ecommerceq&a

Michael: Hello folks, and welcome to eCommerce Q & A. This is the show where we equip you, as a store owner, director of eCommerce, CTO, CIO, CMO, and many other titles like that at three letters long at an eCommerce company, or multi-channel companies to just kill it. I'm joined today by my colleague, and good friend, Chris [inaudible 00:00:25]. Chris, thank you for joining us.

Chris: Hey, Michael. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here.

Michael: Absolutely. Chris, can you give us a little background on the topic today, which is going to be around why you should, maybe, consider a re-platform under eCommerce. And also some reasons maybe why you shouldn't.

Chris: Yeah. Absolutely. As you know, majority of commerce stores migrate every two to three years, according to Forester. It's important to know, what are those main reasons that can kind of flag and say, maybe we need to look at a new platform. Briefly, these points include legacy systems that don't allow you to scale effectively and efficiently. Also, not utilizing a platform in full, you know, it may have a whole bunch of bells and whistles that you're not using.

Also, to initiate any new company goals, maybe product lines. Then, finally, also, if there's something happening with performance and security. Those are kind of a highlight able overview of the main ports of why someone should definitely looking into re-platforming.

Michael: Tell me this Chris, you've been in this for a while. What are you seeing in your own personal experience, you mentioned some Forester research. But just maybe give a little bit of your background on this topic.

Chris: Yeah. Definitely. I mean, it's funny that we always try to kind of come up with a general consensus of what we can expect. I think, ultimately, it really comes down to each individual use case. I've definitely see people that are very consistent with looking at new technology, through and through. Maybe a few years ago. But, with eCommerce platform specifically, it definitely ranges. You'll get a large number of companies that will be on a platform for seven, eight years plus. I've seen a lot of companies that make moves very quickly, every couple of years they change systems.

But, ultimately, I think there is a good general rule of thumb, every three to five years. In my experience, it has been very common for companies to re-platform within that time frame.

Michael: We didn't really go into your background at all though. So, where do you come into this picture?

Chris: Absolutely. I've been in the eCommerce for a little over five years now, and had the honor of working with amazing and intellectual individuals across the board. I've been over at another agency that is very heavily [inaudible 00:03:00] Magento. I was leading business development there, and consulting companies on, ultimately, how to grow their business online. Evaluating each component of their business digitally and finding areas of improvement and [inaudible 00:03:15] and such.

Over the course of my tenure at other agencies, I've been accepted onto ... As a eCommerce consultant for Oxford Digital. That kind of came about in my experience working with various companies, just kind of became invited on several occasions to take a look at other projects that maybe a particular group, from a very specific agency, may have taken on ... Maybe had run into some issues three months down the road, or even a couple weeks in. Kind of looking at what's happening there. My experience coming from SAP, high risk background. And looking at systems that relate to SAP.

A lot of demand [inaudible 00:04:02] Magento as well, but I think kind of taking the run on where I am now. It's definitely a good place to be in terms of being able to look at all these other situations from various type of industries and companies. And really understanding what is it that they're experiencing. A lot of times it's funny, things will just be very simple, that just may have gone unnoticed.

Today, I'm definitely happy to be [inaudible 00:04:33] VP of strategy over at Sellry. And taking everything that I've learned over the years, and applying it to help other eCommerce executives grow their company as well.

Michael: [inaudible 00:04:44] SAP, Magento, [inaudible 00:04:47]. You're like the man with a plan when it comes to platforms.

Chris: Yeah. Absolutely. I've done several comparisons to weight technologies against others. Forester comes out with really great reports on this. You know, B2B wave, B2C wave, I bet most post are familiar with. They have a lot of good information there on a high level as well.

Michael: Let's do this, let's dive right in. Okay. What are the reasons that you maybe should consider a re-platform?

Chris: Absolutely. The Legacy systems was one of the first ones I mentioned. It's a very common situation. Where a company will adopt a system, in a lot of cases in the 90's actually and still to this day are standing. Those systems typically don't necessarily allow you to scale effectively and efficiently. The complexity that are involved in maintaining those systems are very costly.

Michael: Can you give me an example of a system you have in mind?

Chris: I think an old system that's pretty common for companies to kind of maintain for several years, for many years, is ... Cold Fusion, I think is one.

Michael: Cold Fusion. It has such a cool name.

Chris: I know. It actually does. It's funny, they've powered some really intense sights. You'd be surprised. But ...

Michael: Is anybody really using that? I mean, I thought you were going to be like Magenta 1. Magenta 1 is eight years old, everybody still ... A lot of people are still using it.

Chris: Yeah. I would actually consider Magenta 1 to be a Legacy system, for lack of better terms. But Legacy as a whole really comes in a variety of packages. You'll have super Legacy systems from the 90's. Then you'll have Legacy systems like you said, just [inaudible 00:06:35] on eight or ten years or so.

If you're still using Magenta 1 today, there's got to be some type of validity in that. Or maybe you're just not ready to make the move for whatever reason. But, considering the fact that they'll no longer be releasing security patches as of next year. It's something to definitely consider.

Michael: What I see with these things, is there's a fatigue that comes from re-platforming once or twice. And you're like, I don't want to do that again.

Chris: Yeah.

Michael: [crosstalk 00:07:03] out a catalog every year. Thankfully, we don't have to do it every two months. The complexity, and I've definitely seen that there. If you're using a platform that's old, producing you're having to actually maintain old code because nobody else is even using that code. You're having to make it compatible for some of our screen plans, for example. They haven't made the move to [inaudible 00:07:24] yes.

As a result, they're having to literally maintain for lack of a better term, this free platform. Just for their own usage. Rather than just getting onto the new thing. So, be said for staying current. Right.

Now, can we jump ahead? I want to dive in more on this one, but I want to talk to you about your second point. About what if you're just not utilizing what's in your platform? Talk to me more about that. I mean, how many people ... There's the concept of a marketing feature. Right?

When a platform just has something, so that you'll see it and be like, that's cool that that has that, or I really want that, then you're never going to use it. That just goes with every platform. I think you're saying something different.

I think you're saying, there's a lot of platforms where you're way overpaying for a lot of things that you really don't need. And you don't have to. Is that what you're getting at?

Chris: Definitely. If someone is under utilizing a platform, it really just depends on the type of company, and the business model as a whole. Ultimately, just like you said, it's funny how often that happens. You'll see all these really cool, fancy, marketing personalization, centralized data. There's a lot of things that will really kind of make you raise your hand say, that sounds like I want to try that. A lot of times these businesses aren't necessarily well suited in terms of resources to even utilize each of these various facets. Because, ultimately, if you only have one person that's going to maintain your platform internally, that's not going to cut it.

Michael: What if you got a team of 100 merchandisers. I mean, in that case, you probably need more complexity. Right?

Chris: Absolutely. But, even then, you have solutions revolved around that. SAP has a really interesting cockpit, where it can be centralized. So, if you're having all these different people on the same team, everything is centralized and viewable. And things can be moved around easily, you know, you can push product data across multiple sites at once. There's various things.

To get back to your point though. In SAP, I've seen it a lot, in Demandware I've seen it a lot. You know, companies will look at ... Demandware specifically, with a particular type of compensation structure that they have, may be favorable in certain industries where you have high margin products. Looking longterm, Demandware does have a lot of really cool, fancy tools, that they go under utilized.

Then, ultimately, if you're looking at a rev share model, then that may not validate the functions and features that that platform has.

Michael: I think this is actually ... [inaudible 00:10:04] I just go on a brief tangent here. Because this is getting me all fired up about something. Well all heard about segmentation in the last few years. And we all said, we're going to do that. Then every single client that I've got has started doing it, and found really good ROI. Even 2X, 3X, and even more ROI, when you start segmenting. But the problem is, it's not scalable.

Now, we've got dynamic [inaudible 00:10:28]. Where you can feed all of your data into [inaudible 00:10:31] learning engine, then it's going to do that for you and free up your resources. I think it's very easy to be small minded about the fact that it feels like so much work to re-platform or to embrace the latest and greatest. But, in reality, when you consistently have a mindset of doing that, and doing it well, and doing it fast. And cutting out the things you don't need, it actually saves you a bunch of time.

Sorry for that brief tangent. But we're going to do a show in a couple weeks on this topic of dynamic segmentation. Which is think is super exciting. All right. Let's move on.

What's the third reason why you should maybe consider re-platforming?

Chris: Yes. I'd say that's going to be led by any new company initiatives. A particular goal that the company may have, maybe revolved around growth. Or maybe trying out a new product, product category. You know, a lot of tests are run this way as well. I think it's a good ... It's definitely a good way for a certain situations. For a company to kind of get their feet wet. And see what a particular platform could be like because I've been in several situations where a lot of larger enterprise companies, there's a lot more [inaudible 00:11:39] involved in their advancement need the proof of concepts, ultimately, to see and validate a new type of technology.

So, a new product is a really good way to do that. Launching it quickly on a new platform, if you're spending it up on Magento or Shopify for example. Very easy to measure that.

I think another way to ... In terms of a new company initiative, is perhaps a large B2B manufacturer. Especially in my experience, definitely worked with a lot of B2B companies that are looking into ... Either breaking into the B2C market, or looking to finally focus on the B2C market.

There's also the flip side of that, where these companies are looking to hone in on their experience, for the B2B. Just how you're mentioning this whole segmentation, and we're on this hype. That goes hand in hand with B2B as well. I mean, it's phenomenal to see how quickly these B2B companies are getting up to speed. And having all the functionality features set, the look and feel aesthetics that you would expect from a B2C experience, also reflection B2B. I think that's huge because the B2B commerce market is a lot larger than B2C, as you know.

Michael: Yeah. A little tidbit of what we're focusing on, as an agency. New goals, I think this is a big thing for just trying something out. You're seeing the big brands doing this. They're taking the ... We typically think of lower end platforms and doing really amazing things with them, and at low risk for new product lines, or new product launches, or just an isolated category they don't emphasize. Then going, that worked well. We're going to roll it out the rest of the way.

So, let's move on. What's the final, and in my opinion, one of the most important pieces why you won't consider a re-platform.

Chris: I think that's definitely going to go with performance and security. If you really think about it, that should be a no brainer. Right? If you're experiencing any type of outages, if your site is painfully slow. In some way your customer data has been compromised, I mean wow. You definitely need to look at making a change, you definitely don't want to be in a situation where you're experiencing any type of reoccurring performance issues.

Even small incidents with security or compliance that you may be experiencing could definitely be a red flag and something that you should consider. In a timely manner, it's funny you'll see a lot of companies that will be like, "Hey, I think my site is being hacked. I think something is happening here." You take a look, and you're like, "How long has this been going on?" It's hard to see what damage has been done. Certain information has been disseminated, etc.

Michael: Yeah. Sometimes it's too late.

Chris: Most of the time it is. There's been situations where companies would suffer because they had damaged loyalty with their customers by their data being leaked. Getting customer purchase information credit card numbers, things like that, being obtained by hackers. That's definitely one of the most important.

Michael: I'm glad that we're not in the days where it's like, everybody was storing credit card numbers. That was a ... Waiting to happen. Great. So, there's four reasons why you should definitely consider a re-platform. What about on the flip side? Are there any reasons why maybe you don't need to re-platform? You might think you do, but actually you don't. There's some faster way forward for you.

Chris: Definitely. In a lot of cases, you'll see that people may look to another platform, simply because of lack of resources to support the technology. There's definitely situations where you may have the wrong type of resource, maybe you're working with an agency that under qualified, or not as experienced as you'd like. That's definitely not a valid reason to make a move just yet.

Michael: Platform is a pill. If I take this pill, all my problems will go away.

Chris: Exactly. I think there's a lot more evaluation that needs to go into that. Another would be, you're looking at your competition. And they're implementing a new platform. You're just falling to the bandwagon appeal and saying, "They've got it, I want it to." And try to jump on it, and don't necessarily weigh that particular technology against your business. I think that could be a mistake that I've seen quite a few times.

Michael: That's definitely a good call.

Chris: Yeah. Another I think is ... If you're in a particular situation where your current platform you think may be giving you problems, a lot of times it depends on who is looking at the situation. Are they more marketing, are they more technology based type role? And then their experience, because they're going to look at the situation differently.

In any circumstances, it's most beneficial to have all parties, all departments, looking at the situation to identify a root of the problem. I think a lot of cases, people may think that something is going. Maybe, for example, the performance and speed of the site. They think it has something directly to do with the platform. But, it could be just the way it's configured, or it could be the architecture itself.

There's various reasons of why that could happen. That's another use case where I see quite common.

Michael: I think there's an exhaustion factor to. It's like, people don't really want to re-platform, but you really hate the one that you're on a lot of the time. The issues is, it's not always an issue with the platform.

What's your final reason, that you maybe don't need to re-platform.

Chris: Man, the last one and I'd say it's probably the most common ... Which it shouldn't be, by any means. But, I'd say it being super close to Black Friday and saying, "We've been experiencing these issues. We need a new platform, asap. Black Friday is coming, let's do this in like a month." Yeah, let's not do that. It's very unlikely that everything will be set up within four weeks.

So, we've got to plan ahead on those types of things.

Michael: Yeah. If you're thinking of re-platforming in time for Black Friday, sorry folks. It's too late. I would say, we actually had a client last year where they switched up their entire ERP, right leading after Black Friday. It was one of the most crazy things I've ever seen happen and it all came together. It was just like, by the skin of our teeth kind of thing.

I was so nervous for like three months, my hair literally went gray.

Chris: Nailed it, though. It was successful.

Michael: [crosstalk 00:18:09] we were only a small part of that process, privileged to be a part of that but I just really don't want to do that again.

Chris: I totally understand. You get into situations too where there's all this unnecessary pressure.

Michael: Listen, let's do a quick review here. Reasons you might want to re-platform. Number one, your Legacy system is actually impairing your ability to scale. That's a little bit hard to see, it's a [inaudible 00:18:35] pan. If the pan has been heating up, and you didn't notice what you're missing. Well, you need to get some outside opinion probably there on what ... How many years out of date you are. Or you might not know that.

