eCommerce Australia
Ryan Martin - Founder of eCommerce SEO Agency Remarkable Digital interviews Australian eCommerce experts to discuss trends, strategies, and best practice methods to run a successful online business.
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eCommerce Australia
Boom or Bust? - Ilan Hurwitz & Ryan Martin Discuss Black Friday!
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Ready to transform your Black Friday strategy and skyrocket your conversion rates?
We're excited to have Ilan Hurwitz from Clever Conversions join us in this episode of Ecommerce Australia Podcast.
Ilan uncovers the staggering $8.7 billion spent over the Black Friday weekend last year and shares expert insights on whether every brand should engage in the now extended "Black November" shopping frenzy.
Nab Link: - https://business.nab.com.au/tag/online-retail-sales-index/
From managing discounts without diminishing brand value to navigating the rising costs per click, we explore actionable strategies to thrive in today's economic landscape.
Discover the secrets to mastering customer acquisition with tools like Google Search Console, Shopify reports, and heat maps.
I emphasize the importance of cohort analysis and understanding long-term customer value to refine your e-commerce strategy.
We also delve into the role of excellent customer service and logistics in maintaining satisfaction and repeat purchases, crucial elements for e-commerce success during peak seasons.
Learn how to leverage SEO, CRO, and user experience to maximize your Black Friday preparations and drive organic traffic.
CRO Calculator: https://www.cleverconversions.com.au/cro-calculator
Finally, we explore innovative e-commerce tactics designed to elevate your customer experience and boost sales.
From offering free shipping and smart product bundling to leveraging email marketing and SMS campaigns, Ilan and I provide a comprehensive guide to optimizing your Black Friday sales strategy.
We also highlight the importance of website speed, especially for mobile users, and discuss the benefits of understanding customer behavior through data and feedback.
Don't miss out on these expert insights that will ensure your brand stays ahead during peak sales periods!
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Welcome to the Ecommerce Australia podcast. For those of you seeking direct assistance, Remarkable Digital is just a call away. Our mission is to be remarkable, doing great things for great people and great businesses. I understand how much choice you have and how many podcasts are out there, so I'm truly grateful you've tuned in. Please let me know if you have any questions, comments or topics you'd like covered. Let's get started. Welcome to eCommerce Australia. I'm really pumped about this episode. We're talking CRO and Black Friday considerations with the best CRO specialist in the country, Alain Hurwitz from Clever Conversions, a great man with a big heart and a lot of knowledge, who looks very tanned after spending a few days in Byron Bay, might I add. So, mate, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 1:You're in rarefied air as a returning guest I think it's Adriana Bazzari and Brendan Gillen as my only two returning guests, so you should feel incredibly privileged.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Ryan. Thanks for having me back. Really looking forward to this one.
Speaker 1:Nice one, mate. How was Byron? Before we get stuck into things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, really good Got away for a couple of days. Never a dull moment working in e-commerce, so good just to to relax for a little bit. Always tricky trying to get that balance right, but yeah, good to get away for a few days before we we head into the grand final of e-commerce, which I know we're diving into a bit more today yeah, yeah, exactly mate.
Speaker 1:What are you doing, byron? Do you get a surfing? Are you a surfer? Do you go on this? Do you go for a swim?
Speaker 2:No, you don't want to see me trying to surf at all, but just yeah, staying in Lenox Head, which is a lovely part of the world, going to the beach. I went to Byron a couple of times for a night out, so it was a good couple of days.
Speaker 1:Yeah, nice one, mate. Now, yeah, we's chat all things. Conversion rate optimization, Obviously, with Black Friday coming up, we can chat a little bit around what to expect for this coming period. But also, I guess cost per clicks have never been as high as what they are now, and especially in that sales period. So I feel like conversion rate optimization plays a big part in okay, it's going to cost us a fair bit to get traffic to our website. How do we maximize that traffic? So you put together some notes around the numbers and the size of Black Friday. Mate, Do you want to go through your research for us?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the question is is it going to be a big Black Friday? And I think it's going to be massive again this year? It was massive last year $8.7 billion in sales just over the four days, which is crazy. That's $1.5 million spent a minute. So it's really big. In Australia now Black Friday it's almost becoming better in our calendar, so I think it's going to be bigger again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't know, mate. I can't disagree with the numbers, absolutely, but I'm a little bit over Black Friday. To be honest. I think Black Friday has morphed into Black November. Let's be completely honest and we'll talk about last year. Brands went very earlier and again it's going to happen again this year, so I feel like it's lost its urgency just to be those Friday and Monday days. It's become a month of discounting, do you think all brands need to participate or should participate.
Speaker 1:No, I don't, I don't think all brands but it depends on their situation and how their year's been, and I get that there's pressure to go and discount. But I think you need to understand why you're discounting. I think you need to understand those shoppers and what moves the needle for those discounters. Are they actually good customers to acquire and then what do you do with them? So you know, I just wonder whether there's going to be a tipping point where a lot of brands go. You know what we're out Like if you look at Gen Z and the recent retail report come out that was produced by Shopify.
