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Will works in conversion rate optimization (CRO) for some well-known DTC brands, and having him on the podcast this week was fascinating. If you’ve ever wondered how you can optimize your website to drive more conversions (and bring in more sales!) this episode is for you.
Welcome to Dig In, the podcast brought to you by the minds at Dig Insights. We're interviewing some of the most inspiring brand professionals in marketing, innovation, and insights to discover the story behind the story of their most exciting innovations.
Ian: Hi, I'm Ian, co-founder of Dig Insights and president of Dig's innovation insights platform, Upsiide. Welcome to Dig In. Dig In is the place to stay up to date on what's happening in the world of innovation, research and technology, to find inspiration from today's business and innovation leaders, and to properly dig into hot topics that matter for consumer brands right now, and when applicable, we'll bring our own research to that conversation.
Meagan: Welcome back to this week's episode of Dig In. Today, I'm joined by Will, who's a Conversion Optimization Consultant at Customers Who Click. We're going to dive into how you can leverage research to get higher conversion rates for DTC brands. Thanks so much for joining me, Will.
Will: No problem. Thanks for having me.
Meagan: Yeah, I'm really excited to hear the kind of work that you do. Can you tell the listeners a little bit about your background?
Will: Yes. So I've been in B2C marketing for about 11 years at a few different startups. Had a business of my own for a couple of years, and then ended my in-house career at one of the biggest casino firms in the UK. Which is quite an interesting role as Head of Conversion. And I left that November’19 to go out on my own as a consultant and worked with many DTC brands, but anyone selling e-commerce really.
And the reason I got into this is because in those startups mainly I kept seeing the same problem. So marketing teams were generally handed large budgets and told to go and acquire potential customers and basically the approach to it was that the marketing team's job was to go and drive traffic and that was kind of it.
There was a bit of an acknowledgment that email kind of came into it as well. But yeah, it was generally you drive traffic. If traffic is not converting, that's your fault. You're obviously using the wrong ads, targeting the wrong people. So I started to kind of push into the product and development teams and say, Look, I'm speaking to customers, I'm doing a bit of customer service, these issues keep popping up. There are problems with the app or the website or whatever it was at the time. So I started to work more closely with them on how we can actually take the customer feedback into account and improve these things. And sometimes it was A/B tested and sometimes it just wasn't possible at the time. We just put it live, see what happens over a few days and then roll it back if needed. But yeah, that's kind of where it came from. This general approach that marketing's just supposed to acquire customers. So drive traffic and that traffic should just convert when in reality, if the website's not good enough, if the app isn't good enough and often if the product isn't good enough, you're not going to get the conversions.
Meagan: Yeah. And I guess, I mean, I live in a different world than a DTC brand, but you kind of see that divide all the time between marketing being tasked with driving traffic and then not actually having that connection or that bridge between the product team on the B2B side. And I guess that that's kind of similar in the DTC world as well. So I totally get it. Just a different context for me.
Will: You see them in B2B, where the marketing team is basically just tasked with driving leads. And so they will acquire any leads they can and as many of them as they can. And then it's the sales team's fault if they're not converting those leads into customers, when actually the general issue… obviously you might have some bad sales people you just are not good at selling. But generally, the cases, the leads. Just terrible. I've probably popped up in over a thousand business databases because I filled out a form for an e-book or a demo or a webinar or whatever. And at those times, I was never the decision maker. So I was never going to be converted by a salesperson. But because the marketing team didn't really do the qualification or there's no qualification process, the salesperson has to waste their time on me, doesn't get a sale, and it looks bad on them. So it’s the same in B2C, except often it for some reason, it kind of works the other way in that it looks bad on the marketing team when they drive the traffic and it doesn't convert.
