Nick Disabato | Draft
This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Draft founder Nick Disabato breaks down the advanced conversion rate optimization strategies he uses with his ecommerce clients.
Nick’s results are impressive. He beats the ecommerce industry average CRO results by 4X, typically increases conversion rates by 40%, and average order value by 15%.
In this episode, he breaks down exactly how he does it, with specific examples of CRO tests you can conduct on your own website (ecommerce or not—these strategies work just as well in B2B), and shares information on his favorite tools that make up his CRO tech stack.
Check out the full episode to hear Nick’s insights.
Resources from this episode:
Visit the Draft website
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Nick and Kathleen recording this episode
Kathleen (00:00):
Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week I have with me,Nick, Disabato from Draft. Welcome to the podcast, Nick.
Nick (01:00):
Hey, there. Happy to be here. Appreciate it.
Kathleen (01:04):
Yeah, you are somebody that I'm really excited to talk about because I love getting nerdy on this podcast and diving deep into marketing tactics that get results. And I just have this feeling that you are going to be somebody that I can get very nerdy with. So that seems very likely for those who don't know you Nick, can you talk a little bit just about your background and what you're doing now and what Draft is?
Nick (01:34):
So I have a user experience design background, and I have 18 years of experience in the field. I run an interaction design consultancy called Draft. We've been around for just shy of 10 years now, which is amazing to think about. And we do effectively optimization for larger stores predominantly on Shopify, but I don't discriminate. We research your customers, understand what motivates them, understand how they behave, what they say, what they do are often mutually exclusive things. And then we recommend a bunch of improvements to the store, both in the form of one-off fixes. So this is a bug fix it. And AB tests, which are the form of, well, this copy might work. We don't know. We have some research backing it up. Let's try. And so, because we back everything up with evidence we happened to beat the industry-wide success rate by about 4X. We're about 60% right now for a win rate for AB tests. And we usually lift conversion rate by around 40% and AOV by around 15% as of press time. So we're pretty good at our jobs. And it's been a very, very fun journey working in e-commerce. And I think it's a lot of things that people don't do that they could do. And then we come in and do those things and we look like wizards. I would prefer for other people to look like wizards. So I think that's why we're on this podcast.
Kathleen (03:04):
Well, I love that everything you just said was totally data backed because I will admit your reputation proceeds you as somebody who knows his stuff. But I love that you're able to back it up with with more than just a bunch of hot air.
Nick (03:20):
Yeah. Yeah.
Kathleen (03:23):
So I wanted to start out and, and I should, I should back up and say, we have a lot of listeners of this podcast. Many of them are with e-commerce companies, but many of them are not. We have B2B, we have, you know, other forms of B-to-C. The thing that I think is so interesting and why I wanted to, to have you on and talk about this, is that what I've learned since working in e-commerce is that really what everyone in e-commerce already knows, which is that if you, you know, your, your website conversion optimization your UX, like that is everything because all of your business is done through your website. And if you don't get it right, you don't really have a business. And so, you know, I think in, in other industries, in B2B, et cetera, there are ways to disguise poor website, conversion optimization in UX and still appear to be successful, but really there's nowhere to hide in e-commerce if you're not doing it well. And so I, I do feel as though the e-commerce industry is kind of at the bleeding edge with this, or at least the ones who are doing it well. And I think there's a lot of lessons that those in other segments, like B2B can kind of take away and apply and get better with. So with that, as our jumping off point, what I wanted to ask you first is what do you think are the biggest mistakes that you see brands making when it comes to UX and conversion optimization?
Nick (04:47):
I think I can answer this from two different points and there's kind of strategy and tactics, right? I'll talk about the tactics. And then we'll talk about the symptoms are because the tactics are what you see every day. I think a lot of stores put out maybe image carousels on their home page that they, you know, haven't tested or they don't know why they're putting those elements there. And they haven't bothered QA them. And as a result, everybody just hits the first frame on it and they don't care about the rest of it. And it increases page weight. I think a lot of brands just talk about themselves all the time, and sometimes that's good for DTC, but if you don't organize it properly, the stuff that you're doing to talk about yourself can distract people from the process of actually browsing for products and finding what they want and buying from you, which is ultimately what you want your store to do at the end of the day.
Nick (05:35):
I think a lot of stores punt to whatever their default theme is proposing and they don't bother removing elements that aren't working for them. I think a lot of stores add in cross sell rows that just say products that you will also like, and they're effectively randomized, and they don't make sense for the customer's journey. I think that a lot of product are written by people in the warehouse or by the CEO. And they haven't been really written with a sense of the customer's interests in mind. Those are the big things, right? And those are all scary, right? Like that all of them will harm conversion if you keep them in place. But I think broader there's two tactics that really suck for especially DTC or two strategies that really suck for DTC e-commerce. So I'm talking like smaller, see maybe sub 10 million, which is predominantly the space that Draft plays in.