Speaker 1:Like Gen Z especially, they're looking for sustainability, they're looking for a lot more from their brands and I just think this is really mass consumption, high discount. But also shoppers are looking for value and they'll definitely get that for Black Friday. I just think there's going to be a point where retailers go you know what we're not racing to the bottom anymore, or there's going to be a different way to do it. If you are a brand that hasn't discounted all year, then you do get that green light to discount Black Friday without losing any kind of appeal. But I think we're going to see a shift in the way brands deliver on these sorts of holiday promotions in the coming years, but given how tough it's been this year, maybe not this year.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you're right. I think a lot of brands will start out talking about discounting less or not discounting, but inevitably, as you say, every situation is different. Some people might have stock that they need to get through, but it works and everyone else is going to be participating. I think it was interesting to look at. June was massive for online. The NAB online report, which is a good one to look at if you want to see how online is growing, saw a massive June. It was 14% bigger than the previous June. Why was that? End of financial year sales? So I think, as well as Black Friday being just a key part of the calendar in Australia's minds, as Australian shoppers' minds, now people really know about it. People are still spending, but they're waiting for sales. We're in a tough economy. People are budgeting, so I think that's why it's going to be big as well, because people have marked it in the calendar and are going to spend big.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, exactly. And once you start getting into that kind of October period, which we're not far away from now, shoppers are already planning their Black Friday purchases or getting ready to purchase. So I think it's really interesting the way that brands and e-commerce stores and retailers more generally need to consider your loyal customers and your VIPs, and I guess that's where that sort of November blur starts to come in. Do you go early with an EDM campaign and keep it off your social media to your loyal customers and your VIPs? I know, as a consumer, I'd be pretty annoyed if I paid full price for something on October 20 and then November 1, it's half price. So how do you kind of handle that? And it's just all about brands getting their timing right for their campaigns.
Speaker 2:The number one question I've had this week that's really started to heat up we're recording this late August is when do we start Black Friday? What do you think? When is the right time to start? When do you think brands will start this week?
Speaker 1:Well, I think the brands will definitely start, you know, 1st of November, if not earlier. So let's just for clarity, you know November 11 to 15 is the Click Frenzy yes, the main event. So you know that starts the ball rolling. Then you've got black friday, november 29. You've got cyber monday, december 2. You've got boxing day sales, december 26. You've got singles day, which I didn't also include. I think that's the 11th of the 11th, obviously for all the number ones there. So there's a lot happening, but I think brands will go November 1, if not earlier. Potentially, a smart way to do it is to let your consumers know what's going to be on special so they can plan for that a little bit and that might be able to. You know they're planning their spending, trying to get that share of wallet right. Well, if you start to manage expectations about what's on sale, what's not on sale and how they can get ready for it, then that's potentially a good way to start.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I heard someone say the other day flashing the funnel. That's how you describe Black Friday. There's all this pent up demand from the year. People are aware of your products, they're creating their lists and then over that weekend or a bit earlier is when you convert all that interest. And I think the emails is a great way to do it. Things like wish lists just helping people curate and make it really easy for them. They've already decided what they want. Make it easy for them to purchase.
Speaker 2:I think another interesting one, black Friday is a bit later this year, on the 29th, and so it starts to go into Christmas gift guide and gift shopping time as well. So creating gift guides and helping people create a shopping list from that as well. I think it'll start just after Click Frenzy. I think you'll see a lot of people talk about Black Friday 1st November in their marketing, but they're not really offering their true Black Friday deals. Click Frenzy offers a great opportunity to offer a great deal. It's still two weeks before I'm advising clients. Go pretty big on ClickFrenzy, see if you can get some early sales before people spend all their money and then probably start some sort of Black Friday the week following with your big, big offers happening over that weekend.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interesting. And I think it's also important to remember what discounting does to your you know, you mentioned their funnels before. So you know there's generally, you know, whilst it's never linear, there are, you know, awareness, consideration and conversion. If we want to just keep it at its most simple form, when you discount, you just bring people through that funnel so much quicker. When you discount, you just bring people through that funnel so much quicker. If you're not having awareness campaigns and consideration campaigns to kind of refuel that funnel off the back of Black Friday and Christmas, then that first quarter of next year could be quite slow as well. So whilst we're trying to get as many conversions as we can, I still think it's important, especially for creative, to try and find a way to get new people aware of your products over that period as well, and otherwise it's going to be a huge, huge increase in sales, reduced profit, and then you get to Jan, feb, march and it's quiet again and you're wondering why that's potentially why. So that's something just to keep an eye on as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and this is such a good point the hangover which happened within the financial year as well. This year, too, it's going to happen, and be ready for it when you're doing your forecasting and mapping out your offers. But you're right, everything happens so quickly over Black Friday. It's a really high conversion, so people aren't spending as much time researching, looking for products, deciding what they want. So you've got to do all of that work really from now. But in particular, as it gets closer, people are going to be starting to move from buying it now to waiting to Black Friday, and so how do you make sure that you're on that list?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and if you don't go with Black Friday, if you decide like I think some of these retailers may do in the coming years that we've had enough of this race to the bottom and the discounting, we're actually going to uphold our values and our margins and our premium product and offer something different, All of a sudden, you've probably got more ammo to fire come sort of Jan, Feb and March and continue to sort of build and invest in content and nurture the kind of clients or the kind of consumers that you actually want to attract. So there's some interesting plays out there, so I'm looking forward to seeing how brands execute on it. So, yeah, you know in terms of what to do. First, mate, what are your suggestions? Would you review last year's performance and identify opportunities to improve? What's your kind of research phase look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely that's the first place to start is looking at last year. We've been very busy this year. It's kind of hard to remember exactly what went on. So going back and having a look at what were the top products that sold, what were the key pages that people landed on, what was your key messaging you probably should be doing this I'm talking specifically around CRO and conversion what happens on site but really this should be happening across your whole business with your product team. Obviously, the logistics team is looking at stock, the marketing team is looking at ad spend as well, and just really getting an understanding of what happened and going through as a team, taking the time now while you can to be honest about what went well, what didn't go well and what you can improve on, and going through that exercise and getting really really clear on the opportunities before you dive into the planning and execution phase and deciding exactly what you're going to do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, spot on, mate. That's a great point. And even looking at that cohort last year and understanding of those new audience and users that purchased at a discount have they purchased again? What's their behavior and then that can start to build out your strategy a little bit as well and maybe again evaluate the worthiness of entering into Black Friday. And speaking of reviewing last year's performance, one thing that I do come across which surprises me a little bit but a lot of e-com brands, they don't really have Google Search Console set up as well as they should.
