One Stop Shop

1. Finish the process. It’s like planting a tree: it’s better to plant a coconut tree first and take care of it until it grows fully, rather than to plant a coconut seed first, then change your mind and replace it with a mango seed, then with an avocado seed, then with an orange seed – if you do it this way, you’ll never see your tree grow because you didn’t stick with it long enough. Focus on a single marketing strategy first and stick with it until you reach the point of learning where you’ll learn one of the following: How valuable something is to your business’ growth. For example, this strategy is effective since it added $500/month into your revenue. Great! How can you work on this so it’ll grow to $1,000/month or even more? Or; How not valuable something is to your business’ growth: If it’s not moving the needle, and you don’t see any significant results happening, then great! At least you learned from it so you can now move onto testing other strategies that may work for you. You can only reach this point of learning when you “exhaust” a specific tactic – when you start it, stick with it, and eventually get to the bottom of it. 2. Focus on the ones with positive results. Once you’ve done this, the next part is focusing on the strategies that work for you and doubling down on them. Take your customer support, for example. If your customer support is top-notch and you can convert 50 customers a month through referrals alone, you know it works, so how can you double down on this? 3. Figure out how you can improve it. You want to get the best results that can help grow your ecommerce store over time, right? In our example earlier, perhaps you can automate the administrative tasks associated with this so you can deliver a more personal touch to every customer interaction and increase your conversion to 100 customers a month? There isn’t a marketing strategy that’s one-size-fits-all, so dedicate some of your resources to find out what works for you and then making the best out of it. Two caveats on this advice, though: In my earlier video about “The Last 5% May Not Be Worth It”, I talk about the idea that even if you’re doubling down on something, you’ll reach a point where the marginal gain won’t be the same anymore since you’ve already reached the point of learning. You don’t need to double down on a specific strategy forever. Once you’ve reached this point where there’s no obvious viable improvement anymore, it’s time to move on to the implementation of the next strategy. Also, remember the Pareto principle which says that 80% of your sales comes from 20% of your top marketing strategies? It applies to this concept, too. You can spend 80% of your time working on the strategies I’ve mentioned on this blog post today, and then spend the remaining 20% into experimentation. Go ahead and try out something completely new, something you’ve never heard of before, or maybe even something that’s trending in your industry today, and find out if it works for you. If it does, then, double down on it until you reach the point of learning again. I hope this concept can help you grow your business by focusing on a tried-and-tested system that works and optimizing it for the best results for you. This way, there’s a certain reliability factor that can help you move forward efficiently and effectively so you can reach that much desired sustainability of your business. See you again next week, then! Cheers.

Consolidate your customer communications in a central inbox. Simply put, use a help desk software so you have a central platform that focuses solely on customer service needs. I know what you’re thinking -- you need to spend money! But before you close this tab on your browser, hear me out first: a) there are lots of help desk solutions out there so you’re guaranteed to find one that fits your budget; and b) it’s worth investing in this platform because you don’t want any customer communication to fall through the cracks, do you? If you don’t have any central inbox to consolidate your customer communications, there’s a higher chance that a customer’s message will be forgotten, overlooked, or even accidentally ignored. The #1 reason why customers switch to a new brand is because they feel underappreciated. Not replying to your customer’s message sends them the message that you don’t care about them. And you don’t want this to happen, do you? It’s also more convenient to onboard other team members to help you with customer service if you have a central customer service platform to train them on. This way, the process is more streamlined, structured and easier to get the hang of. Be owner-involved in customer service. Your customers are the life of your business. If you don’t have any happy customers, you won’t have any business in the first place! That’s why it’s important for you to be involved in customer service and interact with your customers as well. This way, you can learn from them, find out what areas of your business you need to improve on, and generally keep your pulse on your business. Sure, you also need to delegate customer service to your trusted team members, and you also need the time to work on other areas of your business, but whenever you have extra time, you can also do customer service-related tasks accordingly. Build a knowledge base of documentation and canned replies. Customers prefer knowledge bases over other self-service channels. You can build your own brand’s knowledge base by taking note of frequently asked questions and the most common customer concerns whenever you respond to your customers’ messages. Check your customer support inbox. What are your customers’ top ten most common concerns? What do they usually complain about? What needs do your customers want to be taken cared of? Create a list of articles about these and direct your customers’ attention to these articles as necessary. You can also craft high fidelity, detailed replies that answer their most common concerns. Use these as templates that you can personalize and tweak before sending to specific customers. Doing this helps you kill three birds with one stone: You save valuable resources in responding to your customer’s concern; Your customers receive personalized messages that help resolve their concern; and, You can quickly onboard your customer service team because there’s already a knowledge base they can refer to and a collection of detailed templates they can use Beware of live chat. Yes, in today’s world of instant gratification, offering a live chat function makes sense. After all, 42% of customers want to communicate with companies via live chat. If you can respond within 5 minutes of your customer’s message, and you can do this consistently, then offer live chat. But if you’re not available to respond within 5 minutes, it’s better for you not to offer live chat in the first place. Imagine sending someone a live chat message and not getting any reply after 5-10 minutes -- you’d feel underappreciated, too, wouldn’t you? Here’s a better solution: direct them to email instead. More customers (62%) prefer email over live chat (42%) anyway. Include a reminder that your customer service team will get back to them in an hour or two. This way, your customer’s expectations are managed better. Additionally, customers believe that emails should be responded to within 24 hours, so if you respond within 1-2 hours, then your customers will be pleasantly surprised. Another win for the both of you, don’t you think? Hopefully these tips can help you have better structures and subsequently, better conversations with your customers! That’s it for me today - now, over to you. What tip do you think is the easiest to start working on? Let me know in the comments below. See you next week! Cheers.

Figure out your skills and focus on the business-related activities you enjoy. The idea of “do what you love and you never have to work another day in your life” seemed to be a lie - when you were starting out in business, you didn’t have the luxury to do only the things you love because you had to do a lot of things, even things you don’t necessarily enjoy doing. Now that you’re scaling your business, though, you’ll have the joy of sitting down, figuring out what your greatest strengths & enjoyable tasks are, and delegating them to someone else in your team. Do you want to focus more on sales and spend less time on bookkeeping? Or spend 80% of your time on product development to build a sustainable business, so you want to delegate your inventory-related tasks to someone else? Find out what your weaknesses or your least enjoyable tasks are. Then, delegate them to someone who’s more qualified than you are. Your investment on doing proper delegation will be worth it. After all, you’re in it for the long run, right? Hire a part-time assistant to help you with customer service and support. As an entrepreneur, your mental space is one of your greatest assets. That’s why it’s important that you hire a virtual assistant or a freelancer (even on a part-time basis!) to clear up some of your mental overhead. This way, you don’t exhaust your mental energy by focusing on these tasks only: you’re still involved with customer support and service, but you’ll have an assistant helping you along the way. Like the captain of a ship, you’ll still be in charge as you supervise your crew as sail through the rough seas. You get to prevent burnout and improve your customer service at the same time. Talk about hitting two birds with one stone, right? Batch similar tasks as much as possible. Batching is a productivity hack that encourages you to do similar tasks all at once. Think of batching as grocery-shopping: you don’t want go to the store every single day to pick up food, right? You’d waste your precious time and energy! Instead, you sit down, take note of your stock, plan your meals, and go to the grocery every week. Personally, since I release weekly videos for Conversio, I batch my video recordings accordingly. This allows me to maximize my productivity and optimize my mental space to focus on a specific task for a scheduled period of time. You can batch customer support and product shipping by doing them everyday - but only on specific schedules like doing them for an hour during morning and afternoon, instead of getting stuck on doing them several times in a day. Additionally, you can also dedicate a specific time to batch a whole week’s social media content once a week. Or even batch your email newsletters by drafting them one month in advance. There you have it. I hope these tips will help you scale your business successfully, without losing your sanity! As entrepreneurs, we should not be burning out - even the longest candle will burn out if you light it forever. That’s why I’ve made these tips that I hope you find helpful. Let me know what your valuable insights are, and see you again next week! Learn with our FREE Ecommerce Academy: conversio.com/academy Music featured in this episode was "Celery Man" by Birocratic and can be found at @birocratic.

