Little Known Factors with Huge Effects on Conversion Rates
In this episode, we open with a deep dive into conversion rates across devices and traffic sources, and how you can apply that info to your store.
This episode is also available as a video interview on YouTube.
You'll the hear answers to:
Paul Reda: (singing).
Kurt Elster: I drove a race car.
Paul Reda: Yeah?
Kurt Elster: I did. We built-
Paul Reda: What is it? It's like a Ferrari?
Kurt Elster: No, I think you know it's not a Ferrari. It's a 2000-
Paul Reda: Label?
Kurt Elster: Volkswagen Jetta that I bought from a hillbilly in Indiana an honest to God hillbilly. For $300 no bill of sale or title. He was just like, there you go. Do you need a [inaudible 00:00:25] push it on the trailer? And my brother and I was like, let's get out of here before they kill us for your wife's truck. All right, that's not good. So we built this thing for a race called a chump car race. The car can't cost more than $500. But then you spend like two grand and safety equipment and the car, the more absurd the better. It's like a circus environment. And on the first lap, the first time we attempted this, we car fail, just fell apart. We fixed it two years later. We actually ran it this year... I am so proud. I've always raced in my own car, that's very stressful.
Kurt Elster: When you're racing in a heinous piece of garbage against a bunch of other heinous pieces of garbage wheel to wheel, passing like full on real deal racing where you can hit each other, and you don't care about that car and you know, no one else does either. That is the most fun in the world. I loved it. Despite in lap three, I disintegrated the clutch and we spent the rest of day one replacing a clutch in a field in Michigan, and 50 degree windy... it was horrible. If I described it to you in detail, the entire thing sounds really horrible, but I absolutely loved it. I'm going again next year, and it's going to cost us thousands more to run this piece of garbage again.
Paul Reda: I've been with you on this multi year journey. And every year you tell me about all the work you have to do. And then how terrible it is and how your car breaks immediately when you do it after driving several hours and working for months on this. And it really sounds like the worst thing to do ever.
Kurt Elster: I always have a big smile on my face.
Paul Reda: You truly... And every time you're telling me, I'm like, this is the worst thing I've ever heard in my life. And then this year you had a problem finding another person. You were, hey you want to come do the lemons race with me? I was like, no. I definitely don't. I've been here for years. My mother was Kurt's doing that again. She was like, that sounds horrible.
Kurt Elster: I agree that on the surface, this sounds terrible. It is ridiculous fun. I'm doing it again.
Paul Reda: Your brother-in-law Mike was sleeping in a tent at the racetrack?
Kurt Elster: Well, that's his own idiocy. I stayed at a holiday inn.
Paul Reda: Oh, well, all right.
Kurt Elster: Very pleasant. So, one of the questions we got we're going to do list our q&a as usual, but we're doing a deep dive into conversion rate data. Ryan Stein had asked, when looking at Mobile versus desktop conversion rate, what is the expected drop off on mobile? We have a 5.36% desktop rate and a 2.47% mobile rate. Is this indicative of a problem or fairly standard? And the Answer we traditionally give is, hey, we generally expect mobile conversion rate to be half of desktop conversion rate. So, if you've got that you're doing it right. And his was about that. It was five and a third versus two and a half. So, a little less than half, but nothing to be concerned about. You went hog wild into data, you took a deep dive. Tell me about the data you gathered on this?
Paul Reda: Well, it's funny, because a couple months ago, just on my own time, I pulled a bunch of data from our clients and was like-
Kurt Elster: It looks like you just grabbed the top five biggest.
Paul Reda: I grabbed the top five biggest in terms of revenue, and they all happen to have different market segments and different price points. So it was a good look. But I had done this myself to be like, hey, are there problems I could solve? I knew about the mobile problem. It sucks that the number one type of traffic all these stores have is a mobile traffic, it blows desktop out of the water on every single one. And the number one type of traffic is also the worst converting type of traffic. So, it's like if you could solve that problem if you could get mobile conversion rates, at parity with desktop conversion rates somehow, it literally would mean millions of dollars for every single one of these stores on this list.
Kurt Elster: Multiple millions?
Paul Reda: Multiple millions
Kurt Elster: Overnight?
Paul Reda: Yeah, overnight. Immediately. So it's like, is there anything I could glean from this data? And so, then he asked that question this week. And I was Well, now I really gotta break it down. So I did, I built... Gave me a spreadsheet. And Kurt has it too, I don't know how deep we want to get into the names or [crosstalk 00:04:33] the secrecy can't name names. But so yeah, it's generally below half. So, I averaged it all out and average probably isn't the right thing. I should probably wait at blah, blah, blah. This is supposed to be illustrated, not statistically perfectly correct.
Paul Reda: So, across these five big time stores that are like our five biggest clients, the desktop conversion rate is five and a half percent, and the mobile conversion rate is two. And then tablets are right in the middle at 3.6. So, it's more than a half drop. And it obviously wildly swings. We got someone who's desktop rate is 13 and a half and their mobile is 4.6. Down to someone who's desktop rate is 2.4 and their mobile rate is point six. The other main thing that really showed up to me here is the drop off, I calculated the drop off from Add To Cart down to checkout down to converted. And our rule of thumb whenever we're talking with our clients is you always say you want it to go down by half.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, so if Add To Cart was 10%, and you told me your [inaudible 00:05:41] rate was 5%. That would not be cause for concern, cause then your conversion rate would be two and a half percent, and that'd be very good.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Well, it depends.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: Depends on what you're selling. But looking at these numbers, generally we're seeing it actually goes down by a third. So it's not it.So-
Kurt Elster: Well, these are stores we set up [crosstalk 00:06:00]
Paul Reda: So, we did a great job. Clearly, that must it.