Nick (06:32):
The first is that they rip off either enterprise customers or Amazon. So they look at things that Amazon is doing and say, oh, we should go and do that too. Without realizing Amazon have entire floors devoted to optimization, they have entire AI resources. Like they, they're playing a different game than you're playing, selling maybe 40 products on the store that turns a million a year. You know? And then the second thing that's a little bit more insidious is pay attention to people that have like an aura of famous, like fame in ecommerce. And some of those people provide good advice, but then other times they provide advice that just gets applied poorly by the store. Right. They'll say, add to this thing. And then you go and add this thing without even thinking about it or an app that now exists to add the thing, maybe like a roulette wheel or a quiz, or some sort of like widget that floats over the whole mobile layout and gives you a chance to provide feedback.
Nick (07:35):
And so you put that there and what ends up happening is it does more harm than good because it's reporting analytics that make it, it look good. It's like a lot of people clicked on this widget and then eventually purchased. And that was great. And what you don't see is that the conversion rate of people who clicked on that widget is actually way lower or the people who aren't looking at that widget find it distracting and usability tests, and they're not getting that information and back. And so what's the solution there. I think it's to kind of more carefully that what things are doing, hang on your store and maybe slow down a little bit. Now that's slowing down. I know that's scary. Q4 is happening. You have a lot of competition. There are 25 fires to be putting out. That's why people hire me, right?
Nick (08:24):
Like they, they eventually ended up resourcing for it, but there are a lot of ways to do it where you can kind of passively collect data and then look at it. And then within the span of an afternoon, learn how to act on it. So what we do@draftisifyougotodraft.edu slash blog, or my book, draft.edu/value, we provide loads of resources so that you can learn this, learn how to fish and then do it for yourself and hopefully do it in a way that's as like efficient, as humanly possible because I, that ultimately you need it to be an ROI positive activity. And if it distracts you from the rest of the operations of the business, it's not going to work out well for you. So that answered, I think that answered the question. Then I went one step further, which just talking about like, what, what, what can you do about it? And I'm talking to in a very general sense, but I think it really is very empowering to develop a culture of listening to your customers. And ultimately when clients part way it was with me, I want them to have that baked into their cultures. They don't need me anymore. I don't want people to come to depend on me. I think that's not good business. Yeah.
Kathleen (09:30):
That makes sense. I have so many questions from what you just said. I love that you gave some specific examples. And then, but then at one point you talked about like listening and watching data and passively collecting information that all could be used to better inform your decisions. And so when you start working with brands, are there certain either processes or tools or systems that you put in place to gather that information so that you have the right foundation from which to make decisions?
Nick (10:07):
It's an amazing question. And it's going to get another long answer. So go for it. The answer is yes. So the first deceit and scroll maps and behavior recordings. So that is through a tool that I use called Hotjar and basically throw JavaScript snippet on every page sign up for, I think it's like a $49 a month paid plan. It's like chump change for the business. You can also use that to gather what are called post-purchase surveys. So on the thank you page, the order status page, it asks you how you felt about your purchase today. All so that you can scroll maps and behavior recordings all covered by one tool, $49 a month. The next is Google analytics. So yes, I'm looking at GA, but I'm also doing a lot of like configuration of your goal funnel to make sure that I know what the, like add to cart rate looks like, then cart to checkout, then each step at the checkout and then check out to thank you.
Nick (11:04):
And I'm figuring out what the drop rates look like there. So I can fix usability issues. I am creating segments within Google analytics to try and qualify out specific traffic based on either behavioral or criteria or like specific products that you're buying. So I have a client right now. They have a whole wholesale operation. I have recreated every major segment in Google analytics that you can think of qualifying out anyone who purchased a wholesale product, because it swings AOV and conversion rate like wholesale customers behave completely differently from consumers and we're trying to sell to more consumers. So there you go. What else am I doing as far as setting up tools? Usually if you hire me as a consultant, I'm getting access to our customer support. And so when I do that, I want to make sure that every time you have a case that specifically concerns a usability error with the website it's tagged with like website issue or something like that.