Monitor your bad reviews so you can respond on a timely manner. Have a system that notifies you each time you receive a bad review. For example, with Conversio, you can choose to be notified of reviews which achieve a certain rating (or less) and you customize the rating level. So you might pick 3 stars or less, or 1 star ratings only. Strike while the iron is hot so you can increase the possibility of your customer engaging with you. This can also diffuse the tension and communicate how much you care about your customers. On average, 53% of customers expect businesses to reply to their online reviews within seven days so can you imagine the positive impact to your customer when you reply to their online review in less than an hour? Empathize with your customer and never ever be defensive. Be sincere when apologizing but be objective when assessing the bad review you’ve received. Start with a sincere “Hey, John, I’m really sorry about [reason why they’re upset].” This statement shows that you’re listening to them – you’re open to start a meaningful conversation with them and you’re accepting that the situation may be something that you’re partly responsible for. Once you’ve apologized, address the customer’s concern or issue and fix it accordingly. If they’ve received a defective product, apologize and tell them that you’ve sent a replacement immediately. If they’ve received an item on a later date than expected, you can’t really fix slow delivery since it already happened. So if you can’t fix something that already happened, offer a simple compensation to make up for your mistake. Giving them store credit, a discount code, a freebie or even a refund (in extreme cases) works. Just remember to always apologize first. After all, 37% of customers are satisfied with service recovery when they are offered something of monetary value (e.g., a refund or credit) but their satisfaction doubles to 74% when there’s an apology on top of the compensation. The goal here is to improve your customer’s impression of you: from a one-star review, perhaps you can shift it to a 4-star or even a 5-star review instead. Sounds corny, but handling a bad review is like turning your customer’s frown upside down. Not everyone will be 100% pleased with your product & service, but it’s worth a try, right? If you were successful in improving your customer’s impression of your business, ask for an updated review. Once you’ve established that your customer is now satisfied with the resolution of their concern, and you’ve managed to turn that frown upside down, it’s now time to ask for an updated review from them. With Conversio, they can simply submit a new review via the email request or review form and it will overwrite the old one. It’s better if they mention that they had concerns before, and that you were helpful in rectifying this. This way, you’re not only selling your high-quality product – you’re also guaranteeing great customer service to go with the product you’re offering. Not to mention the added bonus that if you resolve a complaint in your customer’s favor, they’ll do business with you again 70% of the time. And who would say no to repeated customers, right? Hopefully, this three-step process helps you to better address bad reviews in the future.

As an entrepreneur for nearly 13 years, I’ve had two life-changing realizations: One, wow, has it been more than a decade already? And two, there’s no such thing as a perfect entrepreneur or a 100% successful venture. Spending all your time, energy and resources to achieve perfection might not be viable anymore, considering that your to-do list as an entrepreneur is seemingly never-ending. Sometimes, the last 5% is probably not worth it. Talking about this reminds me of the blog post that Derek Sivers, CD Baby founder, wrote entitled “Relax for the same result”. Derek used to bike 15 miles every day. He used to do full-on biking, as in pedal to the metal, red-faced, rockstar biking that left him exhausted. Doing this -- giving his full, maximum effort -- gave him 43 minutes. Over time, though, he started to link exhaustion and tiredness with the act of biking, so he felt tedious and less enthusiastic about it. That’s why he decided to give 50% of his usual effort instead. Doing so made him notice things, live in the present more, and actually enjoy his bike ride. The best part? His time was 45 minutes -- only two minutes more than his usual! So for him, giving 100% of his effort resulted in 43 minutes; whereas giving only 50% and taking it easy resulted in 45 minutes, plus, he even got to enjoy it more as he wasn’t stressed and wasn’t exhausted about the ride. Considering that the time difference between 100% effort and 50% effort was only 2 minutes, that last percent of effort didn’t give a significant result so it wasn’t probably worth it. It doesn’t matter how much the actual percentage is. What matters is that aiming for perfection -- for 100%, for the maximum effort -- in your business isn’t realistic. When you come to the point where the result you get isn’t really greater than the effort you make to get that result, it’s not viable anymore. After all, investing 50% of your resources and achieving 23% is much better than putting in 80% and receiving 25%, right? How does this translate to your business? Take email design, for example. In my video “How Anyone Can Design and Send Beautiful Emails”, I talked about not custom-designing your emails and sticking to tried-and-tested templates instead. Why? The trade-off isn’t viable. Your time, money, and effort to custom-design your email may be greater than the direct and indirect profit you receive from doing it. The marginal gains may be off and you may be better off developing other core components of your business that can achieve a significant impact in your company’s growth. Having two businesses worth multi-million dollars under my belt, I can say with absolute certainty that you don’t really need to achieve super-duper expert level in all aspects of your business. You don’t need to be perfect because perfection doesn’t exist. You can approach this with a bootstrapper’s mindset: when inputs are scarce, maximize the output. Because when your time, money and energy are limited, the best thing you need to do is to make the most out of it. Know the phrase, “get the best bang for your buck”? It’s similar, but you want to find the best bang for your time, money and energy. Another concept that applies to this idea is the Pareto principle: for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. This means that for your business, 80% of the profit may come from 20% of your clients. Or 80% of your company’s growth may come from only 20% of your activities, such as setting up a better marketing funnel, or a more improved internal system for efficiency. The key here is to find the best input to output ratio so you can focus more of your resources into doing things that actually improve the growth of your business. I want to hear from you: have you ever had an experience where doing something in your business led you to the point of wondering if giving your absolute 100% resources is absolutely worthwhile? Let me know in the comments below. See you next week. Cheers.