Kurt Elster: Give ourselves pat on the back.
Paul Reda: So yeah, really, you should be looking for a one third drop. So it should go from nine to six to three instead of nine to four and a half.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Paul Reda: And I guess my other main takeaway is that, I am seeing here is, stores that sell expensive things have a much harder time on mobile. Like there's two on here, where their average order value has to be over $100 for every order, and their mobile conversion rates just get annihilated. Because, I don't know people are too scared, people don't trust their phones enough. They're too scared to buy something very expensive on their phones, I guess is my takeaway on that. I don't know.
Kurt Elster: If I pull out, all right... If I'm doing work on my computer, I'm doing work. If you see me doing work on my phone, it looks like I'm screwing around. There is I think this mental idea that as soon as this is serious, I better get my desktop. And we have seen over and over that $50 is like this pricing Rubicon that once crossed, it gets harder to sell, conversion rates go down.
Kurt Elster: And to your point about the average order value having an effect here, the store that's got the super high conversion rate also has the lowest average order value. And the store with the lowest conversion rate has the highest average order value. So it could just be like this mental block that Oh, if I'm going to spend it if a few hundred dollars, well I better do it right and bust out the laptop or it's just like why should wait and it's less of an impulse purchase. And they're cool picking them up on their emails down the line.
Paul Reda: They're waiting till they're really hunkered down and doing things and then that's what they buy the more expensive things. But yeah, the biggest converting store with the highest rates, their average order value there, well I know their highest selling item is literally like $12 and they also have the smallest drop rate between Add To Cart, reach checkout and conversions. And desktop, it's only 17% at each step, which is crazy great. But again, they're only selling $12 products. So it's easy for people, it's harder for people to talk themselves out of buying it.
Kurt Elster: The lower drop rates, I think that's interesting. The effect on average order value is interesting. It's also in all of these tablets sits right in the middle between mobile and desktop in terms of conversion rate. Isn't that interesting?
Paul Reda: I guess. Well, I guess one of the things I was looking for is like, hey, what if this was a hypothesis I had? What if the Add To the Cart rates are the same everywhere? And then maybe even the reach checkouts are the same everywhere. But then the conversion rate is where the mobile drop happens. And that would say to me, okay, it's people that, they're scared about handing over their money, or they don't want to type in their credit card, or the checkout isn't optimized for mobile or something like that. But that's not what we're seeing. The add to cart rates on phone are much lower than they are in desktop. Checkout rates on phone are much lower than they are in desktop. You're just starting off with a smaller amount of people willing to buy on that device. And so, that is always in the middle, so part of me just thinks it's just literal screen size.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, well, it's harder to use the smaller device. I think what you're finding is, you can optimize that mobile experience all day long. What are you going to do to... You can't do anything to fix that person's prior crappy mobile experiences. They're not adding to cart on mobile. It's the quality of traffic is not as good, the buyer intent is not as high because the moment I'm on my phone, like maybe I'm sitting at a stoplight for all we know, like, we don't know what the context is there as far as my attention goes. But I think people are just significantly less willing to go through making a purchase on their phone, and yeah, we've got dynamic checkup and Apple Pay and Google pay and PayPal and it auto fills the password. How many people actually have that setup though?
Paul Reda: I think a lot of people have Apple Pay setup.
Kurt Elster: Well, and that's where we can dive into.
Paul Reda: Well, and as you're saying with that, well, phone time is screw around time. On two stores, I broke out the conversion rate by browser, and one store, which does millions of dollars. It's our biggest client in terms of total revenue. They're monsters, I think probably do like a million dollars a month. Their second highest browser that they see is mobile, Instagram, people are clicking, people are coming to their site from their Instagram. And the problem with that is the conversion rates on mobile Safari and mobile chrome are two and a half percent. They're great.
Kurt Elster: So let's back up a little bit. In Shopify you can pull a report in which it will break down conversion rate by mobile versus desktop versus tablet. Then further break it down by browser on those devices. And that's where things get really interesting. Tell me what you see here.
Paul Reda: On this big gun store that is locked in. It's running turbo that we modified significantly. But I mean, it's great. We're proud of it, they're proud of it. They make millions of dollars. It is a big gun. Mobile Safari tune at 2.45%. Mobile chrome 2.49%. Instagram 1.1%.
Kurt Elster: And they're driving, that's their second highest traffic source.
Paul Reda: Their highest traffic source is mobile Safari, their second highest traffic source Instagram browser. The browser in the WebKit browser inside Instagram.
Kurt Elster: I know what this says to me, what does this say to you?
Paul Reda: This says to me that people I mean, they do a great job on Instagram. So people are looking at their Instagram photos and then clicking through to the store just to like check it out. But it's all drive by traffic and they're not They're early in the funnel their top of the funnel I mean, if you can... And the best case scenario I feel is that these people look at you from Instagram, they don't buy your Instagram conversion rates terrible. But if you're able to tag them and remarket them, when the remarketing pushes them down the funnel farther, they're going to buy. But they're probably going to end up buying a desktop in a couple of weeks.