The second you mentioned, not utilizing your platform fully. So, if you're basically paying for a bunch of stuff that you don't need. Then that could be a consideration. If you've got a new initiative, or a new goal, or something like that, it can take a lot of time implement that in your current platform if it hasn't been designed with that in mind. It might be a good way to experience a new platform, to just align it with a new initiative in your company. Form a sense of security a major [inaudible 00:19:17].

Reasons why you should really re-platform, the first being if you are thinking that the platform implementation will solve your current problems. Well, it may need a check to see what the problems actually are. It might be a [inaudible 00:19:31] problem, it might be something else.

You also mentioned there's a second point, that if your competition does something and that means you should do it, well, not necessary. This is an industry subject to [inaudible 00:19:42] we just talked about in previous episodes. But, the platform is a big move. And may be able to get a lot more life out of your platform. I've got a buddy, who has been a guest on the show, where his whole pitch is like, don't change out your eCommerce, just fix your current website.

He's got a really good framework for how to do that. So, a quick [inaudible 00:20:04] sometimes the best approach. Third, you mentioned that if you are ... I guess that's kind of the second, or an extension of it. You need to understand the new problems that you're experiencing, before you should look to a new platform.

Then, finally, you mentioned the timeline. If you're too close to an important lunch, that's not a good time to do a re-platform. So, let's look at this here Chris. Our audience is going to have a lot of questions about this. And should I re-platform now, how close to Black Friday should I consider being before I should do a re-platform? Is there a framework or a model that I can utilize to consider a re-platform, already cracked the code on?

How can people get a hold of you if they have questions like that.

Chris: Absolutely, I'm always happy to answer any questions. I think the best way to reach me would be directly via email, that's going to be Chris@Sellry.com, C-H-R-I-S @ Sellry, S-E-L-L-R-Y .com. And feel free to reach out with any question you may have, I'll be available.

Michael: I also want to mention that we have actually put together a checklist, thank you Chris. Which you can get at eCommerceQA.com/replatforming. If you go there, it's going to give you a one pager on basically you checking off boxes, that will tell you, yeah. I should probably re-platform.

Again, that's eCommerceQA.com/replatforming. As always, you've got the show notes eCommerceQA.com, you can contact us generally by hitting podcast at Sellry.com, P-O-D-C-A-S-T. I don't know why I'm spelling Podcast.

I was going to spell Sellry because Sellry, it's not spelt ... [inaudible 00:21:46] with one or two tips here, Chris. What are some things here we can take away from the show that will help everyone sell three times as much this year, as last year.

Chris: I think one thing that you should definitely be mindful of is, what do your customers care about? What are they experiencing, what is valuable to them? Those are the best thing you can do today. You know, following up on that is, how can I better serve them, based on that information?

I think even if you just take those two simple points, you can apply that in various ways.

Michael: That's excellent. That is nice. Thanks everyone. Keep selling, let's go to Black Friday strong this year.

Chris: Thanks, guys.

Shownotes:

hotjar.com

everyonehatesmarketers.com

Transcripts:
Michael: Hello folks, and welcome to Ecommerce QA. This is a podcast where store owners, directors of e-comm and e-commerce managers can stay up to date on the latest tools and tech in e-commerce. I'm your host, Michael Bauer, and my guest today is Louis Grenier from hotjar.com. Louis has three jobs, he posts a digital marketing podcast called Everyone Hates Marketers.com, it's a show for digital marketers sick of shady, manipulative marketing, like everyone who's listening here.

Nobody on this show would ever do any of the things that you talk about on that show, right?

Louis: Yeah, for sure. And then you put them under pressure and the magic happens. It's not easy to not be sleazy sometimes when you have [crosstalk 00:00:43].

Michael: Oh, that's wonderful. I'm gonna write that down. It's not easy to not be sleazy.

Louis: Yeah. That should be amazed, actually.

Michael: That's what my wife, love that kinda quote. You're also the content strategist at HotJar, which I want to talk a lot about, but most importantly, you haven't said the third item but I think that's because it's the most important. You are the fiance to the beautiful Jennifer, and you guys are getting married in two weeks.

Louis: That's the biggest job, right?

Michael: Yeah. Cool. Well congrats on that, first of all. Why are you talking to me on the show, you should be go, wedding planning or whatever people do.

Louis: Yeah. It's already much, pretty much everything is done. Took us two years to organize it, it's not gonna be a big one, but we took it slow, one thing at a time. It's all ready.

Michael: Nice. Well, two years to plan a wedding, that's what we should have done.

Feel like we, it's hard to follow that one. Tell me this, Louis, why are you at HotJar?

Louis: Because I want to make the internet a better place. Simple as. HotJar is really the best kind of company to join to do that, the solution we are building is really a good way for anybody to improve Internet as a whole, because you can make any website much better by listening to people, by understanding how people behave on your website, by understanding what you should improve on, and stop guessing, right? This is why I join.

Michael: You're making me feel bad, because I thought my company was the best one at making the Internet a better place.

Louis: Okay.

Michael: So listen, I actually probably agree that your company is definitely way cooler than ours. We got hooked on HotJar back in, I think, '14 when a client of mine heard about your product when it was still in beta, and we were like oh my gosh, this is great. It's got all these useful things right in one place and they're really easy to use and onboarding is incredibly fast.

We haven't even talked about what it is. So tell us in a nutshell what HotJar does and is.

Louis: So, it's an all-in-one solution to understand how people behave on your website or on your app. What they do, what they don't do, what they like, what they don't like, and using that, you are able then to identify what you should improve on and where you can grow. So that's really it in a nutshell. Yes, as you've mentioned, HotJar was launched as a beta in our first strategy, so they really got a lot of early adopters, like yourself, to test the product and improve on, so the way we use HotJar is the same way we expect people to use it, which is constantly using it, making sure that we listen to people and we get back on board.

Michael: So you're using HotJar with HotJar, obviously, right? That sounds-

Louis: Yeah it's pretty, pretty metal, right? So that's exactly what we do.

Michael: Nice. So let's talk about this a little bit more. When we're talking about HotJar, we're talking about a few different things. The way we've used it is for funnel evaluation, so you tie in so you can evaluate your funnel. Check out funnel is usually what we're doing, as well as you can do user recordings, you can do user polls, you can do, oh, heat maps, obviously. What else can you do?

Louis: You also have a new feature called incoming feedback, which is a way to understand what people like and don't like about specific elements of your page or the page on its own. So it brings a bit more emotion to the user experience. It's brand new and we just literally launched it yesterday.

Michael: Okay, well I need to turn this on for a client. We went live with a client site last week, and we ran all the other stuff in HotJar but we should have waited til we got that, because this was the main thing we were trying to figure out is what are people reacting negatively to and positively to within the experience in general, and in specific areas. So I need to turn that on, I'm making a note about that right now.

But you do content at HotJar, tell me more. What's your vision for how the internet needs to change in healthy ways?

Louis: Right, so my role is really to try to help inspire as many people as we can using content. Guide, blog posts, anything. Podcasts, anything like this, right? Division we have is really trying to, as I said earlier on, to make Internet a better place by really trying to make as many people understand that you should listen to people. If you understand how they behave, if you truly ... if you truly give a damn about your users, you will have an unfair advantage, and you will be able to go faster than anybody else. You will be able, in the long run, to have a system and a business.

Michael: Talk to me about the fact that the tooling that you provide in HotJar is a kind of a mixture of qualitative and quantitative, and why have you guys decided to go with the exact mix that you use right now.

Louis: That's the question, right, why we've decided this way. Initially it was really about putting, trying to get all of those tools together. So all of the known tools together, as an all-in-one solution, right? So heat maps is not new, polls are not new, recordings are not new, all of the features we had weren't new on their own, but we put them together in a way that really enabled you to get the full picture, the full funnel, the full journey.

Now we are in the phase where we are moving on to just providing stuff to move on to things that are new, brand new, like true innovation such as the incoming feedback, which is not something that is being seen anywhere else. We are moving on to that next phase, right.

Michael: Yeah, you know, it seems like a super big pain when you're trying to make any kind of substitute change or even kinda just understand what you have on a website, because you know, there's user testing but that seems to take forever to get good quality feedback, and I just think that it's great that you're making that that much simpler, and things like that.

Now, let's say that somebody wants to be really, really quantitative, and you know, maybe they've got mixed panel or they've got Periscope or they've got Giraffe or some kind of super duper quantitative metrics tool. How do these tools play together? How would HotJar work in tandem with these other tooling?

Louis: Those tools that you mentioned, I would also include in analytics. Those are, those give you the what. So they give you the key pages that you should focus on. They give you the number of people going there and leaving. They give you the big picture and the what's, right, and HotJar gives you the why. So this is how you should connect them together. HotJar is not intended to compete against [inaudible 00:06:55] on this panel. HotJar is really intended to compliment them, to give you more context around why certain people are doing certain things.

If, for example, you have an e-commerce shop called Fat Pillows, because you said those pillows are actually better than anybody else, right? And you have this check out funnel, and you don't understand why you have such a drop off. Maybe like 90% of people landing on checkout end up leaving. Well, you can use HotJar there to understand why. You set up a heat map, understand where they click. You set up a poll, asking them why they are leaving or about to leave. You set up recordings to understand how people behave on the page, and after a day or two of traffic you will know the answer. You will know exactly why they are leaving.

Michael: So can you lay this out step by step? Let's say that somebody wants to improve let's say the check out. So we've got a check out, what are the steps that you're gonna use, and don't just talk about HotJar, maybe talk about what the other tooling is that you'd need to set up to do this properly.

Louis: So the first thing is, whatever tool you're using for that analytics, you need to understand how many people are coming to this check out. It can be done via Google Analytics, fairly simply. So you need to understand what type of product they are adding to their cart and the last step of the funnel, which is the check out. So, you can use any type of free tool to do that.

The main thing here is really understand ... I think the check out might be something that we can talk about in the next two minutes, but I think the best example to give to start with as a rating and action plan would be maybe at the top of the funnel. So when people land on your website in the first place, because the check out is kinda the last thing. But actually, if you improve, maybe if you improve the first step of the funnel, you might have a much bigger lift than if you put the check out, right?

You figure out that when people land on your home page or on a specific landing page where you're paying a lot of money for people to land on, if you find out that many, many people drop off, maybe 80%, maybe that's where you need to look first, right?

You need to look at the number of people landing on this specific page and then the amount of people leaving, the amount of money you're potentially losing, and therefore the opportunity that you have in front of you to improve.

Let's say people come from an ad and land on this landing page. The first thing you should do is understand why are those people on this page, so it might seem like they all want to buy your product, in your head. That's not necessarily the case, and that's usually not the case, especially if they have never heard of your brand before.

So, the first thing I would do is try to understand what are those people looking for, and might only be two people just saying pillows but actually, if I search for pillows or good pillows on Google, it might not mean that I want to buy one. It might just mean that I'm doing research right now, and therefore if I land on a page, kinda forcing me to buy something, I'm gonna leave because that doesn't give me the answer I'm looking for, right?

So, you could set up a poll there, on this page, straightaway after somebody lands on it or after a few seconds, asking what's the purpose of your visit today? What are you actually trying to achieve, right? The second question I would ask, which is actually really interesting especially in e-commerce because Cempathyion is really fierce, is have you heard of our brand before? And asking these questions means that if, let's say, the vast majority of people say no, never, well it's unlikely that they're actually gonna take the decision to buy from you straightaway, because they only said they trust you right now, right?

There actually have been a lot of studies about that. The more people know your brand, the more they are familiar with it, the more likely they are to go through the purchase, to click on an ad, and all these kind of things, right? That's called brand affinity, and this is incredibly important, especially at the top of your funnel. So that's what I would do first, understand what are people looking for, and then if you find out that people are looking for, like have a lot of questions, don't necessarily want to buy right now, perhaps you need to switch your ad into something more educational about the guide to find the best pillows and get a reader this way, educate those people and then lead your brand this way so that they have heard of you and they are much more likely to buy in the future.

That's what I would look at first, you know? The type of people landing on the page and what they are looking for.

Michael: Yeah, yeah. You know what my favorite thing to do with HotJar is? Is to stick up a poll after check out and say what almost caused you to abandon today?

Louis: Absolutely. That's ... sorry to cut you, yeah, yeah. It's just, I'm passionate about this and I tend to cut people off.

Michael: Right.

Louis: So exactly. So let's say now you've moved into the middle of the funnel, where you're more likely to drop off for other reasons. This is exactly what you can ask, you can say "What almost prevented you from buying today?" As you mentioned in the check out. But you can before that-

Michael: Yeah, even before that, exactly.

Louis: You can ask what's preventing you, actually, from doing what I want you to do today. So you can set up something that's a poll that asks this particular question when they are about to leave the page, and honestly, it's not a [inaudible 00:11:59] hard sell, you can, the mini tool's enabling you to do that, right?

Michael: So you would just set up an exit intent poll?

Louis: Yeah, yeah. So you can set up a poll that's on Test Doctor that says when they're about to leave the play, display the poll.

Michael: Why are you leaving?

Louis: Yeah. So you need to have a decent amount of visitors in order to get enough answers, but it's a quite careful one. But let's not forget one thing, though, we are talking about technology and HotJar and all of the other tools like analytics. Do you know, there is a tool that we all have that we don't use too much, do you know what that is?

Michael: It's not my screwdriver. I don't know.

Louis: It's our mouth, our ears, basically our senses, right? So, let's not forget that we are human beings and talking to other human beings is still our most valuable thing ever, which means that instead of investing a lot of money in ads and in user testing, which you can do, it's just bringing a few friends in the same room as you, showing them your website, letting them use it and just see what they do, how they react to it, what they say, the question they ask, and that's gonna be probably the most effective thing you can do if you have a low budget and don't have a lot of visitors right now.

Michael: I'm gonna push back just a tiny bit on that and say that works really well if those people are somewhat close to your target market or at least can ...

Louis: Of course.

Michael: You and I probably aren't that similar to the people that use our tools, in a sense. I mean, it's a good idea, I'm not saying not to do it, I'm just saying that's one thing we have to watch out for, is making sure that whoever's giving input is a member of the audience that we're trying to hit. So good input there.

Okay, so we hit top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, conclusion of the funnel. We hit asking basic questions. Can you back up a little bit and do some kind of more high level discussion around one really important method: clickthrough rate.