Note: Before we go to the main course, here’s a tasty treat for your appetizer: I’m giving away ONE ticket to the “Running Remote Conference” where I’ll be speaking in this June in Bali, Indonesia. If you’re interested in remote working, this is one conference you can’t miss. Make sure to join here as this giveaway ends in a couple of days! Everyone wants to have a slice of the remote working pie. After all, being a “digital nomad” who can “work from anywhere” so they can live the “laptop lifestyle” gives them the freedom to earn money and still enjoy their time with their loved ones, right? You don’t even need to log on to Instagram to check out the remote working trend. Stripe, the payment processor, recently announced that they would have an office exclusively for remote workers, even though they have offices worldwide. Additionally, a Citrix study shows that 50% of the workforce will be office-free by 2020. Can you imagine a world where half of the working population will be working from the comforts of their own home? It’s also possible, considering that the remote workforce has increased by 140% since 2005. While the idea of remote working sounds great to the remote workers, the entrepreneurs involved in the hiring and team-building process find it a bit daunting. After all, how can you trust someone to actually hire them and work with them, even though you haven’t met them before? How do you build a remote team if you don’t have any experience with the process? Before you paralyse yourself with all these questions, take a deep breath and get your favorite drink as I help you start building your own remote team by discussing the 3-step process in today’s podcast. You can start building a remote team by hiring: Freelancer or Consultant Hiring a freelancer or a consultant is a great start since you’ll be exposed to the wonders of remote working without feeling overwhelmed. To start the hiring process, you can work with them by assigning a project to them first and consider future collaborations if you’re satisfied with their work and the results they bring in. There’s no full-time commitment yet and you can test your work compatibility with them by communicating with them via email or video/voice check-ins. Your freelancer or consultant needs to be professional and reliable enough since they’ll be managing themselves. There’s no need to micro-manage them since you’ll be working with them on a per-project basis and they’ll invoice you accordingly. Virtual Assistant Now that you have a little bit of hiring experience for a remote team, the next step is to hire a virtual assistant who can help you with customer support or administrative tasks. Normally, you’d be advised to hire someone working at the same time zone as you -- but isn’t it actually better to hire an assistant who won’t be working at the same hours as you do? This will give you the necessary experience to deal with your remote team in the future. After all, your team will be all over the world, right? In hiring a virtual assistant, you’ll ultimately be responsible for them, so the best way you can handle this is by working on a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) you can use to train them effectively and efficiently. You can also apply here the communication channels and processes that you’ve learned by working with a freelancer/consultant first. Nurture your relationship with your virtual assistant: it’s a win-win situation that gives you more experience to work on building your remote team and allows you to win back some of your resources, too. Full-Time Hire You can get your full-time employee by evolving their relationship from a freelancer/consultant to an official member of your remote team. This way, you already know that you have professional compatibility and you’re guaranteed that their work output will be satisfactory. Another pathway you can get full-time employees is by posting on job boards that are focused on remote working opportunities. In a world where freelancers and remote workers are forecasted to be the majority of the US workforce by 2027, hiring someone full-time means you’ll treat team exactly the way you would treat someone who’s an official part of your team, regardless of the physical boundaries. After all, you’re all working towards the same goal -- to boost your company’s growth, aren’t you? If I had to do it over again, I’d still build a remote team for Conversio. And you’ll get to hear more about my personal experience in building a remote team by listening to my talk over at the Running Remote Conference in Bali. Join our giveaway and win your free ticket here! See you next week. Learn with our FREE Ecommerce Academy: conversio.com/academy Music featured in this episode was "Celery Man" by Birocratic and can be found at @birocratic.

Should content be king, and strategy be the king’s advisors, then visual identity is definitely the queen. Sure, the most important element in your email is your content since it has to resonate well with your target customers. Compelling content helps motivate your customers to do whatever action you need them to do, right? Whether it’s buying, referring or subscribing. Now, for the great content to be engaging, it also needs to be sent strategically by optimizing it via personalization, timing and segmentation. These elements, as discussed in my podcast, “4-Step Checklist To Effectively Boost Your Engagement in Email Marketing”, help drive email engagement up and boost your sales over the long run. But these aren’t enough. Visual impression of the email matters, too. This is why 51% of B2B marketers prioritize visual assets creation as part of their content marketing strategy. In this week’s podcast, I’m going to help you design beautiful, engaging and great-looking emails. Spoiler alert: I’m definitely not a designer, so you can guarantee that these tips are for everyone who needs them. 1. Use a tried-and-tested email template that just works I agree that custom-designed emails are amazing. They’re great tools to solidify your branding identity and keep your business at top of mind. However, designing custom emails take up a lot of time and investment -- resources that are better spent on growing your business and taking it to the next level. Just think of the 80-20 principle: custom-designed emails don’t necessarily outperform templates by much, so why would you “improve” it when you can improve other elements of your business that are directly related to boosting your revenue instead? You’re not sending a Christmas card to your family, so you don’t need to customize and overthink every single thing. You’re better off using a good email template, once that’s been stress-tested in multiple browsers and has a good design language, as your foundation for your email’s visual identity. If you’re still within the early stages of your brand’s growth, if it works (and it doesn’t have a significant impact yet), don’t stress too much about it. 2. Use better imagery in your emails Now that your template is done, focus on the image you’re going to be using. As I’ve mentioned in my previous video, “One Action Rule”, the simple formula to create super-performing emails is a striking and related image + brief but consistent and relevant copy + one compelling call-to-action. Since you’ll be using one image in your email, it needs to convey exactly what your content is talking about. This single image has the power to make or break your email so it has to be impressive to catch your reader’s attention and relevant to keep the momentum going. HardGraft practices this simple recipe into their emails. You can check out several examples of their appealing emails here -- and when I say appealing, I mean it: after all, I am one of their customers! Observe how the images they use are striking enough to make an impression and appealing enough to encourage you to scroll down. I’m leaving you with these two tips for today. Is there any other tip for creating beautiful images you’d like to add? Let me know in the comments below. Cheers. Learn with our FREE Ecommerce Academy: conversio.com/academy Music featured in this episode was "Celery Man" by Birocratic and can be found at @birocratic.