Kurt Elster: So, mobile Instagram, ore conversion rate drops to its lowest at approximately 1%. Verses, if I just get someone on Chrome mobile or mobile Safari, it's two and a half percent more than double. So, this speaks to the issue on mobile, that conversion rates are always lower on mobile. And a third to a half is quality of traffic. People are unwilling, we based on that add to cart rate we think they're unwilling to even attempt the experience. And two you've just got a lot of drive by traffic with lower buyer intent, because that's where a lot of your top of funnel Ads Live.
Kurt Elster: So, if you're seeing a lower conversion rate on mobile, that really is not the scary, scary nightmare that it may seem initially. And it you need to have a full funnel in place where you're increasing as many touch points as you can. So, I want a pop up to try and grab an email and welcome and exit. I want, I need remarketing in place. And then ideally, I've got email marketing automation behind all of that. So, if I capture their attention on mobile and they don't buy that is completely fine and expected. And then later, I picked them up on desktop, where suddenly, at chrome desktop my conversion rate was 5% compared to that 1% on mobile, Instagram. So this really is not so much the device. It's the mindset and it's the quality of traffic, which I get it's their mindset.
Paul Reda: Yeah, so and just to go Instagram bad. Same thing with the Facebook internet browser on Facebook, it's 1.3%. So it's like, again, that social mobile traffic is the top of the funnel and it doesn't buy. And what it ends up doing is if you're only just looking at your top line mobile conversion rate, it's dragging it down your top line, mobile conversion rate is not as bad as you think it is. It's not as good as desktop. Even in the best case scenario, it's not good as desktop, not even close. But it's not as bad as the top line number appears.
Kurt Elster: And tell me, do you remember off top your head in Shopify, where people can go find this.
Paul Reda: Alright, so you go to analytics, it's on the right side, it's like second or third from the bottom, and it says traffic by device type. And it will just have mobile tablet, desktop, and it'll just show you the raw traffic numbers, you have to click on that. That'll take you into a bigger report. And then there's a little drop down and then you could check off the things you want to see in that report. Now the one problem with this is they don't give you the rates. The only rate they give you is conversion rate for those different devices, they don't give you Add to Cart rate or read checkout rate, they just give you the raw numbers. And then for the purposes of this, I calculated the numbers myself in a spreadsheet. But you could break it down.
Paul Reda: The one of the things you could select in the drop down is device browser, just check off device browser. And then there will just be a chart that has, what kind of browser is it? Is it a mobile, a desktop or tablet? Then the name of the browser, then you can get the conversion rate right there next to it. One more thing was that one of our other stores that is just a mobile monster, their mobile traffic is literally 10 times higher than their desktop traffic. And that hurts them because, like we said, mobile conversion rates are lower than desktop traffic. So if your mobile traffic is 10 times more than your desktop traffic, your conversion rates gonna look like shit. But they got the same problem in that their second highest browser is Facebook. Well, that's only half a percent. Mobile Safari, it's 1.8. It's three times as much their mobile,[inaudible 00:16:13]
Kurt Elster: It's about their conversion rate.
Paul Reda: Their conversion rate, yeah, sorry. And also they get pinned on Pinterest a ton. Their fourth biggest browser overall is Pinterest. And that converts at 0.4%. Nobody bought off with Pinterest. So, if their fourth-
Kurt Elster: 0.4 brutal.
Paul Reda: So, if their fourth highest browser is something literally no one buys on, it kills their rates.
Kurt Elster: It's going to widely skew their rate. Now, what's interesting is when you look at desktop, and you start breaking out desktop by browser, on all of these sites, they have the same highest conversion rate on the same two browsers, Safari for desktop and edge in Windows. And the theory here is the reason is, it is an indicator of the dispposable income. If I'm on desktop Safari, I am almost certainly on a MacBook. And you didn't didn't shell out for a MacBook if you're hurting for cash.
Paul Reda: Well, I mean, that was a good... I mean, I remember seeing analytics where they got... this was years ago, before iPhones were as ubiquitous were they were a much higher status symbol. And they could just map out that, they got free open data of like whether a phone on the network was an iPhone or an Android phone. And they could easily map out areas by income just by looking at the relative amounts of iPhones or Android phones in those areas. I mean, there was an easily seen correlation.
Kurt Elster: Well, and we used to see on mobile Safari always did significantly better.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Now it's not the case.
Paul Reda: Now it's not the case. They're pretty much at pair. There're at parity.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, if like they'll be one 10th percent better on mobile Safari. But nothing extraordinary dramatic like these desktop numbers. So, what's the what's the takeaway? What's the action item for people?
Paul Reda: I don't know, I guess the action item is one. Even if you do the best you can on mobile, and just really dial it in and do everything you can think of it's still will never be as good as desktop. And [crosstalk 00:18:22]
Kurt Elster: And you can't break through that. There's own the customer psychological barrier.
Paul Reda: Yeah. And I guess don't worry so. And then also, if you can dive into your mobile conversion numbers, take a look at how much your traffic is coming from Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest. Because those people just don't convert and you may be tearing your hair out. But your mobile conversion may not be as bad as you think it is.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, it becomes much more revealing when you can see it by browser. Now, you could also use this to try and reveal if there's a weird outlier. And it could be that, browser specific bug.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, these are very interesting to dive into these numbers.