Speaker 1:So I think it's imperative when looking at organic search to have that Google Search Console set up. It literally takes five minutes. If you're an emerging brand and you haven't done too much SEO, I would highly recommend downloading or jumping onto Google Search Console setting up your account. As I said, it literally takes five minutes. Reach out to me. I'm happy to help if you need to, but you can really get some interesting data around. You know history and where your organic traffic is coming from, what searches you turn up for. You can really get granular in terms of the queries so you can. Example, if you want to know like branded versus non-branded, you can put in a query not containing and then put your brand name in there and it just really helps to see what kind of people are searching, especially with Black Friday keywords and that sort of thing. So quick tip there get Google search console set up so you can analyze the data from this year.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's such a good one. I think there's so many easy data sources and trying to understand, for example, what the activity on your website like. Just going to shopify reports like gfo has been a bit of a challenge for historical data. But shopify reports are pretty good. There's landing page reports. You can go back and look at what happened last november, looking at bounce rates, looking at time on page all these things from a CRO perspective. You really want to understand how people are shopping on the site. There's so much competition. People are doing things so quickly. You want to get into that mindset so you can understand how important it is to present all of your offers A good one as well. If you want to see what others did last year the Wayback Archive Machine have you heard of that?
Speaker 1:Nice one as well, if you want to see what others did last year. The way back archive machine have you heard of that? Nice yeah, I have actually to be honest, yeah it's pretty cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can just put in anyone's url and there's a pretty good chance. This machine, uh, this website it's been around forever, but it takes snapshots of a whole lot of the internet periodically, and so there's a pretty good chance your competitor's website was snapped and so you can go and have a look at their offers and see and, of course, you can go back into your own perhaps if you're on Shopify, your own old themes and just remind yourself of what you did. If you've got heat maps, that's also a great way just to just to really understand what you did and what you can improve on yeah, spot on, mate.
Speaker 1:One of the things we mentioned in preparation for this podcast was around checking that lifetime value of new customers acquired. So obviously we've sort of touched on that a little bit. But how do you evaluate the long-term value of customers acquired and see that sort of impact on your overall marketing strategy?
Speaker 2:Yeah, doing that cohort analysis. So Shopify has got a really good report. There's a lot of add-on tools, like Lifetime Triple Whale, which you can use, which are really good at helping you do this as well. So one of the best places to start is with a cohort analysis. So what that does is it will actually show you what happened with all your Black Friday or your November customers in subsequent months. So if you had a thousand customers, they spent a hundred thousand dollars. It actually shows you how many of those customers came back in December, january, february and how much they spent as well, and so you can look at them in isolation. And that is always very interesting because you can compare to your normal customer. When you know you're not on sale, you can see your average price as well, and if you see a big difference, that's the sign straight away that perhaps you're not. If it's really low for the November cohort, then you're probably not attracting the best type of customer who is coming back, because, of course, there's going to be people around who are just looking for a deal that is going to use you and they're not coming back, and for a lot of people, getting repeat purchases is really built into their profitability. So that's the first one to look at.
Speaker 2:Shopify does have it as a report and there's a lot of other great tools like I use Lifetime. I use Lifetime Lee is pretty good. Triple Wow, which also make it. It's not. It's quite easy to understand that data, so that's like a really important one. I think the other one is to look at your customer service and your customer service tickets and your logistics. These are all the things where we get so focused and excited about the big day and all the revenue that comes from it. But then, yes, what happens next with the value of the customer and was your customer service team and support, because that equally plays a role in getting that customer back. You want to try and acquire new customers. There's so many people out there shopping, so how do you take that opportunity to introduce them to your product and make sure they have a great experience?
Speaker 1:Yeah, spot on, mate. And speaking of kind of getting in front of new customers too, I think an important question that I get asked around how does SEO kind of merge into Black Friday and how do we set ourselves up from an organic point of view? And a couple of tips I would have is, obviously, set up that Google Search Console to start with, so we can actually get the data. Google Search Console is the ultimate source of truth as far as I'm concerned. But then, when it comes to SEO and this is why I love talking to you, because there's such a huge correlation, I should say, between SEO, cro, ux At the end of the day, it's all about user experience.