Louis: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Michael: What are some really good tactics that you've seen people using HotJar for to make a big dent in things like click through?

Louis: So do you mean click through rate from an ad to a landing page?

Michael: More like once you hit the landing page and then you're gonna go beyond there and actually click all the way through the site. You could also use the term abandonment, so what are some really great ways people have been using your tools to identify problems with their abandonment and how have they been solving those problems?

Louis: Just think, first of all. In HotJar we're not a big fan of best practices, right, so it's very difficult to tell you this is the thing you should try today that definitely works. That's a word of caution, every business is different and therefore everything you can do, your customers are different so you should be careful of so-called best practices, generally speaking.

However, what we like to talk about more is kind of what we call first principles, so what are the things that will never change about people? And let's focus on that, so there's one good thing that we mention in outlining to prepare for this show is the choice of a lot, so data, like behavioral scientists have proven many times over that the more choice you're giving someone in front of them, the less likely they are to take a decision and the more likely they are to be frustrated about it.

Michael: So ...

Louis: Think about any time of you're going to the restaurant and you have this menu with literally fifty items for starter, 50 items for mains, 50 items for dessert, then you have the daily special, you have the middle of the day, you have so many options. You feel overwhelmed, you don't know what to choose, you get frustrated. Now, I show you just the early bird menu, two items for each. All of a sudden, you just feel much more relaxed and you're able to take a decision. So it's actually extremely important, so that's one of the first principles you can use. Try to simplify the experience you're offering users. Try to remove things that are not being clicked on. Try to remove things that people don't look at, because chances are it might overwhelm them to take a decision, so that will definitely be one of the first principles you should be looking at.

Michael: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, that's a super important thing to me. It's like people feel nervous when they're removing things, but in reality it's like you're reducing friction, you're making it easier for people to make decisions. So if you know anything about your product at all, prioritize the content that you want people to take action on and you will find that they will be inclined to actually do that.

Louis: Absolutely. Another thing I can say is, so we love to talk to our own users and customers in HotJar, so we like to spend time interviewing them, understanding how they talk and how they describe HotJar and how to describe the features we have. So, another thing that works really well, because once again it's based on first principles, it's based on the fact that you are using your customer for your marketing, is that you should use the language they use.

That sounds cliché or that sounds simplistic, but it's not. So, there's something happening in the marketing world or even in the e-commerce world is that when we write copy or when we try to explain something to customers on a page, we tend to put this hard, which is the hardcore salesman person, trying to sell you something and we use words we will never use face to face with anybody, right? So we tend to overpromise, overdeliver, we tend to use words that don't make any sense, that are like overly generalizing and we are not specific enough.

A good thing to do is to literally use exactly the language your customer are using to describe your products and this will have a dramatic effect. It's likely to have a dramatic effect on your commercial, on the experience because that's how people talk, right?

Michael: You have a good way of figuring out how ... that's one thing if you're just talking to someone in person, how would you do that? Maybe there's a way to use HotJar to determine how customers are talking about your product?

Louis: Yeah, so you know, if you send surveys and ask them the question "How would you describe your product to a friend?" And asking them to be as literal as possible, you recollect a lot of data around how people actually describe that to a friend, right? So surveys is a good way, if you don't have a lot of time to spend talking to people, but I would say the number one thing, even if you can't meet people face to face, is to have a 15 minute conversation with them and just make them talk. So you're not a salesman in this conversation, you are a journalist. Your aim is to understand them better so you must make them talk. And once again, the question could be as simple as, let's say you are describing what you do to a friend. What would you say exactly? And let them talk. And if you recall the conversation, you can use transcript as a way to really improve your marketing, to something that really talks to people much better.

Michael: That's great, and I think that would apply to product descriptions, that would apply to landing pages, that would apply even to your motifs and your logos and your, it's a very useful thing to do. How have you guys used that approach with HotJar to change your messaging?

Louis: So we are doing it right now. We don't see that as a one-off project, obviously it's a continuous project. So at the minute in the content team we are talking to at least one customer a week, we do that over 30 minutes and we have a customer delotment process. So if you don't know about customer delotment, it has been kind of developed by, in the start-up world as a way to understand what people value about your tool or your product or you're selling, what they don't value, how to describe it to a friend, et cetera, et cetera. So we have a few questions like this that we go through and we let people talk. We compare them every month and we try to improve things one thing at a time, one page at a time, one piece of copy at a time.

At the minute, we are actually undergoing a big project around the jobs to be done, [inaudible 00:19:36], which is a very powerful concept. It sounds also really simple when you explain it, but it's actually very powerful. So instead of trying to sell features or even benefits, what you are trying to do is consider your solution as the way somebody uses to perform a job. Such as, you know, you don't buy a pillow just to be comfortable, you buy a pillow to sleep better, but even beyond that, maybe you buy a better pillow, to get on better with your wife because you've been snoring for the last 6 months.

Michael: You keep coming back to pillows, man. You must have been shopping for pillows recently.

Louis: Yeah. I'm trying to stick to one example or else it gets tricky, doesn't it? So, this is kinda the job to be done of the pillow. If you understand exactly why those customers hiring this pillow for or your product for, you really then understand that you can explain what you do and what you said much better. Because it's never about the pillow.

Michael: Yeah. You know, it's interesting with the jobs to be done, the thing I find funny and I'm not saying not to use it, I'm a really really big endorser of this, but it's funny how it sounds when you write out "The job for this website to be done is blank," as though it's a person, but that's the whole point, right? We're trying to take the things we're creating and have them do things that cater to the needs of real people, rather than just roughly approximating.

How, for example, with HotJar, how would you describe the job to be done with point to the components of HotJar as you understand it now?

Louis: So you see, it's not about the component anymore, so that's what we've discovered. It's never about the component, it's more about the job. So for marketers in particular, let's take an example on them because we are interrogating many marketers at the minute. It seems like the best, the biggest job that they have is to understand people, understand how people behave on their website, right? That's the job, so they want to understand that. It means that they don't really care whether they have to use a poll, a heat map, a recording, or all of the above. They want the job to be performed.

So what they want to know is how to use those features together and in each other to perform the job, right?

Michael: Exactly.

Louis: The other thing we discover is there are adjacent jobs that they want to be done at the same time. The first one is they want to get stuff done. They don't want to lose time doing it, they want to spend six hours a day performing this job, they want to do it as fast as possible because they are so busy, they have so many things in their head. So therefore, not only do they want to understand how people behave on their website, but they want to understand 50 minutes a day.

That really gives us a huge insight into, we need to get better at giving them what they need faster in a better fashion, better designed way, so that they get the value straightaway and they can move on into the rest of their day.

Michael: Interesting. That almost sounds like a parameter in part of the job. Your audience wants to understand user behavior; they also want to do that quickly within under 50 minutes a day.

Louis: Exactly, right? And the second adjacent job we discovered is also, not only do they want to do it fast but they also want to be able to convince the decision makers, the managers, the C Suite, to change the experience based on that. So they want the tool to be able to convince them, right? Because they are convinced, but it's not the case of everybody that's here.

Michael: So to talk about ... I want to riff off of that for just a moment. That was a really great example of using the jobs to be done framework. What do you see HotJar going towards in the future, if you could share anything about that? Right now I see the tool is providing a lot of ways to understand your audience quickly. Anything you can share about the future of the company?

Louis: Sure. So the first thing to say is that we are very transparent and you can access the HotJar roadmap right now if you go to, let me check again the address. You should just Google HotJar roadmap, you'll find it straightaway. So we actually publish what we are working in the future. There are a few things that we are working on that are more like fixes rather than brand new features. There's a few things that we need to fix, especially regarding recordings, that we're improving but we are very excited about a few things coming next.

The first thing, as I said, is the incoming feedback feature, which is coming out of beta, which is a very good way to evaluate emotions rather than just things. We are also working on integrating Google Analytics with HotJar, which is something that people have been asking for quite a lot. Also integrating it with Xavier. We are also working always on recordings, so at the minute-

Michael: Oh, that'll be awesome.

Louis: Yeah, right? A lot of people, lot of customers have been requesting that for ages. The ability to record visitors on an ongoing basis without to set up new recordings all the time, that's definitely something that has been ask a lot. More in the future, we are gonna move to what we call an event-based architecture. So, instead of just recording page views, we really move on to give you the ability to select the event you want to record. It could be anything, right? So stemming out and [inaudible 00:24:52] you can record specific triggers that are unique to you and really use HotJar to edit them. So it's really a move from basic function ADT's around page views and site visits to really integrating with your marketing stack and understanding how people truly behave on your website.

Michael: That's absolutely fabulous. You know what we're doing with the client right now is we're setting up MixPanel for all of the qualitative, the what, you know, quantitative, I always get those two mixed up. And what I want to do is we already have HotJar installed, but I want to get it fully aligned with the MixPanel data so we'll be able to see the what and see the why and just dig deep into that. It's gonna be fantastic.

Louis: Yeah, we are really looking forward to it.

Michael: So Louis, tell me this. Any final thoughts as we kinda start to wind down here?

Louis: Oh, that's a wide question. I would say to summarize, really, it's all about empathy. You know, we see HotJar's almost an empathy as an obvious kind of product, it's really about understanding kind of people. So, it can be difficult sometimes for you to see the forest from the tree when you are like in front of your computer all day and have to manage this e-commerce tour and looking at these Google Analytics numbers and those spreadsheets and all, but trust me, if you do try to speak more to your customers and understand who they are and what they are trying to achieve in their life, you will get better at what you do. You will increase your sales in the long run, because you'll have more empathy for them. So I would say that's probably the most single biggest improvement anybody can take in their business, can make in their business.

Michael: That's great, empathy, yeah. So cool. How can people get in touch with you if they've got questions about how to maybe set up a really effective HotJar, testing and recordings and all that, or maybe they've got some questions about how can we collect user data better in general, or some of the methodological or framework stuff that you shared?

Louis: Right, so there are two things you can look at. You can Google HotJar big picture, which is a big picture worksheet that allows you to basically do what I explained this episode, which is understanding why people are doing certain things, it's one page that really enables you to get the big picture of what's going on on their website.

Michael: Oh, I love this. I'm looking at it right now, this is fantastic.

Louis: The second thing is the HotJar action plan, which is a little bit more actionable items that tells you what you need to do. So as I mentioned, you set up your key pages, you set up your heat maps, you set up polls, all these kinds of stuff. So it's really a solution based action plan, it's not about choosing x feature or x feature, it's about using them in coordination in order for you to perform the job you have to do, right? So those are two step I think you can do next, right, and if you have any questions you can email me at louis@hotjar.com, so it's L-O-U-I-S@hotjar.com. Any question, really, you can email me and then I'll forward to the right person if I can't answer them directly.

We have an excellent support team as well, who are more than happy to help you if you need any help. They're also on the ball if you need them.

Michael: Let's make sure to mention your podcast, that's EveryoneHatesMarketers.com, because everyone does hate marketers. Do you think people hate sales people or marketers more?

Louis: They hate them both.

Michael: How about lawyers?

Louis: There's actually a study about, you know what, I saw it, I think it was on HotSpot, marketers and salesmen are only 2% of people who trust us. Even lawyers are above us, around 4 or 5% if I remember well.

Michael: I think I'm gonna have to tell my brother that. I'm always telling him lawyer jokes, I'm gonna have to switch to marketer jokes.

Alright, well let's change the industry. Let's start using real data to solve people's needs and then they'll be happy and like us instead of hating us, right?

Louis: Exactly.

Michael: Cool, Louis. Thanks so much for joining the show and congrats on your upcoming marriage. This has been fantastic. As you know everyone, you can find the show notes at ecommerceqa.com. If you have any questions regarding the show or suggestions for a future topic, podcast@sellry.com, S-E-L-L-R-Y.com and that's it for today. Thanks everyone. Thanks Louis.

Louis: Thank you.

Dillon: Hello everybody! This is Dillon Holst and today, I am joined by the founder and CEO of Freeeup, Nathan Hirsch. Nathan is a serial entrepreneur. He is an expert in remote hiring and e-commerce in general. Nathan, thank you for being on with us today.

Nathan: Dillon, that's for having me.

Dillon: One of the things that I found interesting, just browsing through your site, how many people it seems, really have latched onto this idea of remote hiring and are really excited about the things that it can do, just in terms of either augmenting, or completely staffing their workforce. Maybe you could just give me a little bit of background about how you were introduced to the idea of remote hiring and how you decided to kind of make this your thing.

Nathan: Sure, so, going way back, when I was 20, I'm 27 right now, I started an e-commerce drop-shipping business out of my college dorm room. It quickly blew up. I was running a multi-million dollar business before I knew it. Hiring my friends for the first time. I hired my first employee before I could legally drink. I really just had no idea what I was doing. I got lucky and I made some really great hires. People who are still with me seven years later.

Like every entrepreneur, I made some bad hires as well. My business was always drop-shipping, so you never have to touch any products. So, I could hire people that could work at their place or across the hall in a different room, or whatever it was. It didn't really matter whether they were with me at any point. We would have group meetings and what not to get on the same page, but, for the most part, we could be in different states or any part of the world and still do your job.

When I graduated and I decided to become an entrepreneur full-time, and I moved to Florida, I actually did end up opening up an office, which I think was one of the biggest mistakes that I've made. I've hired a lot of full-time people, employees. I quickly realized that if I'm paying someone $50,000, $60,000, $70,000 a year, I need to get the most out of them, because I'm an efficiency person. It was really bothering me that they were spending a lot of their time doing very easy data-entry work or answering simple emails. It didn't feel like I was getting good value. I didn't feel like I was challenging them either. They enjoy their job more when they're being challenged and building rather than doing.

So, a buddy of mine that was actually on my softball team when I moved down here, introduced me to oDesk, which was Upwork at the time, and I just fell in love with it. I mean, in my mind, and I'm a pretty logical person, I'm very limited in the talent that I can get in Orlando, Florida. If I open myself out to the entire world, the possibilities are endless. Not to mention the other benefits of no payroll taxes for hiring contractors, hiring, maybe outsourcing certain tasks, although, I did remote hiring, so, it wasn't all international. But, I was determined to build this army of remote workers, which I did.

