, you know, there’s little tools like, oh, fast checkout or quick, quick checkout will, what just happened, where where’s the, you know, there’s this, these functionality pieces that you really want to think through and have your, your checkout experience be as, as simple as possible.
[00:23:49] The phrase that comes to mind for this is that a confused mind always says no, or go slow. And in this case for confusion related to checkout, you don’t want them to go slow. You know, you know, you don’t want them to slow down at that step. You, you don’t want them to be befuddled by your weird website setup.
[00:24:07] So, th that’s one thing related to Shopify checkout construct or methodology, and there are a few bits of that you mentioned. No by and say, or, that’s a buy-in what’s it called? Subscribing. Yeah. Same functionality exists. Now in Shopify, we have clients who were, have installed that and are seeing it go just month after month, just more and more money flowing through the, the subscribe and save app.
[00:24:35] And so if it makes sense, if you have a consumable product or something that where people are going to buy it that frequently, you know, weekly, monthly, whatever, then absolutely having a subscribe and save type app installed so that people can come back, that will come once. And then really their transaction is like a ghost in your machine.
[00:24:55] It just flows through as a new order, by trigger. And then. The, it creates an order for you to fulfill and they haven’t even needed to do anything. So that kind of magic is really, really ninja stuff. I mean, that’s very cool stuff. It is.
[00:25:11] Michael: And by the way, he talking about, you know, just kind of blowing past something.
[00:25:14] I there’s a book called the automatic customer by John Warrillow. I think it is. And he’s done a deep dive into the economics of this and, and, and basically, intention setting up subscription-based recurring revenue businesses. And, there was huge magic in it. You can sell them for much, much bigger model.
[00:25:34] Dennis sort of one onesy twosies type business. We’re talking like 10 X profit instead of three. And that sort of difference. And there is more stability and it’s future income stream. So as a business owner, there’s no stability for the people who buy it. There’s more predictability. So it’s huge. I mean, so subscriptions are, should be your next obsession.
[00:25:52] I think after conversion rate, once you’ve got the customer, like how do we make them subscribe? And to your point about the subscribe and save thing and to my experts yesterday, buying these simple face masks, I don’t need surgical. Quality face my scene in London. I mean, I just, you know, have whatever fabric ones that my wife’s made and we’ve got other ones I’ve just bought a and yet some part of me was tempted to just click it and go, yeah, why not?
[00:26:14] I need face mask. And just go ahead and subscribe, even though I didn’t need them because they set that up as the easy default option. And I just observed the part of my, my brain is always observing my buying behavior a as a marketer, I’m like, this is fascinating, isn’t it. I very nearly subscribed to save to something I just don’t need to subscribe to because it was set as a default because there was a bargain and it wasn’t even the money.
[00:26:37] It was just the fact that there was an assumption close, like, oh, you want to subscribe and save. Right. And I was forced to say, actually, no, I want to opt out of that. Just the same as if you get people to opt into marketing or opt out. If the default is you opt in, then you can get way higher subscription rates.
[00:26:52] Then if the default is you have to choose to opt that. And so I thought that was an interesting buying experience. So there you go. I think I would, I would really gently nudge people in the direction of subscription every time. That’s my
[00:27:04] Jason: thoughts. Tell me the name of that book again
[00:27:06] Michael: is called the automatic customer, but John Warrillow quite complex book.
[00:27:10] Very, very good, but it was mostly sort of geared to SAS businesses and stuff, but I don’t see that it doesn’t apply to physical products, businesses, and the dollar shave club is obviously that the kind of very often touted a example of a business that blew up because of that subscription model. Well,
[00:27:26] Jason: it’s an interesting psychological scenario, isn’t it?
[00:27:29] Because like in your case there, one of the factors I would assume is in people’s mind is if I click this button, does that mean they’re going to have stock and inventory for me in the months to come? Maybe I better just click it because I don’t want to not be able to get this in the future. You know what I mean?
[00:27:44] Like it almost implies that it will be available because it kind of makes it seem like it would be. And in a way that’s really comfortable. It’s comforting to people who are kind of stressed out about, can I get toilet paper? Whatever cat food or whatever I’m trying to hoard currently for the pantry.