Speaker 1:So if we want to set ourselves up for success when it comes to Black Friday, as an example, we should have a collections page that is purely for that sale period. So one tip I would say is don't have in the URL slug, don't have Black Friday 2024 sale, just have Black Friday sale and have that collections page and have every deal that you have on that page. So when you're sending traffic for people that are looking for that service, whether that's through social or whatever it is send them to that page. That's all about Black Friday and keep it as relevant as you can and then, as you go through each year, you can keep that same page so you can keep your link building activities, you can keep building authority to that sales page throughout the years and you don't have to create a new page each year. So building those evergreen sales pages really important for SEO, but also really important for UX and it gives your customer a much better experience if you're sending them to a page that's so relevant to Black Friday or that sales period.
Speaker 2:So important with the UX. People just want to know they land on a site. Am I in the right place? What do I do next? Like I'm on the Black Friday page, I don't need to go hunting around for the best deals. This is where I need to keep browsing and looking for a product. And then, of course, from SEO perspective, ad costs are going to be so high during this time In fact, with the election as well the US election ad costs could actually be even more expensive this year around. So you need that SEO traffic to help bring down those costs. I was just Googling Black Friday sales and JB Hi-Fi have got themselves ranked number one. You can see Catch. I imagine they started those pages years ago and were able to get those rankings.
Speaker 1:Do they have the year in the URL?
Speaker 2:They have put the year, yes, in the description title. They have, but no, not in the URL.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so keep that URL the same, or year agnostic, but then you can use them for the H1s and H2s and the copy that's gold. That's gold, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean how easy it is to just set up that page now. It's something Okay. Maybe this year it's like getting the rankings it might not rank yet, but getting that going is going to help you so much in future years.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean we all know obviously SEO is long-term, so JB Hi-Fi would have had that page for years and years.
Speaker 2:They'd be interested actually to the Wayback Machine To click on the.
Speaker 1:Wayback Machine and have a look and see, but I'm assuming that they've been building authority building links through that page for many years, which is why they're ranked one and they'll see a massive return on investment over this sort of next couple of months for that.
Speaker 2:And one thing I've seen people do with those style pages is actually have a newsletter opt-in Going back to your point around, just getting people ready. They might start searching November, mid-November. You haven't got your sales yet, so you just have the email opt-in and they can sign in, be the first to know as soon as we launch our offers. I think I saw that Woody do that last year.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and that's the best way and that's probably the playbook for most of the great e-commerce brands out there is launching soft launch to your database before you go out to social. So I think email is a great way to start that conversation, to nurture them, to set expectations around what is and what's not going to be on sale and whether you're going to do a sale at all. I think that's really important to keep the customer informed. So email obviously plays a huge part in Black Friday.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's so critical and it's the one time of the year where you can get away with lots of emails and lots of SMS as a brand. I think SMS is always a tricky one, you've got to be so careful. But it's 100 open, right. So it's so powerful and it works. And there's just so much noise around black friday.
Speaker 2:I was listening to a podcast the other day in america and they were talking about emailing two or three times a day during black friday too much, every single day, every day. They did say start to your whole database and after the second or third, only go to people who've clicked and opened. And that's another key thing you can do. This year is generally best practice. You should only be emailing to an engaged segment of your database, not to everyone. But black friday is when you you can go to everyone and you're more like. There's more people out there who are ready to purchase, who might not have engaged with you throughout the year.
Speaker 2:So there's so much that you can do with email and particularly in the lead up to email is just building out the database. Yeah, so just gives you that extra marketing lever to get your message across during a busy time. So there's always the on-site pop-ups, which are good, which can be optimized, but one thing I've done with a few clients lately is run competitions off-site. So what you can do is run an ad on facebook, win a prize to whatever it is, something related to your product, because you want to try and qualify people. You don't just want people who are interested in competitions and they don't need to go to the site or anything to enter the competition, they just enter on facebook you have to have some pretty good T's and C's around that, though, wouldn't you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you've got to make sure the T's and C's around winning the prize and how they use the information. But you can integrate it directly with Klaviyo and so that way it just goes straight into Klaviyo that you can then use for Black Friday.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think list hygiene is so critical for these sorts of sales periods. So if you can like the most hyper-personalized segmented list that any e-commerce business has, the better or, you know, will make the most amount of money, I think, with Black Friday. So, you know, instead of just doing a big blanket email, which is kind of the done thing, if you can email a specific segment with a specific message and a specific offer that's so granular to what they're looking at or what they're interested in, you're going to get such better results. And that comes down to the preparation, obviously before November. So you need to know as much about your customers as you can to segment them and really send lists. Send them offers that they're interested in and ones that they're not, and I think you'll get a lot better return on investment with your emails as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's a really good point. It's kind of across the board with all your marketing. The more you understand your customer, the more you can tailor your message. This is going to absolutely increase conversion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and then we'll get on to talking about the website, um, shortly, but I think that's yeah, yeah, exactly that's where you come into your own mate. But we're doing all these things, we're sending out our. I can only imagine the amount of sms's I'm going to get because I'm subscribed to a lot for the podcast and, you know, I can imagine my phone's going to get smashed I think some people start up like uh, burner emails just for that, um just for their promotions, just so that yeah yeah, exactly, it's not a bad idea.
Speaker 1:But we're doing seo, we're doing email, we're running obviously, running paid ads as well. We're doing it everything we can to get people to the website. If the website is not optimized for success, then all of our efforts are going to go through the window, out the door. I don't know, have I mixed up too? We've both done that. Yeah, exactly. So we need to really make sure that the website's in order, and one of the things, before I hand it over to you, our website and CRO expert is just because it's top of mind at the moment.