Meagan: So the marketing team gets a lot of the blame in a B2C context whereas the sales team, where the blame goes, in a B2B context. And I definitely resonate with that. It makes total sense. I mean, a few years ago I remember we could probably have a whole podcast just about, you know, the ways in which B2C and B2B are so similar these days. But with the whole ebook argument, like I remember just throwing up LinkedIn ads, trying to get people to download a specific e-book and hoping that those leads would then be nurtured through email marketing. And it's like really not. It's really not that simple anymore. And that doesn't necessarily make for good leads. And so it's an exciting time to be in B2B because I think a lot of people are trying to borrow from a lot of what the B2C businesses are doing.
That seems to kind of be working well. I'd love to, to just get a better sense from you, like exactly what you hope your customers buy. So I think I really understand the problem, but what do you kind of go in and do what some of these do to see brands?
Will: Yeah. So the two main areas I focus on are conversion rate optimization and marketing automation. So in emails, SMS, workflows that customers and leads go through automatically. And the reason to do both is because I think roughly 96% of people when they visit your website are not ready to buy. So when you're optimizing for your conversion goals, you're really optimizing for that 4% and trying to convert as much of that 4% as you can, which is why conversion rates are 3, 4, 5%. So it doesn't make sense as a CRO strategy (conversion rate optimization strategy) to only focus on the webpage optimization when really, and this does apply to tomorrow's as well.
My role is to generate value for the company, to improve the company to generate revenue for it. And if that means driving lead generation instead, you know, there might be a business out there where it's so difficult. It's kind of a DTC business. People just buy online, it’s e-commerce. But for some reason, everybody wants some sort of information.
Actually, an example would be Snug Sofa. Snug. So if you're buying a sofa online from them, their conversion rate… I don't know what the numbers are because they haven't told me such as making that clear, but they've told me that the numbers, the conversion rate is much, much better if someone orders a sample of switches, so their samples of fabrics.
And so it would make sense from a CRO point of view to make that almost the primary goal initially. If someone is a new customer and you visit this website, let's get them to sign up, let's get them, let's get their details, let's get them to order those samples. Whereas, you know, there'll be other CROs who say, well, that's not my responsibility because I'm to get revenue and sales. So they're going to focus on purely the optimizations that will drive people to a purchase. But that's always going to have its limitations. So my approach is I would do some of that, obviously, because I want to make it easier for people who are ready to buy to buy.
But if they're not ready to buy, let's capture the email. Let's then nurture them. Let's capture some zero party data as well. So in the example of a Sofa, again, are they buying it? It might be questions like how big is their property? Which room is it for? How many people are living there? When they're looking to buy, the budget and colors, the preferences, that sort of stuff. So you can put that into the marketing automation and say, “right, you said you're moving house in three months, so we're going to slowly nurture you over these next three months”. And then three or four days before your moving date, we're going to ping an email and say “cool, you're moving in a few days, order your sofa now and it'll be there a day after you move at”, something like that.
And because you've got the rest of the data, you're able to say, “we'd recommend this sofa or this corner sofa” or “buy this one” because it's, you know, depending on the data you've captured, I know that snug is quite modular. So they could say, “well, buy this sofa because if you find that you do have the space, you can just buy some add ons to it and make it a bigger sofa. Whereas if you buy too big a sofa and it's too big for your space, you might end up just sending the whole thing back”. So I hope this guy has kind of answered the question.
Meagan: Yes. It's really interesting. I just think it's so interesting to hear about it because I've never worked in B2C marketing, so it's just really interesting. I mean, the first thing that pops to mind is how do you capture that? And that's probably, you know, a huge proponent of what you're helping people with. But how do you capture that information? In B2B, we call them leads. How do you capture that information in an intuitive way? Like how do you capture all of that information? What's your approach to like personalizing that, that inevitable nurture user experience based on the information? Because I know from a form-fill perspective that can be really challenging. Like you don't want to ask too many questions and how do you approach that?
Will: Yeah, I mean, you're never going to convert everyone. Yeah. So you need to bear that in mind and say, “well, you know, only a certain percentage of people are going to fill out this form”. There will always be people who close it. There will always be people who just don't want to pass over this data. So obviously yeah. So, you know, immediately you're probably looking at, at best, 20, 30% if you really nail it. So just saying expectations I suppose. And then it's just about being honest with customers really and explaining why you want this data.
