w/ Matthew Stafford, Build Grow Scale
“Most Shopify themes are built by developers to create an online store catalog, not a converting funnel.”
In this episode of The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, Kurt Elster talks with Matthew Stafford, the CEO of BuildGrowScale, about finding success in e-commerce. Stafford, who went from selling t-shirts to mastering conversion rate optimization (CRO), shares his journey and offers practical advice for Shopify store owners. He discusses how to boost conversion rates, improve site speed, and create better user experiences. Whether you’re an experienced store owner or just starting out, Stafford’s insights will help you navigate the challenges of online retail and achieve lasting success. Tune in for a mix of compelling stories and actionable tips that can transform your e-commerce business.
Kurt Elster
This episode is brought to you in part by Omnisend. Yes, that Omnisend. Alright, Shopfire friends. Are you ready to take your e-comm game to the next level? Then you've gotta check out Omnisend. the go-to tool for supercharging your Shopify store. With OmniSend, you'll be launching pre-built e-com automations in no time, segmenting customers based on their shopping behavior, and even trying out SMS or push notifications. all from the same powerful platform. And that's not all. Over 100,000 e-com brands trust Omnisend to drive sales and build stronger customer relationships. Whether you're sending quick to create, highly relevant emails, or targeted texts, OmniSend makes it easier than ever to connect with your audience and convert them into loyal customers. Don't miss out on transforming your Shopify store with Omnisend. Check out we even have a link. It's in the show notes. Your dotomisen. com slash unofficial Shopify podcast. Omnisend. My friends, I am told that our guest today believes anyone can be successful in e-commerce. Alright, bold claim, but there's a copy out there. He said You can't. Those the four-hour work week days are over. You gotta put in the work and potentially you gotta build a team to make that happen. But with those two caveats. Anyone could be successful in e-commerce who puts in that work and builds the team. But how do we do it? And so our our guest, the man who told me this moments ago before we were recording. is Matthew Stafford, CEO and managing partner of Build Grow Scale. And we'll get into we'll we'll hear from him what what Build Grow Scale is. I want to hear about that. his journey and uh also conversion rate optimization. That is one of his specialties, and that's going to be our theme today. And so that's what we'll be We're going to be discussing e-commerce success, what it takes in conversion rate optimization, uh, and and Matthew Stafford's journey with Build Grow Scale. That's our Our topic for today on the unofficial Shopify podcast. I'm your host, Kurt Elster. Technasty. Uh Matthew Stafford. Welcome. How you doing?
Matthew Stafford
Welcome. Glad to be here.
Kurt Elster
Happy to have you. Uh so okay, let's start with with Build Growth Scale. Explain to us what Build Growth Scale is or or what you do.
Matthew Stafford
I had my own Shopify site or I had sold during the t-shirt days like on Teespring and built a platform and sold uh an enormous amount of t shirts, about fifteen million of them, into uh yeah, into the faith-based, into a faith-based knit and mothers audience. And from there, uh Excuse me, we sold that platform and I moved into Shopify and um thought, okay, let's let's now do this on Shopify. And it started off right away. I was actually really good at Facebook ads and uh I was really good at targeting and we were in the kitchen niche. And so we're Within a matter of a few weeks, we're doing several hundred sales a day and growing it. And I thought, wow, this is just gonna be easy. And I started adding apps and doing more things and Facebook algorithm changes and we went from um doing two three hundred sales to five or six hundred sales and within about six months we were selling three four hundred and and breaking even some days and losing money some days and making money some days. Um and I was like, this just doesn't make any sense. When we first started, it was Awesome. And um, so anyways, I had a friend, and this is how much I knew about themes and developers and stuff back then, uh, who who was a developer and he said, Yeah, well when I try to load your site, it takes 13 seconds. Um, no wonder nobody's buying. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Loads fast. He goes, yeah, on your computer 'cause it's cached. Um but y you load it on somewhere else or if they don't have a Wi Fi And uh it's horrendous. And so over the next forty eight hours he helped me and we went through and made a bunch of changes and we went from that 13 seconds to 1. 6 and like that like literally sales just took off again and and we were doing a thousand sales a day. Um literally uh started ordering our products from China, doing all this other stuff, and I happened to come across a friend of mine on Facebook that was teaching some uh Google Analytics. Like, hey, look at the data on your website and use that to make better decisions. And so I spent a thousand dollars, I think it was a thousand dollars And he would do like six or seven calls with me over in all the next six or seven weeks. Well. As he showed me the data and then I would go in and make changes each week, our store did better and better and better. And I was like, oh my goodness, there's something here um using this data on the back end to really optimize the experience because it it was night and day. It took us from you know, making a grand a day to four or five thousand dollars a day.