Revenue -- such music to an entrepreneur’s ears! After all, it feels extremely great to know that implementing a strategy results in revenue to your company, right? But did you know that revenue can be achieved directly and indirectly? You ran an ad campaign and your target customers purchased from you so you got $13,000 in sales? That’s direct revenue. You implemented an abandoned cart recovery campaign so you made an extra $5,000 in profit? That’s direct revenue. Direct revenue is the obvious result of your marketing strategies: an increase in profit. Beyond direct revenue, though, there’s another magical realm where fairies, unicorns, Doctor Strange and indirect revenue exist. And it’s good if you implement a marketing strategy that results in direct revenue. But isn’t it better if you can run a strategy that achieves both direct and indirect revenue at the same time because it’s optimized for both? Your time, investment and efforts will be the same but you get to hit two birds with one stone. In this week’s podcast, I’m going to help you achieve exactly this. In the spirit of having your cake and eating it, too, the inspiration to share the concept of indirect revenue came when I was doing a case study for one of Conversio’s customers, Pastreez, an online shop selling beautiful and yummy macarons (French cookies). As a Conversio client, Pastreez’ lead magnet is simple and enticing enough: sign up at their website pop-up for free so you can receive 7 pieces of macarons for free. Once they’ve received the voucher for the free macarons, they’ll also be included in a nurturing email campaign to encourage sales over time. In this scenario, the direct revenue is simple. For example, if you’ve sent 100 emails and made $500 from them, then $500 is the direct revenue. Now, checking at the case study of Pastreez, I’ve noticed that the direct revenue seemed promising -- an additional $10,000 in direct revenue for them, spread over ~2500 email recipients in a 3-part email campaign is great, right? But that wasn’t the end of it. There were also extra benefits in the name of indirect benefit that I’ve monitored: 1. Higher Average Order Value Customers who went through this specific email campaign by Conversio had 23.57% higher Average Order Value (AOV) compared to customers who didn’t experience this campaign. This is massively beneficial in terms of boosting Customer Lifetime Value and direct revenue. Just imagine: if your AOV is $300, and it’s increased by 23.57%, you get to have an additional $70 in sales -- for every customer! 2. Higher Repeat Purchase Rate Another hidden benefit of indirect revenue is the increase of repeat purchase rate: customers who experienced this specific email campaign made 2.56% more purchases compared to the rest of the brand’s customers. This is amazing news because a) it’s easier to sell to engaged customers who purchase repeatedly; and, b) repeat customers tend to spend 3%-15% more. So in a way, this indirect revenue affects your direct revenue, too. 3. Improved Cart Recovery Rate Sure, 10.7% of customers who receive recovery emails return to make a purchase. But Pastreez’ number was off-the-charts: they had a 50% increase of the overall cart recovery rate! This means that the overall email campaign was effective over the long run since it had a momentum going that encouraged the prospects to buy from them, even though it took two to three emails to make this happen. Figuring out the hidden benefits also allows you to decide on whether or not a strategy is worth investing on: since you’ll be considering at least two metrics that’ll help you determine your ROI, you can make better investment decisions so your company can move forward. Also, indirect revenue encourages you to look beyond the obvious metric -- sales in terms of numbers -- so you can also look into optimizing your email campaigns for both direct and indirect revenue. So there you have it. I hope this video helps you with your company’s growth as a brand and as a business! Any other insights you’d like to add? Let me know in the comments below. Chat to you next week! Cheers. Learn with our FREE Ecommerce Academy: conversio.com/academy Music featured in this episode was "Celery Man" by Birocratic and can be found at @birocratic. This podcast was produced by comealivecreative.com.

Sure, knowing that customers rated discounts in email as the biggest influence on their purchase decisions counts. But this doesn’t mean you should just hand out discount coupons to everyone in your mailing list, of course. Consider your prospects who recently gave you their email addresses to sign up to your mailing list. At this stage, they’re still warm leads, right? They gave their email addresses as a way to engage with your brand, so you’re not necessarily required to give them a discount code at your first contact with them. You already got their attention. Now, the story changes if after a week or two, they still haven’t bought from you. At this stage, they’re becoming less warm: there may be less interest or less engagement with your brand. This is when sending a small discount -- $10 off their purchase or 5% off -- makes sense. This is what the Heat Map Method of Better Discounting is all about. Take every customer category (prospect, first-time customer, repeated customer, inactive customer) and place them on the “heat map”. Warm customers are those who are highly engaged, meaning, those who recently subscribed to your list, or those who recently bought from you. Less warm customers are those who have been inactive for a specified time frame: those who’ve never bought from you, those who bought from you one year ago, or those who repeatedly bought from you in the past but abruptly stopped doing business with you. Your customer is “warm”? Don’t send an email just yet. They’re “less warm”? Better get started on sending those discount coupons. Now, this idea isn’t limited to your customer categories only. You can apply the Heat Map Method of Better Discounting to your abandoned cart emails as well. For your first recovery email, don’t send a discount code yet. Remind them of their abandoned cart. Find out what stopped them from finalizing their purchase. Listen to what they have to say first. Then, if by the second and third emails, they still haven’t made their purchase yet, then by all means, include a discount code in your email so you can motivate them to finalize the transaction. Pro tip: most customers want percentage off discounts (35%) and free shipping (20%) so keep these in mind when considering what kind of discount scheme you’ll offer in your email. The “colder” a customer is, the better it is for you to do discounting. Simple, sweet, and straight-to-the-point, right? I hope you find this video helpful! Any insights you’d like to add? Let me know in the comments section below. See you next week! Ciao.