You know, if I'm, let's go back to sofas, right? If I'm selling sofas and I'm asking you your date of birth, your salary, your title… What else would be pointless? You know, if I'm asking information that clearly I want to know is a business for some reason, but is of no value to you, you're not going to answer the questions.
But if I'm asking you, when are you moving or why do you want a new sofa and you tell me you're moving. So I ask, okay, well, when are you moving? What sort of property is moving into? And these questions and with statements that say, you know, this is going to help us recommend the right sofa to you. That's what gets people to convert.
And it's always helpful to give a discount. Obviously, I would still recommend that on that first purchase because people are still having that data. And, you know, you just want that first purchase, right? You do want to get people in. So if it's going to cost you 10%, but you're also capturing the leads of 10, 15% of the website visitors instead of 3 or 4%, then you're massively better off.
Meagan: Yeah, that's really interesting. And I'm as you're walking me through that example I'm thinking of the, you know, the beauty brands that I've shopped with online who are essentially asking me all of those questions. But it feels like an interactive quiz, you know, like it feels very intuitive. I'm getting value out of it as well. So that's really interesting.
Will: I mean, there are two ways you can do it. So there are brands like that where you can get that quite natural product wisdom. And it's literally a case of answering some questions, we will tell you which product is right for you. And then there might be the example of so far where maybe that doesn't quite work because really all the sofas are fine for me.
It's just whether one fits in my room and I can figure that out for myself. So with Snug Sofa it's more of “allow us to recommend you, allow us to remind you of this discount if you sign up”. But yeah. With a beauty brand or any kind of meal prep or meal recipe kits, anything like that, you asked the question so that you can then say “here is your bundle of products”.
Meagan: Yeah. Yeah. And you're relying on those brands for their, I guess, expertise in their products. So you've kind of touched on it a little bit, but I imagine you kind of have a framework that you approach each of your clients with in terms of, you know, depending on what their needs are and how you're going to go about optimizing their conversion rates.
Can you walk me through what a brand would expect from working with you?
Will: Yeah, so those two, I guess, to kind of frameworks, I suppose the first is the general process of working together, right? So that always starts with research. So whether that's browsing through Google Analytics to look through metrics, identify blockages in websites or where there might be breakages as well. So if there's a browser that's having problems. Then there's heatmaps, click maps and session recordings which tell you, you know, once identified that blockage, how are people interacting with that landing page? And therefore, you know, is it something that's broken or is it something that people are just not understanding, you know, is it the case that something looks like a button and it's not or something that should be a button people aren't thinking is a button, that sort of thing.
And then there's customer interviews. There’s a few forms of actual customer feedback. So there's the on-site surveys. So things like exit intent, “was the number one reason you haven't made a purchase today? What is the one thing we could do to improve this page?”, that sort of thing.
Really helpful. Again, you'd be surprised what sort of feedback you get. On almost every website I work on, free shipping and returns policies come up with frequent questions there. So it's clear that these just aren't displayed prominently enough on the website. And as the business owner or the website owner, you'll be looking at this website thinking, “but I know it's there why aren't people seeing it?”
And you're just kind of I suppose it's the opposite to banner blindness, really. I don't know what the word for it would be, but, you know, it's there. So you can point out immediately. But you only can do that because you know it's there.
And then the final version would be customer interviews. So let you jump in on 30 minute calls. I've got one literally after this podcast recording. It's finding out why people buy what is going on. Was it a certain event they bought for what they like from the product? So what's important to them on the product page? What information do they want to see about the products? And then what information do they want to say about the business as well?
And you're trying to answer the questions, “is this the right product for me?” and “is this the right business to buy that product from?”. With the first question obviously being the more important, if you can't convince someone that a product's right, then it doesn't matter if you look like an amazing business, if you've got an amazing product and you've convinced people that you've got a better chance of converting them. But if people are skeptical about the legitimacy of your business or the trustworthiness, then obviously you're going to struggle to convert people. So it's really important to both.