Nick (12:01):
So that I, or any other value based designer who's going in can understand where the bugs what's going on. And that helps us identify, oh, the add to cart button is broken on this old version of an Android phone. Right. So I think that's it for like active data collection. And then there's a lot of one-off stuff that we do too. So usability testing involves more passive recruitment. It's kind of a one-off thing. The same with interviews, the same with surveying where you're, you know, going on survey monkey or something like that and configuring something and sending it out over Klaviyo. But the stuff that you can kind of configure that passively collects data, I think Hotjar is probably the highest leverage that you can possibly do. And it's a pittance. Super easy.
Kathleen (12:46):
Yeah. And it's funny as you were talking, I was thinking about this, like I use Hotjar and I love data, but I wouldn't consider myself like, you know, the, the biggest data wonk. Very often I've had people on my teams who are, who are more kind of like the BI person, if you will, but I find Hotjar is really easy to use for anybody. And it's very intuitive now on the other end of that spectrum is Google analytics where I know I'm sure my Google analytics could, could be improved. And I, and I I've heard people on my team who have access to lots of e-comm brands, Google analytics say, they're, they're set up all wrong. And I do feel like that is a bit of a black hole for a lot of e-commerce marketers. You know, there isn't necessarily one great source that says like, here's how you should set your GA up. So how, how approachable is it for like, for an e-commerce brand or an e-commerce marketer to eventually insource the, the management of their own Google analytics to the level that you think is necessary to get these kinds of results?
Nick (13:50):
I think if you're an e-commerce marketing manager and that's your job title, not necessarily the store owner, who's wearing the marketing manager hat, but like you're big enough that you have a marketing manager as a job title. You should know Google analytics, you should at least know 1 0 1 level Google analytics. I'm not expecting you to create like 10 views and 50 segments and like max out the goal funnels and stuff like that. But like, if you go on cxl.com they have a ton of good, like one-on-one level, Google analytics courses that help you get at least the data cleaned up to the point where it's presentable in an afternoon. Right? Yeah. I don't, I don't think that's hard. The challenge is the difference between that and getting like, just some very high level reports going like, oh, here's mobile device breakdown. Here's individual product, page values, stuff like that.
Nick (14:47):
I think if you start with that, you're doing okay, but when you want to run into like being the star Trek computer, what I call it, like somebody has a sentence query for you and, you know, you can answer it with Google analytics, the difference between a good and a great marketer is somebody who can answer that in 15 minutes of Google analytics and give you all the caveats and someone for whom it takes half a day. Right? Yeah. I have definitely taken half a day to answer questions like that before it sucks. And I hate it. I'm a designer by trade. I would prefer not to write like, but that's part of the beast. I think it's I think you're, and it also like spending that amount of time teaches you about Google analytics. You have to get in there and do it. And unfortunately, as of press time, there's not really a good substitute, not necessarily because there aren't competitors, like Fathom is a big one. Matomo is a big one. You could use those, but the, the connection with Google ads and Google tag manager and optimize, which is what I use with my clients. Like I value those tremendously and I'm not about to give that up. So I think it's actually worth the trade to continue using what amounts to fundamentally busted terrible software. Yeah.
Kathleen (16:03):
Yeah. They definitely have a monopoly on, on that space, just because of all the other products, as you mentioned, and the interoperability and love the shout out to CXL pep Leia was was a guest on the podcast sometime ago and, and have mad respect for everything he built over there and is now building with winter. So, okay, so, so that's sort of like the tool set the, the initial foundation of data and, and not just initial, obviously once you build it, then it gives you an ongoing flow of information from which to continue to optimize. You talked about several common mistakes and, or I would characterize them as like the low hanging fruit areas of improvement that you often see with e-commerce brands. If you had to sort of pick from amongst those, which would you say typically gives a brand the biggest bang for their buck if they're able to successfully address it?
Nick (17:01):
I think honestly, so I sort of buried this and then I'm going to surface it in. Then I'm going to bring another thing into the, into play. So if you are looking at Google analytics and you spent 10 minutes configuring everything and you go into the mobile platform breakdown, you know, that mobile devices are probably something like 70 to 80% of your traffic and to convert roughly like a third of the store average, if your numbers are better than that, congratulations, you beat the mean. And I've looked at over 200 stores in my life. So I think I'm fairly well-qualified to say those numbers. And I was talking earlier about the difference between talking about yourself and providing decent browsing and what ends up happening, the reason that's a problem is on mobile, your navigation doesn't show a clear hierarchy between stuff that you can buy and stuff that tells you more about why the brand is school, especially in DTC.