Paul Reda: And I guess the other thing I learned is that we've always been saying everything every step drops off by a half, we should change that to every step drops off by a third
Kurt Elster: If it's optimized.
Paul Reda: Oh, and your conversion rates going to be smaller if your stuff is more expensive.
Kurt Elster: Oh, yeah, wouldn't do that.
Paul Reda: As well, especially on phone.
Kurt Elster: Much easier to sell a $10 item than $100 item.
Paul Reda: Well true.
Kurt Elster: What app do your best stores use for returns and exchanges on Shopify? Well, I set it up just last week, returns' manager. It's super cool. Person puts in their order ID and email address like you link your request return in your folder and they go to a page says order ID and email address, put it in and immediately comes back with here's your order, here's your items. Check the ones you want to return, and then select the reason. You set up the reasons in the app. So it could be like wrong size need an exchange, item damaged, wrong item shipped or other, or didn't want it. And then for each of those reasons you set who pay shipping.
Kurt Elster: So if it's damaged or wrong item sent, obviously the merchant pays the shipping, you can have it just immediately. Approve the return and send them return label, can have it asked to require if they say it's damaged, you can have it require a photo, that kind of thing. I thought it was very cool. Not difficult to set up at all. So bold returns' manager is your answer. If you're trying to do returns, streamline your returns and exchange process in Shopify. Then we had Rachel read a question that near and dear to my heart, "how to scale creative. I really struggle to keep content fresh and cohesive. Do you have any plan you implemented for scaling content for small teams that have to outsource that kind of thing?"
Kurt Elster: So I can tell you our success managing Facebook ads on retainer for clients is largely dependent on the content But also how fresh it is. So, can the clients who go Hey, every month, here's a fresh set of content go? Those are the ones that are the most successful because you reduce ad fatigue and you're continuously trying new things and you develop a sense of this is the kind of thing that works right now. So, I don't think it's crazy to have to create fresh content for ads in the term in even just fresh photos once a month. But if you're saying look, how do I scale it and I'm struggling with it? I think number one, it's a mindset, it's a skill a muscle that you develop with practice. Number two, rather than set out to I'm going to make content just as wherever you can document the work you're already doing.
Paul Reda: Yeah, that's what I was gonna say is that it should just be ABC always be creating. You always have your phone on you. This podcast. We're recording it now. It's recorded on our phones. Everything on the internet now is just recorded on people's phones. You just use your phone throughout The day to create more content, take photos with it, take videos with it, document the things you're doing. And that is content right there. Just document your day.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, document don't create, once you've got, so that creates your initial piece of content, then all right. Can you scale that via distribution or format? So for me, if someone asked a question in the Facebook group, I will take that answer. And I will write that as a tweet, then I'll put that into a social media app I called buffer. So that will go to two Facebook pages, LinkedIn, Twitter and a Facebook group. So, it gets one question and the answer turns into content posted in five places. Then it will get stored in our podcast topics List, will discuss it here. It will be recorded on audio and video. Then that gets distributed to the podcast, which is syndicated and gets posted to YouTube. And I post it to Facebook group.
Kurt Elster: Alright, so now it's across several places, then if there's what I should really be doing is using highlighter to pull some segments from the podcast or just cut out 62nd highlights from each episode, and then post those throughout the week. So, now it's like a couple hours of activity turned into dozens of pieces of content. So you have to think about it at scale. Just this morning, I saw a new book came out, it's on Amazon. I haven't read it. It looked really cool. I almost bought it. It's called 10 x content. And it's literally was if you're creating content, here's how to make more content. So I will put that in the show notes. I thought that was a good one. Well, I take that note, why don't you read the next one?
Paul Reda: Well, I don't know the answer to it. It's Jacob Bradsheer asks, Why use Privy if we're using Klaviyo, Kurt Why?
Kurt Elster: I like this question so much.
Paul Reda: I turned it into 10 pieces of content.
Kurt Elster: No, I went and I asked Ben from Privy. I said hey, why should someone use Privy if they're already using Klaviyo? What's the difference? My answer for me is the WYSIWYG Builder is much better in Privy like the Klaviyo pop up builders fine, but it is not as advanced as what Privy doing. So if I want to build a really fancy cool one, I could do it. But here's what Ben's answer was, Privy should be viewed as a suite of conversion tools that sit on top of your website, because you're getting a whole bunch of display formats, designed tools and targeting rules. And he gave three examples. He said, the bread and butter which is really a small subset of what Privy does is exit intent email capture. Which you can do that in Klaviyo, which is not going to look as fancy. Cart savings displays. This one's cool. So you reduce cart abandonment by looking for pre abandonment signals in the checkout flow and then you can change the pop up offer based on the value of the cart.
Paul Reda: What are pre abandonment signals?
Kurt Elster: I have no idea.
Paul Reda: Is it like how the Mouse is kind of look, the mouse is shaking back and forth. They're going No, no, I can't buy this.[inaudible 00:25:06]
Kurt Elster: You're not gonna get me website. No. So when we say cart abandonment email, it's really a checkout abandonment email. You don't get that email unless you got to step two of the checkout.
Paul Reda: Yeah, because they have to enter their email.