And three ways of targeting this. So this is kind of the other sort of framework I use. There's usability, which is “how does your website work? How does it operate?” A very basic part of that is does it actually work properly or is anything broken? But the main, main kind of point of direction of this is does the website make it easy to do what the customer needs to do? So if they land on a product through an advertisement and that product is not what they want, does the website make it easy for them to find the one they want. And then obviously, does it allow them to add to the shopping cart to pay for it? If they need to pick a size, is that easy and obvious? All that sort of thing. But it's the functionality of “can I browse the website”, “can I find what I want” and “can I buy it”.
Then there's anxiety. So the anxiety are the doubts and concerns a customer might have about buying from you. And generally this is dealt with three things like social proof and testimonials, free returns or returns policy. The presence of customer service helps. So literally just having a live chat there. It doesn't matter if people interact with it by having a live chat, that can be a positive indicator to people. Same with an email or phone number. If contact details are available, it makes people feel more comfortable. But if I can't see any way of contacting you. then it doesn't matter if you've got a double your money back, 100 day guarantee, because if I don't think I'll be able to actually claim it, then I'm not going to make the purchase in the first place.
Meagan: That's so true. Like, I'm just thinking of my own shopping experience. That's 100% true. Sorry. Go on.
Will: And obviously, the final point that's part of anxiety is, is this, you know, is the product going to work? Am I convinced the product's actually going to do what it tells me, do what it promises?
The third point, which is the most powerful point, is motivation. So does the website motivate me to make that purchase? And some of that is the kind of tactical stuff like, you know, scarcity, urgency or place your order by 3 p.m. to receive it tomorrow, that sort of thing. That helps. But the real motivation comes from “do I get excited about this product?” If I'm looking at the images, if I'm reading the copy about it, the benefits, the way it's been manufactured, the science behind it, all that sort of stuff, am I convinced that this product is going to be amazing for me and is going to change my life? Now I see people don't think like that. I'm exaggerating it a bit, but that's what you really need to get people doing. And if anyone has doubts about a product, they're not going to buy it. If you read the reviews, if you read the description ingredients maybe, look at the pictures and see people wearing nice looking clothes or shoes or whatever or jewelry, that's the thing that's going to make you go, “I need that in my life because I haven't got that. I don't look that good, but I want to look that good. So I need to buy that product”
Magan: It's like motivation and kind of aspiration as well, right? You know, I want to look like that person. And perhaps I will if I purchase this.
Will: Yeah, exactly. Which is why social media settings work quite well. You know, if you can take UGC, stick it on your website, tag up the different products. And so when people see them go, “that looks like an amazing outfit”. I want to buy a tool and they've just got to click, click, click, click, add to Cart and Buy. And it works in so many industries as well. You know, at a very basic level, you've just gotta have happy people in your images right?
So even if you've got a product that isn't clothing or, if it's something like that, like some sort of green smoothie, if you've got someone who's looking really happy drinking it, that just kind of nudges people and makes them accept it a bit more.
MeaganL Yeah, I know there's I mean, I work for an agency in a software business, but in our ads, they always perform better if there's a human in the ad as opposed to a product shot or anything like that. We're always trying to change things up. But up to this point, I've never had a better performing LinkedIn ad or Facebook ad. Basically what I'm trying to say is it always has to include a person. So I do that.
Will: The interviews I'm taking at the moment, I think all four people so far have said they would like to see models wearing the shoes. That’s the feedback. What's actually interesting is that one person said they didn't care if they couldn't see the whole model. They just needed to see a foot in the shoe, basically. That's not their wording, but that went down when I was going into the details. And he said, Yeah, you don't need to see a full picture of someone wearing the whole outfit and everything like that. But he just wants to see a picture of someone wearing the product.