Kurt Elster
And what was this data? Like heat maps, screen recordings?
Matthew Stafford
Um yeah, it was it was all the Google Analytics um enhanced e-commerce metric. So honestly.
Kurt Elster
Oh so we're just looking at GA funnels.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah. It really, really wasn't even close to the data that we collect now using Tag Manager and all that stuff. But again, remember this is 10 years ago. And so um the Anything that you did to improve the experience back then had exponential results because you were the only one doing it. Like nobody else even had a clue that it was available to you. And so uh my other my other business partner at the time, he taught education. I really never taught education. I was in more in the in the back end doing the work and and creating the sales and running the traffic and doing that. And um I remember everybody and their brother was teaching um how to run Facebook ads. And I mean, I almost still think that's really what lots of people do, or now you just have an agency do it. Um, but uh I said traffic's not the problem when I look at the data. And people's stores are converting at one and a half, two percent. Um, a hundred people clicked on an ad to come to the store. and look at what you have to offer and 98 people left. So the ad actually did its work. Um traffic's not the problem. Why don't you try to convert two more of those people of those ninety-eight that left and you would double your results with the same amount of traffic? And so then that kind of became my mission. And and over the next three, four years, you know, we have stores that convert at six, seven percent um consistently, which is three, four times the average. of you know e-commerce. And really the the way that I'd had done it was I had studied a lot of marketing and built Um, Bill Glazer and Dan Kennedy and Drect Response. And I started looking at a Shopify site as like your homepage is top of funnel and your checkout is the end. And how do we get them to graduate through those steps. That's really how I got into it and how I discovered understanding that the conversion rate optimization or the CRO just makes everything else work better
Kurt Elster
Given this experience, I like to know what's the thing that drives you crazy that like everybody gets wrong. What's the big common misconception about Conversion rate optimization for Shopify.
Matthew Stafford
Actually there's three. Everybody thinks, oh, because I send them to my product page, that's where the entire experience of my store is, which is just not true. And most people's product pages um raise more questions than answer than answers. Um and I would say the other thing is if they've done their own customer service for a certain amount of time They think every single complaint or every single question needs to then be put in an answer on the site. And what happens is they force a hundred percent of the visitors to go through the problems that 20% of them had. And um they they end up creating a journey that has no congruency, no ease and flow and it actually uh generates more confusion than less.
Kurt Elster
All right, talk to me about that. The product detail page, in a attempt to optimize it, they end up creating a product detail page. Which is like largely that's where our purchase decision is gonna happen, whether or not they had to cart Yeah. You said it generates more questions than answers.
Matthew Stafford
Yes.
Kurt Elster
And that's potentially because they're every customer supporting query They go, well, clearly if they had to ask us, we should put that on the website. Which does not seem outrageous, but it sounds like there's there's too much going on there.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah. So let me let me um I'll I'll give you some interesting stats. If your site converts at let's just say 4%, which is good. That's better than 99. 9% of the other stores out there. Um, I can tell you that if your store converts at four percent, you can go look at the people that click on your filters. which would be on a category page, not a product page, are going to convert at probably close to eight to twelve percent And the people that use the search bar up above are gonna convert at that much or higher and be worth twice the amount of revenue per visit. So all that said to go back to the product page, why do those two areas of your site convert so much higher than the site average? Um, and that's the question that we, you know, are always looking to answer. Or, you know, when we find a spot on the site that's high converting, how do we get that everywhere else? Well, um my Theory is uh if you make something very easy for them to find, or if you make it easy to find what they're looking for, they are going to convert much higher. Um, most people are trying to guess at how do I make my product page convert higher and send everybody there when um that's not actually the question that I think they should be addressing. I think they should be addressing what's the easiest way for the customer to find what they're looking for and then let them look at it from that standpoint. because most store owners are looking at their site as how do I make as many sales as possible? How do I show them everything that we have and all the stuff? Instead of how do I make it super easy for them to find what they're looking for? When they find what they're looking for, they convert more than twice the site average. So um it feels like When you look at the product page and you try to put everything there, um, that's actually hurting you. Otherwise, it would convert as high as those other two areas, too.