Kurt Elster: So what Privy does is it waits until it sees an item is added to cart and they're in the cart, and they're about to exit. And then it will fire a cart savings pop up. That's like wait, save your x whatever on your order today. And then ideally, you collect their email, and then it gives them the coupon or emails the coupon,
Paul Reda: But it's not firing that in the Shopify checkout though, right?
Kurt Elster: No, this is the cart page.
Paul Reda: So how do they know your email? Or they're trying to get the email.
Kurt Elster: They're trying to collect the email.
Paul Reda: Yeah, all right.
Kurt Elster: Or if they've already signed up at like, let's say you get a welcome offer and they signed up. Okay, now it already has your email.
Paul Reda: So just note it down?
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: And it's like I will email them later.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, well it could do it. You could say, hey, if we've already collected this person's email, don't fire subsequent pop ups.
Paul Reda: Well, that makes sense.
Kurt Elster: And then it could do cross sell displays. So you could do targeted Add To Cart displays. So essentially, you could do cross sell offers. So like, if you bought a razor, do you want the blade too? Kind of thing? So it's a little more than a pop up builder?
Paul Reda: I honestly thought you were talking about a Motorola razor. And I was like, where's this going?
Kurt Elster: I, we all love their Motorola razors.
Paul Reda: I never had one.
Kurt Elster: No?
Paul Reda: No. My first cell phone ran Windows Phone. I did not buy a cell phone until 2007. And I had a Windows Phone with a full QWERTY keyboard, and all that stuff. And then my second cell phone was the first iPhone.
Kurt Elster: Did you have a beeper, grandpa?
Paul Reda: No.
Kurt Elster: No?
Paul Reda: I just didn't like I did cell phones by who needs them? Dumb. They're dumb. I waited until the smartphones came.
Kurt Elster: You just skipped over it.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: All right. I did not have any such qualm about cell phones. I had the T nine texting down. Winston Lovers asks, Is there a step by step process used to test product pages, optimize for conversions? Do you test a certain period of time or impressions before making a decision? Right now I'm using heat maps on Hotjar was wondering if you had any other best practices and suggestions. Okay, so the two tools I use here are Hotjar for heat mapping, but also the polls in Hotjar is really my favorite thing. So I'm running on just the product page and say if you didn't un exit, you fire up a question. It says, If you didn't make purchase today, why not? And that is utterly revealing as to people's motivations. Because you here for people buy from me you're not here for the people who don't buy from you. This is a great way to do it.
Kurt Elster: And often answering those objections, those common objections that keep coming up, maybe they're complaining about price. Okay, that means you didn't do a good job of explaining the value or maybe you should offer financing or both. And there's stuff you probably didn't think of Like, I just I'm not sure what the dimensions are. Okay, include a size guide, include some frame of point of reference, put it next to a quarter, whatever it is, I don't know. But I will also use Hotjar to heat map the page. Ideally, you want 2000 views in it not so much time, but just total quantity of sessions. And if it's a big site, you'll get that in a day. And other sites that might take a couple weeks.
Paul Reda: But I think he's asking before, after you make a change, what is the correct amount of time to decide whether that change was good or not?
Kurt Elster: Well, that's a split testing questions.
Paul Reda: That is a split testing I think.
Kurt Elster: In which case, use Google Optimize, it's free, it's awesome. But it gives you a confidence interval. So it's not based on timers. It's based on sessions, not time, but it will make the call for you and go Hey, like it's got the confidence interval. You can look at it and go, all right. I've got faith that this is true.
Paul Reda: If the question is I made a change on my product page, how long should I wait to see whether that change was good or not? You're never going to know. Really because the inputs are different and constantly changing. Do you have a sale? Were your Facebook ads that week really good?
Kurt Elster: What time of year is it?
Paul Reda: What time of year is it?
Kurt Elster: Did Trump say something crazy on Twitter? That affects a stunning number of stores?
Paul Reda: It does, because it affects the markets. And I mean, we had an old client that but we could see their weekly revenue numbers changed depending on how the market was doing. Now, if the market was crap, I was like, Oh, she's gonna have crap numbers this week. And it was always true. Google optimizing split testing is really the real true way to see if changes like that work because your inputs are fluctuating and changing so much. It's just going to get lost in the noise and you're probably making changes on other spots too. And that's affecting the whole flow.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, yeah. It's definitely a squishy subjective art not a science.
Paul Reda: Yeah, it's pretty much just like, well that makes me feel... and then you do it and then your conversions are down for three days, the three days following. And you're like, Oh, no, that must have broken.
Kurt Elster: And really, it's just recency bias.
Paul Reda: Yeah, you didn't break it.
Kurt Elster: We fall back to this all the time, like a thing entirely unrelated to us breaks the site. And it's, well, whatever the last change you did conversions dropped. Was like, well, no, it's a holiday weekend, you know?
Paul Reda: Yeah, its labor day.
Kurt Elster: But recency bias-
Paul Reda: No one is shopping. Everyone's out.
Kurt Elster: ... always gets whatever the last change we made gets blamed. So I would try and be aware of their cognitive bias. I hope that answered the question or at least gave you some some starting point there. KJ Marcus asks, How do you suggest you make your business stand apart from others in a saturated market?
Paul Reda: Content?
Kurt Elster: Yes.
Paul Reda: Funny, good content. Interesting content.