How do you eat an elephant? Do you open your mouth as wide as possible and hope you can eat it all at once? No, of course not. That’s crazy! You eat it one bite at a time. The same principle applies to improving customer experience on your website so you can increase your conversion rate. You don’t do a major makeover and hope your conversion rate jumps from an average of 2% to a whopping 20% overnight. That’s impossible. Instead, you tweak your website’s elements bit by bit and aim for a realistic improvement from 2% to 2.2% conversion rate. Sure, the figures may seem small when you look at it superficially. But have you considered the extra revenue you can earn just by doing small changes in your website? You can start improving your website – and your customer’s experience – by doing these small tricks I talk about in today’s podcast. Imagine walking into a brick-and-mortar store and just being bombarded by 20 different employees asking you what you want to buy, how they can help you, why you should sign up to their exclusive list, or what your target budget is. It’s irritating. It’s overwhelming. It’s confusing. Right? So if your prospect visits your website and sees a lot of things happening: a pop-up appearing, multiple widgets loading, and several things flashing on the screen at the same time, it’s the same thing. They feel targeted. They feel attacked. They feel overwhelmed. And you bet they’re going to want to leave your website as quickly as possible. Unless you do these three things to improve your customer experience, of course: Log out of your admin dashboard and browse through your website in the eyes of a prospect. Here’s where a change in perspective comes in handy. Instead of checking your website as an administrator, think of yourself as a guest. Another advantage of doing this tip is it gives you the opportunity to view your website with all its features. Sometimes, the website development team tends to add a lot of widgets and pop-ups because they’re logged in as admin so they can’t view everything, so logging out and viewing in a private browser window helps you fix this by seeing all the website elements first-hand. Think of pop-ups, for example. If you’ve set your pop-up to appear every 3 days only, and you’ve already seen it, whenever you test it while you’re logged in, you may not see it any more so you tend to add another pop-up to really capture your market. Before you know it, you already have 3 pop-ups and 2 widgets. The only way you can know about this is if you view the site in a private browsing window and see for yourself – kind of like putting yourself in your prospects’ shoes, isn’t it? Create contextual and relevant pop-ups with trigger, instead of showing it all the time. You and I both know that pop-up works. Sure, Sumo even discovered that top performing 10% of pop-up forms convert at a whopping 9.3%. But you also need to consider the fact that intrusive pop-ups are overwhelming and sometimes, irritating enough to negatively affect your customer experience. After all, 70% of Americans say they get annoyed by irrelevant pop-up ads. So how do you go about it? You make your pop-ups relevant by providing: Context Instead of randomly showing your pop-up on every page of your website, consider displaying it in a highly relevant blog post. For example, you can write an in-depth guide on investing and then display your pop-up offering a free ebook about personal finance. This way, you’re sure that people who want to download your book are interested in finance as they’ve seen it appear on your post about investing – exclusively. Trigger Using the concept of “less is more”, show a pop-up only when it’s triggered by an action. For example, the exit pop-up is triggered only once a prospect approaches the close button to exit your website. Another example is taken from the Conversio website: whenever a visitor who’s reading our long-form content stays a certain time on the page or scrolls beyond a specific part of the page, a pop-up is also triggered to appear. Of course, if you also want your offer to be available anytime but you don’t want it to appear as intrusive as a pop-up form, you can also use a bar that’s fixed on the top or bottom part and persistently appears on the page. It’s still a nice visual call-to-action that doesn’t detract from your customer experience. Consider how your website elements interact with each other. Perhaps you have several pop-ups appearing: a persistent bar, a widget for chat, a widget for a loyalty program like Smile.io, and even Conversio’s Review Tab. Sure, I understand the reason for wanting to include all these elements. They may all be helpful in helping you achieve your respective goals. Again, think of choosing your website elements as you personally talking to your visitor. If you talk about different things all at the same time, your message will be lost, your customers will be confused, and your goal will be left unfulfilled altogether. That’s why you really need to consider and prioritize which element you actually need and how this element will be displayed on your website. Perhaps you don’t really need to have a persistent bar that’s available all the time? Or maybe just showing a simple “contact us” link is better instead of showing a chat widget all the time? Maybe instead of displaying everything on your homepage, you can consider displaying a certain element on certain pages only. Prioritize and consider alternatives to pop-ups. You owe this to your website readers and customers. I hope this video inspired you to assess and modify your website as needed. After all, improving your customer experience can boost your conversion rate and increase your Customer Lifetime Value over time – killing two birds with one stone, right? Interested in learning more about this? Let’s chat about it in the comments section below. Talk to you next week! Ciao. Learn with our FREE Ecommerce Academy: conversio.com/academy Music featured in this episode was "Celery Man" by Birocratic and can be found at @birocratic. This podcast was produced by comealivecreative.com.

If you’ve done everything (shipping coupons, social proof, product reviews, etc) and you still haven’t seen an increase in your abandoned cart recovery rate, it may be time for you to change your tactics so you can view different results. As my imaginary friend Albert Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” and we don’t want this, do we? Because here’s the truth: sometimes, your website may be great, and your email sequence may be top-notch, but if the customers coming into your website aren’t a good fit with your brand’s target market profile, then you’ll still see no change in your abandoned cart recovery rates. If this is the truth, then, you shouldn’t change your website or your email marketing strategy. They’re already effective to your chosen target market. Sometimes, it’s not HOW you talk – it’s about WHO you’re talking to. Instead, you need to tweak your traffic acquisition channels so you can get customers who are more likely to finalize their purchase with you since they’re a better fit for you and your company. You can do this both in your email marketing tool and Conversio. First, you need to look into customers who have recently abandoned their carts but haven’t purchased anything yet. In Conversio, it’s simply a matter of going to your All Carts page and filtering those into carts that are still recoverable. Once you have your list, get in touch with them via direct one-on-one email. Start with customers who have the highest abandoned cart value and then slowly but steadily work your way through the list. Perhaps they were just browsing. Or maybe they lost interest and bought from your competition instead. Or it could be that they don’t have the budget for it right now. Because you see, you can always check out abandoned cart statistics and make an educated guess as to why your customers aren’t buying from you. Or you can do this trick and find out the exact cause — straight from the horse’s mouth. You’ll never know the real reason why they abandoned their carts unless you personally contact them and find out for yourself. Afterwards, feel free to tweak your website or your email marketing campaign accordingly. After all, you know the exact reason why your customers are abandoning their carts, so what’s stopping you from recovering them? Now, I know a hands-on approach like this doesn’t scale. It’s not very “efficient” or “automated”, but if it’s going to be effective in increasing your abandoned cart recovery rate even just by 1%, then, by all means, try it out and see the difference for yourself. It may take time and a lot of your resources. But this is one strategy that can give you a slow but steady ROI over time. I hope this video will contribute to the growth of your business! Let me know in the comments below or email me at adii@conversio.com if you’ve tried out this strategy before. See you next week!

First, identify your top 10% customers in terms of Customer Lifetime Value. Once you know who these customers are, find out the initial products they purchased with you. Look for products that they bought for their first purchase with you. Then, rank these products according to how many top customers bought it. The more it was purchased by the top 10% customers, the higher it’ll go up in your list. Will a single product top the list? Or will you identify a product bundle that most customers buy because it provides the most value for their money? You’ll only find out once you do this exercise. Knowing which of your products are loss leaders enables you to strategize a marketing strategy that works in your favor. You can push your loss leaders to a prospect who’s recently signed up for your mailing list. After all, you may just break even on your loss leader’s sale, but theoretically, this first-time customer will also make repeated purchases over time, based on the purchase history of your top spenders. There’s no second-guessing or blindly hoping for the best scenario here. You’re promoting your loss leader simply because they promote sales -- just refer to the abovementioned exercise that you need to do before implementing this strategy. Remember: numbers, like Shakira’s hips, don’t lie. Now, if you’re not a fan of discounting, it’s okay. The key here is to expose your prospects to your loss leaders as soon as possible. While your prospects are browsing on your website, redirect their attention to your loss leaders. During this time, they’re highly engaged so they’re more likely to check it out. If they haven’t made a purchase yet, you can also send them a follow-up email. A simple “Hey, just wanted to check in on you. By the way, most of our customers bought this product. Here’s what they have to say about it. You may be interested…” can get the ball rolling in the direction that you’d like. Of course, if you’ve identified a product bundle as your best-selling item, you can also send them product pitches about those as historically speaking, they’ve already been effective in increasing your Customer Lifetime Value over time. So there you go! As of this writing, you can do the exercise manually since there’s no tool available for it yet. And if you’ve reached the end of this post and you’re excited to develop a tool that helps does this efficiently and effortlessly, let me know in the comments below! I’ll totally share it with you guys. See you next week!