Kathleen (18:05):
Yeah. Yeah. When you say like it's hard and mobile to distinguish, like, what do you see typically
Nick (18:10):
Like a flat listing of links when you hit the hamburger menu, you tap the hamburger menu, drawer, slides up from the left and you see like, shop about us reviews, FAQl you know, like, and then like four other information links and then you tap shop and then it takes you to all the shop stuff. Right? What you would rather want in that situation. If you were really designing mobile first, you would know, and instantly correct that this was costing people, a tap, right. Really what they want to do is get to your stuff, or you should just surface that. So you should have shop expanded and then indented underneath. You can have, I don't know, you're in parallel brand, men, women, kids, new on sale, whatever.
Kathleen (18:58):
So basically an accordion that, that is opened in that one tab, right?
Nick (19:01):
And then if you have the about links or something like that, change the typeface color, make it not bold, put a horizontal rule under them to convey that there's a difference between what you're seeing under the shop links and what you're seeing underneath. And no one does this. I mean, maybe you do this and you're the exception that proves the rule. Congratulations, but broadly speaking, no one does this. And I see it in every usability test I run and then I fix it and I look like a wizard and mobile conversion rates go up. And then we're like, maybe we should do mobile first. If you are listening to this with a pulse, should do mobile first. And by that, I mean, you should, in the culture of the company, make it so that you are looking almost exclusively at your store on mobile devices.
Nick (19:54):
If you are spending on Facebook, your row depends on it. I, I cannot state this and not and I think, okay, I'm lazy. I don't want to pick up my device. I'm doing a bunch of other things, great. Download X code, I'm sorry. At 17 gigs, it takes forever. It's for free from apple. It's how you make iOS apps. And within it, they have a device simulator, which literally you pop up a giant iPhone that shows up on your desktop and you can go in safari there and it shows you, at least you have an iPhone sitting there in front of you and you know how to go about doing it. That's assuming you have a Mac, but most people have Macs. I don't know. But but yeah, like if, if you're lazy, go ahead and do that. And it gets you in 90% of the way there. Browser stack is another one. There are a bunch of places that you, you know, test stuff out, but I, I think a lot of people botch mobile first design, and I think it's one of the highest leverage points because if your conversion rate is that low and you're dumping so much of your, your marketing budget into ad spend, and you're only going to be doing more of that. And you're concerned about, you know, iOS updates recently increasing the cost of, of buying ads. Like you really should be.
Kathleen (21:17):
That's the perfect example of something that I think is, is really relevant equally as relevant for B2B. You know, in the sense that so many B2B marketers think desktop first but then they go and spend a lot of money on ads and, and I think you'd make a great point, which is that, excuse me, particularly if they're advertising on someplace like Facebook, which a lot of B2B does odds are that the person seeing that ad is, is going to click through to your site from mobile. And if you have a very long involved, you know, page that you've designed for a desktop experience, and somebody comes to it from Facebook, they're gonna, they're going to be exhausted by the time they find the part that they really want to read and, you know, they may bounce. And so I love that advice. So what kind of a lift do you generally see when you make that sort of a change in the menu?
Nick (22:15):
So it really depends on the client and it depends on how messed up the menu is. I have, I will say I have seen lifts for the mobile segment as high as 20% higher conversion rate. So it goes from not 20% higher, but like, it goes from five to six. So not from five to 25. So you're all not freaking out, but like, yeah, it's a relative percentage, but like then just the game shifts. Right. And we have more resources to work with. And honestly, I, as an optimizer have more like latitude to get away with doing weirder stuff, just so I have the political capital then. And I know, I know how that operates. So yeah, I, I see, I mean the average time on site increases reorder rate ends up increasing because you have returning customers who don't need to learn about your brand anymore. Right? Like they, they already know. And I think now this was a little bit different last year, cause everybody was stuck at home. And so page load times were a little bit better and people were spending more time on their phones, but now people are out, I'm out seven nights a week now, you know, I live in Chicago, I'm already stuff. I think everyone is a party animal and I'm not normally a party animal.
Kathleen (23:37):
They've been calling this hot vaxx summer because we're all, we've all got a lot of pent up party in us.
Nick (23:42):
I think that's it. Yeah. I'm just seeing my friends again and it's wonderful. And so I'm on, you know, the blue line or on my bike and I'm not looking at my phone. My, my attention has gone back to being fragmented point being, and it represents more of my 2019 behavior. And I don't think I'm alone here. I'm I don't know. I don't even think I'm a cool millennial. I'm 39. So like, you know but I do think I represent a certain white urban segment for sure. And most the country now, so yeah.
Kathleen (24:13):
Yeah. That's interesting. All right. So we talked about nav navigation and thinking mobile first and, and reducing the number of clicks required for the visitor to get to their and their intended destination. What would you say would be like another kind of like big bang for your buck area?