Speaker 1:I had Kate Massey on from Search Spring and she was talking about increasingly in smart product bundling. If we don't have you know, if we're doing all this hard work and spending budget to get people to the website and we don't give them an option to bundle up products and increase our AOV, cross-sells, post-sell, you know, engagement, that sort of thing If we don't have those mechanics in place, I'd strongly recommend looking at how you can implement that between now and November, because we want good UX, we want good product bundles that make sense to the consumer. Give them a chance to add more to their cart, get more value. You get a higher AOV, so everyone wins really. So, yeah, that would be. One thing I would consider is ensuring that you've got good bundling, and good sort of people also purchase those sorts of things, so I'll leave it there. Have you got anything to add to that?
Speaker 2:It's never been more important. I'm obviously pretty biased, but it really is so critical. We know if you've worked in e-commerce or at an agency. We're so far past just being able to put money on Facebook, having a good product and a good site and seeing money come the other side. We now need to optimize every single part of the journey, and that means really dialing in on your website experience, and that has to happen during Black Friday.
Speaker 2:It's such an opportunity. There's so much traffic, there is so much being spent, and I mentioned this in the first podcast, but I'll mention it again Just think about what happens in a retail store. Think about what ever been to Boxing Day sales in a retail store. There's so much going on and just getting someone into the store is only half the job done, and you've really got to make sure that every single little detail, every single little point we say when viewing a website, are you increasing every single part of your website, increase motivation and reduce friction, and that is something that just needs to be perfect for that post-click experience. I like that.
Speaker 1:You like that. Yeah, that's a good one. Each sort of new page that they click on or each sort of action they take. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean every single thing that they're looking at, every single click that they're making so friction there's pop-ups, pop-ups, pop-ups. Motivation is good images Like it's a great way, because you actually are quite complicated pretty quickly, but everyone can understand that and it's going through. Yeah, just asking yourself that question Is this headline motivating or is it friction? Is this pop-up motivating or is it causing friction in the shopping journey? Every single detail matters. I go through websites and I get into a lot of detail and I say to people I know this seems small, but think about an elite athlete, think about people who are the best in the world at what they do. It's all about the hard work and the detail that you don't see If you go look at big brands, if you look at other sites or products you want to be like, don't just think about what you see on the outside. I can tell you they're spending a lot of time understanding their customer, going through their website and doing the hard work to make sure that it looks easy and is easy for customers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and we're talking about such incremental margins when it comes to conversion rate, aren't we? So if you can get your conversion rate from 1.8 to 2.5, it's a game changer at that level.
Speaker 2:We've got a calculator I'll just shout out on our website. But just look, just Google conversion rate calculator and it's amazing the difference. It's so powerful. Obviously, it increases your orders and your revenue, but then it reduces your cost per sale. What does that mean? You've got more funds to invest into marketing, so you get your cost per sale from $30 to $20. Maybe then, if you want to grow, you've got an extra $10 to bid higher in Google or Facebook, because it's a bidding game, right. Then, if you want to grow, you've got an extra $10 to bid higher in Google or Facebook, because it's a bidding game, right. Whoever pays more wins. And so you can just set off this growth cycle and you haven't had to pay for it. You've improved the baseline website experience, converting from your existing budget. So, yeah, it can make a huge difference and it improves customer experience. That's actually. You actually get happy customers as well, because they're not going to buy and convert unless they're happy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, exactly. And all good marketing stems from a great website. I've got clients, or I've had clients that I've tried to run SEO campaigns through, and their website hasn't been that great and the campaigns just don't work. You know, I'd love to take all the credit and say, yeah, the SEO was brilliant, but the most common thing that I see of campaigns that do work and campaigns that don't is the motherboard right, the homepage, the website. Sorry, I should say, if that is not optimized, I don't care what you do, your marketing won't be anywhere near as efficient. So it's so critical. How does someone know if they've got a good UX?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there's two ways to understand the UX. We can look at the data and we can just speak to our customers and understand the true experience. I think something to keep in mind as e-commerce professionals. We sit in front of computers all day. We're actually separated from our customers, but whoever's closest to their customers wins. It's kind of like a. It's kind of like a fundamental principle of business and we need to remind ourselves. Even it's crazy, but I we need to remind ourselves to check our experience on mobile sometimes, because we're on desktop all day.
Speaker 2:This is a really simple example. So we don't have the advantage of, say, people in retail where they're speaking face to face and getting feedback from customers. So you've got to be quite proactive in how you do that. So people want to listen to my first pod. I go into a bit of detail. On the data side, we can look. Obviously, using GA4 or Shopify reports is a great way, because you can actually look at where people are bouncing on your site understanding the time on page so you're trying to just time on page and looking at the device, so you can look and see they're on mobile, they browse for a minute and most of them are new, so we're starting to add some color and understand who our customer is, and so you can look at the website and go.
Speaker 2:Does this make sense on mobile? Is there too much information? They're not spending that much time, so that's one way to do it, but then, of course, just putting it in front of people and seeing how they browse through it, and there's a couple of platforms. I always just encourage people to go out on the street and put their phone in front of people and see how they're experienced. But you can do more formal research.