Don’t get me wrong here: I get it. Sometimes when we’re given access to our prospect’s emails, we can’t help but think that people are already overloaded, so when they open our email, we need to put everything there so they can get as much information as possible, don’t you think? After all, more than 59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI. And knowing that around 76% of subscribers make purchases from email marketing makes you feel pressured to say everything you want to say in a single email so you can convince them to buy from you, right? The problem with this approach, though, is that everything’s too cluttered and unfocused. Your reader will have a hard time following the content’s flow and eventually lose interest in what you’re saying. Here’s how you can use the “one action rule”: before writing your email, figure out the one action you want your reader to do from this email and work towards this by providing relevant content that helps you convince your readers to fulfill this goal. Nothing more. Nothing less. Confused? Let’s take abandoned cart emails as an example -- what’s your one action for writing and sending out abandoned cart emails? To convince your reader to buy the items they’ve abandoned in their shopping cart, of course. In other words, to finalize a sale. How can you fulfill this one action -- to finalize a sale? You can 1) show the items they’ve abandoned to refresh their memory, 2) include discount coupons to incentivize them to checkout and actually purchase the products, and 3) share social proof. You can include as much relevant content as you’d like - as long as they all help the reader fulfill the email’s purpose of finalizing a sale. Now, there may be some instances where a single call-to-action (CTA) isn’t enough. In this case, a secondary CTA may be added as long as the primary CTA is emphasized accordingly. An example of this one would be announcing a new product launch in a newsletter. You can draft your email by dedicating 80% of the content talking about the new product and 20% of the content sharing about a product recommendation list that your readers may find helpful, based on their personal purchase history algorithm. In this way, the readers have a clear idea that you wrote the email with the primary goal of introducing your company’s newest product. As such, they know that this is the most important thing that you talked about in the email, so they will respond accordingly. Remember: the “one action rule” doesn’t necessarily mean you need to write just one sentence or just one paragraph. It means that you’re free to write as much content as you’d like, as long as it’s relevant to fulfilling your email’s primary goal. If, before discarding an item, Marie Kondo tells you to ask yourself, “Does this item spark joy?”... Before writing a sentence, I’d tell you to ask yourself, “Does this content help me to convince the reader to fulfill this email’s primary purpose?” If not, delete it right away. And if it does, feel free to write to your heart’s content. Try this exercise and let me know how it works out for you! Shoot me an email at adii@conversio.com or let me know in the comments below. See you next week. Cheers.

1. Asking website visitors to “spin a wheel” You get to spin a wheel. I get to spin a wheel. We all get a chance to spin a wheel! Come on, we all know how these things work, right? After all, when you get to see this “spin a wheel!” offer pop up every other day when you’re visiting different websites, it becomes a bit meh. Personally, too, I just don’t think that profitable and sustainable Ecommerce brands are built on short-term trends like this that deters from customer experience. 2. Marking all the products in your catalogue as “on sale” If you went to a brick-and-mortar store and saw that every product was marked down without any mention of a special holiday or anniversary sale, you’d be pretty skeptical, wouldn’t you? As a customer, you’d be wondering if you’re really getting a discount or if the company’s just inflating the products’ worth and selling them to you at their original price… Why? Let’s be real here: would a sustainable company actually put all their products on unlimited sale just because they wanted to? This’ll put them in the red -- it’s just not something that translates well to customer experience and brand longevity. 3. Using generic themes because everyone is your target market If you use a generic theme for your brand’s website because you’d like to sell to “everyone who has disposable income”, you’re making it difficult for yourself to close a sale. Because your approach is so wide and untargeted, people browsing through your website aren’t compelled enough to get to know you more and eventually trust your company enough to do business with you. The effective alternative? Identify your target market specifically, then brand your website design and customer service according to their preferences. What’s the age range of your target customer? What jobs do they have? What are their interests? Hobbies? Preferences? What are their desires and pain points? How would they like to be talked to? Find these out and then tweak your branding, product catalogue, and marketing strategy accordingly. Here’s the light at the end of the tunnel: yes, we talked about the trends that need to be out. And now that we know what they are, this gives us the opportunity to improve our businesses and aim for the long-term by thinking about the things we can do better. There’s a rainbow after the rain, after all. Try to do this short exercise with me. Just think of at least one big, successful Ecommerce brand and ask yourself if they’re implementing any of the “trends” I mentioned above. Most likely, they’re not. So why should you? Listen, Ecommerce sales are expected to surpass $735 USD in the year 2023. People with disposable income are expecting online buying as the new norm. And it’s time for you to ride the Ecommerce wave. For every branding decision or marketing strategy you’re thinking of implementing, ask yourself: “Will doing this help me build the foundation to build a sustainable and long-term brand for the years to come?” So there you go, we hopefully finished the post on a positive note that enables you to think strategically for your business. Any comments you’d like to add, or insights you want to share? Let me know in the comments. See you next week! Cheers.

1. Provide product recommendations Product recommendations generate 33% higher average order value. You can include product recommendations in both your product pages and cart pages. In your product pages, you can include the phrase “Other customers who view this product are also interested in these products…” And for your cart pages, you can include a list of products with the title “This product you’re buying is frequently purchased together with these products…” How do you figure out which products to include in your recommendations? You can do this manually or by simply using a recommendation algorithm. 2. Upsell or cross-sell complementary products You can get an immediate 15-30% increase in revenue from upsells. If you’re not doing this tactic, you’re stealing from your company by limiting its potential to earn more revenue. If product recommendations mean you’re encouraging your customer to add popular products to their purchase, up-selling & cross-selling mean you’re encourage your customer to add helpful and complementary products to their cart. Confused? Let’s take a customer buying a laptop as an example. Product recommendation is suggesting a smartphone or a tablet. Upselling is suggesting a more premium laptop model. Cross-selling is suggesting a mouse, a keyboard or a laptop bag. 3. Set order minimums for a discount In my 30+ years of experience as a human, I haven’t met anyone who doesn’t want to get a discount. After all, it’s more bang for your buck, right? Don’t give out discounts too freely, though! You need to qualify This tactic helps you incentivize your customers to spend more just so they can save money. How do you do this in a sustainable way that’s win-win for the both of you? Compute for your AOV. Then, pick a number higher than your AOV and add how much you’re willing to discount and use this number. For example, if your AOV is $15, and you’re willing to discount $10, tell your customer that if he reaches $30, you’ll take $10 off his total. This way, your customer gets to save money via the discount and you get to increase your AOV over the long run ($20 vs $15). 4. Set up a customer loyalty program that exchanges points for customer benefits The more your customer spends with you, the more points he’ll receive. And the more points he’ll get, the more benefits he can experience. An effective way to implement this is to establish tiers within your loyalty program. The more he spends, the faster it is to unlock the higher tiers which provide more points per dollar spent. Don’t know if this really works? Just check out this study done by Smile.io which found that “majority of brands see at least a 13.71% increase in order values from rewards program members over non program members.” This means that every time a non-member spends $100 on an order, a member would have spent $13.71 more. 5. Sell product bundles/product packages or offer BOGO deals Offer product bundles that cost less compared to buying the same items individually. For example, a product bundle that includes a laptop + a mouse + a charger + a laptop bag can cost $499, whereas buying the same products individually can cost $649. This way, customers are more likely to buy the bundle because this will save them money. And doing this helps you increase your AOV and subsequently, your revenue as well. You can also offer Buy One, Get One deals to incentivize purchases higher than your AOV. Bonus! Now, we’ve talked about the five tactics that you can use to increase AOV but you can do these only on the pre-checkout phase, meaning, before your customer finalizes the transaction. What do you post-checkout? You can also: 6. Include product recommendations and up-sells while the payment token is still active Once your customer clicked the “pay now” button and while his payment token is still active, you can still send him to a post-purchase sales funnel which does the product recommendations and upsells for you. For example, you can use CartHook to do this for you: while your customer’s payment token is still active, you can present time-limited exclusive offers that they can click once to be included in their final order. 7. Include product recommendations and up-sells in your email receipts Here at Conversio, we still see email receipts performing really well: high open rate, high click rate and high conversion rates. Simply include a discount coupon and a product recommendation in your email receipts to boost your AOV. For example, include a casual offer in the email they’ll receive, something like: “Hey, nice cart! Customers who bought the products you’ve bought also got these… Want to get these products at a discount? Here’s a discount code just for you - valid for 1 hour only!” Increase your AOV this 2019 and see your company’s profitability soar, too. Any other things you’d like to add? Let me know and let’s talk in the comments section below. See you next week. Cheers!