I found that hiring these remote workers allowed my full-time people, the people who I was paying to think rather than do repetitive tasks, would really excel and would be able to put a lot more of the company, enjoy their jobs more. We just grew so much faster, to the point where I got rid of the office and made the entire company remote, and I kind of had the idea that I wanted to help other businesses do the same thing, because, there are tricks to the trade. It took me a while, just like it took me a while to learn how to hire employees correctly, it took me a while to learn how to hire remote workers and even international workers correctly. I created Freeeup to help other business owners free up their time the way I have for the past seven years.

Dillon: Sure, okay. In terms of just building a workforce, I love the fact that you identified that your most valuable employees were maybe not using their time in the most efficient manner, or the way that they might have wanted to be spending their time, do you feel like that is something that exists across all industries or is that specific to the tech industry? Basically, remote teams, is that something that can work for every industry or is it just specific industries that you see as being in need of augmentation via remote teams?

Nathan: I mean, there's certainly some industries that it might not apply, if you own a bakery or something like that. But, for the most part, most businesses are online in some way, shape, or form. Even if you own that bakery, someone should run your social media, someone should build your website and run it, and all that. If you're not tapping into remote workers and talent from across the world, you're really missing out on a huge opportunity to expand your business at a fraction of the cost of what it would require to hire internal employees.

Dillon: Yeah, sure, okay, so let's say somebody comes to your site and they're looking for somebody to do some specific thing, let's say data entry. What should that person be looking for in terms of qualities. What should we be looking for in people? What makes somebody a good, remote team member?

Nathan: Sure, and that's one of the reasons why I created Freeeup, because, there are a lot of places out there, where you go to them, and you want to post a job, but it's hard to really figure out what you're looking for. Especially if you've never hired before, or you've never hired remotely before, and you're trying to pick out from 50 people that are in the Philippines, it can be challenging. A lot of times you don't know what to look for.

From my past seven years of hiring, I have a pretty good idea of what I want to look for, and I'll get into that a little bit later. So, the cool thing about us, is we identify these people, we vet them, we test them, we have a strict communication policy that they have to follow, which I'm sure we'll touch upon later as well. Then, we make these workers available to our clients. On our site, there's very little thinking involved. You tell us what you want in terms of skill, "Hey, I have this project day, I need this full-time position," whatever it is, and we pick someone from our network that's already been pre-vetted, that we already know has those qualities, and we introduce them to you.

It's really that simple.

Dillon: What kind of metrics are you testing people for when they come to you and they say, "Hey, I want to be a freelancer. I want to work for you guys."?

Nathan: Sure, so there's three things. One is skill. Obviously, if you're hiring someone to build your website on WordPress they have to have years of experience in WordPress. We're not that new, freelancer marketplace. People that are freelancing for the first time, they don't get into our network.

Dillon: What's the requirement like there?

Nathan: We want people with three plus years of experience for the most part. It can be less if it's a newer platform or something that just came out, but that's a baseline. There are really talented people that learn fast that are the exception to the rule, but, for the most part, three plus years. We have people on our team that have 10, 15 years of experience. We're really looking for that. A track record of success with past clients and years of experience.

Two is their attitude. We want people that care more about money. That are workaholics. That really like working. Where work is the number one priority, or close to the number one priority in their life, and that can really care about our client's business as if it was their own, and not just doing it for the paycheck, like I said before.

Then, quality number three is communication. Because, to me, communication is everything. I don't care how talented of a person that you hire, if you can't communicate with them, it's going to go south so fast you won't even believe it.

Those are really the three things that we look for when we're hiring a worker.

Dillon: Okay, somebody might argue that building a remote workforce could leave yourself open to people leaving early, or maybe they'll feel like you, as a company, are not investing them because you're remote. Is employee turnover more difficult to handle, I guess, when you're dealing with remote workers?

Nathan: If you treat your worker like they're not part of the team, like you're just using them, and you're just giving orders, and they don't care at all about your business, the turnover is going to be high. What I teach is to change that mentality. Make them a part of the team. Make them care about your business. Make them want to be part of the journey in growing your business, and your turnover will be pretty low.

I mean, we have a pretty large network of workers, and our turnover is extremely low. The lowest it's been in either of my two companies at this point. It's all about how you treat people, how you vet people. Whatever your company culture is, if you're adding people to the team that are like that culture, or if you're adding people that are more of that corporate mindset, but you're a start up, or vice verse. Anything that you can do to make people fit in to what you're building, is going to reduce turnover. To me, it's not the fact that their remote workers that leads to turnover, it's your whole attitude and how you treat people in general.

Dillon: You say what you teach, do you offer resources for business owners who are using a remote workforce for the first time? How does that work?

Nathan: Definitely. I mean, we offer free consulting. I do a lot of webinars and podcasts about it. We have e-books that we have continued to come out with. We have our Freeeup blog that you can check out. We always talk about building a culture, and managing people, and how to hire, and stuff like that. We have an online masterminds Facebook group that people can post questions in. We're pretty responsive. We try to answer every single one in as much detail as possible. We're really there to assist you along the way as much as we are to provide you those workers that you need.

Dillon: In terms of people that are not familiar, or maybe are just starting to build a remote workforce, what would you say the most common question you get asked by business owners is?

Nathan: Are they going to steal my information or what are the risks involved in something like that?

Like I tell them, there's nothing I can do to make that risk zero. There's always going to be a risk, that employee, or contractor, or worker, whatever it is, makes a bad decision. But, at the same time, we're pre-vetting these people. Most of the time these people are in it to provide for their family. They care a lot more about having the job than they do about stealing your information. What a lot of clients realize, is their information, unless you're a huge company, really isn't as valuable as you think it is to have someone jeopardize their job over it.

I mean, even with us, what's cool about it, is it's so hard to get into our network. Once they're in, just like our clients like it, 'cause they don't have to interview hundreds of people, our workers like it, 'cause they don't have to do hundreds of interviews. They want to stay in the network. They want us to bring clients to them, and if they jeopardize anything, they get kicked out for life.

Yes, you should be protective of your stuff, and you should give people limited access when it applies. But, you really want to have the mentality that you're trying to build trust with these workers, and everyone is in it for the same reason.

Dillon: Sure, yeah, so, keeping in the same kind of thought process with first-time business owners that are doing the remote worker thing for the first time, what would you say, just from your years of experience in watching people do hiring, what would you say the biggest mistake is, especially within the context of remote hiring?

Nathan: The biggest mistake that people make is not diversifying. They'll hire one person to do everything. They'll teach them how to do bookkeeping, how to answer customer emails, how to do this and that, and everything that it takes to run their business. They put them in that manager position, and six months later, that person quits and they have to start all over and their entire business is in shambles, and it sets them back three to six months. It's the worse thing that you can do.

If you're hiring and your business is growing at a good pace, diversify. Hire one person per team. Spread it out, if one person quits, it's not the end of the world. Come up with training guides and videos where your ... No one on your team is indispensable. If you look at your business right now, and you have 10 employees, and three of them it would just be an absolute disaster if they left, you really need to work on diversifying and changing that kind of atmosphere.

Dillon: Hm, okay, yeah, that makes sense. In terms of just working with a remote team, often, in the past when I've worked with larger companies, you'll have specific teams do team building. They'll do things to try to build group cohesion, all that kind of stuff. What would you tell business owners, and how would you guide them in terms of building team cohesion when everybody is not sitting in the same office, or they might not ever see each other face to face, how do they build team cohesion?

Nathan: Sure, so, step one is make sure everyone understands the company. When you hire someone, or you onboard someone, you should hand them a piece of paper that's like, "Hey, this is how we started. These are our goals and expectations. These are the important people in the company, and their contact information. These are my personal pet peeves, if you're going to be working under me."

Just, everything is laid out and clear. On top of that, as you hire them and you set these goals, make sure you're updating them. Is your company having a good week, having a bad week, what projects are you working on? When projects finish and you launch them, make it a big deal. Make it so that everyone's talking in a group. Have those Monday morning meetings where everyone gets on the same page and then spends a week attacking instead of everyone logging in at different times and going and doing their own thing away from everyone. Build that atmosphere where everyone is working together and is rooting for each other for a common goal.

It's really not that hard to do if you put some time into it up front. A lot of issues arise when you just have 10 contractors that never talk to each other, that don't know what the other pieces are in the company, and for the most part, don't even know what their contributions are, they just know that they do their job and hand it to you and do the next job. That's very easy to lose a person, because, the second that someone comes along like Freeeup, or anyone else, that has that positive company culture, and is paying the same rate, then that person's going to jump.

You can either pay people a lot of money and treat them poorly, or you can pay them market rate and have that great culture and lower turnover and have a great team working together.

Dillon: Can you give me an example, or maybe a specific scenario in which you've seen, either somebody do it the right way or do it the wrong way in terms of building team cohesion?

Nathan: Yeah, I mean, I've had clients that I've sat down with them, and I've been like, "Listen, you shouldn't talk to workers that way," and I'll be honest with them, I'm like, "Listen, I want you to succeed. It's not my job to tell you how to run your business. If you want my advice, I'm happy to give it."

They're good enough that they want my advice and I'm like, "Listen, if someone's pissing you off, you can't just scream at them. You have to look at it as in a problem-solving situation. Yes, you can always fire them and replace them. But, it's in your best interest, if you invested two months into training someone, to sit down and have an honest conversation and hear them out and get feedback on yourself."

Because, a lot of the time, it's not only the worker's miscommunication, but, it's also how the client manages people. It may be stuff like organization and stuff like that. In my atmosphere I'm always looking for feedback. I'm a totally different owner now than I was five years ago. A lot of that is because my business partner, Connor, looked me in the eye and he was like, "You need to change these things."

Because, we got feedback from my team of 15 to 20 assistants, that when I'm doing performance reviews or anything like that, it's right back at me. Tell me how I can be a better leader or a better manager, because, people think I'm a business owner, that the only thing I care about is money. I'm going to make more money if I'm a better manager and a better leader and people stay here.

I try to adjust people's just attitude in general, because, that's a lot of the problem. They're so used to being that boss, it's like, "Do this. Do that," without having that team mentality.

Dillon: In terms of just ... I'll give you an example from our own company, we do hire quite a few people from either overseas, or contractors here in the United States, and one of the things that we've found to be somewhat challenging is that, I guess the best way to say it would be, to build a communication process that has longevity, I guess. And what that looks like for us is, we've done our best to do kind of like a stand-up meeting every week where everybody gets together. They talk about what they've been working on. They share positive things that have happened, negative things that have happened, but one of the things that we ... Especially when we were first starting out, struggled with, was consistency and everybody making an effort to be there on time, all that kind of stuff. Because, it's really easy, when you're working remotely, it can be easy to fall into the trap of, "Well, I've got this project going on, so I'd rather get this project done, rather than show up to the meeting."

That sort of thing. Give a company like us some advice in terms of instilling, I guess, an attitude of this is really important, that we have this time to connect as a team, that we have this time to motivate each other. What would you say to somebody, especially a company that is new to the whole remote hiring scene, what would you say to them in terms of establishing some sort of consistency?

Nathan: I would divide it into two parts. Is it the workers or is it the system?

If you're just looking at the workers, are you hiring the right people? Are you hiring people that prioritize communication, that prioritize teamwork and company culture and group building or are you hiring people that just get satisfaction from completing projects and don't care about the rest of the team in any way?

If you're looking at the systems, I would say, does it flow from the top down? Connor and I, we've been working together for seven years, and we're pretty honest with each other. One of my biggest issues with Connor in the first years that we were in business is he would be like, "Yeah, let's do this project, this project, this project, this project," and he would get overwhelmed and he would be inconsistent, because meetings that he wanted to have would get pushed back.

Projects that he wanted to do would get moved around or changed, and it flowed down. Everyone else just became completely unorganized below him. On the top flowing down, I mean, with us we have Monday morning meetings, 10 am, every Monday, that for the past two years that I've been running Freeeup. It hasn't changed, everyone knows to show up. If you're an assistant of mine and you're not showing up to Monday morning meetings, you're not going to be an assistant of mine very long.

For me, it's setting that culture and putting it set in stone, and making sure that if you have other owners in the company, or other people that are up top, or even assistants that maybe have been with you for a while and have gotten a promotion or in a manager position, or whatever you want to call it. Make sure that they're following the policies and the culture, and that trickles down to the new people that are hired. Because, if you have a new person that walks in the door of McDonald's, and every person working there being like, "This place sucks. I don't want to be here right now. Get out when you can."Or, if you walk in and everyone's like, "Hey, the boss is awesome. We're all working together to make as much money as possible. They treat us well. If this happens, we get rewarded."

Then, it's going to flow down. People that walk in the door are just going to snap right into it and know, "This is how it's done here. I need to follow suit."

Dillon: In remote offices in general, give me some keys to what good productivity looks like in a remote office, and maybe if you have any particular tools that you're using in terms of project management, that kind of thing, what are the biggest keys?

Nathan: Sure, so, all my assistants, I have a team of 15 to 20 assistants. Then, I have an internal team of six people that run the teams and have their own assistants outside that. All my assistants have a combination of daily tasks that they know they have to get done. They have short-term projects. Stuff that, cool ideas we've came up with or things that we're building, that are one weeks or two weeks that they know have these due dates and they have to get them done, or tell us in advance if something comes up they need an extension, but, for the most part get it done. Then, they have long-term projects. Things that we're building over the course of the year. They know that they're responsible for these three things.

During the day I'm getting the most out of them because the day-to-day operations that I just don't have the time to do, I know are getting done. The short-term projects, I'm utilizing their brain to chop away at these projects that I can implement right away, which is huge when you're running a startup, because you don't want to wait too long to implement things. Then, I also had the long term vision in mind where my bookkeeping team is working on a long-term solution to payments, or whatever it is. My HR team is building our new testing platform for new hires in six months.

It just works out very well that every worker knows they have these responsibilities and sticks to it and reports on them. It's very structured. There's really just no excuses along the way. Everyone knows that that's the way it is. You're responsible and ... We never are like, "Hey, if you don't do this, you're going to lose your job."