Kurt Elster
So our we're talking about uh navigation. The thing you have to nail is site hierarchy navigation. Okay, I agree with you because what I have my experience has been even just like getting the main menu right yes in a moderately sized catalog is really hard. Like way harder than one would think.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah. So we I always tell people like you have a eighty twenty on your store. You everyone does like no matter what. Um, 20% of your products make 80% of your sales. I consider those your money-making links. Um success leaves clues. Those 20% should be extremely easy, if not their own link in the main menu. We call the main menu your money making links. All the other stuff is searchable, available. Um other people purchased this or other people viewed this. All of that can be done later, but um the goal is create a customer. not um do all this other fancy stuff and upsells and and things. Obviously AOV matters, but there's certain very specific ways that we teach to do that. But yeah, create a customer. And the way that you do that is you help them find what they're looking for easier than anyone else. Like most Shopify themes are built by developers to create an online store catalog, not a converting funnel. And so people think, oh, I offer these 1,000 SKUs. You need to see all 1,000 SKUs in order to make a decision. And if I show you more, then there's a better chance you'll buy. The truth of the matter is that creates cognitive load and confusion and people actually buy less. So um we've proven it and it's amazing how many times I've had to argue with our clients when they have like 13 options or 13 colors, and I'm like, you should only have three or four max. And they're like, no way. Like, you know, we sold pink uh last week and we sold blue, you know, a month ago. So people are buying those. I'm like, I understand, but when you go into Baskin Robbins and there's 32 flavors, how long does it take you to decide? Um, or if you go into McDonald's and you have chocolate or vanilla, like you can decide like that. Well, what's happening is people go, oh, I like this pink. Oh, I like this shade of pink too. Oh, this other off red. Ah, I don't know which one. I'm just come back later.
Kurt Elster
Choice paralysis.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah. So it's it's literally um yeah, there's too many choices and it creates a freeze or I'll come back later. Well now they just lost the sale and they gotta pay to get them back. So there are you know their ROAS is way worse. So make a sale and then you got all kinds of people to market to. So when we Tear down the offering every single time the conversion goes up. Like I've literally never, ever, ever had it not go up. Sometimes by hundreds of percent. Um, and so it's crazy to me. that people don't learn from that and understand that um when I point it out and then they even s and and they look at the experience on another store, they'll go Oh yeah, that's true. But they just don't see it on their own because you you develop banner blindness for your own site.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, they're they're within within days, they're blind to like any issues on their own site. This episode is sponsored in part by Clever Riffic. Hey, ever wake up to customers canceling orders? Maybe they said, oh I'm bad at math and I shouldn't shop when I'm high. This was a gift But we broke up. You're taking too fing long. Why should the customer have to ask you to edit their order for them? What if they could do it themselves? Enter Cleverific. With Cleverific, you can empower your customers to make their own changes through a self-service portal or let your team handle complex changes. directly from the back end. Clever IFIC is designed to reduce customer support tickets, ship orders faster, and even reduce returns and lost packages. Don't just take our word for it. Peter Manning New York cut their order support queries by 99% with Cleverific. And they're not alone. Don Get this, exclusively for unofficial Shopify podcast listeners, you can get 50% off Cleverifix Pro Plan, now just $49 a month, giving you full access to everything their app has to offer. Just go to Cleverific. com/slash unofficial and use the promo code Kurt50 at checkout to claim your discount. Take control with Cleverific and watch your customer support tickets plummet, shipping speeds increase, and package returns decrease. For a brand owner, their own site, their ego is their personality, gets intertwined with it. And that's where you get into you're like, well, you know, I've had these arguments that are baffling. Well, it's because You are removed from it and so you're not emotionally invested. They're emotionally invested. That's the problem. Yeah. A little bit of ego there. Um
Matthew Stafford