Nick (24:35):
I think that product detail page copy is under discussed. And I think that product detail pages work best when they are more personalized to the customer's journey. So what do I mean by that? This is a bit more sophisticated and if you get a lot more traffic and it's, especially if you have like strong segments, like it's not, you don't just have like 10% is new. I mean, like it's like 50 50, right. But if you have new customers, you probably, and you have a flagship product say I'm thinking about my, my old client KeySmart, which you have one thing you sell, which is the key organizer, and then you have a ton of accessories, right. But ultimately you're not going to sell anything if you don't sell the original key organizers. So Andrew getting a lot of people in who don't really think about key organization on a day-to-day basis, you have to sell them on it.
Nick (25:30):
But if you have returning customers who are coming to buy one nets or replace one, or upgrade one, or do something, you have to talk to them in a completely different way. And one thing that's really cool about Google optimize that's happened recently. After the bad times hit, they made their personalization engine totally free for customers. Now it used to be that you had to do this with a really expensive enterprise plan. And now you can go in and say, if the customer is new, deliver them this experience, or redirect them to this page with this layout. And if they're a returning customer, give them this layout. And if they're on mobile, give them this with this messaging. And if you have like a short tail of products that get a ton of traffic and, and this is not uncommon in DTC, right? And you have strong like new versus returning or mobile versus desktop segments where you get enough traffic to be really optimizing those pages.
Nick (26:26):
I think you should be creating bespoke experiences for them. I think ideally you would be doing that for individual traffic outlets. Like you came in through an ad versus through an influencer versus an email. Each one of those requires different messaging and different ways of handling it. And you know, what those sorts of mindsets would be. If you're coming in through an ad, you have to be more aggressive in your selling because they don't care about UVM. You know, they barely know who you are. You haven't been recommended by anyone trusted. They came in through an ad. It's not coming in through a friend. Whereas if it's, if you're coming in through an influencer, you may have a UTM parameter and you can say welcome Kathleen Booth readers. You know, like it sounds wooden, but you know,
Kathleen (27:10):
The idea, I always talk like that. What are you talking about? Hello?
Nick (27:14):
How are you doing my kids? No but like something like that, you know, welcome readers of this, our Draft or whatever it is, you know, where the, the refer agent is coming from. And you can personalize that in Google optimize as well and, and provide new copy. If you have a long tail of visitors and you're sending mostly people into the homepage, provide people with different homepage experiences that this is insanely high leverage. It's so powerful. And I see very, very few companies doing it unless they're making maybe eight figures. I think once you're on Shopify, plus you should be thinking more holistically about personalization and thinking about segmentation. And that's a huge responsibility for you as a marketing manager. It's a responsibility for me as an optimizer. And I'm just the Schmo coming in, trying to make the numbers go up. So, yeah.
Kathleen (28:08):
Devil's advocate here on this for a second. And because I love this topic and I love that you brought up like personalization. You know, I used to own an agency for many years and it's funny, I was a HubSpot partner. And when HubSpot first introduced the ability to dynamically like personalize content, based on all the things you talked about, like referral source, device type, et cetera, everybody went bananas in the beginning. And, and we used to talk to prospects who were like, oh, I want to, I want to do the personalization. I want all the pages of my website to be personalized. And, and there was almost a like, sort of a "just because you can doesn't mean you should" aspect to it where I started to feel like we're personalizing for the sake of personalizing. And, and there's also like a level of personalization, like where you reached diminishing returns, you know, where you're getting so granular. And so I, I just want to get your take on this, like how much is too much. And at what point are there bigger fish to fry in the marketing you know, universe.
Nick (29:14):
I will lean into your devil's advocate and say that it is very, very possible to go too far on this. And too far is way shorter than you think, right. I'm talking like, personalize it for like maybe three or four segments like ever. Don't, don't go fractal with it. Don't do it for every ad campaign you're running. Don't do it for every influencer that you coordinate with. You're not going to get good results from it. What I see is a lack of intentionality around it, and people tend to get drunk on the process because they, they think they want to talk to every single individual customer. And that ain't, it, it, it really is. I'm saying like new versus returning, like, this is not hard. Like, I'm not saying new versus returning as the thing that gets you hooked on personalization. And then, you know, four months later, you're thinking about like only Toledo, Ohio, as far as your strategy.