[00:28:00] Michael: Yeah. I hadn’t thought about that. And I guess that’s an interesting wrinkle, I guess. I’m imagining that this was not created with that in mind because I’m, as it’s done subscribing say for what 18 months now or something, but maybe more, I think it was pre pandemic that it keeps on funny in which case, I guess it’s going to be two years, but what I would say is the marketeering me would say, oh, what I should do is just kind of twist the knife a bit in a problem, agitate solution and say, why don’t you buy a hundred toilet rolls from us now, just in case you can’t buy them next month.
[00:28:29] But obviously the supply chain manager in my company would go not to me, because that would be a very bad idea. So sometimes the, the obvious marketing angle is not practical for your business cash flows, stock management, and. That’s what to think through, isn’t it? I mean, that’s a whole different topic that is coming back though, to the conversion rate optimization.
[00:28:49] I know that you’ve got a, you want us to talk about the words that we use and that’s just often kind of blown past as well. Cause everyone says it’s all about images. Where’s that mother and I don’t think that’s true. What are your
[00:28:59] Jason: thoughts on that? Yeah, absolutely. Another way to really radically impact, conversion rate and to get towards this idea of doubling your conversion rate is copywriting and an obsession with copywriting.
[00:29:10] And so that’s just, you know, an, an obvious area of opportunity, the most effective copywriting wins. And there’s something there for all of us, whether on Amazon or Shopify site or on Etsy or eBay or wherever. I think every e-commerce seller should have an arsenal of. Copywriting loyal to books and really geek out over the word choices and phrases, the way in which you position your product in your copy.
[00:29:38] And so this is, you know, this is the fourth bucket, in fact, as it happens, I think what we might do for our live audience here is in this introductory, session. And then we maybe do a whole nother segment and we talk all about copywriting cause we’ve got the notes for it. And that’s really one of the things we can do a deep dive on.
[00:29:54] So maybe what we do, Michael is give me, just give me your feedback on the copywriting in general, related to Amazon and, and e-commerce work. And then, let’s wrap this episode and then we’ll, we’ll just keep going. Recording wise and do a deep dive into copywriting is a competitive topic.
[00:30:09] Michael: Yeah. I mean, first of all, I think it’s, it’s, absolutely critical.
[00:30:12] I think having, an article of, of books and I know you’ve got some really juicy ones coming up in our next episode about this. I agree with having a separate episode on it, is a really important thing. The main thing I would say about this, and I’m in danger of going to be reiterating this in the next episode, but I’m going to say it again because it’s important as Perry Marshall says, who’s, who’s a marketer has been around for two decades and I really respect his quality of thinking apart from anything else he says, if you’re a words based person, you can survive on your own as a marketer.
[00:30:39] If you’re an image person, you need a words person. Now, I guess he’s biased. Cause he’s very much an email marketing, you know, very kind of email marketer and a thinker. And he’s not particularly visual marketer, I think, but nevertheless, I think it’s an important corrective to this idea that we can get on Amazon, that you just Chuck a load of pretty pictures up on not, and this the same as Shopify on shore.
[00:30:56] And then your job is done. The words do actually have an impact. And I think the way I would put it is that if you haven’t clarified things into words, then it’s hard to clarify the images. I think. Writing well, for me anyway, is a way of making sure you’ve formed your thoughts. Clearly. I think Tim Ferris mentioned this in the four hour work week, and I think once you’ve got very, very clear thoughts about exactly why people should buy your product really then is the time and own is then the time to start putting together your image briefing and getting a photographer.
[00:31:26] And so for me, if nothing else, the words form the backbone, conceptually of a listing and conceptual might sound a bit abstract, but it is kind of abstract. You’re actually trying to sell the abstracts. You’re selling a feeling of using a certain type of product in the end, but it is abstracts. And I think as long as you recognize that, then it has great power.
[00:31:44] And so I think that’s for me, the number one reason why you should obsess with copywriters.