And I certainly I've I've learned over the years um to address that right when we very first start. I'm gonna say, hey, listen, um, I just need to know uh are you data driven or are you design driven? And um I'm okay with either. Uh, but that's gonna change, you know, the complexity of our of our relationship. If If you're data driven, um we're gonna be a lot more excited to work on this because we want to win. Um, I don't want to show you a bunch of data that you can change this, this, and this and get better conversions. You go, yeah, that's not on brand. We don't wanna da-da-da. Okay, that's cool. If brand me if brand means you make less sales. Um to me that's just like such a contradiction of the purpose of a store. It's it's hard for me to get excited about working on it.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. Yes. Well, and especially since it just it feels Not just subjective, but at times it could feel arbitrary where it's like it, you know, it has to work this way. My our example of that is sometime internally we'll say um, you know, when going through site revisions. Like the the brand owner will describe everything as a bug. And certainly some things are bugs, but everything you don't like is not a bug. Right. What's like a an unconventional on-site like design element pattern or something that just gets frequently pushed back on? Like the I like the example of It less is more on our our choices, you know, maybe fewer skews, fewer colors, whatever it may be. Um any other examples like that where you're like, I know this to be true, and people really push back on it.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah. So I I call it the hierarchy of focus. um on a page. Uh I believe that every page should have a most important action. And it should be extremely clear exactly what that is And then a secondary action, and that's it. Not eight things that you can do. Um, and so uh People try to their design element, oh, the buttons all got to match the theme. Okay, well then that means they blend in and your mind literally doesn't notice them as the next most important action. We know for a fact that when when the button looks like a button and it's the text on it, the text on it on a button does matter, the color matters way less. Um, but the hierarchy of focus is that the button doesn't match anything else on the page. Like it stands out like a sort thumb um that's the button, that's the action that I'm gonna take if this is agreeable, like the product. And that always raises convergence. When you blend it in, it's crazy. People still can look at it and want to do it, but less of them take the action. So the hierarchy of focus and the text on the button is the thing that we get the most. pushback. Um buy now or add to card on a home page is literally the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Because none of those things are actually happening. So you're telling them when I click the button, I'm buying now, but I'm really not. I'm just adding it to my cart. And do I have enough information on a homepage to add a eighty, ninety, two hundred dollar item to my cart? Um So they're literally creating a conflict on the person's mind before they're on the page. And I believe that every page should kind of just like Be this slope that you just automatically go to the next action, the next action, the next action. And we know that the less time someone's on your home page, the higher they convert. What does that mean? Well, if they land on your homepage and they find what they're looking for quickly, they convert higher. If they're on there longer looking around, they actually convert less. So um every single thing that we've always done that's worked um at very, very high levels, we've taken stores from three, four hundred grand a month and then had them at two and a half million a month in six months. Like and they would have been faster if they could have got inventory. So like I love stores that work where they've done no optimization because when you do that then then they just Take off. But um we like like see more, more options, learn more, stuff like that. to get them to the next step and then when you're on the product page, it would be add to cart. And then when you're in the cart, it wouldn't be buy now, it would be proceed to checkout. Oh, my favorite. Continue to shipping, etc. People don't want to click on something that they don't know where it's going to take them. And if you go buy now, they're like, oh, I'm going to give you money for this. I want to read the description. Well, um it it just like it creates this um pause in their mind instead of like they can just easily go through the whole thing without even realizing why they bought because it's just seamless. And so we're always looking at how do we do that. And I'll give w one more tip that like anybody that's listening to this um can learn from our In all reality, it's probably been, you know, with the volume that we've had, we probably lost a hundred million dollars worth of sales in that first several years by not doing this. Um, we would look at the data, we would split test something, get a win, and then go look for something else to split test. Well, about three, four years into the process, um one of one of our team members said, well, that winning element, like everybody doesn't read the page the same way. What if we put that element that just raised our conversions somewhere else on the same page in a different format or a different way? And so we did that, and the page went up. And then we did it again and you know down in the description and the page went up. And we're like, wow. So we just got three wins in a row with the exact same win by just putting it more places on the page.