But, I mean, everyone knows that that's what's expected of you. They've seen that if people come in and we assign them stuff and they don't do it, they're no longer a part of the team. We don't threaten them. We just say, "This is the way it is, if you want to be here, you have to do it."

Dillon: Are there any other things that you'd like to bring up, just in context of what we've been talking about that maybe I haven't asked you or you think is important for people to know about remote hiring in general?

Nathan: Yeah, I think you should value your time at a very high level. Valuing your time also applies to valuing your workers' time, you're business partner's time, your clients' and your customers' time. Really think about how long it takes you to do HR, and how long you spend doing interviews, and going through resumes, and training people, and even turnover. Because, turnover is the most expensive thing in business. It can set companies back for a while.

I really created Freeeup to end all of that. We have a very great interview process. We get hundreds of applicants a week. We take the top 1%. When you're a client of ours, it's free. Whenever you need a worker, you press a button, it asks you a few questions so that we know exactly what you want. We introduce you within 24 hours or even less. Because our turnover is so low, we have a no-turnover guarantee that if our worker, on the rare chance that they quit, because it is real life, people do leave jobs, we cover all retraining costs, and get you a new worker right away.

The amount of time that you can save just on the HR alone, nevermind turnover cost, is huge. It really, I mean, think about whether you're actually spending time in your business focused on sales, marketing, and expansion, or whether you're focusing them on day to day operations and HR. Because, you'd be surprised how many really smart business owners wake up one day and realize that they're spending 40, 50, 60% of their time on the latter.

Dillon: Yeah, sure, so, maybe you could give us a high-level overview of what Freeeup can do for a business owner.

Nathan: Like I said, signing up is free. We have a network of workers from $5 to $50 an hour. We're about 40% U.S., 40% Philippines, 20% scattered throughout. Everything e-commerce and online business, from WordPress, graphic design, data entry, customer service, advanced consultants on Amazon, eBay, click funnels, all that stuff, and they're ready to go.

Our workers are first come first serve. We're very much a vast hiring platform, which, I don't know any others that are like that. Where you can have someone hired within an hour. We make it super fast. All our workers have strict communication policies. We have 15 pages of communication policies that our workers have to memorize and get tested on, so that you know our workers are not going to disappear. If you ever need to get ahold of your workers, you can come to me and my assistants, and we grab them for you.

It's a very streamlined process, so you never find yourself chasing down remote workers, or interviewing, or any of that. Then, I mentioned that we're hands on. We're there to help you along the way. We're there to guide you with our blog and our Facebook group. You can always ask us questions and ask our assistants questions. And we have that no turnover guarantee. We're really trying to be that solution for the business owner, to help free up their time, hence the name, along the path to building their business.

Dillon: Awesome, so, what are you guys looking forward to in 2017? Are you guys working on any new initiatives or new projects that people should be aware of?

Nathan: Yeah, #beeverywhere. That is the goal for 2017. Connor is doing a great job on the marketing front with the blog, lots of podcasts, and webinars, and all of that. Just hired a great PR manager. I'm pretty sure she's the one that got me on this show. We have our new software that's being updated. We're always looking for software improvements. We just added five new people to the internal team to help that extra level of support, so our clients always have someone to go to whenever they need something.

We're really trying to be that hands on solution that's always there when you need us. We're really not interested in you hiring a worker, having a bad experience, and us making a few dollars. We want to make sure that you love the workers that we give you, and that they help you grow your business long term.

Dillon: Cool, well, thank you, Nathan. I appreciate you taking the time to answer some questions here today. Guys, please check out the link to Freeeup.com in the show notes. Then, we're going to also have some additional information on services that Freeeup can provide for you down there as well. Nathan, thank you for your time.

Nathan: Sure. One quick thing. Anyone that mentions this podcast gets $1 off their first worker forever. So make sure-

Dillon: Awesome, is there any kind of code that they should use?

Nathan: I'll get you an affiliate link after the show. We can track that.

Dillon: All right, that'll in the show notes as well, guys. Cool, thanks, Nathan.

Nathan: Thank you.

Show Notes:

Get Your Conversion Rate Optimization Starter Guide Courtesy of Disruptive Advertising.

Tell Us Your Ecommerce Pain Points

Check out our episode with Nick Disabato

Use Unbounce To Build Beautiful Landing Pages. (FOR FREE if you can be considered a startup)

Optimizly or Visual Website Optimizer or Adobe Target to create a better version of your current landing page

Talk to Chris On Twitter

Transcripts:

Michael: Hello folks, and welcome to eCommerce Q&A, this is a podcast where store owners, directors of eCommerce, and eCommerce managers can stay up to date on the latest tools and tech in eCommerce. I'm your host Michael Bower, self proclaimed eCommerce junky and my guest today is Chris Dayley, the VP of testing inside optimization at Disruptive Advertising. I'm reading Chris's bio here. It says, "When he's not fixing his hair, you will most likely find him pushing the boundaries of AB testing. Disrupting the website design space, Chris frequently speaks on the topics of CRO and other things like that." Chris, welcome.

Chris: Thank you guys so much for having me on the show.

Michael: Absolutely. Tell me what the most disruptive thing you did this year was.

Chris: Well, it's actually, I'm not even going to give you an example in the website realm. The most disruptive thing I've done this year is, and I haven't even uploaded this to the site yet, but I started growing out my mustache. I decided this might be something that I need to try before I'm an old man, so I've got a long curly mustache going on and I just-

Michael: I've got to see this. You got to see this. Can you send a picture?

Chris: Just this week, I will say ... I will send you a picture. Just this week, I got a full curl in. It goes all the way around. It's a big accomplishment, it's pretty disruptive.

Michael: Nice, nice. You know I'm imagining a world where you can have a curly mustache and people not think you're a firefighter.

Chris: Or a painter.

Michael: Painter, okay. I don't know about the painter thing because what I've seen with painters, at least the painters that I know, they're all a little bit quirky because they've been drinking too much paint. What I mean is like ... A painter, to get those nice edges on his brush he'll stick his brush in his mouth to get it just the right moisture. At least this one painter I did a lot work with 20 years ago, he was a total weirdo, okay ... So mustaches. Well Disruptive Marketing, can you give us the big idea in a few words?

Chris: Sure.

Michael: Start with advertising and advertising marketing.

Chris: Yeah. There's a couple reasons I love the name Disruptive Advertising. Number one there are so many marketing agencies out there and there's a lot of marketing agencies that you can go out there to get an all-in-one solution. Lots of agencies that offer any kind of marketing service you want. We are just focused on one approach, and that is we are a data-driven marketing company that helps companies build advertising campaigns that convert and then convert that traffic on the website. So we take a very focused approach that is completely centered around conversions. So that's obviously a disruptive approach. That's one reason I really like it, obviously, our approach is different from everyone else in the space.

But also, we're also very disruptive in the sense that we don't use traditional tactics. We're not a rote agency that goes in and does the same thing with every client. We are absolutely an agency that looks for anyway of getting in front of your target audience. If that is using Facebook or using Google Ad words that's great. If that is re-targeting, if that's figuring out e-mail campaigns, if that is running tests on your website. We dive in and we look for ways that we can learn what is actually going to convert each of our clients' audiences. That is also a disruptive approach. I am a huge fan of adapting ... We're in such a rapidly changing industry that you've got to be able to adapt and think on the fly and be strategic and that's our core competency.

Michael: That's great, thanks for that. My understanding is that you mostly focus on lead gen, is that right?

Chris: No, actually the majority of our clients and the space that we do the best in is eCommerce. I have a lot of background in legion and that may be what you're referring to. But I would say over half of our client base is eCommerce.

Michael: You know what I'm seeing and what we're pushing right now for a lot our clients is use these strategies and tactics of info marketing in lead generation that have been proven over time, over the last multiple, honestly more than a dozen years and apply those to your eCommerce site. The main thing that I see when we're talking about info marketing or lead gen is that you have a single page that lays out a case if it's a persuasive argument that you're doing. A lot of us in eCommerce think that if we just show you our stuff that that will make you buy it, which is not necessarily true if everybody else is doing that same thing. You have to be persuasive, you have to give you a reason to buy this thing. Or if you're earlier in the customer journey, let you know why you need to be considering this type of thing in the first place.

We're going through this with a client right now, it's an ebike company, which is in interesting space, being a biker myself I'm in to that and actually have been considering buying an ebike, which is freakishly expensive right now. Which is the point, right? When you have a ... When you're not competing on the basis of price, you're in, maybe a better industry or a newer industry or something like that. There's a lot of people that are going to be competing on the basis of a lot of other attributes other than just the price. That's where all these strategies and tactics can be really valuable.

Chris: Well and what you said that I loved that's a big big part of what we do, you're talking about value proposition. And for me, someone's motivation to convert on your site is a simple, simple equation that I didn't make up. But someone's motivation to convert is equal to their perceived value minus the perceived costs. You have to build up enough value for your user that they think that that value is greater than the cost of either the dollar amount cost or the time cost it's going to take or the cost of potentially getting blasted with emails and texts from you. There's a lot of perceived costs that's in someone's mind and so almost immediately when someone comes to your site, you're working at a disadvantage. You're working with a debt that you need to repay them in the form of value. You need to show them that value. So I love what you said there.

Michael: How are we working at a disadvantage? Can you elaborate on that?

Chris: Yeah, so people in general, especially people that are web-savvy, which is everybody, is people are so familiar with the standard tactics. People are very familiar with the things that they encounter on websites everyday. So there's a lot of things that people, when they come to your website are immediately going to tune out. They're going to tune out probably 80% of your website experience. So you have to make sure that the things that you are really drawing attention to, the things that stand out to your audience, you have to make sure that those things within two to three seconds can communicate a tremendous amount of value. Because that's about all you have. You have about two to three seconds when someone comes to your website for them to psychologically draw context from your site and decide if they want to stay.

Michael: Let's dig into this some more if you don't mind.

Chris: Yeah.

Michael: The whole idea of getting value within two to three seconds, let's say we're selling a product and that product's a physical product and I can't get that product to you within two to three seconds. So what do you mean exactly in an eCommerce site let's say?

Chris: Ecommerce is probably the very best place and sometimes the hardest place to do this because we want to tell them so much about our product, right? It doesn't matter what the product is, it could be, I have optimized pages for doctors that are buying hereditary cancer testing kits. Extremely detailed, lots of components to this package and very scientific. There's lots of information that we could just barf all over these users. That's what we as marketers and we as business owners are really tempted to do, is just give them a ton of information. Whether it's doctors that you're advertising to or kids or mothers or whatever it is, you need to be able to show the value of the product in two to three seconds.

There's two things that need to happen. Number one, you need to make it seem very easy to take action. It needs to be obvious what the user is supposed to do. The very best way to make it obvious what they're supposed to do is to use color contrast to your advantage. My eye needs to be drawn to the call to action immediately. Because psychologically if I feel like I have to figure out something. If I feel like I have to figure out what I'm supposed to do, if I feel like I have to scroll down your page or read a bunch of stuff, that immediately causes anxiety for me. That's never good for conversion rate. So you want it to be very obvious, what they're supposed to do.

And then you want it to be very easy for them to figure out why they should buy your product. There shouldn't be a ton of information that you just spew all over them right away. You can have a lot of information on site. You can have a lot of information on an eCommerce product but you don't typically want to barrage them with all that information immediately. You probably want to have two to three things that are going to stand out to them, above the fold so that they can go, okay, there's a little bit of information here. If I want more I can scroll down. But it needs to seem psychologically easy for someone. If they can figure out what they're supposed to do and they can figure out why they should buy your product and they can at least just draw some quick context from the page you have a much much higher chance of converting them.

Michael: Let me make sure I've got this straight. There's two things that you mentioned are crucial for making a conversion friendly product detail page, which is first making it super obvious what you want them to do. Putting it right in front of them. And second making it really obvious why they should do it, is that right?

Chris: Yeah. What I see happen a lot with eCommerce sites, here's an example, I'm actually going to tell you about one of our eCommerce clients that sells a bunch of products. This client is Diesel Power Gear, they have a show on the discovery channel. So they get lots of traffic to their site and their monetizing on this show with a bunch of knick knacks. Like hats and beard oils and t-shirts, whatever. He's got a bunch of stuff that you could buy from them. When you go to their homepage, they were like, "Hey we've got all these cool products, there's tons of different types of people that are coming to our homepage so we just want to show them as many different kinds of products as possible". So they had this very long scrolling page, you could just scroll and scroll and scroll. They're like, "It's kind of like Instagram, people love Instagram". So they thought that this was the ultimate homepage.

When we went in, one of the very first tests that we ran that I am a huge proponent of and it's called an existence test. Existence tests are basically, we want to figure out what content should be on the site. So they have all these products that are one their homepage, for an existence test we go through and we just create a bunch of different variations of the homepage where we remove some of those products. So we had eight or ten different variations where we removed one or two or four products at a time. And we launched that test and by the end of the first week we had generated an additional 28,000 dollars in revenue. Just from removing stuff from the site.

Michael: I'm not going to ask you to share real numbers but can you give us an idea of roughly how much revenue this site's doing? Is it ...

Chris: It fluctuates from one to three hundred thousand dollars a week.

Michael: Okay. So that's a roughly, almost a 10% or even more actually, it's 10% plus ...

Chris: Yes.

Michael: Actually that's 10-30% increase.

Chris: Yeah, just from removing stuff. And you have to remember too that we were splitting traffic to some of these variations. Once we implemented one of the winning variations it represented, I believe something like 40 to 50 thousand dollars in increased monthly revenue.

Michael: Just from removing stuff off the site? Not changing any of the messaging, wow ...

Chris: Exactly. That really speaks to this point of when you give people too much stuff, it makes it really hard for people to make it a decision. When you make it simple, when you make it easy, when you help them and guide their attention where it should go, you have a much higher chance of actually converting them and them buying something.

Michael: This is great. Honestly this ties in, Chris, really closely with a series that we just recently did around timeless UX principles. This idea of taking things out, figuring out what really matters, focusing on that, pushing that, that was one of the main things we talked about. I'm glad to hear that this is further confirmation of that. Chris I want to change gears slightly and talk about you guys, was it you personally or your company won the 2014 Gold Witch Test 1? Was that you?