[00:31:48] Jason: I love that. Yeah. Okay. So if you want, let’s do this, let’s wrap this episode and then we’ll just jump right in those copywriting one. And if you’re listening on the podcast and just hit play the next episode here, look for the one on copywriting that impacts conversion rate at some title like that will be the appropriate
[00:32:05] Michael: there.
[00:32:06] Sounds. Great. Well, look, can you summarize why conversion rate Madison and the excitement of the conversion rate to possibility frontier?
[00:32:13] Jason: Absolutely. Every e-commerce seller has a conversion rate, and if you can double it, you’re going to dramatically improve your business. And the e-commerce conversion rate possibility frontier is just a framework by which you can start to plot this out for your business.
[00:32:29] It comes down to creating changes to your system that positively impact your conversion rate. And the question is, how good can you get? Can you double it? Can you double it again? There are tools and techniques to do that. Obviously the first thing is the quality of your traffic coming to your listing or to your website is, is incredibly important.
[00:32:51] The second thing is improving your onsite checkout methodology for Shopify sellers in particular. The third thing is keeping shoppers in your store, on your listing for the maximum amount of time possible. And then the fourth thing is working to improve your copywriting to really be effective at your words and phrases that sell.
[00:33:14] And that’s it, man. That’s how you make radical improvements to your conversion rate and all of us as e-commerce sellers need to work hard on this, and it’s going to make a big, big difference in our lives forever. If we can figure out how to do this.
[00:33:28] Michael: Amazing. Well, I love this topic and I see repeatedly, by the way, this isn’t just a lovely therapy thing.
[00:33:32] We both see with our clients. They really obsessed with conversion rate that has almost magical properties because it, once you do it, once it pays you forever, there’s no additional costs. You’re not selling more products. They haven’t got a cost of goods sold if you’re selling physical products and you’re not driving PPC, so you don’t have to pay for every click.
[00:33:48] So there is magic in this economically and for me, economic magic is business magic. So folks, if you’re enjoying today’s show, don’t forget, we’ve got this whole new, exciting concept now with the calling out. So we’re into season three of the commerce leader. So stay tuned as ever, don’t forget to subscribe on Spotify or apple podcasts do leave a.
[00:34:07] Here’s the e-commerce call-in show. So, Jason, do you want to just tell us just about to ask people to leave us a rating on apple podcasts, and please do that, but Jason, how do we subscribe to the call-in show on the calling app? Yeah, just
[00:34:18] Jason: to make sure everybody’s heard kind of what we’ve doing. We have a new stream of content for this show that we’re recording on another app called the Collin app, Chris green and Kyle Haimer are our co-hosts in that show.
[00:34:31] So it’s a foursome and we’re doing our hot takes on specific topics. And then we’re going to take those files, stream it into the e-commerce leader, you know, a podcast on Spotify and apple and all that. But you can go into the Collin app and directly subscribe and even w listen, live or recording 7:00 AM on Tuesdays.
[00:34:54] And so we’d love to have you do that. In the Collin app, it is the e-commerce leader, call-in show, and people are subscribing all the cool kids are already subject. Just kidding people are subscribing. And, so we just announced it this last week and we’d love to have you subscribe to the show and follow us.
[00:35:11] It’s designed to be a social podcasting tool and if it blows up cool, we’ll be there. And so if not, then you can catch the episodes on our normal feed on Spotify or apple. There you have it. That’s the colon. Yeah. And
[00:35:25] Michael: I was just going to say, this is part of a chance to be part of a, a new platform in it’s fairly early days in the public.
[00:35:32] So come and be part of it and come and see how that works. I mean, the cool thing is that I think you and I, Jason, we love podcasts as listeners. We’d love doing podcasts. And this is where calling is addressing that missing piece for podcasts, which is really that lack of interactivity, which Facebook has a YouTube powers to a degree, but which, you know, isn’t necessarily where we want to be as podcasts, enthusiastic.
[00:35:52] So come and be part of it and experience it for yourself and, just remains for us to say, yeah, it’s good goodbye from him. And it’s goodbye from me. And thank you so much for listening to our show. All about conversion rates, possibility, frontiers.
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