Nick (30:12):
No, I mean, stop there. Like really, and maybe you're howling that, that isn't it. Okay, great. Your store is different, you know, I don't know, I'm not working for you. That's the whole point. This is a conversation. And I get one shot to tell you, but I think that a lot of, how do I put this a lot of stores here, the idea personalization, right? This is what I said before about famous people in e-commerce and they get drunk on it and they just do it and they don't do it. And they don't think about the strategy behind it. And I really want to invite like a holistic strict, like, tactical way of thinking about this, because yes, personalization is a good idea. I really do believe that. However, is there like a, how to guide for it? Is there like a specific strategy that generally works? Maybe that's something I should be writing about because I've seen ones that work because we're not scope creeping it, and we're not thinking unrealistically about it. We're looking at the evidence and trying to lean into that. And I think that's really where it comes from, you know, it's, it comes down to research at the end of the day and in that case.
Kathleen (31:24):
Yeah. And I think there's like, it's the 80 20 thing, right? I mean, you could, you know, if you, if you get, if you believe that you get 80% of your results from 20% of the things you do that you need to stay within the 20% of personalization, that's really going to have an impact and not get tempted to stray into the other, the other 80% of, of, of following the, the rabbit trail down and, and making it almost creepy, you know, so that somebody comes to your site, like, how do they know who I am and what I'm looking at? Interesting. Alright. So you talked about a couple of other things in the beginning when you were discussing some of the biggest mistakes. One of them was like product recommendations you know, and, and somebody is looking at one thing, and then you say, you might also like this. Can you talk a little bit more about what you typically see there, that brands get wrong?
Nick (32:20):
Yeah. So the background for that element, just so you know, a historical interlude there's a very small website that you may have heard of called Amazon. They're they're an e-commerce player that based in Seattle and they that created this element, that's actually worked out quite well for them. And it's basically like people who looked at this also looked at this, or this is based on your past, past browsing and purchasing history. Here's some other products. And yes, people have made fun of that element before, because like I bought a refrigerator on Amazon. Now there are 25 refrigerators, like, oh God.
Kathleen (32:55):
Right. Because you need 10 of them.
Nick (32:57):
To start a collection. For all my body is, I don't know. But but like, I think that really Amazon wouldn't keep those around if it's not working out well for them. And what has happened in practice is that they have used AI to optimize those as in an inch of their lives. Right. So all you see is the element, right? Like you see these five products in a row and they're being presented nicely and there's a header. Well, I can put that on my store. Right? Why not? And so it's infected all of e-commerce at every level of e-commerce. And so you get this it's, I call a cross sell row where basically, if you didn't like the thing you're looking at, here's some other things. And usually if you're on Shopify, it's just a random selection of crap on the store, or it's the five most popular products on the store that you're not looking at right now. If you're lucky, right? Or it's four things that you browsed, but decided you didn't want, but they were like, what about those? Anyway, none of that makes any sense for the customer. Think about your own browsing habits, right? Like maybe the popular one would be cool, but you probably have a bestseller tabs. So why are you doing that?
Nick (34:18):
And so what I found works from a testing standpoint is something a little bit more focused where you recommend either similar things in the category. So I worked for a barbecue company and they sell sauces, rubs, you know, soaks, whatever. If you're looking at a barbecue rub, recommend the other barbecue rubs or recommend the bundle of barbecue rubs, you can buy all eight of them for example, right. Or you, but recommend things that work well in specific recipes. So it's not just this rub, but if you use this rub and the sauce together, you get heaven. Okay, great. Recommend that pairing and then up, sell it there. Make it easy to add to cart without having to navigate away from the page. In most cases, if you're not sewing apparel or something like that, and there's no like variants on it, be super easy, just be careful about it.
Nick (35:15):
Cause otherwise you're loading five images and confusing the customer, or you're putting it in a place where the customer isn't even looking at it. So you run heat and scroll maps and you see, 18% of customers are even getting to that element. And then none of them are clicking on it. Well, why do you have it there then? Right? Like what's the point? And people just leave it in there. Cause it's in the default of their theme because everyone asks for it and theme developers leave it in so that they can sell themes. And they're doing that in order to sell themes, not in order to make better stores, I'm here to make your better store.
Kathleen (35:47):
I loved that. You brought up like people default to what's in the theme because I've seen that as well. And I think, you know, there's a logic behind it. And the logic is, is like, oh, they built it this way because you know, in theory they've tested things out and these are the elements or the page layouts that perform the best. Or at least we'd like to hope that that's what, what is going on. But no, yeah, exactly. They're theme developers. They're not conversion rate optimizers.
Nick (36:15):
They're theme developers, key word developers. When you are creating software in general, you are listening to what your customers ask you for. And if your customers ask you for cross sell rows, then you create cross sell rows. If your customers asked you for a carousel on your homepage, then you create a carousel on your homepage and then you fill that carousel and you don't think about it. And it's not because either of those is good it's because someone else demanded it because of inertia or because a famous person said so, or because Jeff Bezos decided it and, and that's literally, it it's nothing that your customers did. And it's nothing that your business is like, and that's why I have a job.