Chris: That was my company back ... 2014 I started my agency, Daily Conversion, this is prior to Disruptive.

Michael: Got it. So can you tell me about that? What exactly did you do, how did you win that, what did you learn from it?

Chris: This was a really fun test. The reason I submitted it was because it was a test that I think a lot of people might have rolled their eyes at when they saw what we wanted to test. And it had a tremendous impact. What we ended up testing was we had a landing page that we had optimized a lot around. We had been testing on this landing page for over a year.

Michael: What kind of company was this, what was being sold?

Chris: It was for, this was a lead generation, it was for universities. So getting people to go back to school. So we had a landing page with a giant form, a ridiculously giant form with 20-something form fields on it. Like I said, we had been testing on this for years so we had figured we had a best practice landing page here. We've been testing on this for so long, we've seen so many improvements, we've learned so much about the audience, we've got it pretty dialed in.

But I decided to shake things up a little bit so I ran a test, I just called it the color test. That's what we called it. Literally all we tested, is we tested 12 different variations of colors on this page. So we tested the background color, the value proposition colors and the button color. So different color combinations. And we used any color we could come up. So we had purple backgrounds with orange buttons. We had orange backgrounds with purple buttons. We had blue backgrounds with ... Red backgrounds ... We had green, any color you could think of we tested in this test. At the end of this test, we ran this test for ... We had, I think, close to 500,000 visitors that we ran through this test. So a significant amount of data. What we did was, after we finished the test we went in and we segmented the results by traffic source. We wanted to see, okay, do different traffic sources respond to colors differently?

What we found is that each traffic source had a different winner. So our email traffic had one color combination winner-

Michael: What was it? I got to hear this. What was the color combination that email liked?

Chris: This was so interesting. Email liked purple background with orange buttons. Like Phoenix Suns. It was the most ugly, when our designer saw that page, our designer actually told me I shouldn't even run that as a variation of the test. Because he said it looked so bad there's no way this is going to win. Not only did it win, but it had over a hundred percent increase in conversion rate.

Michael: Okay, so that's email.

Chris: Email for organic, I believe it was a blue background with an orange button. Then we had our, I guess what we called affiliate traffic, its re-marketing and then affiliate advertisers. I believe on that one it was the flip flop of the email. We had an orange background with purple call to action buttons. What came to me out of this test, was something that was very interesting. Number one, color obviously played a huge role in how people responded to that page. And different types of audiences respond differently to different colors. We had just assumed, well we'll just run the same variation for all traffic. From this point on, we learned our traffic sources respond very differently to our test variations, so we need to test them all separately. We need to have a customized landing experience for each of these traffic sources. It was very very interesting and some of the craziest results I've ever seen.

Michael: That's so weird. We just did a call the other day with Nick Disabato, whom you probably know from the industry. We had a very interesting conversation about the whole dynamic tension between activities that basically make your site look worse but convert better. There is a balance to be struck just to be clear for anyone whose new to this show, you don't want to only go off of what tests are better in the short-term, because that's like all the low-end fast food restaurants that just start randomly adding things to their menu until it's so cluttered you can't even figure out what's going on. Basically you lose your brand eventually. So you've got to watch out for that. But at the end of the day you have to balance those two things because you need to sell stuff. You need to sign up leads. This is a transactional scenario here, it's not an art gallery. Dynamic tension. Wow, that's really interesting.

One of the things that we're running into is when you start getting more targeted you get a much better conversion rate. Astronomically better, right? Every single factor by which you segment in an audience and then market to that makes it way better. What's a modern tool that you guys can maybe recommend for managing the, all the different versions of everything that you have to have? Landing pages, let's start with that.

Chris: A couple things on that note. First, I always recommend testing before you start personalizing all of your landing pages. Because I have also run very similar tests in different industries where all the traffic responded the same. Or all the traffic didn't really seem to care. I wouldn't get too complicated before you know that you nee to. But if you've tested and you find that these different audiences respond differently ... I can't even tell you, the idea of personalization gets a lot of business owners really excited. They're like, "okay yeah we can have a campaign for, we can have a landing page for women, we can have a landing page for men, we can have a landing page for Asians". This idea sounds really exciting and it also is a ton of work. And it only makes sense if the audience cares, right? If the audiences actually perform differently.

But assuming that you have tested and these different audiences actually want a customized experience, there's a variety of things. We used, for landing pages, we use Unbounce. Unbounce is a great way, very easy tool to set up landing pages. You can copy and duplicate landing pages, create variations. It's a really really easy way to manage tons of different landing pages. And it's very very simple. It has a drag and drop editor so you don't need a developer to go in and develop these landing pages. So highly recommend a tool like Unbounce.

If you're testing an actual page on your site, so not a landing page, you've got to have a testing tool in place. So something like Optimizly or Visual Website Optimizer or Adobe Target. You've got to use something and these testing tools ... What we do for a lot of our clients when we've broken out landing pages like this and we have four or five different audiences with different site experiences, we won't even make the changes on the actual site. Because it can get complicated if you've got five different versions of a page that your developer has to code up based on traffic source. A lot of time we'll just have one version of that page and then we'll use that testing tool to pull out those specific audiences and customize the experience for them. So that way you don't have this nightmare of a back end on your website that you're developer cries every time you need to make a change to. He can just manage one version and then you use the testing tool to manage all the rest.

Michael: Absolutely. We're actually seeing the emergence now, this is a bleeding edge area, but of tooling that will not only do what you said but it will do it dynamically from a data source. It will be like personalizing your page based on data that we are pulling from our [inaudible 00:21:06] or whatever it's pulling. So that's going to get really really fancy in the next, I would say, year where we'll be able to do dynamic personalization without having to do a ton of manual work.

Chris: Yep, personalization on the fly.

Michael: Cool, that's interesting. I don't want to spend too much time talking about the tech here. I want to here more about the disruptive side of your business. What are some other really disruptive things you guys have done?

Chris: Well, in the testing space pretty much anything you do is going to be disruptive. Especially because most of the time you're dealing with a business owner that has very firm opinions on what is going to work and what isn't.

Michael: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Because they started this thing and it's their baby and they know this industry. Maybe they're part of the market, that kind of thing.

Chris: Oh yeah. In fact, I'll give you one example. Just the other day, we have a fashion retailer, she's got a lot store boutiques and then now she's launched an online website to sell her clothes. So she's very very very involved in the fashion industry. She flies out to Europe every year, multiple times per year to figure out all the latest fashions to make sure that she's on top of the latest trends. She's sources out all of the materials herself, so she's very involved in this space. Because she's very involved in this space and she's very on top of the trends, she was positive she knew what her audience wanted.

One of the things that we proposed to her ... One of the things that we've seen work very well on eCommerce sites, if you're looking for a test that you should run, it's not the easiest test to build but it can have tremendous impact, is having some kind of a pop-up experience when you add something to your cart. Going back to this idea of making it very easy for your customers, you want it to be very obvious what the next step of the process is. On this particular website, if I clicked add to cart, I added a shirt to my cart, for example, I would just get a little notification that says, "successfully added to your cart". And now it's great. We recommended to her, we've seen this work on other sites, "instead of that we should have a pop-up that comes up and says, you added this to your cart, now let's go checkout and buy this", and she said "no that will never work". So we said, "okay why will it not work"? And she said, "I tried this three or four years ago, my audience just doesn't like pop-ups, plus nobody else in my space is doing pop-ups. If it worked, someone else would be doing it."

We said, "well let's go ahead and let's run it anyways". So we ran three or four different variations of pop-ups with different designs, different content, different information, different emphasis on checking out versus continuing to shop. Anyways, by the end of the test all of the variations that we ran were beating her existing website. The one that ended up winning, even though she wanted to push people to continue shopping, the one that ended up generation by far the most revenue was the one that just had, in your face a big red button that says "proceed to checkout". And then had a little tiny link that said "continue shopping". So making it very obvious, you just added something to your cart, let's get you to checkout now and actually buy it.

Again, this was very surprising to her. It went one hundred percent against what she believed her audience wanted. And went against what her industry, quote/un-quote, best practices were. But it totally worked for her audience. Again this whole idea of being disruptive is all about challenging assumptions. You can't assume, just because no one else in your industry is doing it, that it doesn't work. Chances are, no one else in your industry is even testing. They're probably just launching a new website every six months and everyone thinks that what they're doing is working. So everyone else is copying them. You've got to test what works for your audience. You've got to be willing to challenge those assumptions and be disruptive in your industry.

Michael: That's really interesting. Again I want to refer back to the fact that it tested well in the short-term, do you think that's going to have a negative impact on the brand in the long-term? Is there a way of testing that?

Chris: That's a really interesting concept that you bring up. This whole idea of branding is one that's near and dear to my heart. I'm very passionate about, obviously I was a business owner myself. I do care about brand. But to me, I think a lot of brands get way too caught up in the idea of their brand. To me, whether or not you're pushing someone to check out or giving them the option to continue shopping, your customers most likely are not going to remember that long-term. And if it's working on your site, if it's generating consistently more sales ... If you're really worried about it hurting your brand long-term, one thing I've done in the past is run what I call a perpetual control where you always have a very small percentage of your traffic that's going to a version of your website before you started testing. And then you've got your latest and greatest version of your website where you have 95% of your traffic going.

So you can track and make sure that these improvements you're seeing actually play out long-term. But for most of our clients, we see these continue to play out long-term. And that idea of brand being so concerned about what your audience thinks about your brand, if they like your site experience you've got a good brand. It doesn't matter whether you're using pink or purple or red or orange on your site to your audience. They don't really care what your site looks like and feels like. They really just care, is it easy to use? That's one thing that Amazon has found. And Amazon, I think, is the king of, is they're constantly tweaking their site. It has nothing to do with, "we want people to think that we are the most sophisticated website in the world. It's really just about, how do we sell the most damn product in the world?" And everyone loves Amazon because it's so easy to buy crap. It's almost too easy.

Michael: You know what's interesting, what this is reminding me of, to be honest with you, I don't know if I fully agree. But that is because I haven't done the testing that you have done. And I feel anxious about this idea of making changes that may feel so dangerous or whatever. I'm feeling really challenged in my assumptions about that and I appreciate that challenge. What I was thinking about just a moment ago was that the concept of, in genetics, in biology, I'm not a biologist ... But the idea that a genetic population, when it's exposed to a certain environment will change and morph. The idea of hopeful mutations basically, that genetic traits expressing themselves in a particular way within an environment will allow the population to survive better in that environment. I think maybe we can analogize from the idea that an audience is like an environment and that your website is like an organism or maybe a specific subpopulation of that genetic community that then can find it's safest and best expression. And it's going to be a little bit different depending on the environment, depending on strengths of the company and so on.

What I'm getting at is you have lizards that develop larger pads on their feet to be able to grip things better. But then in another scenario it's actually gets smaller pads so they don't have as much surface area with the sand so they don't burn their feet or whatever. I think that we can basically, maybe take that idea and just thinking out loud here, but apply that to changing ... When we think of testing and changing our websites and really any of our digital properties, or any of our marketing, any of our messaging, anything about the company that's customer-facing, maybe we can be a little bit bolder and see what's going to stick and be more straightforward. So that's a challenging thought for me.

Chris: And just going along with that, it's important that we not get so tied to what has worked in the past that we are unwilling to try new things that may work and let the audience surprise us. Because I will tell you this, I run hundreds of tests every month right now for a variety of different clients in every industry you can imagine. I am surprised every day by a test result. Something that I didn't think would work that did or something I thought would work didn't. You've got to give your audience room to surprise you.

Michael: That's great. Well that's a great place to stop and Chris we so appreciate your input and just your enthusiasm on the show today. Before we go can you let us know how folks can follow up and learn more from you and your company and maybe work with you guys?

Chris: Yeah, you bet. I'd love people to reach out if they have any questions. I'm on Twitter, @chrisdayley. My last name is D-A-Y-L-E-Y. We have, we've put together actually a free starter guide if anyone wants to start testing and they don't know exactly what to do or what tools to use. So if people want to check out our starter guide, they can go to disruptiveadvertising.com/guide. If they want to work with us there's a little check box to click. If you don't want to be contact by us just don't check that box and we won't pester you. That's a great resource if you want to get started.

Michael: Excellent. And we'll leave it there. Thank you again Chris. And everyone, start testing. Start breaking things. If you're afraid of what's going to happen, maybe work with an expert like Chris and his team. Let's improve our websites in some really amazing ways.

Show Notes:

Tell Us Your Ecommerce Pain

Subscribe On iTunes

Set Up Merchant Center

Set Up Adwords

Set Up Remarketing

SocialSEO twitter

Josh@socialseo.com

How To Setup Gmail Ads

Set up Product Listing Ads

Learn More About One of The Most Valuable Adwords Demographics

Transcripts:

Michael: Hello folks and welcome to eCommerce's Q&A. This is the show where store owners, directors of ecommerce, and ecommerce managers can stay up to date on the latest tools and tech in ecommerce. Our guest today is Josh Martin, pay-per-click manager at SocialSEO which is a wonderful agency down in Colorado Springs. Anybody that's doing this type of work in Colorado, we consider wonderful, but these guys are really amazing. We've done a lot of great work with them. We used to do SEO back from the day. Then we realized that it was a discipline where it wasn't really possible for us to stay on top of that and all the other things that we do, so we basically have opted to partner with really excellent providers like SocialSEO.

Josh is a Google Premier partner, which means he is certified in all of Google AdWords and Analyics modules, which believe me is not an easy feat to get certified in. As mentioned he is SocialSEO's resident product, well I should say like AdWords and product advertising and things like that specialist. So today what we're going to focus on is talking about product listing ads, retargeting, and some other really interesting related topics. Josh, thank you for joining us.

Josh: Yeah, thanks for having me Michael. And thanks for that glowing welcome. I really appreciate that.

Michael: Absolutely. So let's go ahead and dig right in. Retargeting, by retargeting, in case you haven't heard the term, the way retargeting works is somebody comes to your website and then we know that they were there so that when they're off the website later on we're able to deliver relevant ads to that exact person. That allows you to optimize your ad spent. A lot of people will not do general search ads, but they'll do retargeting, because they know that if somebody has already visited their website, putting an ad in front of them again to bring them back may have a really good result. That's the basic idea of retargeting.