Kurt Elster
You doubled down on what worked.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
That's often you know my advice to people, but more like on a holistic level. It's like, all right, looking at your marketing spin, which one of these makes the most money? Which and then like drill down into that. Double that and see what happens.
Matthew Stafford
Cut this fifty percent that doesn't work and yeah.
Kurt Elster
Yeah. But you've taken that idea and applied this to to the UI to conversion rate optimization where you're going like, we know that this button, this micro copy, this element works, was an improvement, a statistical improvement. Okay, let's keep it, but then let's also add that, you know, as a a safety net throughout the page.
Matthew Stafford
What's crazy, yeah, not every single person goes through the page the same way. Some people are picture. uh related. Some people are uh read all the text, some people uh like infographic, some people, you know, and so when we started finding different ways to install it, the winning things, on the page in multiple areas. And then many times we could put it in other places on the site where it would answer the same question. So uh a way that we found a lot of stuff is we would check scroll depth. and watch the conversion rate based on scroll depth. Well if all of a sudden you have a huge spike three quarters of the way down the page, like all of a sudden things are converting, we go, all right, let's go look at that page, see what things in there and we'll use that as an idea to test get that above the fold because we know so many people don't scroll. Get that above the fold, the page does better.
Kurt Elster
I didn't know that you could track you could correlate scroll depth and conversion rate.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah, for sure.
Kurt Elster
Because I've been using um Microsoft Clarity.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah, we do use clarity too. Yep. We use clarity too.
Kurt Elster
How do you get that to work in clarity?
Matthew Stafford
Uh you'd have to ask my GA guy for sure. Um I I can't tell you how to do that, but I know for a fact. Like we know the scroll depth on every page and where it converts the best. Obviously, nine times out of ten, um you kinda want the page where if it's grow if it's converting at, you know, fifteen percent, it kind of converts fifteen percent all the way down and then Maybe a little more at the bottom just because all the people that get to the bottom are the ones that read everything and then they buy. Um But yeah, like I can take you through our stores that we've been on the longest. And you'll see over time the page will convert very even instead of have these chunky different areas. And that is by paying attention to what elements are creating the winds. Um very that one's interesting.
Kurt Elster
The other one I was not I did not think of, at least in this way, was Time on site and conversion rate are inversely correlated because time on site going up tells you that they're lost.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah. Yeah.
Kurt Elster
Versus the lower time onsite, like it is very streamlined and very obvious what to do next.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah. And I think that that's more more true on the ancillary pages in the beginning than it is your product page. So I would not say longer time on product page causes less conversion where it does like on the filter page and the home page. what that typically means is exactly what you said. I think, because we have to guess at some point. Um, I think it means they're confused. They're not finding what they're looking for and and uh they're frustrated. Um I'll give you I can give you two more uh really good tips. Please do. This is gold. That will be uh Aha's for your audience for sure. One, we put a survey on the thank you page. And it I will tell you out of our top 10 wins, this is probably where we got six or seven of them. The survey question is um we ask everyone who bought because it's on the thank you page. What was the one thing that almost made you not buy? I'm writing this down right now because I will put this into action today. These people who have just given you money And have their dopamine rush will answer that and tell you what was confusing or what they didn't understand or what was hard for them to figure out. And Again, don't just take every single one and create it as gospel, but as you get those answers, start grouping them together and you're gonna find things on your site. that you would never find and never see because you look at it all day, every day. And it it will give you crazy good wins. Like we install it on every store that we partner with immediately. It's like literally what we do the first day because we want those customers to start telling us what was difficult for them to understand or what almost made them not buy.
Kurt Elster
That's really good. Okay. That I wrote down because I I'll I'll put that into practice today and see um see what I can get out of it.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah, you'll be you'll be shocked at the answers you get from these people. It's cold.