Speaker 2:There's a platform called Askable where you can actually recruit people, pay about $50 per person and you can send them a task and they'll take a video of them browsing the website and giving you feedback. So if I have to choose, that's always the one I prefer, because you're just hearing from real customers. Another really good one is post-purchase surveys, so you can put them on the thank you page when people have just purchased, so it's fresh in their memory and you ask them really direct questions about the experience. Could you find what you were looking for? Is there anything we could do to improve questions like that, which give you quite actionable tips on different things that that you can improve. The other one is heat maps as well is a great place just to understand what people are engaging with across the site, what they're clicking on and what they're viewing you mentioned microsoft clarity.
Speaker 1:Do you know as one that you prefer or one of your preferred?
Speaker 2:options. It's one I recommend because it's good and it's completely free, so it's kind of like the GA4 of Heatmap, so that's always a good one to get started. There's a couple of other out there. Heatmapcom is a good paid product designed specifically for e-commerce, which is good. And then there's Hotjar, of course, which I think most people have heard of. Everyone with Hotjar, of course, which I think most people have heard of.
Speaker 1:Everyone knows. Yeah, exactly, that makes sense. So, you know, get your website checked out. I just love the fact that, yeah, those that know their customers best win, and that's been the common theme amongst every person I've had on this podcast. You know I had Kelly Jamison on, who was the founder of Edible Blooms, who do a huge business nowadays. She's not too big to not call her customers randomly and ask how their experience was.
Speaker 1:So you know, I put it to you, the listener when was the last time you've actually rang a customer that you don't really know, but you just sort of give them a call, see how their experience as well. I guarantee you that builds great rapport. Now it's not scalable, but you'll start to pick up some common themes that you can just really fix up between now and November. You can understand in terms of cross-sell or up-sell opportunities, you just can pick up such good clues by connecting with real people. That's why I love that fact that you can just go outside too and ask 10 random people to go through the purchase journey of buying something on your website and just talk out loud about what they're seeing or what their concerns are. And another thing we haven't touched on yet, but I know we mentioned before in preparation for this podcast was just the sizing charts as well and ensuring that people have all the information they need to make a decision.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think the sizing chart is a really important one and maybe I can run through just a bit of a list of what you can do first to get your website ready for Black Friday. And the first is we kind of call it the jobs to be done like just fixing the basics, doing a real spring clean of your website. When was the last time to the listeners, that you actually went through your purchase journey all the way through, end to end, in detail? That's the first place to start is the whole team, get everyone to go through the full experience. Every time I do an audit, I always find things buttons not working, links not working or just things that kind of don't make a lot of sense, and I get why it's very busy being an e-commerce manager, a business owner. It's sometimes things that aren't that obvious, and so going through that exhaustive exercise, just going through the journeys now's the time to do it because you still have a window of opportunity to fix things and clean things up, and people will just not tolerate friction during Black Friday unless it's a really big discount or they really want the product. People are going to have three or four tabs open, they've got the credit card out their spending and any little issues is an opportunity for them to drop off, and you don't want to be that site.
Speaker 2:So there's a lot of issues on the site which aren't going to be obvious to you as you go through the site and we need to get on top of those as well. Things like bugs and JavaScript errors. They might not be obvious to customers either. They might be in the background slowing down the site, and we can't afford that either during Black Friday. So do all your speed tests now.
Speaker 2:Try and understand all the things that are slowing down your site. A lot of them could be really easy to fix. Things like large images, things like unnecessary apps, apps you've uninstalled, which have left code on the site All these things could be slowing down the site. Microsoft Clarity and the other heat map tools do have built-in what they call like friction metrics, like dead clicks, which is when people click on something they think is clickable but it's not. It's got rage clicks, which is which is when people click on something that is clickable, like a cta button, but they click it two or three times because it's not responding, which suggests there's an error in the link. So these reports help you zone in and figure out which pages to have a closer look at. You can then work with your agency or in-house dev team to make sure a really nice, clean, fast site and preparation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, nice one, mate. And for a speed test, do you recommend like? Pagespeed Insights is probably the best one to utilize.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I always like to get a second opinion, so I use PageSpeed Insights and I normally use GTmetrix. Gtmetrix is good as well, because you need an account, a free account. But once you do that, it allows you to select the city, and so I think the default's US, so it at least allows you to select. Okay, do this test from a server in Sydney. I think is the one they have for Australia.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, nice, and I think the speed test is vital for running any sort of paid acquisition campaigns and for SEO as well. I should say the speed test is just vital. You need to have a quick loading website, Otherwise it's just you're losing dollars every time. So that's, you know, vital for performance.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the good one with PageSpeed is it shows the mobile and there's always a big difference as well, so that's really really critical as well. Most listeners are going to have probably 70% 80% of people browsing and shopping on mobile.
Speaker 1:Yeah, nice one, mate. So there's a couple of apps that I really want to recommend. I think you've got a recommendation for a great app and we actually need to get him on the show because I haven't had him on yet. But also there's a couple of apps that we highly recommend you use, but we'll save them for the end of the podcast For now. We've spoken about how to improve the overall UX, but let's get a little bit more specific around the collections pages and the PDP. So what can we do from a CRO point of view to make sure that they're set up to succeed? I think.