Then what we're wanting to talk about today is taking that and putting that on steroids with product specific ads. So Josh how does this work, how do you have to, what does it take to be able to do not basic retargeting with AdWords, I think most people in our audience know how to do that, but product listing ads, what are the steps to get that set up?

Josh: Sure. You're going to need a few prerequisites here, three. You're going to need to register for a Merchant Center account. This is going to be the handshake between your AdWords account and your actual inventory. You're going to need an inventory with live products hosted. Then lastly you're going to need that AdWords account. Those three things are what you're going to use to communicate what's currently in your products, or pardon me, in your inventory and that will be pushed out to Google. Now that can be done automatically with platforms like Magento. If you're using the Wiziwigs of the world, the what you see is what you get like Weebly or WIX you're going to have to manually upload your products, but those are basically the three prerequisites you're going to need to get started.

Michael: So basically you're going to, if I can summarize that just for my own sake, you have to start with accurate inventory that is then going to be published to Google Merchant Center, is that right?

Josh: Right.

Michael: Right. Then what do you do after that?

Josh: Yeah. So once it's published your products are now live in Google Shopping, which is great, you're now going to be put with every other site that sells similar products to you, and you're going to be in Google search with a picture of your product, price, and even a promotion. That's the only way to participate in Google Shopping. But from there if you're looking to retarget or remarket users, you're going to need to set up a remarketing campaign. This will be done by inserting a little script onto your website that's going to begin to kind of track the users behaviors on your website, whether they did or did not engage with your website, what they did or didn't do. And then from there-

Michael: This is kind of tied in with your existing AdWords pixel, you have to change it a little bit I believe?

Josh: Yes, exactly right. Your traditional pixel tracks conversions, so phone calls, form fills, or products sold, whereas this pixel is strictly there to track behaviors of the user.

Michael: Right, so we'll include some links in the show notes about exactly where you need to go to learn about the precise changes that you need to make to your website. The point is once you've correctly added the scripts to your website, Google is going to know about shoppers behavior and which products they're looking at, which is the key last ingredient in being able to create these campaigns if I'm not mistaken. Let's say that you have gone ahead and correctly applied the retargeting code onto your website. Let's say that you have your product information being published to Google Shopping and successfully actually visible on Google shopping, and then you've gone into AdWords and you've created this campaign. What's the next step?

Josh: Sure. So next we've got the what, it's your products, and now we've got to decide on the where, so where are you going to show these advertisements. There really is a plethora of options. You can have manual placements on relevant sites, let's say you're selling cooking ware. It would be great to have a placement on a cooking ware specific forum. Then you have Gmail itself, which can be an advertising platform and we have seen, not being bashful here, I've seen conversion rates on the Gmail side of things because what this does is it actually drops a relevant product into the users inbox and that user can purchase directly from Gmail.

You really want to look at the types of products you're selling and the types of consumers that purchase them, because you can also begin to target based off of income, your traditional demographics, anything you can target within Facebook or social media you can target. You can also add a layer of what that user's behavior is in Google. So what's their search habits within the last seven to 90 days? Are they currently in market for your product or not? It's a very, very powerful medium.

Michael: Josh, this is something I want to dig into much more towards the end of the call around how we can do Facebook style demographic targeting within AdWords. Just to continue this thread along the lines of the product listing ads, where in your campaign settings do you find the ability to let's say choose Gmail as the target or to use a particular forum, or is it going to be more of a general thing where you have to extend a little bit of trust towards Google that they will find the best locations to distribute the ads?

Josh: Yeah, no, it's relatively manual actually. You're going to need to develop a individual campaign for each target type. So you'll need a Gmail campaign to target Gmail. You'll need a search product listing campaign to target the search portion. And then you're going to need a remarketing campaign to target users who have visited your site, but did not convert.

Michael: Got it, and that sounds like something that a company like yours would be optimally suited to assist with at least on getting things rolling?

Josh: Oh most definitely.

Michael: Let's talk about this now. We've got our products being published to Google Merchant. We've got that being sucked into Google AdWords. Google makes all this really easy to connect all these accounts. And then you've got several campaigns going on. So we have a Gmail campaign, retargeting campaign, and maybe one or two other ones. The biggest thing that we've run into with AdWords, and I have a lot of clients that are always talking to me about this is our AdWords spend is not getting us sufficient ROI and sometimes it's not even getting any ROI. Can you share any tips for how to optimize the ROI of your ad spent?

Josh: Sure. Yeah, and it's a very common sentiment, and a lot of people have been burnt by AdWords and paid advertising in general, and a lot of times it's a good intent but the effort is a little misguided.

Michael: What do you mean by misguided?

Josh: Typically, people are directed to and encouraged to sign up for search campaigns via a lightweight AdWords version called AdWords Express. Most businesses find themselves by virtue of AdWords Express starting with the search campaign. Now search can be very, very powerful in the right place. However, search can also be relatively expensive. So the advertis-

Michael: By search just to be clear I think just so I'm clear you mean like search advertising what we normally think of as Google paid shopping ads, the ones that appear at the top of the search results when you put it any old keyword, right?

Josh: Almost. Search would just be those text ads that we're familiar with at the top and the bottom of Google that have the ad icon, whereas remarketing also known as display would be those product listing ads at the top. Think if it's got an image or a video, that would be display. If it's text on the top of a search engine, that would be a search campaign.

Michael: Got it.

Josh: And so from there the cost per click in search on average is about $5, depending on the keyword it can go as high as $100 cost per click.

Michael: Oh my gosh. I remember when it was like 15 cents a click.

Josh: Well it still is in the remarketing world. That's what a lot of people don't realize, is when you come in to display video, or images, or product listing your cost per click is in the neighborhood of 40 cents and oftentimes, yeah, we see that 15, 13 cents mark when we go into these more complicated campaigns. The reason being AdWords is a big auction. And if an auction is more crowded, the cost goes up. Search or text advertising is the most crowded option you're going to find in AdWords. Whereas product listing advertisement is a little more nuanced and very specific to ecommerce so you're going to get a reward of a little bit better cost per click.

Michael: Would you say that the reason it's less crowded is because it's a little bit harder to set this up than just setting up a text ad that only takes like two minutes to set up?

Josh: Most definitely. And it's also the reason they, it's not the first thing Google's going to point out to you.

Michael: I think if you're listening to this show you definitely care about your ecommerce store, and what I want to share with you is that this is a valuable opportunity for you to differentiate from your competition by doing something that most of them aren't going to do, which is go through the effort and it can be a little bit tricky to wire all this up, I can speak from personal experience, at least if you're me. Now if you're Josh working with SocialSEO, then that's probably the easiest thing in the world for you.

I would just encourage you to don't ... It's very easy in ecommerce to, because we're all so busy, to only do the things that are easy to do, simply because you don't have time to do the other things. Well this is an opportunity where it's very, like very obvious that if you can't easily do it yourself, don't just not do it. That would be like ... I can't think of a good analogy, but this is an obvious win for you to get for your business. Just like if you weren't doing Facebook advertising for example like of course you've got to pixel your website, you've got to get all of your custom audiences working and so on, but everybody's doing it, right? Now this is a case where you should especially do it because not everybody is doing it.

Let's continue the thought here. I really want to make this interesting for folks. So maybe could you share a couple of campaign stories, maybe some really effective ad campaigns that you have been able to put together and what the results that you got out of those were?

Josh: Sure, yeah. Without getting into specifics I'm just going to kind of speak about a client out of turn a little bit here. But one of the most effective ways to use almost any campaign type but certainly product listing advertising is to layer it with all of the demographics that I mentioned earlier, but also make sure you're using all applicable areas of AdWords, so as I mentioned Gmail, remarketing, but also segmentation.

What's huge here is a lot of people simply put their inventory into one feed, which would be one campaign, and really just let it kind of live in Google Shopping. But you don't have the control you do in other types of campaigns. For example, keywords, they don't exist in product listing advertising. You're going to need to get crafty in order to show your advertisements to the correct individuals.

My example here is a client who sells high end natural skin care products but at a very, very affordable cost. That makes clearly this job a little bit easier on the end that it's more affordable. The thing is most people don't realize that most natural products are also hypoallergenic. What we were able to do is take the information that Google knows about its users and kind of their search habits and behavior and use that to target people who we had a very educated guess were in market or likely to need hypoallergenic products. So by being able to leverage the big data that Google provides we were able to open up a whole new market segmentation for this client, whereas before they were mostly akin to compete with Burt's Bees, things on that level, where those consumers are more health conscious than a need based where we were able to use the-

Michael: Allergies as a need based, yeah, right. Interesting. Now did you determine that the hypoallergenic market was an available opportunity through seeing something in Google, or was this something that you found out through another type of research?

Josh: No, Google actually provided it. They have a great tool called Keyword Planner. Now we can't use keywords in product listings, but we can use that tool to understand how much market interest there are. So by running a few hypoallergenic related keywords through the Planner we were able to see that there's a pretty decent market for them and we were also able to see that the competition and cost were relatively low, which showed us that not a lot of people were targeting it.

Michael: So let me see if I'm getting this. You used the keyword tool to determine the potential market receptivity for a new market, and then did, what did you do, product listing ads towards that market or did you do traditional text ads?

Josh: Yeah, product listings. And those were delivered via Gmail. So they came right into those users in boxes. It was a product that was relevant to them, something they needed, and it was likely a better cost than where they were getting their previous product.

Michael: Interesting, and you were targeting the hypoallergenic. So what was the ROI? What were some of the figures if you can share them since we don't know who it is?

Josh: Sure, yeah. On the first month they invested about $1,000 into this campaign and we were able to return to them two fold, so we returned $3,000. The campaign was really, really gangbusters. It converted 18%, and that's about average for what we've seen in Gmail. Because let's consider this, if you are a Gmail user you might be familiar with the three tabs at the top of your Gmail: Inbox, Social, and Promotions. Well Promotions is where all of your newsletters are going to live, and where all of your promotion based emails should be funneled into. So when somebody actually clicks on the Promotion tab they're a very applicable user because they're practically raising their hand at that moment saying, "I'd like to see some promotions and be advertised to at this moment."

Michael: You know it's interesting to me is like we started to touch on at the beginning, that's really an impressive story. I appreciate that. Is that we've all, a lot of us have turned in some ways to Facebook to address the need to have highly targeted advertising because there's so many little demographic themes and interest groups you can segment towards. And what we're showing with you here is definitely keep doing that, but don't abandon AdWords just because of your bad ROI, like dig into some of these extra mechanisms that you can use to get product listing ads in front of people at a better price point, to use the keyword planning tool in conjunction with the product listing ads, to utilize Gmail based advertising and you can use ... I mean I've even seen this in Google Analytics recently. The demographic capabilities that Google is rolling into its tools are better and better. Don't think of Google based advertising as like what it used to be. It's much more powerful now in terms of targeting and so on.

Josh, as we kind of move towards the conclusion here, I'm wondering if you can share maybe some ways for our guests to connect with you if they have some follow up questions. There's been several really interesting ideas that people will probably want to interact with you on.

Josh: Yeah, sure thing. I'm pretty active on our Twitter feed. So anybody's welcome to reach out to @socialseo and I'm more than available for any questions. Feel free. It's josh@socialseo.com. Go ahead and shoot me any questions you have and a member of my team will be back to you within 24 hours.

Michael: Oh boy. Awesome. Maybe what we can do is let's have in the show notes we're going to have some direct links to three different things, number one, how to get your Gmail based ads going, number two, how to set up your product listing ads in general, and then three, maybe some information around demographic targeting that I wasn't aware before this call that we had such a powerful tool set, so I'm really excited to dig into this more personally and a lot of our listeners will be as well.

Josh, one of the things we're doing more broadly is we're trying to help everybody who's listening to this show and generally everyone we're interacting with in the ecommerce world, just understanding what the needs are, and we mentioned in other episodes needs around ROI, needs around clarity, needs around time. There's so many needs and there's so many things that are vying for our attention in this industry. We really want to understand, speaking to you as our listeners we want to understand what your needs are.

What we'd love to have you do is go to sellry.com/survey. That's S-E-L-L-R-Y.com, it's our website, /survey. We've put together a little survey that you can fill out to just give us some insight into what your biggest paint points are right now. Don't worry. We're not going to try and sell you on something, at least not until we come up with a really good solution for your problems. But we want to kind of get a feel for what the biggest issues are that everybody is dealing with these days.

Once again that URL is sellry.com/survey and, yeah, go and interact. Let's kind of share, share some goods here between ourselves, and then that will help us also inform the further content of the show. Josh, we really appreciate your time today and I'm excited to learn more so thanks for making yourself available. As everyone knows, show notes at ecommerceqa.com. Make sure to subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher or however you listen to us. Thanks everybody. Keep selling.

Show Notes:

Tell Us Your Biggest Ecommerce Pain

Check out Freeeup

Schedule a Call with Nathan

Nathan's Recommended Repricing Software

Check Out Freeeup on Facebook

Free Up Your Business: 50 Secrets to Bootstrap Million Dollar Companies

Upgrade Your Ecommerce Store With Sellry

podcast@sellry.com

Transcripts:

Michael: Hello folks and welcome to E-commerce Q&A, this is the podcast where store owners, directors of E-commerce, and E-commerce managers can stay up to date on the latest tools and technologies in E-commerce. Our guest today is Nathan Hirsch and Nathan is the CEO and founder at FreeeUp, which is an amazing company. We've actually interviewed Nathan before and today we're gonna talk about very a interesting topic that jumps further back into his history. Nathan, thank you for joining us.

Nathan: Thanks so much for having me guys.

Michael: Absolutely. First of all is it Nate or Nathan?

Nathan: Nathan's fine.

Michael: Cool. I was looking at your LinkedIn and you're in Winter Park, is that right?

Nathan: Yup, right outside Orlando, Florida.

Michael: Cool. Yeah Winter Park you being from Colorado I was thinking more a different type of winter park, but that's great. So-

Nathan: Whatever Florida winter park can be.

Michael: It should be almost a joke right? It'd be summer park in the winter? Is that ... I've never been to Florida believe it or not, so yeah.