Kurt Elster: I think start with sharing your story. Get out from behind the scenes. Give them that behind the scenes content, share you share your story, be your own brand evangelist, number one. You can also try going the route of educational content like right? Hire somebody to create the ultimate guide to buying x? And it's like 3000 words, and has video and photos and all right now you've got like a real educational content piece. So I think the answer is either education, your story or both.
Paul Reda: How did you give that answer without mentioning your favorite store?
Kurt Elster: Chubbies?
Paul Reda: Yes. Cause all they do is sell shorts.
Kurt Elster: I was thinking about Chubbies.
Paul Reda: They just sell shorts. That's all they do. You could buy those Chubbies shorts at 20 other stores that look exactly like that. But why does Chubbies make so much money?
Kurt Elster: Because of the storytelling behind it is phenomenal.
Paul Reda: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Well, there was that great. I forgot the name of that study. But the guy, the journalist who bought, when he bought-
Paul Reda: All that eBay fame. That was great.
Kurt Elster: ... Like 200 items on eBay for $1 each, and they're just nonsense items like a motel key, rubber Duck. Then he hired a, or got volunteers I don't know, a copywriter to write a story product description for each individual item. Then resold them all at I think was like an eight x profit. That was crazy and the only thing that changed was the items had stories attached to them now. So, I think we know empirically the answer is your story. Mary Geraldine asks, how do you choose which apps make the cut in which don't? There's so many choices and too many start to interfere with each other and slow down the website?
Paul Reda: Ask yourself if you need it. Don't install an app if it sounds cool. That's not a good valid reason. Really good. Sounds cool.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, number one, just don't start with installing it. Avoid shiny toy syndrome.
Paul Reda: Yeah. Just being like, Oh, I have this pain or problem with my store that's really holding me back. I wonder if there's an app that fixes that. That should be the starting point. Don't just go look for apps. That's my thoughts.
Kurt Elster: Well, yeah.
Paul Reda: And a couple of weeks ago, we talked about it, we were like, what are the four apps you need to have?
Kurt Elster: That was a good thought exercise.
Paul Reda: And then the rest, you don't really need.
Kurt Elster: The only thing that was annoying about that thought exercise is the number of people who replied to the tweet version of it. And we're like, I can't believe you didn't include thing that's bespoke to my business. Because, I'm terribly myopic like Meta Fields. How many people are actually using Meta Fields in their Shopify store? A minority. But there were at least two people who were shocked, shocked that I did not include Meta Fields as like that was one of the five required apps? Hardly.
Kurt Elster: Well, I think number one is fight the urge. Don't install apps if you could avoid it, unless they solve a pain or problem. Like the first one was, hey, how do you deal with returns and exchanges? All right, if returns and exchanges are eating up a bunch of your time or customer support issue, then yeah, returns manager is going to save you time, provide a better experience. So find one and install it. So the other solution, and no matter what there's going to be apps for like, that's too cool not struggle to try it. Periodically audit your apps, maybe once a quarter, set it, put it in your calendar, set a reminder in your phone every 90 days, go through your apps and go, what am I even using this for? Because oftentimes, when we do a project, people say, hey, can you help audit my apps? and there's like 40 apps installed. And I'll just talk it through them on the phone. And you'd be surprised the number of apps they got, I really don't know what that does. And they don't know.
Paul Reda: Why did you install it?
Kurt Elster: It's like it will solve some issue at the time. And we don't even know, it's like, Is it even running? So I would say review them periodically and ask yourself, what is this doing for my business? And if it's not solving a painter problem, okay, then it better be increasing revenue. And for that it should have ideally some reporting metrics in there. But if not, see, like use Google Optimize split test that widget. It's easy. You can hide widgets, with Google Optimize, or just turn the thing off for a couple weeks and see if anything happened. I think that would be the approach I take to it.
Paul Reda: Apps are bad.
Kurt Elster: We have four apps. You should install those though.
Paul Reda: Yeah, no-
Kurt Elster: Our apps are fine.
Paul Reda: Our apps are good.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Sponsors apps. Those are fine, too.
Paul Reda: Oh, yeah. Everything.
Kurt Elster: The other apps though those are evil.
Paul Reda: Listen, if you install... I'm not making any promises here. But I heard that if you install Bold app, Jay Myers, the CEO of Bold will come to your house and thank you.
Kurt Elster: Oh, yeah?
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Wow.
Paul Reda: They're doing that now.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Paul Reda: It's like if you donate money to Elizabeth Warren, she might just call you and talk to you about stuff?
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Paul Reda: You install Bold app, Jay Myers might come to your house.
Kurt Elster: Okay. Yeah, let's go on record with that. Jay is very, he is nice by Canadian standards. He's the nicest you can get.
Paul Reda: He's one of the nicest dudes I've ever met.
Kurt Elster: Oh, for sure. Tom Humphries says ways to improve signup forms by using Data. I use a Mailchimp built in pop up form I'm not sure if there's a way to see what percent of people actually sign up. If I knew that I could try different versions of pop up to optimize it follow up question top headline ideas for pop ups apart from would you like 10% off?
Paul Reda: That sounds like a damn good headline to me. I would like 10% off.
Kurt Elster: Like yeah, I do. No, I don't want to say money.
Paul Reda: Yeah, people...