Speaker 2:CRO is very different. I spoke about increasing that motivation and it's really all about deals over Black Friday and I think typically people rightfully so are careful around talking about discounts and deals because it can dilute the brand proposition. But over Black Friday, I think you really need to make sure that at every single touch point, people know there's a sale going on, make it easy for them to understand what the deal is, make it easy for them to find the products with the best deals relevant to them. So I think that's the first point is don't go crazy, but talk about Black Friday as often as possible, across every touchpoint. People are coming to your website and landing on different pages and you don't want to make it difficult for them to find where the Black Friday deals are, because 90% of them are going to be asking that question in their mind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, If you're in, you're in right. You know, if you're doing Black Friday, you're doing it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like have it as exactly, exactly so in your announcement bar in your navigation menu. Like for the landing page. Like Black Friday like change the color so it's easy to click. Like on your homepage banner at the top of all your collections. Like Black Friday specials. Like little when you obviously on the product page on the product page for now, the money page we're getting closer to conversion People are seriously considering.
Speaker 2:So all the things we talk about in CRO really need to just make sure they're really elevated, countdown timers and urgency really effective. Make sure they're genuine. People sometimes go a bit crazy with countdown timers but time and time again, with the tests I've done, having a countdown timer it's probably a day out, not too long, because then you lose the urgency, and having that near the add to cart button, well-designed on the product page, is really, really effective. If you've got limited stock genuinely perhaps you've got a limited run you could also probably look at having that as a time, not a time up, but you're having a countdown of the stock, letting people know there's only a few left.
Speaker 1:I think that is like so key for scarcity and urgency. As I mentioned, off the top, we're losing urgency with Black Friday because it goes for a month, like it probably goes longer than a month. I think people are going to go even earlier. But how do you include some scarcity in it or how do you protect yourself from being that big discount brand? One way to do it is say we're only going to discount 20 of these or whatever that is, and then you get people like that builds scarcity into that. So if you don't take advantage of that in the first 20 people to purchase it, then it's gone. So people aren't going to wait for a better deal or hold off, or hold off, or hold off. They're like geez, there's an emergency here. If I want this, I need to get it now. Anything you can do to increase urgency is huge.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. I think if you've got those limited runs like that's so powerful. We're not driving a sale with a discount, you're driving it with scarcity as well. So using the combination of those two and they're just so effective. It just works so well. People went shopping during this time.
Speaker 2:Now thinking about return policies as well, and you're trying to bring in some new customers, and so if you've got money-back guarantees, if you've got a really strong return policy, a lot of fashion brands often extend their return policy just to give people that comfort. So that's something as well that you really want to elevate on that product page. So, again, you're removing any friction and any doubt in the consumer's mind. I think, then, the other one is just there's a standard checklist of things which should be on every product page. Never assume that people have been to your homepage and the collections page. I often see people might have some good reviews on the homepage than are on the product page, for example. So just making sure things like your return policy, your money back guarantees, your delivery dates Some people are buying for Christmas, so they want to know delivery dates.
Speaker 2:A lot of brands choose to extend their return policy over this time just to remove that friction and get people adding more to cart. I think another really important thing to keep doing is keeping your offers fresh, keeping your merchandising fresh across the site. So changing up that home banner, changing up those offers and trying to people might come have a look. They're going to come back, they might come back later on and seeing something different which hopefully that second or third time resonates. So keeping the theme really fresh as well and, ideally, your offers, if if you can, but at least having the creative and the overall feel of the site different. So giving people who are returning a reason to stay and explore offers yeah, fantastic mate.
Speaker 1:Anything else before we?
Speaker 2:uh, we sort of wrap up and and suggest a couple of apps that everyone must download I'm just going to say, if you do have the time between now and black friday, if you're a store that has a hero product, try building out a dedicated landing page. So the idea is to do something really different to your typical product page. We've all seen the typical PDP. We can put some links into the show notes for your listeners.
Speaker 2:There's that typical PDP page, but this is more of a think about your homepage, your collections page and your product page all in one. It has all the information and Nick Sharma, who's a bit of a DTC guru in North America, he says every good landing page should answer these questions what is the product? How does it benefit me as the buyer? Why should I trust this brand? How does it compare to other options in the market? If I order today, when does it arrive and what happens if I don't like the product? If you can answer all those questions with great design, copy and UX, you can see conversion rate often double or triple and I've seen this a few times with a few brands.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's brilliant, mate. I love that. So, what's the product? How does it benefit me? Why should I trust the brand or the product? How does it compare to other ones? It's a really big one, because that is what your customer is thinking, right, how does this compare? Is this the best option that I have If I order today? When does it arrive? So, so important. And then what happens if I don't like the product as well? So that answers everything. And, yeah, there's no reason for that customer to then click off on any other page because they don't have any other questions. Really, you know, that covers most of them in terms of lessening the amount of risk and highlighting. Yeah, pretty much just lessening the amount of risk. I can leave it at that, beautiful mate.
Speaker 1:Well, look, we've covered a lot of ground, really keen to get your advice on what apps we should be using.
Speaker 1:Obviously, there's a few good apps that you've recommended, and I'll leave this last little bit into the podcast to go through this for the last couple of minutes.
Speaker 1:One of the apps that I've had on the podcast previously and I think it's an absolute no-brainer to not have his mateship that app allows you like, like it, just.