Kurt Elster
Okay. The So where you Key KPIs, key performance metrics indicators have come up a few times. And you talked about Um vital metrics like conversion rate, add-to-curt rate, and actionable metrics like bounce rate and time on site. What uh well give me your uh your approach on metrics. Maybe you've got some great thoughts here, like what people get wrong about it or how you differentiate between what's important and what's noise.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah, so I can just give you a couple rules of thumb that we've um used as to find out where there's issues. So um desktop and tablet will always convert twice as high as mobile. And if that's not the case on your site, um, then you know you have an area, an issue in one or the other.
Kurt Elster
I know this one's true. I see it myself. I give the same advice because I'd be like to see with my own eyes. Why do we think that is? Like I I've got my theories, but what's yours?
Matthew Stafford
Well, there's more real estate. Um And so things can be laid out more, it's clearer. Uh you just have a lot more area to convey your message. Um and Like I do I genu I genuinely believe that the mobile experience should be different than the desktop experience. It should be the 8020 of what creates the sales. Um the goal is to create a customer. If you have a good product and you nurture your customers to come back and buy again and again again, like then really uh the first sale is just the start of the process. Um And so uh we care way more about creating customers in the beginning than we do anything else. And so uh Yeah, I would I would certainly focus on the the 20% that creates 80% of sales and make the mobile the very best experience possible. You can get away with a lot more stuff and run tests. on your desktop. We have several um stores who have an older demographic and they don't like to buy stuff on their phone and it's difficult for them to buy on the phone. And so we hit them on the phone and when they don't buy, we retarget them back to desktop. And that works really, really well because they've convert much higher there. And it makes their retargeting a lot more profitable. So um I definitely think yeah, I think that I think that's why um to answer your question.
Kurt Elster
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Matthew Stafford
Um and it's also it meshes with Google Analytics amazingly. Wow. Like goes straight in there and very clear. Yeah.
Kurt Elster
And then we've got, yeah, they they've got that GA integration, which is nice. And then you're doing surveys, you're doing split testing. What are we using for those?
Matthew Stafford
Uh we use Lucky Orange. um for the surveys or whatever heat mapping survey process that the the client already has. Um, but we you know anything that you can get the the survey to pop up on the thank you page and uh yeah we do that immediately. We also do um Yeah, there's a couple other things. We have a post-purchase survey that we run that works really, really well too. Um first-time buyers, we um bribe them with a gift card, not a coupon or or a percentage off. And my theory behind that is um if you give someone a gift card, they have money to spend. If you give them a discount, they have to spend money. And so the interesting mentality is totally different. If you send someone a twenty-five dollar gift card, uh, they feel like they have money to spend. And what's crazy is uh We did that in the very beginning. We did it as a way to buy data. We wanted to ask surveys because it was a very complicated site. um hundreds of options and different variants. And so we said, hey, we need two grand to buy some data. We want to give a twenty dollar gift card. Uh their lowest price product is $25. Um they have $5 in hard cost to it. So we said, listen, we'll give you a $20 gift card. You'll have to spend 25 and then they get the cover, they get their their cost covered. And so we said, listen, we need to buy at least a hundred of these survey responses. And so we need two grand. And they agreed to it. We started this post-purchase survey and what we found is that the people that got the gift card would come back and buy again within the first seven days. Almost 40% of them did. And so before they actually even got their initial shipment, they would buy again. And their average order value was around ninety bucks. So um all their new about 30 to 35% of their brand new buyers because we only sent it to new buyers, because if it's someone who has already visited the site, they're going to have biases And our questions were like we asked them very specific things about the site. Um, I think there's seven questions in it. And um over time, those people that uh got that gift card and bought twice in that first seven days Um, now we've been tracking it over six years. Uh, their average lifetime value is four or five times their average lifetime value of the other customers on their site. So it creates this form of loyalty almost immediately. Hey, I answered these questions to help them improve their site. I like them, you know, and they gave me a gift card. I came back and bought again. Now I'm in the mode of buying from them and those people are way more valuable. Uh and what we realized was We weren't actually buying data uh because we were given a twenty dollar gift card and their average order value is around ninety bucks. We were actually making money. And now the volume that they do every month, it's it's they make about an extra ten to twelve thousand dollars a month. off of the post-purchase survey question email that comes through. So we've never shut it off. Now we have literally a way to just tabulate those answers and we create a graph and that tells us where we're going to go work on the site. Um, and so it's just become this profitable way to know exactly what to work on all the time because the customers are telling us.