Kathleen (36:54):
I love it. Yeah. It's it's very easy to just stay within the confines of the theme and, you know, kind of rest on that. So are you able to share any examples and, and of course you can anonymize the company if that is what needs to happen, but like of changes that you were able to make and then specific outcomes that that resulted to resulted in.
Nick (37:18):
I'll say this. If you go to draft.edu/helped I have a bunch of case studies that are not anonymous and often involve examples from things. So if you want the whole library of like big wins that we've done as a business, you can go there. I'll talk about a couple successful ones recently. I mean, I implemented an in cart upsell that increased average order value by I think, 18% for a client. And that was literally just, you had a sidebar cart. I added in a couple of things that you would want to add. I was the barbecue company. I don't think I have a case study for them yet because I'm still working with them. But rest assured I will. And they basically just had like a couple of well-placed upsells. And I think I just installed in cart upsell and looked at, I downloaded the past six months of carts and saw and looked at pairings of them and then tried to create in cart upsells based on the most popular pairings. And then I looked at the recipe page and looked at everything that was popular there. So like, and then I, I just put together maybe like 10 or 11 of them, something like.
Kathleen (38:35):
That makes so much sense. And it's like, it's so intuitive, but funny that more people don't do it just like purchase history.
Nick (38:42):
It was like an hour of work. It's like, what are customers already buying? Okay, let's meet them halfway. And I just did that.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
So much common sense stuff.
Nick (38:55):
It blows my mind. There was one, one really famous one I did with Ezra Firestone's store Boom, by Cindy Joseph. We knew that's like makeup for older women was going to require a lot of social proof because they may have tried a lot of stuff in, it didn't work out well for them. So we made, instead of, you know, normally your H1 on a product detail page is the name of the product, right? We made it a testimonial quote from the customer. And I actually ran that test on their most popular products. And I ran three different ones and two of them were inconclusive and one of them failed miserably. And I looked, I was like, oh, but one of them failed miserably. That means people cared about it. That means people are looking at it, which means if we keep running tests on it, we might find a winner. So he'd go in and we workshop five different ones that I've like narrow down, like 50 quotes. Then we did a short list. Then we like escalated it to the whole company. And we ran five for a whole month and we got two winners and one loser. And we got two winners and one loser. Oh God, hold on.
Kathleen (40:14):
You sound like me. I was having a cough earlier.
Nick (40:21):
That's okay. And we got two winners, one loser, and two inconclusives. Kept one of the winners and started doing that process for every other product on the store. And I think conversion rate went up by like 35%, by the time we were done with it. Now that sounds like a really high conversion rate improvement. And it was the keep in mind, the amount of work that we did for all of the products across the store, like this was a six month project. And it involved every corner of the company. Involved customer service. It involved me looking at all the reviews. It involves me like enlisting other people to think about the brand vision, but it was high reward. Right. And we de-risked the operation by discovering a couple of wins early on and viewing it because I view failing tests as possibly successful. We did the right thing in the wrong way. When you find a loser, you did the right thing in the wrong way. If you find an inconclusive test to taught you nothing, which, okay, great. Move on. Do something else. I think those two examples are good examples. And then I'm, I'm forgetting a billion, other really great ones that are probably germane to your specific store, dear listener. But I don't know what your store is. So I don't know, hit me up.
Kathleen (41:43):
I, I love those examples and I mean, I think you already provided a lot of really concrete stuff earlier. So now we're going to shift gears and I have two questions I always ask all of my guests and you have sort of a different perspective. And so I'm interested to hear what you have to say on this. First one being, you know, on this podcast, it's the loose theme of it is, is inbound marketing, you know, whatever attracts qualified customers to your website. And I'm curious if you have a particular company or individual that you think is really kind of setting the bar for what it means to be a great inbound marketer today.
Nick (42:27):
I think a lot of gen Z brands are setting the tone for like, not necessarily inbound marketing, but it's getting a lot of people talking about them, right? So I'm thinking of Nuggs or Fly by Jing. Those are both good examples of brands that really have a strong opinion or Chubbies of the way that they want to be. And they're fearless. And I think fearlessness is likely to win the day from an optimization standpoint because it gets people's attention and it really communicates effectively to kindred spirits. It's scary to do that. You want to go bland, like your lizard brain makes you want to go bland because you think you're appeasing as many people as humanly possible, but y'all, you aren't Google. Like you don't have to, you know, appease every living thing every day. You can be weird, like, and I would like to invite you dear listener to be a little weirder in what you're doing, because you're probably more likely to find customers who are really passionate about who you are and what you do and what makes you special.