1. Double your prices. As long as you don’t lose more than 50% of sales, you’re coming out ahead, mathematically. Imagine, you get higher gross margin since you’re selling for a higher price. Also, you’re selling enough products that doubling their prices increases your revenue without necessarily increasing the volume, too. Not yet convinced why you should do this? Customers usually associate higher price = more value for their money. Just check out how Apple prices their products: according to a recent study, it costs Apple $247.51 to create an iPhone, yet they sell it for over $1,000. Higher revenue and less volume of transactions translates to less overhead expenses. You get to enjoy the benefits of increased profit with decreased costs - how sweet is this? Doing this enables you to get that extra 1% or 5% that’ll help you increase your bottom line profit. 2. Increase your prices by 10% Compare your conversion and profit every time you change your pricing. For example, increasing your prices by 10% this February 2019 and comparing its profit versus your profit last February 2018 can help you figure out which of your products have more price sensitivity compared to others - perhaps you’re better off increasing the prices of your more “premium” or “exclusive” products? The only way you’ll know if this is effective is by experimentation with product pricing according to the historical performance of your sales. Start with one product or one category: focus on the 20% of your products that provide the most value for 80% of your target market. Once you prove that this strategy is effective in increasing conversion, go ahead and try the other product lines, too. 3. List down your top 10 products with the highest conversion rates and find out the pricing strategies behind them. Look at your sales history: which products have the highest conversion rates for an average of three to five years? This means we’re looking for products that have consistent performance and sustainable sales among the years. Prioritize the top ten products and look into the pricing strategies you’ve adopted for each product. Find their similarities - have they performed well due to “power of 9” pricing, cost-based pricing, fragmented pricing, or bundle pricing? If you’re not sure which pricing strategy it specifically is, check out this helpful guide for your reference. Once you’ve found out the pricing strategy of your best-performing products, use it in pricing your under-performing products and compare profits over the same selling period. 4. Compare your pricing strategy with your competitors and price according to the concept of “exclusivity” Instead of offering your product at a lower price than your competitors, premium pricing allows you to offer your product at a higher price than expected because exclusive products naturally cost more. Just think of premium brands like Apple Macbooks or Rolex watches - if someone offered the same brands at a lower price, you’d undoubtedly think something has to be wrong about the products they’re selling, right? You can take advantage of premium pricing by offering functional value (it does what it says it does) and psychological value (not everyone can have access to this product so you’re pretty special if you do). It’s all about product positioning in relation to value perception. How do you market your premium products? What branding message do you want to tell your audience so you can tug at their heartstrings and invoke emotions that make them want to buy your exclusive products at higher prices? What makes your brand and your products high-quality and premium that your customers would willingly want to be associated with them? Implementing these product pricing strategies can help you increase your bottom line profit and boost your company’s growth this 2019. Have you incorporated these tactics into your product’s marketing and development? Learn with our FREE Ecommerce Academy: Conversio Academy Facebook Twitter Instagram Music featured in this episode was "Celery Man" by Birocratic and can be found at www.soundcloud.com/birocratic. This podcast was produced by comealivecreative.com.

“The tipping point” is a term coined by Malcolm Gladwell which means that this is the critical moment when an event, trend, idea or product ceases to be marginal and becomes massive instead. You can check out this helpful summary of Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” book to learn more about it. Basically, the tipping point is when you or your business crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. It’s the moment when your idea, business or brand becomes viral because it’s spread by “connectors”, “salesmen” and “mavens” and simply because your brand is memorable enough to encourage people to take action. Surely, you’d want your business to reach the tipping point, don’t you? However, simply learning about the tipping point isn’t enough. You need to understand why certain people act a certain way and respond to certain brands, too. Seth Godin exemplifies it best on his book This is Marketing when he says: “For most of us, from the first day we are able to remember until the last day we breathe, our actions are primarily driven by one question: “Do people like me do things like this?” People like me don’t cheat on their taxes. People like me own a car; we don’t take the bus. People like me have a full-time job. People like me want to see the new James Bond movie. Even when we adopt the behavior of an outlier, when we do something the crowd doesn’t often do, we’re still aligning ourselves with the behavior of outliers.” This narrative of “people like us” influences our behavior - even our purchasing decisions and the way we go about life. Think about it: before you do something, buy something, or even respond to something, you think about what your peers or other like-minded people would do first, right? We act the way we do and we respond to certain brands because “people like us” do the same thing. Now, to further drive my point about being local and building a global business, let’s talk about how Facebook and Uber started. Facebook started on a per-campus basis. They started at Stanford, and once they’ve reached the tipping point on a specific campus, they move on to another one, over and over again. Doing this helped them build a strong base, so when they finally launched publicly, they had a solid momentum that grew steadily upwards over time. Uber did the same thing: they started at San Francisco and once they’ve reached the tipping point on a specific city, they moved on to the next one over and over again. Because of this, they’re able to grow into the global business they are today. Here’s how you can apply these interconnected concepts into your business: Where are you based? First, find “people like you” by focusing on your own locality. Get your first 10 or 100 customers by being true to your local roots. Cater to their needs, wants & desires as consumers. Speak to who they are so you can influence how they respond to you. Like-minded people are more likely to engage with each other. Doing this can help your business become viral. When you’re locally focused, it’s much easier to reach the critical mass and gain the momentum you need to expand outwards - you simply need to take the momentum you’ve gained from the first location and move it to the next one. Also, a little bonus point is infusing your heritage and your roots into your overall branding efforts makes you stand out from the crowd more. Share what you stand for. Talk about where you came from. Include a little bit of local flavor into your visual identity and similar-minded people can relate to you more. After all, we behave according to what “people like us” behave, remember? I truly hope today’s video helped encourage you to build your business and turn it into a global brand by integrating the concepts of “the tipping point” and “people like us” in your strategies - be more targeted, focus on a niche first, and start with your own location. You’re well on your way to building a better business. Any thoughts you’d like to add? Questions you’d like to ask? Or valuable personal experiences you’d like to share? Let me know in the comments below! See you next week. Cheers from Cape Town.