Kurt Elster
Do you do it hasn't come up, do you do anything with um on-site personalization?
Matthew Stafford
Um we do. Uh I don't know. Like I would be the wrong one to ask. Uh I know that we've custom done it because our developers, like we have uh seven or eight developers that just work on Shopify only um for years. And so uh most of the clients that we work with where we do the dev work, um, you know, we have a contract with them. And so we just build Build things rather than use apps. A lot of times we'll use an app, test it, and go, yep, that works. All right, cool. Let's build it into the theme and make it even better and that's what we do. So um I'm probably not a really good one to ask.
Kurt Elster
I like that approach and I think you're You're right. Like we don't do a ton with on-site personalization, but when I have done it, I really we just build it into the theme similar to what you described where you know, based customers logged in, so now we know who they are and we know things about them or we know what you know we know context, like what country they are, if they're B2B. And then so based on that, like They think the the simplest approach is if I know who they are, can I hide the things that are irrelevant to them? Yeah. Yeah, that that's often um our approach there, but nothing like wild and crazy.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah, so those are a couple of the really big wins that anyone can do. I'll give you one more that uh I've literally in 10 years never seen it not. make more money. Um and the reason for that is it's right where you transfer or where they make the sale. So on the information where you fill out the checkout Every single every single Shopify site I've ever seen says email and address and then phone. Well you can change the language in those form fields. And we've tested it um and literally tried, I would say 50 or 60 variations, and have never been able to beat the variation that we have now, which is Email required for order confirmation. And it came from I was reading the book Persuasion, and it was basically like people don't mind giving you information if they know why. When we were tracking the form fields, we noticed that there's just a lot of errors, a lot of errors in the form fields. And so we wanted to try to reduce the number of errors. And when we put that text in there, number one most opened email that you'll ever send, highest percentage of open rate. Thank you. Order confirmation. Exactly. It's a 80, 83%. They don't put their junk email or their secondary email. They give you their best email. And so we we actually realized our abandoned carts went up. Um, the recovery went up when we got less form field errors in the email confirmation.
Kurt Elster
Oh, that's brilliant.
Matthew Stafford
We said, okay, now we're gonna figure out with phone because SMS is crazy good. And so we put phone required for shipping notification. You tell me anybody that doesn't want to know when their product shipped. And so by putting those in there, uh, we've had as much as a 17% lift on the checkout, which is a hundred percent found money. Um, that's the point at which, you know, you're going to get them. They're gonna click the button, but you know, now per complete purchase. And so uh getting that and then also having a better abandon and a better SMS recovery, that is probably one of the most valuable optimizations that anyone can do in You don't have to be on Plus, you don't have to be on anything. You just go to the language settings of your checkout, change that in the form field. Those two optimizations will make you more money. 100%. I've never seen it not work.
Kurt Elster
But what I love about your advice is none of this has really been design-centric. You know, it's like there's some, you know, practical design advice in there. But for the most part, it's like, hey, you the devil's in the details and it's in the content. Like really and a lot of what you've done here is like y what I've heard is nail the microcopy, the labels of buttons, the things I click to take actions. That's what makes the big difference. And then hey, those things should look like buttons and they should be obvious and they should stand out. There's when you distill it, it's like, hey, well, this seems like a lot of common sense advice. But then, you know, when you've been doing this for a decade like we have you realize like how much baggage comes along with making those changes. And so I think sometimes uh getting out of your own way and just going with the the common sense approach that you're advocating is the path to more money.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah, and the crazy thing is, um, just the way my brain works is I don't I I was in the t shirt business and it was like the next greatest, the next greatest, the next hot design, the next And that was just like after a while, it just becomes grueling. Like it just is grueling. And I'm like, I don't want to have to worry about the latest, greatest. I want to understand how human behavior um affects the way people interact with the site. And if my If my website ticks all the boxes and how people behave, I'm gonna have a much, much better chance of converting than trying the latest thing. And so um everything that I've shared is, in my opinion, it's principle-based. And principles last forever and always work. And if they don't, then the principal, you know, you've got it off a little bit. So the majority of the things that I'm sharing We've taught them for years and when people implement them like they work and they still work now just like they did a long time ago. um to the point of like a lot of the things that we've taught over the years have now become pretty standard on themes Um, which was always like a really cool thing when I all sudden we'd see it start showing up after we'd been teaching it for a year or two and go, Oh yeah, now the now the developers have seen it or enough people have asked for it and Um, yeah, it's very, very cool. Like I totally agree with you that uh it seems like common sense, but it's only just because Probably I think our approach to it is principle based, not, you know, tricks and hacks.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, you're you're really advocating without saying it, but you've been advocating against gimmicks. You know, there's a lot of like things, marketing tactics that work temporarily because they have novelty where, you know, spin to win.