Meagan: Wow. So many questions pop up while we were chatting. I mean, one thing I'm interested in is who kind of hires you? Like, is it a digital marketing director that brings you in. Because I'm thinking about the things you're talking about, the Swatch example, for instance, like hopefully a marketing director at DTC brand would know that like a nugget of insight, that people who order Swatches are more likely to convert on the website.
But I'm also wondering about other, you know, financial information about, you know, your best customers or anything like that. Like are you brought in by like the revenue side of the business, sales side of the business? I'm curious who typically reaches out?
Will: It is. It's normally the marketing or e-commerce site I mean, sometimes it can be a managing director or founder of smaller businesses. Otherwise it would be whoever the most senior marketing or ecommerce person, they're generally the one who has either got responsibility for advertiser and in which case improved conversion rates is better for them because there's reduced KPIs, which means the budget goes further. Or the e-commerce store sites, they're responsible for sales and revenue about a bit more generally. So they're interested because they want to convert more of that traffic into customers and sell more products. So yeah, it tends to be one of those two.
Meagan: And how is business? Like, are you finding that there's a lot of issues right now? Are you seeing similar trends or similar things happening at a lot of the companies that you're working with?
Will: Yeah, I mean, most companies aren't doing CRO tests, okay. Some might be doing a little bit of AB testing, but it's not really CRO. It's just the one off tests on A/B testing tools on something that's come up. But very few are doing it with data and research backed insights with a proper process behind it. On the email side, the vast majority of companies still just ask for name and email in exchange for a 10% code. You can't do anything with that data apart from let you just email this person. You've got no idea why they've signed up, what their desired action is, what products they're interested in, when they're looking to purchase. So without that data, you could only provide them a generic welcome series, which you know they still do okay, but you're going to do ten times better if you ask a few more questions.
I gathered a little bit of data from these people and you start to segment them and if you can say, “Well, I know that you're interested in men's products versus women's products” or “you have these particular pain points”. You know, if you're in health and nutrition, this person might say… so a good example of this is actually Noom, the kind of fitness app, they have an onboarding process, right? Which asks you loads of questions. But the very first question on the homepage is, “are you I think it's are you looking to lose weight or get healthier?” or something like that. And I think one's diet, one's exercise, I think is the way they do it. So it's stuff like that. You know, what is your goal if you're… this could apply to so many like edible or drinkable or consumable products.
Right. There's going to be loads where you could say to this person, what is your interest in buying these products? We're getting loads of high protein cereals and things and low sugar. Right. So is your motivation for buying that because you don't want cereal with sugar? Or is it because you want cereal that's high in protein? Those two people are going to respond to slightly different messages. I mean, the person who wants high protein probably still doesn't want sugar, but the person who wants no sugar may not care about the protein.
Meagan: Yeah. It's reminding me a little bit of how we worked with a client in the kid's snack space and we're working on on-pack claims essentially as we were doing research into what worked and, and what didn't. And they had one message that they were leading with, like it was about probiotics, and they're like, “why are our sales doing so poorly?” And it was because mums and dads didn't care about their kids eating probiotics. They cared that it tasted good and that there were, you know, real ingredients, but they didn't care about the one sort of message that they were leading with. And so obviously they switched it up and everything, but that one sort of leading message is so important. So yeah, I know what you mean.
So in terms of customers that you typically work with, I know they're there in the DTC space, argely in the DTC space. Do you have any kind of examples you could walk us through or any recent projects you want to talk about?
Will: Yes, I do a little bit of work with the odd B2B clients, if it's more of a self-service like SaaS products where, you know, conversion optimization does a similar thing where you're driving loads of website traffic. You just want more of them to sign up to an account, that sort of thing. But yeah, most of my work by a long way is DTC or e-commerce.