Kurt Elster: Theree's a reason you see that pop up offer a lot?
Paul Reda: Don't try to get too cute with it. You're just [crosstalk 00:36:26] It's just offering money people a coupon that's just like cheating. I gotta find like a better way to do it. Is that cheating? It works. Just do the thing that works.[crosstalk 00:36:37]
Kurt Elster: Nobody wants to get into discounting.
Paul Reda: They should.
Kurt Elster: Well, it's cause it's an easy thing to offer to. Otherwise, I have to offer something educational, and again it's like pulling teeth to get people to do copywriting. I'm not familiar with MailChimp, but I refuse to believe that they can't give you opt in rate percentages. Like just email their support and ask. And if they say no, then stop using MailChimp, cause that is so basic. You need stats to be able to know if this thing is working or not.
Paul Reda: Yeah, if they tell you that you're just like trapped in 2007, looking for analytics, like don't listen to them anymore.
Kurt Elster: No, I would not. Run screaming from that page. So I would look at, you need to be able to look at opt in rate. And that's how, number one, you want to see that opt in rate. And then ideally, see if you could figure out a conversion rate on that pop up as well. And that's where like the fancier pop up builders can do that they can tell you what the conversion or acceptance rate is. And then you can test different offers. That way. I can tell you the most successful opt ins we do. involved start with a micro commitment. So you say Hey, would you like to save? Would you like 10% off today? Yes, no, you don't just do the email address. So, if you can get them to say yes. Then you ask them all right, here's the catch. I need your email address and then they enter their email address.
Kurt Elster: That will have a significantly higher opt in rate. I'm running that exact setup that offer on a couple stores right now. And there are consistently doing 10% opt in rate, which is extraordinary. The other thing to consider is quality of traffic or quality of the opt ins. So like those spin to win, those will often do a high opt in rate as well. But the quality of the email is not good.
Paul Reda: So, those people don't react to the email is what you're saying?
Kurt Elster: Often it could be a fake email. So you want to make sure you have double opt in turned on. Or it's just like drive by. There is a cost to getting more people into the email. If they're just less engaged and interested. They just want it, was I just wanted to see if I'd get some for free.
Paul Reda: Whereas if you give them the 10% off coupon, they're using that dang coupon, hopefully, well. And the way you do that is, give the coupon code an expiration because then you could email them multiple times being like that codes about to expire. You better buy something and then you push them into buying something.
Kurt Elster: That's the other thing with a welcome pop up. You need a welcome series to back it up where you remind them of the coupon you've got. You're creating that urgency, but then you're also telling your story and you're introducing them to the brand, the team, the product, why they should buy that kind of thing. And when I talk to people Klaviyo Boston so many, what's your favorite flow? A lot of people were like welcome series. That's the one that makes the money.
Kurt Elster: All right, final question. We got a black friday question Kim Otterburn says any outside the box Black Friday promotion ideas, I'm thinking perhaps 15% discount. Then we donate 5% to homeless charity and they do homework to keep it appropriate to their brand. Have you seen any other cool initiatives other than just a single discount? Yes. So single discount tried and true. It works. You aren't sure what to do. Just run store wide X percent off Black Friday. You don't have to complicate it if you don't want to. If you want to get fancy. Two things I like free gift with purchase.
Paul Reda: Oh, yeah.
Kurt Elster: That one always works. So you can use...
Paul Reda: Shopify scripts.
Kurt Elster: Shopify scripts and theme customization to do it. If you're not on Plus, you could use ultimate special offers that kind of thing to do it. The other one I like and this would either involve a series of coupon codes or ideally Shopify scripts is tiered discounts, spend $50, get 10% off, spend $100, get 15% off, spend $200 get 20% off. So now we've got three discounts tied to spending. And you really want to dial this thing in, you'd put a little bit of liquid logic in the cart. So it says Congrats, you save 10% on your order. You're only $40 away from saving 15% and then so you nudge them along and through this discount ladder.
Paul Reda: Yeah, and you need Shopify scripts to do that, and it's super worth it though. And it pays off but you need scripts and plus to do that, but the current liquid for that is really easy. That can be knocked out Quickly.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, like 15 minutes to get that-
Paul Reda: That last card.
Kurt Elster: We've already got the code for that.
Paul Reda: It's adds super worthwhile to do it. The donations like we donate, whatever those always smell scarmy to me. I don't really think you're doing that. I think you're just keeping the money. And it doesn't help by the fact that we've talked to multiple potential clients that did that, that made that a big part of their marketing and their outward facing stuff. And to the man, they were all dicks. Like they all were well, but I donate to all these charities. It's like you're a dick. They've always been next to us people that push how good they are with that.
Kurt Elster: I have noticed that especially doing app support. The people aware the primary focus and message is charity are always so rude. That's very bizarre. And I've heard other Shopify partners say this too, and I can't imagine what it is that does that. I find it consistently surprising and disheartening. We did once for a brand split test the presence of that Charity message.
Paul Reda: Oh yeah, we did.
Kurt Elster: It made no difference.
Paul Reda: Made no difference.
Kurt Elster: Nobody cared.
Paul Reda: No one cares. They're there to buy a thing. They're not there to be like, Oh, well, I wasn't gonna buy this. But since you might give four bucks to a homeless shelter, I'm not even sure if you're going to.