Speaker 1:It costs you nothing to set up. It costs you 15 minutes or 15 minutes of your time to download the app and get yourself set up, but what it does is if someone purchases a product that is in the same apartment building or the same workspace or co-working space or commercial premises as you if there's a few of them that are on that app it allows. It gives you basically free impressions and free emails and emails the entire database to say, hey, someone just purchased this. Would you like free shipping? It just gives you so much more visibility for zero dollars, and the only time that you pay is if it creates an additional order. So you know why not pay an extra $5 or 2% or whatever it is to get those additional orders that you would never have got with the impressions that you never have had, or because someone else purchased within that same space as you. So I think mateship is an absolute no-brainer, especially when people are purchasing more and more products for Black Friday. So there's a tip to all the e-commerce businesses out there to install Mateship.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great one. I think it's as you said. It's kind of a no-brainer with free shipping, is friction Cost you nothing? Yeah, cost you nothing. People hate shipping. You know, once a product arrives, it's like that's it. You paid this money and you've got nothing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the Moz will take a punt on something to get free shipping, and they've already got that social proof built in. So this is not a sponsored post by any means. I just think it makes sense.
Speaker 2:There was another app, I think, a software that I think you mentioned. You saw at online retailer where people can buy clothes without paying up front. Try it on.
Speaker 1:Try with Mirror.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he was on.
Speaker 1:Pete Serady-Gevins. A big shout out to Pete. You know their statistics are mind-blowing. If you follow Pete on LinkedIn, you'll see how impressive and how much it increases that AOV. When people can actually, if they're not sure about a product, they can click one button, it sends it all to them. They have seven days to try it on and what Pete's found is that the AOV in the cart is significantly increased because people already have the products. They try them on and then they keep them. So yeah, that's another great one if you're a fashion business.
Speaker 2:So interesting. I kind of actually hear that. I'm like I'm surprised someone didn't do that earlier on. It makes so much sense, especially for fashion brands. Exactly A big one over Black Friday is cross-sell.
Speaker 2:You're paying for this traffic. There's so much People are only going to spend so much money. How do you put more offers in front of them? And I've mentioned in a previous podcast a couple of apps which are very easy to install and allow you to offer products at different parts of the journey. It might be on the product page, it might be when they click the add to cart.
Speaker 2:The one I love is the post-purchase, which is in between the checkout and the thank you page. So customers have put in their credit card details, they've put in their payment details, they've paid any shipping and then they can add another product, almost similar to Matchship, for no extra shipping as well. So just with one click. So it's very, very effective. There's a lot of apps out there. Honeycomb is a good one, aftersell is very, very popular, and Aftersell has just added a new feature which is very interesting. You know if you ever buy like tickets from Ticketek and then at the end you get given all these offers. Yeah, so they've added that in.
Speaker 2:Okay, so it's a network of offers, which none of them they're not e-commerce, they're not competing directly with your brand, but if people click on that, you actually get some revenue, so you actually get a bit of extra revenue as well. Yeah, I highly recommend testing some cross-sells now, figuring out the ones that people want the most and making sure they're part of the purchase funnel over Black Friday. The other big one I think we're going to talk about is order editing, which is really powerful, allows you to go in and edit an order within 30 minutes of making it Firstly great from a customer service perspective because, again, no sponsoring here, but it's such a great solution customer service perspective. You can edit the order within 30 minutes. So people putting the wrong address, whatever it is, they can just fix it themselves instead of your customer service staff getting involved. But when they do that, they can add more products in as well. So there's another opportunity there to cross-sell and for people to add to their order before it ships.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, nice. I watch. He does a lot of good. Linkedin, too, he does, he does. What's his? I can't think of his name now? Hamish Ham. What's his? I can't think of his name now? Hamish Hamish. That's it. Hamish McKay. Yes, yeah, perfect. So you give him a follow. He's building an incredible business, same as Mateship as well. Those guys are in the US and they're building some pretty cool content as well. But look, they're just some apps to help. I don't think any of them actually cost anything to get set up and get started. I I certainly know that Mateship doesn't, but I'm not sure about the others. But well worth checking out. It enhances the customer experience. All three or four that we mentioned there help enhances the customer experience, which ultimately means that you'll be more trusted and more preferred when it comes to handing over the hard-earned dollars.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, as you said, really easy to install and get started.
Speaker 1:Mate, thank you so much for your time. You've delivered in spades again. We've got a lot of great information there. I'm sure the listeners will have to listen back to this podcast a couple of times to take as much action as we can, but looking forward to a huge Black Friday in the lead up. Mate, you obviously do it, cro, and you do it really well. If someone does want a bit of a tune-up or a bit of an audit, what's the best way to get in touch with you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, linkedin, feel free to send me a message. I'm always happy to do a free audit, do a free review for someone and see if I can help.
Speaker 1:Fantastic mate, and you know I can speak firsthand Alain's helped us out with a couple of our bigger e-com clients as well at Remarkable Digital and done a brilliant job so so thorough and it will definitely help your conversion rate in the lead up to Black Friday. Obviously, it's probably not ideal to do a CRO review the week before Black Friday starts, so maybe get ahead of that train. Yeah, I mean. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Are you doing it for free, did you say at the moment?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, we do it for free. Yeah, if some of your website you're well, I do a little video. Jump on a call and take you through a few ways you can improve your website.
Speaker 1:Mate, you're going to get hammered with that offer. So, yeah, really appreciate that. Love to hear any comments or feedback from this podcast episode. Have a great sales period and a.