Kathleen (43:46):
I, I, I love that you said that, and I have an example of a brand like that, that I think is brilliant. But probably a lot of people also hate. Which is, are you familiar with Shinesty? No. Oh, talk about weird, but in a great way. S H I N E S T Y they make, you'll see, when you go to the website, you'll be like, I know this company.
Nick (44:10):
There it is. Yeah. Wow.
Kathleen (44:13):
Just read the copy on their website. Right down to the product descriptions. Like you talked about product descriptions, like, well, the thing I love about that brand, not only who is, whoever writes all their copy, just freaking brilliant, but everything that company is very consistent, you know, down to the fine print on the website, like it's, it's, it's deployed so consistently that you kind of like, no, there's a science behind it, even though they make it just seem like it's some, you know, kind of like somewhat drunk bro writing their copy.
Nick (44:49):
Yeah. That's this is actually quite a bit like Chubbies. And I invite you to sign up for Chubbies emails because they are similarly very weird. But yeah, like, and, and for me, I don't know if I'm unmasking your question because I, I also focus exclusively on what happens when people come into the store. Right. Like I don't, I work with traffic people. I work with SEO people, but ultimately once a page within your domain name is loaded, that's where my job begins.
Kathleen (45:23):
I think you made a great point, which is that if you, if you have a distinct brand with a point of view, with a personality that gets people talking, and yes, they start talking once they've been to your website, as you point out, but then once they begin talking, other people hear them talk and that gets them to the website. So I do think there's like a bit of a virtuous circle there.
Nick (45:44):
Yeah. It's telling that we're talking about Shinesty, right? Like it's effectively, there's a word of mouth aura that's occurring because they they're unafraid. My goodness. It's not family appropriate, but I invite you to go there.
Kathleen (45:58):
Exactly. Exactly. Well, all right. Second question is one of the biggest pain points that I hear marketers tell me they have is just the incredible pace at which digital marketing is changing and how it can be challenging to keep pace with all of those changes and to stay on top of their game and to feel as though they are on the cutting edge. So I'm curious, you know, obviously your newsletter is a really great source of information, but beyond your newsletter, are there other sources that you personally rely on to keep yourself educated and up-to-date?
Nick (46:36):
Yeah, I I mean, I subscribe to a lot of different stuff. CXL is one. Wider funnel. Baymard Institute B A Y M A R D. That's another big one. On the design front, I subscribed to UX collective because every UX designer seems to do so. I subscribed to Hey Designers, same thing. I read a bunch of different RSS feeds about just tech stuff in general. About the world. And I don't know, I have a very like wide reading diet. I read about a book a week. So yeah, I think for, for me, probably those resources are a good place to, to stay on top of things, but I'm also somebody who very much resists trends. Like most of my trends are, how do you listen to customers better? And how do you react to them better? And that's very specific to the business. It's not necessarily, what's the coolest new thing and optimization. Like I'm not, I'm not doing multi-variate, I'm not doing weird AI stuff. I'm just, you know, sitting down and doing the craft every day. And it seems to be working. People seem to like it, and it seems to make the money. So whatever I'm doing, I must be doing it.
Kathleen (47:49):
I love it. Well, and there are certain principles of marketing that never changed. And I think one of those is that, as you said, if you're listening to what the customer says and you're delivering what they're asking for, like that's pretty timeless.
Nick (48:04):
It doesn't matter how technology evolves, turns out that whole focusing on the customer bit like is not incorrect, but like that means something different to everybody. And I find that fascinating too.
Kathleen (48:14):
Yeah. All right. Well, we've come to the top of our hour. I feel like I could talk to you for another two hours at least, but we don't have that kind of time. And so if somebody wants to learn more or has a question for you or would like to connect with you, what is the best way for them to do that?
Nick (48:33):
So my website is draft.edu. That's the biggest one. And my email's on there. If you can reach out to me anytime, we'd love to hear from you. If you wanna subscribe to my mailing list, go to draft.edu/membership or /letters. And I think those will both get you to the same place and just take a look, sign up and I give new links on optimization, new thoughts on the industry every week. And we'd love to hear from you.
Kathleen (49:00):
Fantastic. Well, as always, I will put those links in the show notes. So if you're listening and you want to connect with Nick head there, and of course, if you're listening and you learned something new this week, I would love it if you would head to apple podcasts and leave the podcast a review. And finally, if you know someone else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, send me a tweet at @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much for joining me, Nick. This was fantastic.
Nick (49:29):
Thank you. This was a lovely time. Appreciate it.