So I can teach you all about automation in email marketing… But I can’t teach your brand to be your brand. It’s the artist that makes the artist. It’s who your brand is that makes your brand stand out from the crowd. And this is also exactly why you need to learn about your customers first before you automate. You can use the best software, you can hire the best copywriters and you can even test for the best subject line. But if you don’t understand your customers fully, you’ll always be one step behind because you’re not directly addressing their concerns, their fears, or their needs. Let’s talk about how this applies to abandoned cart recovery. I had a conversation with an ecommerce brand that had “flat” recovery rates for abandoned carts. Their first email sequence was a simple “Hey, you abandoned this cart…” And then their second & third emails offered free shipping to encourage the customer to finalize their purchase. Guess which email had the best conversion rate? The first email converted the best even though it had no “free shipping” offer in its text! Pretty interesting to find out, considering that the most common reason why customers abandon their carts is due to high or unexpected shipping costs, right? So industry statistics may help you understand why customers generally behave the way they do -- but this doesn’t mean that everything you read about in your research applies to your own customers. That’s why understanding them first is the key. This concept applies to up-selling and cross-selling, too. Recommending products to your customers based on their past purchase history may help you with sales because of accurate algorithms -- but doing so doesn’t necessarily speak to the nature of your business and doesn’t directly address the concerns of your customers. Do you see what I mean here? We can automate all we want, but if we don’t understand the reason for our customer’s behavior, automation won’t be effective in the long run. Imagine running an automated email campaign for abandoned cart recovery...without knowing why your customers abandoned their cart in the first place. Or imagine sending an automated up-selling email to a first-time customer to encourage them to buy more products from you...without knowing why your first-time customer decided to buy from you in the first place. Understand your customer’s motivation for their behavior and you’re off to a great start. Add in the layer of personalization and segmentation in your email marketing campaigns and you’re nearly there. Automation without any understanding of the behavior’s reason makes you a robot. And people don’t buy from robots, right? They buy from real people with real emotions, real reasons and real motivations -- people who strive to understand them more and adapt their business to meet their wants & needs. Hopefully you find this video helpful! Any thoughts you’d like to add? Let’s talk in the comments section below. Also, in the podcasts in the next coming weeks, we’re going to talk more about research-based methods that can help you recover abandoned carts so stay tuned! See you next week!

Assuming most of you have answered d, which talks about building mutually beneficial relationships with your customers and increasing their CLV over time through up-selling and cross-selling, you’ve nearly hit the nail on the head. After all, it costs 5x as much to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one, remember? Additionally, selling to an existing customer has a success rate of 60%-70%, whereas it’s only 5%-20% when you’re selling to a new one. Now, let’s be real here: you already know about the concept of maximizing CLV, right? Maybe you’ve even memorized some of the statistics I’ve mentioned above. In fact, this was the topic of the ebook that I wrote for Conversio — 4 years ago! — and the tactics are still relevant today. To successfully scale your business over time, you need to maximize CLV. And to maximize CLV, you need to upsell and cross-sell to your existing customer. Yes, you can maximize CLV if your first-time customer becomes a regular, repeat customer. But did you know that you can also maximize CLV even through your first-time customer or a customer who bought from you only once in their life? Let’s take the case of Casper, for example. When they launched years ago, they only had one product: a single mattress. Once you’ve purchased this, you were done. They couldn’t up-sell or cross-sell you anything else — even though you were their happiest customer — simply because they only had one product back then! How can you maximize your CLV even though you have only one product in your catalogue? You can do this by getting this customer to bring in a new customer for your business. Engage with your customers + make your existing customers happy with your marketing & customer service + incentivize them to tell their friends about you = maximizing CLV over time. Incentives can come in the form of store credit or discount code, sure. But again, if your product catalogue only has one product, what would your existing customers do with their store credit or discount code? They can’t purchase anything else from you, so why bother getting the incentive in the first place? Instead of giving store credit or discount codes, give your existing customers cash back for every successful referral. One of the brands that’s been successful in doing this is Remarkable. Now you may be thinking, “But Adii, isn’t it bad when I give cash as an incentive? I mean, they’re not going to use that money on my business anymore so why should I do this?” Here’s the thing: giving cash may mean that your customer won’t buy anything else from you since they already bought your main product. But shouldn’t you be happy to give cash to your existing customers? After all, this means they’ve successfully referred their friends to you. This means you got another sale. This means you’ve gotten another value from your existing customers even though they bought from you only once. And this is what I exactly meant by the “one thing” that every business needs: it’s figuring out a way to make sure that you get more value from a first-time customer beyond their first purchase. More value means your first-time customer: – Buys from you again & again through up-sell and cross-sell; or, – Encourages their friends to buy from you and you incentivizing their efforts by giving them cash back. Hopefully this video gave you helpful ideas when it comes to maximizing your CLV over time. Any thoughts, reactions or questions you may have? I’ll be waiting for you in the comments section below. Cheers.

Identify your most engaged customers. Customers who are fully engaged represent a 23% share of profitability, revenue, and relationship growth compared to the average customer. Additionally, your most engaged customers spend more. For example, in the consumer electronics industry, engaged customers spend $373 per shopping trip, while actively disengaged customers spend $289. You can find out who they are by including top-of-mind customers. Or you can check your past product reviews and look for the top twenty customers who gave in-depth, comprehensive and helpful product reviews that discussed product improvement. These people are the key to helping you with your product development. Interact with your most engaged customers during the product ideation and prototyping phase. Let them join the conversation. Ask for their initial feedback on your ideas. Show them sketches. Tell them the product’s benefits and ask if these will be helpful to them. Show them product packaging ideas. Heck, ask for their thoughts on the product’s initial name. It can be as “small” as deciding on the font of the packaging, or as “big” as finalizing on the product features — it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you include them in the process and to show them that their input is valuable. After all, their feedback may help you improve product development, product marketing or both. Once the product’s first version is available, send it to them for free. This is done with the spirit of gratitude: their feedback helped you shape the product’s development, so you’d like to thank them by gifting them the product. Surprise them (small gesture to delight your customers, remember?) by including a handwritten note in the packaging or sending a personalized email before delivery. Build social proof. Once they’ve had time to try our your new product, ask them to leave a review. Including a photo of them using the actual product would be great too! Enjoy the social proof and the authentic product reviews on the launch day. Step #4 kills two birds with one stone: having authentic product reviews on your new product means: – You don’t need to spend a lot of money getting a copywriter to create your sales copy for you. This way, people can read honest-to-goodness product reviews written by clients who’ve actually tried your product and experienced the results first-hand; – You’ve already built social proof for your product so the likelihood that someone will buy it increases. Nearly 63% of consumers say they’re more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. If you’ve successfully followed this five-step process, I’d like to congratulate you in advance — it’ll be your best product launch day ever!