Kurt Elster: It depends on the audience cause there was another store. It was a clothing store, they donated to a women's shelter. And when we did customer surveys that came up as one of the number two reason people bought [inaudible 00:42:28] cause it alleviates their guilt about spending the money. So it really depends on I mean, it's like selling anything else. What you're donating to is an offer. So, is that a compelling offer for that audience at that time? And there's really no way of knowing. I think the issue people get into with cause marketing is they assume it's like icing on the cake. If I just donate 5% of my profit, then hopefully people will spend more money. It's not necessarily the case.
Paul Reda: Well, and I think that consumers have got burned before like, they know that every frickin month the NFL is doing some different thing that's all it's really doing is just lining various NFL executives pockets like that money's not going to actually help people. So they know that's happening in other places. So it's probably making people jaded in general.
Kurt Elster: So, I think like, with cause marketing, you have to, you got to put your money where your mouth is and really backup the message.
Paul Reda: If you could tell the story. I mean...
Kurt Elster: If its part of your story. Yeah,
Paul Reda: One, especially like the women's shelter one. I mean, there's documentation like of this women's shelter, and it's like you make it part of your content marketing. It's like, here's the place here are the people they help like they are for real.
Kurt Elster: And that's what they did. It was part of the welcome series.
Paul Reda: Yeah, I am really doing this. Like that's different than just, oh, now the product page has a banner on it saying, trust me, I'm going to give some money to this place. If you buy bullshit.
Kurt Elster: You're right. That is the difference. Like a badge on a site doesn't mean anything. The story is what is going to be compelling.
Paul Reda: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Cool. Uh, are there any Black Friday sales? You're looking out for? Any items you need?
Paul Reda: No. Well, the outer worlds it's coming out super into that game that comes out on Friday. It's made by the guy obsidian one of my top game developers they made the original Fallout. Fallout New Vegas, love the Fallout series. So very excited for that game. Other than that, I'm just mad that Comcast took Turner Classic Movies off my Comcast here.
Kurt Elster: What, really isn't that like the whole sole thing keeping you from cord cutting?
Paul Reda: Yes, the sole thing keeping me from cord cutting is Turner Classic Movies. Well, and I guess I don't know. I like flipping around sometimes, but and the sole reason I'm on the tier I'm on is because it was the cheapest tier that had Turner Classic Movies. It's also the Hispanic tier. So I have a lot of Spanish channels.
Kurt Elster: So it's very useful for you?
Paul Reda: Yeah, I love it. But so then they moved it in. It's not a higher tier. It's its own separate package of like 12 channels. They're like, well, if you want any of these 12 channels, you gotta pay an extra either 10 to 20 bucks a month. So it's like, I kind of feel like I have to call them and then downgrade my tear. And then by the add on package, so the price ends up being the same, but-
Kurt Elster: Until they get you back in the contract, and it's a whole...
Paul Reda: Yeah, and obviously I'm reticent to do that. So I'm just like, I've been stewing for like a week without any TCM, which is the worst for both worlds.
Kurt Elster: And I'm just using over the air antenna and streaming. And I have got no regrets.
Paul Reda: Yeah, I mean, the Criterion started their own streaming service. But like all the Criterion movies are I think, I'm not sure of this, but I think a lot of the Criterion in content is all like extremely good movies. Whereas I just want to turn on some old thing and have it wash over me and it's like a weird old musical from like, 1937 that's not gonna be on Criterion, but it's like I wouldn't want to watch that.
Kurt Elster: See, when I'm in one of those moods I that's where I fire up Tubi.
Paul Reda: Pluto.
Kurt Elster: Pluto is good too.
Paul Reda: Pluto is great.
Kurt Elster: Pluto and Tubi. I've watched a lot of MTV Cribs on Pluto. I'm all up on what T-pains' house look like 10 years ago.
Paul Reda: 10 years ago?
Kurt Elster: Yeah, probably more than that.
Paul Reda: FifteenT.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. All right. We'll wrap it up there. I asked Santa for an air fryer was my thing.
Paul Reda: Oh, they're good. All my wife makes, my wife Emily. She makes spicy chicken sandwiches in the air fryer. They are the best thing in the world. I love them.
Kurt Elster: Well, our air fryer broke and it turned. The issue with air fryer, you've got that tiny basket. There's a thing called a Convection Toaster Oven.
Paul Reda: Oh, yeah.
Kurt Elster: It's big air fryer. It works the same way but without the limitation. So I asked Santa for a Convection Toaster Oven. Really.
Paul Reda: Really getting your list in early.
Kurt Elster: Yes. Well, it's always a hassle every year for it's my mother-in-law's like, all right, what do you got? What's everybody wants for Christmas this year? And then it's like, well, I'm an adult. It's hard to come up with Christmas ideas. Christmas gift ideas for yourself. I always tell my mom what, Randy moss said straight cash homie. That's very, I got nothing. Anyway, if you want to submit a topic request or a question we ask every two weeks in our Facebook group, just search, the unofficial Shopify podcast, join our insider's club on Facebook. And look for my happy face on a thread. I would be happy to answer your question in our next episode. And if you haven't yet, leave a review. I'm addicted to them. I need reviews to live.
Paul Reda: I think you're a good boy.
Kurt Elster: Oh, thank you. Oh, I needed that affirmation. Alright, see you guys. Bye.