Jon MacDonald knows how to get website visitors to take action.
As Founder of The Good, a conversion-rate optimization firm, he has worked with enterprise brands like Adobe, Nike, Xerox and more.
And today, as demand increases for ecommerce brands, so too has customer expectations of what a shopping experience is.
Brands need to understand these expectations in order to improve from foundational basics to advanced strategies.
In this conversation, Jon expands on what the fundamentals of conversion rate optimization are, how and why discounting is a huge drain on profits, and how brands can capture customer data to improve personalization campaigns.
Jon just released his second book, Opting In To Optimization, which is a set of principles that will help ecommerce leaders capitalize on unprecedented market demand and build sustainable, thriving businesses that can weather unexpected economic storms.
Here are a few lessons from our conversation:
How do you approach a brand’s Conversion Rate Optimization strategy to improve sales?
There are no hacks or tricks that are going to double conversion rates.
It’s really all about providing a better customer experience and tracking every click and movement that happens on your site in an aggregate fashion.
Make sure that you are using data from consumer engagement to improve their experience.
And that in a nutshell will help you convert higher just by improving their experience.
I say this a lot, but your goals and your consumer’s goals are aligned: you both want a conversion!
So help them to complete the research that they’re at your site to do, so that they can learn how your products or services help solve their pain or need.
And if it can, they want to convert.
So help them to do that: help them do that research and then get out of their way and make it as easy as possible to buy.
Why you need an objective perspective to improve your customer site experience
So the reality is it’s very hard for a brand to have an unbiased view.
One chapter in the book is that you can’t read the label from the inside the jar.
It’s very hard as a brand to understand what a new customer’s experience is like, because you are already biased to some degree, in regards to what your products do, what the best product is for any situation, etc.
You know how to find and navigate to things on your website.
So you don’t really have the same questions and you automatically trust the brand.
So I think that it’s a hard thing for a brand to get outside that jar and understand a new customer’s experience, but it’s critical to really understand the customer experience.
How to identify customer challenges
The first thing you want to look at is talking to your customers.
Just start engaging your customers.
They will tell you what their challenges were.
You can do user testing, where you send people to your site who match your ideal customer profiles, and ask them to complete some tasks while you record their audio and video.
And just tell them to talk out loud about what they’re thinking, and you will learn so much that they have an objection at this spot, or that they can’t find what they’re looking for.
And they’ll share what’s very frustrating, or that they want a piece of information that they can’t find.
Those are all ideas for what you should do next to your site and test.
So that’s a goldmine for where you could get AB or multi-variate test ideas.
How A Quiz Increased Revenue 270% in A Year
When we started working with baseball bat company, Easton, we started talking to customers and customer service.
We asked customer service, “ What are the biggest complaints you hear?”
And the first thing we heard was: “Well, parents call all the time angry that they can’t return their bat.”
And it’s like, “Well, why are they trying to return their bat?”
Let’s start there…
The reason was very interesting: Because bats are only certified for certain leagues and a lot of times, people would go to our website and they would just get presented with a big image of bats.
And they’d all look exactly the same.
If you imagine all of these bats — they all just look like little round objects.
You can’t really identify the differences in the bats, other than maybe a few color differences.
So parents did not know where to start, so they would also often just go by price and just buy one that was within their price.
And so we started talking to some parents who were having these problems.
And we did some customer research and interviews.
We found out that there’s a certification, and they have to have the right bat for each league. Otherwise kids would show up to batting practice before games and they’d hit with the new bat and they’d be really excited about it.
They would mess up the paint a little bit and ding up the battle a little bit to the point where they wouldn’t be able to return it.
They’d get to the plate. And the umpire would say, you can’t use this bat because it’s not certified, but it was too late. They’ve already been using it. So they had to return it.
And we said, okay, well, that’s a problem that should be solved…
Why don’t we just put a brief survey or quiz on the site asking a few questions–we found out there are really three big components to finding the right bat:
- The first was what league the kid was playing in
- The second one is what age? Because that helps determine the weight of the bat.
- And the third was what type of hitter or is it a child? Are they swinging for the fences and trying to get a home run all the time, or are they just trying to get on base?
Depending on the answer, we changed the contents of the page.
Implementing the quiz alone increased online sales by 270% year over year, in addition to reducing returns.
So not only were they getting more conversions, but they were also not having to refurbish products and lose that money on something that had already presumably been sold.
So with that in mind those type of, of quizzes, if you will, the pre purchase quizzes to help with filtering can make a huge difference.
This is massive for a corporation that is as big as Easton!
Why discounting can be dangerous
Discounting is not optimization.
It is margin drain.
And the reality is it’s the go-to strategy for many brands because it’s the easy way to get more sales.
“Well, I’ll lower my price and offer a special or I need to collect more email addresses. Well, what can I do? I’ll offer 10% off.” the thinking goes.
And the problem is that you’re telling customers, especially new customers, that your product is not worth what you charge for it.
It’s worth 10% less.
There are many alternatives to a discount, or an offer that is not a dollar or percentage off.
These are all value adds, right?
So think about your promotion as what you can add, as opposed to subtract what you can subtract. So many brands try to subtract a dollar or a percentage, but you could have a more sustainable effect by doing something like free gifts.
Or another popular strategy now is to donate something if a customer busy something — Tom’s and Bombas socks are doing this well.
Now we’re seeing a lot of smaller brands do something like that.
To learn more about Jon’s book: https://thegood.com/opting-in-to-optimization/