Matthew Stafford
And one a lot and then burnt people out on things. And so sites that look like that um typically actually convert worse, not better.
Kurt Elster
Yep. If you could offer one piece of advice to someone, to a store owner, a brand owner. dealing early on with conversion rate optimization, what would it be?
Matthew Stafford
Um it's probably the hardest thing for them to do, so maybe they could do it with a friend. But I would say write out two or three things that they would like to see someone do on their website and then just ask them to do it and watch them. It's basically like user testing. Um, which is always we still have some of our biggest wins come through user testing and that's where we uh propose a path And let someone who's never been on the site go through and do that and we record the screen and and their narrative with it. And then we can now see what they see. based off of um them going through and trying to find stuff. So I would say um look at your website as a as a customer, not as the guy that owns the site trying to sell everybody whatever they want to buy. Like How do I find what I'm looking for? Because the people that find what they're looking for convert two, three, four times higher than all the rest of the traffic on the site.
Kurt Elster
Goes back to like nail that get that navigation right, get that that main menu right. And I wrote I liked it so much I wrote it down was when you said your main menu is your money-making links.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
'Cause it's like a thing I hammer on, but just you know, hearing a a a colleague or another professional you know come to the same conclusion separately. It's like, yeah, that's It doesn't have to be super hard.
Matthew Stafford
Or even just another way to to word it because even the words that we use to describe it give us a new perspective.
Kurt Elster
Going back to the beginning, when we started this, you said if you put in the work, I think anybody can make e-commerce work and successful. Now at the end, you're like, here's here's the straightforward tactics, strategies, and approaches to reach that. Um is there any other advice you want to include there to to wrap it up as to why you think like, hey, this is this is doable and reasonable? given enough effort.
Matthew Stafford
Man, I've never said this, but I I think it's how I actually really feel at the moment. And I think it's based on my own personal experience. Uh I've started getting coaching in other areas of my life. And it's amazing how fast things that I couldn't see, someone else can point out to me and I can make changes. Um, and so I would say just find someone that you resonate with. Um that you get your information from instead of trying to get it from six or eight sources and being confused and and you know shiny object syndrome which is really difficult to not do for most entrepreneurs. Find someone that you resonate with, get some advice, or follow what they're doing. Um, actually do the work. Don't just scratch the itch by learning something new and then not doing it.
Kurt Elster
A hundred percent. It's always a good interview when I end it feeling inspired or like I took notes and I'm like, oh, I'm gonna tell this to like these three clients. And like your your survey question advice, I'm like, oh, I got several people. I'm gonna run that past. I think that's that's a good one. Uh but so Man, I'm sure there's a lot of people who are still listening and going, I want, where can I learn more about uh about you and and what you do?
Matthew Stafford
Yeah, just go to buildgrowthscale. com. Um literally you can get a get a hold of us there, you can go see what we do. Um, or you can email me, which is mad at buildgrowthscale. com Um, just that simple. Uh I love helping people. I love working with people. So um I'm not I don't try to be not accessible. Uh I love what I do.
Kurt Elster
So Matthew Sanford, Build Girl Scale. Thank you so much.
Matthew Stafford
Yeah, this is great. Thanks for having me.
Kurt Elster
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