What have we done recently that's really interesting? So I've had one which is not strictly speaking CRO, but again, it comes into this area of just general improvement for the business. Right? And it will have a positive impact I'm sure. With one client we realized that they had customers who had concerns about selling this product up. So it's basically custom pieces, right? So they spent quite a bit of money on them, but some customers were not too knowledgeable about how to actually set up a PC from scratch. So what we did was, and I think this idea came out of an early episode of my podcast. Anyway, the idea was to put a postcard in with every order that shipped, which had a QR code on it, which said something I “Scan me”, something really simple. Customers scanned it. It would take them to a page which had loads of information on how to set up a PC, how to maintain a PC, how to contact the company if you had any problems, a contact form, if you just had a question or suggestion or something. And this recently got called out in a five star review, and the five star review was pretty much… I can’t make the exact wording, but something like “I got this QR code through just to scan it and it gave me loads of useful information about how to set up a PC. I've not seen this before”. And so for me that was great because something I did got called out in a five star review, so that's fantastic. But that's going to have a positive impact because not only is it five star reviews, which is great, but anyone who reads that review knows that the company supports you when they send the product up. They don't just send it out and say there you go, done, that’s your product. They give you the information you need to support yourself. So that's one of the pieces put on there.
I know I've got loads… I did some work with a B2C company recently, which has worked really well. So again, loads of companies will just stick on their websites, “free delivery over £50” or whatever. So what I did was we've implemented this dynamic shipping message. So if a product is under that free shipping threshold, it says free shipping on orders over £40 now I think. If the product is over £40, then the message just says “free shipping” and this has a really good impact on conversion funnel on both mobile and desktop because people aren't having to work it out, they're not having to double check this. There's no kind of confusion. The message says “you're going to get free shipping”. And the next test we're going to run is doing free returns during checkout processes in a similar way. So everything gets free returns, but we can have this highlighted message in check out, which will say you're getting free returns on this order, which I'm hoping will reduce checkout drop off.
Other things I've tested are things like free shipping thresholds. One of the clients, when I started working with them, I think that the free shipping threshold was about £70 and their medium order value was just under £30. Just under £29 actually because they had some low priced items. So obviously £70 is more than three times what the actual average, like most common purchases, which means that so many people are miles from that and the general accepted rule is I think 15 to 20% higher than your AOV. So AOV was £35 or something, it was just over that £30 mark. But the actual median value, the most common value, was under £30, so we dropped it down to about £10 and added a little bit of a boost and then dropped it down again to 50. And that's where we saw a decent impact. So not only in conversion rate or number of conversions but also average order value because more people were pushing to reach what was attainable, free shipping, threshold. Whereas previously people thought, “well there's no point adding this £15 product in order to get free shipping because I'm going to have to buy two of these, an extra one of these just to get free shipping”. Whereas we brought it down to a level where someone could say, “well, actually if I just buy a second one, which I probably need anyway, I get free shipping.”
Meagan: Yeah. And it's so interesting. I love that.
Will: I think it's really important to look at the median order values, not just the AOV. Because your AOV will be driven up by people who do spend significantly higher. And you know, with an average or devotes a median of about £29 an average or value a mean average of about 35, there were people spending 150-200, like a reasonable number.
So that's what that's really what was driving up the average order value, making the founders of business think that the actual average order value was higher but that it was something like 70% of their orders were just under the £30 mark. So that's the number that needed to be targeted for that free shipping threshold.
Meagan: Really cool. This has been awesome. Thank you so much, Will, for joining me today. It's given me a lot to think about as someone who manages website conversion rates. I'm sure that other people will find this really, really valuable. If people want to connect with you or I know you mentioned you have a podcast as well, where can they kind of find you?
Will” Yeah. So there's the Customers Who Click podcast on Spotify, iTunes, probably everywhere you can get it or the best way is just contact me on LinkedIn. So just connect with me. Mention the podcast. Say Hi. Yeah, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. I share loads of content, loads of advice So yeah, I thought that would be the best way of reaching
Meagan: Awesome. I will talk to you soon.
Will: Brilliant. Thank you. Bye.
Ian: Thanks for joining us for this week's episode of Dig In. If you want more information about Dig Insights or Upsiide, please check us out on LinkedIn or on our websites, diginsights.com or upsiide.com. If you have any ideas for future episodes or would like to be a guest, please feel free to direct message me through the LinkedIn app.