Nathan: Yeah, I just moved here five years ago so maybe that's what they were going for.

Michael: Where were you before?

Nathan: Massachusetts. And I went to school in Connecticut. So, I've seen snow.

Michael: Yeah, for sure. So today's topic I'm very excited about. Not because it's a new topic but it's because it's one that is so important for E-commerce of all flavors and the topic is Drop Shipping. We want to talk about Drop Shipping and we want to talk about optimization when Drop Shipping. That's the whole reason people do Drop Shipping typically, is to free themselves up and give themselves more time to work with the margins. Now you sir, are a very successful Drop Shipper. Can you tell us a little bit about why we'd want to talk to you about Drop Shipping?

Nathan: Sure. So I started off as a broke college kid in my dorm room. And I got mad that the bookstore was ripping me off. I was buying textbooks for hundreds of dollars and selling them back for pennies on the dollar. So I was like, "Alright, I can learn how to do this myself and cut them off," and before I knew it I had lines out my door of people trying to sell me their textbooks 'cause I was paying more than the bookstore. And I was holding onto the books, selling them at the end of next semester and then at the beginning of next semester. And pretty much finding all of these different ways to sell them from different bookstores to Ebay, to Amazon.

And then when I found Amazon I fell in love with it. I thought it was way better than Ebay. I became addicted and obsessed to it. And really wanted to figure out how to maximize it and how to make money. But I was also a relatively broke college student, so besides the money that I made on textbooks, I didn't really have anything to buy inventory and I didn't know anything about buying inventory. So to me, I kept trying to brainstorm how I could start an Amazon business without any kind of initial cast investment. And I came up with the idea of Drop Shipping years before I even knew what Drop Shipping was called. It was honestly like four or five years later that I was into the company that someone told me, "Hey, you're running a Drop Ship model."

So my concept was I would sell stuff I don't have, buy it from someplace that had it, get it shipped to my customer, and then handle all customer service outside of it. And it was a real trial and error experiment. I remember I sold this small toy laptop on Amazon, I actually had it Drop Shipped from Walmart to the customer and I was like, "You know what, I'm gonna try it. Worst case scenario I'm out like 25 bucks and I learned a lesson if the customer complains, and I won't do this again. Or best case I'm on to something here." And the customer never complained. I sent her a few emails to follow up and make sure she was happy. She never responded and I was like, "Alright, I just made $10. Let's start listing lots of different products from different websites." So months later I was running a multi million dollar Amazon Drop Ship business out of my college dorm room and it really only expanded from there.

Michael: Wait, you said months later? How many months later?

Nathan: Within six months to a year.

Michael: Nice.

Nathan: Yeah, I mean I was really ... I started hiring people to just list products all day. I remember being in the back of my college class just listing baby products on Amazon and having people look at me like, "What is this guy doing?" And it was just a lot of trial and error. I started off trying to sell DVDs and different video game systems and realized that the margin wasn't good for that, and I found this niche in baby products, home goods, and toys. And from there it was about building a team, which is why I'm so passionate about hiring, because good teams make you look really good and make you get on top of the world business-wise. And really expanding to get away from retailers and onto more suppliers and building those good supplier relationships, which is a whole nother part of Drop Shipping.

Michael: Yeah. And I definitely ... We'll be linking back to the previous episode where we talked a lot more about that topic. And feel free to bring it in as much as you need to 'cause like you said, it's the people that make it possible to scale a company. It's not just the tech. And that's gonna be true even as we move into a world that's dominated by task work is being done by smart robots.

Nathan: Exactly. There's so many manual processes of a Drop Ship business, and I built a lot of software to do it. But the thing about when we built the software, it was never like, "Okay, we built the software, now let's terminate all the people that were doing that task." It's like, "There's so much to do, let's take those people and move them to the next role to make this next process more efficient. And then once they create a good process for that, we create software for it and then move on to the next one." And really what the technology does is it lets you take the lower level stuff off your plate and focus more on building new processes to build more technology down the line.

Michael: Exactly. So it's basically like operationalizing everything and then helping your people essentially become smarter and smarter, which is a boon to them I would say.

Nathan: Exactly. Connor, my business partner, and I have a strategy that we never do something for more than three or four months before passing it off of our plate. So when we were first coming up with our order placement system, there's a lot of stuff that goes into it. When you're doing orders you want to check for pricing, you want to find the manufacturer, you want to check the address and make sure you're not gonna have issues down the line. 'Cause anything you can do to be proactive will only help you. So, you create this order system with these checklists, and you teach order people to do it, and then you master it and then you add technology to it to make it even easier for the order guys and faster for them to process orders.

Michael: Nathan, I find that there's an incredible disparity between the QA that goes into order fulfillment from company to company, particularly those that are using 3PLs and other forms of distribution. How did you find the perfect level of customer service care, I don't know what you want to call that, but that whole mix of making sure that the order goes out right, making sure that the customer's happy. That entire sequence of events there. What did you do to find that sweet spot where you weren't spending too much time and money and you were able to preserve margin, but you were still ensuring a very high degree of success?

Nathan: Yeah, so I've only used my own systems and processes. And really any software that I built besides one repricing software, Appeagle, that I really like, 'cause I didn't really want to use a ... Actually, I experimented with building repricing software and I kind of gave up and figured that theirs was gonna be better than my end result anyway. But outside of that all the other stuff we've built has been stuff that, processes that we build and turned into software. Because my understanding is that anything that I buy out there, whether it's the channel advisors of the world or whatever it is, they're never as good as what your custom system can be. Because it might be 80% of what I want, but it's impossible to get it to 100 because they're not willing to make adjustments to their software to compliment your business, for the most part.

So most of the stuff that I did was processes I created based on trial and error and doing it over and over again and being proactive and thinking of every possible thing that could go wrong, and then giving that to developers to create a software that fits for my business but might not necessarily fit for someone else's.

Michael: Interesting. I've got a lot of questions there about the software side. But I want to start with the ... Maybe go back to the beginning. Thinking about your story, if you had to do it over again, what are the first steps that you would say, go into starting and managing a Drop Shipping company that could potentially scale? And let me ask you also, would you even do it again? Do you believe in the Drop Shipping model still, or would you go a different direction now?

Nathan: Yeah, so I know a lot of people that have been able to start Drop Shipping models. A lot of them are my clients at FreeeUp, and they do it very successfully. But it's a totally different environment than it was back in the day. When I was selling these products on Amazon, it was like me and four other people on all these listings. Now, it's you've got hundreds of sellers. You've got all these manufacturers that are better educated on Amazon, some of them won't even let you sell there. And you really have to ... If you're gonna drop ship, you almost have to build your own website and drive traffic there.

When I take a step back, the biggest thing that I learned that cost me a lot of time and energy upfront that I would do differently, is being stricter on who you work with. So what I eventually did was I created these guidelines that if a manufacturer is gonna work with us, they have to follow these guidelines. They have to have tracking numbers. They need to ship stuff when they say they're gonna ship stuff. They need to respond to emails within 24 hours every single time. They need to have a return policy that actually works with our business model and works with Amazon, which is what we were selling on, but it would work with whatever platform you're selling on, or whatever return policy you want to offer your customers. Because there's nothing worse that welling your customer that they can't return something in this day and age.

So, coming up with that criteria and really vetting out all those other manufacturers that don't follow it is really the only way to drop ship now a day because either you're selling on Amazon, and if you're not, if you don't have quality control, you're not gonna be selling there very long, 'cause they're gonna suspend you. Or, you're selling on your own website and if your manufacturers are sloppy and they don't care about your end customer, you're gonna get a terrible reputation and your business is gonna tank. So you really have to ... You're really only as good as your suppliers are.

Michael: Talk to my more about that, because that seems like the nub of the issue. How do you find good suppliers for a Drop Shipping scenario?

Nathan: You network, you build relationships, and you sell. What I did was I hired a Lead Gen Team of people in the Philippines that were making a low dollar an hour. And we would just have them do research and come up with these large spreadsheets of manufacturers. And then we would have someone go through them and be like, "Oh, this person doesn't allow sales on Amazon, this person has a bad reputation online," whatever it is to vet those people out.

And then the last group of manufacturers, those are the people that we would cold email, cold call, follow up with, until we got a definite no or got a meeting. And once we got a meeting and realized it could be beneficial, then we had these standards that we needed them to follow in order to work with us. So you're taking these thousands of manufacturers and you just keep narrowing them down and down and down and it takes up a lot of time and effort, and that's where building a team comes in, to help you do that. Because if you're doing it all yourself it really is an impossible task. It wouldn't have been able to get done.

Michael: When you mention manufacturers ... So were you exclusively buying from manufacturers directly?

Nathan: So when I started off I was buying from retailers. And I did that for years. And as Amazon got stricter we migrated to manufacturers, so now we only buy from manufacturers.

Michael: And now, so talk to me about business now. The business is still running Port Light I can see, is that what it's still called? Port Light?

Nathan: Yup, still running. It kind of runs without me. VA's do everything from the order fulfillment to the listings to the customer service. It's at a good level. What I found with Amazon is when you get too big that's when trouble starts to happen. Especially with Drop Shipping and quality control. So we're at a good place, it's profitable, it runs well. I get to focus my time on FreeeUp, which is something I'm very passionate about because with my Amazon Drop Ship business, yes I can make money and sell products and help my internal team. But with FreeeUp, I get to help 500 plus workers provide for their family and I get to build relationships with them. I get to help thousands of clients and meet different influencers and help people achieve their dreams and their passion and build their own Drop Shipping business. So for me that's more rewarding and I also see more potential. And I always preach diversity in my book and every podcast I go on. But just having those multiple revenue streams and not being 100% relying on Amazon is a good business decision.

Michael: One thing I've been seeing is that for companies that are trying to get out there, a lot of times there's ... Let's take the model of a start up. So a start up will come up with typically one really good idea, right? They're either gonna come up with an innovative product that they kickstart or they have a unique way that they're curating things, or it could just be a different take on an existing model. One thing I'm seeing a lot is E-commerce companies wanting to supplement their core product offering that maybe is more innovative or they're manufacturing somewhere themself, with product that they source and Drop Ship. So, I think as we're thinking about this model, the idea of using Drop Shipping as a supplemental way for a company that doesn't typically do that, might be a really good angle. Do you have any input on that?

Nathan: Yeah, I agree with that. Anything you can do to diversify your business is good. Whether you stay in Amazon and you just find different ways to diversify your product line, or maybe you open and Ebay store and a Shopify store, or you open a second business once you get your Amazon business to a certain level. You can reinvest in something else. Or if you just own small percentages of different companies. It's just always good to figure out how to continue diversifying. 'Cause you never know when that main product line of yours might go down when a new competitor comes up, when Amazon might kick you off or when something happens in the economy. There's just so many things that can go on with the business. The tasks that you have as a business owner is to constantly reduce risk by diversifying.

Michael: Absolutely. So speaking of that, I'm only seeing ... I'm not probably doing this right, I'm just googling here instead of asking you what URLs I should go to. So I can see the Port Light store on Amazon. Is there an Ebay store still? Is there a direct URL to an E-commerce store?

Nathan: Nope. So my Amazon business is my Amazon business and then all my time is focused on FreeeUp.

Michael: Got it. But back in the day, did you have several channels or just the one?

Nathan: No, not really. We started off a little bit on Ebay and we launched our own site but we ended up consolidating it. So I thought the question you were asking before was, "What was the worst business decision I made," and was opening up an office. Because I added Overhead to Drop Shipping business that just needed no Overhead, so it was completely unnecessary. So when we opened up an office we're like, "Yeah, we're gonna expand and we're gonna be the next Amazon of the world." And that didn't happen. And so once we hit that peak where we were like, "Alright, this doesn't make sense to reinvest these resources," that's when we scaled it back down, got rid of the office, made it all remote, focused on our Amazon store which was booming. And it allowed me to have another passion of mine, another idea I had, to focus on FreeeUp.

Michael: Absolutely. Nathan, I've got a very specific question for you. What strategy did you use for determining what your mark up should be? I know you mentioned that you use all internal processes. So I'm very curious to hear what you came up with to do that equation.

Nathan: Yeah, so it's all trial and error. Almost everything I do in business is trial and error. What I try to avoid is learning necessarily from the experts, 'cause what I've found is yes, you should take bits and pieces of what the experts are saying and apply them to your business. But if you just copy them, everyone copies them, and no one makes any money. So what I try to do is trial and error. I try to push the limits. Hey, how high can we sell this product? And then once we figure out that, hey the Drop Ship business works between that 10 to 20% margin, and even getting 20 is pushing it, then we're like, "Okay, now let's come up with different formulas for the price range of zero to 50, the price range of 50 to 100." And really dissect it and go down. And then you take those formulas for each one and you trial and error them and you adjust them accordingly.

So really that's the only way I do it, is by finding market data of real live customers. And yeah, you might spend a few months kind of trying to figure it out, but then once you identify what your target is and what they're willing to pay and what your optimal margins are, then you have these formulas in place and they're not just some generic formula. They're formulas that are customized to your business that you can use long term.

Michael: And these formulas are things that you build into your software or into some sort of operationalized process? Or how did you scale the business via these formulas?

Nathan: Yes, they're all ... We started off with macros and then eventually moved it to software.

Michael: So all of the software, you're still using it?

Nathan: Yes.

Michael: Cool. How does it compare to off the shelf Amazon repricing software and that kind of thing?

Nathan: The order fulfillment and the getting orders and the sorting them and the sending them, that we have our software for. I mentioned before that for the repricing we use Appeagle, we love them. So we built the pricing software, we added pricing formula to it, and it was okay. But we still found that Appeagle was better. They're really good at what they do. They focus on it. So we migrated to them, but outside of just using our software we have our own formulas that are connected to macros that are connected to Appeagle. So I don't know if that answers your question but-

Michael: Yeah, conceptually answers it. I'm very curious in seeing how that was actually played out, but that might be a little bit of a trade secret that you might want to keep, I don't know. So this is really fascinating. Can you tell me more about this whole transition that you went ... From you had the office, then you said, "No, that's not gonna work, we're gonna go everything remote." And I'm kind of guessing, tell me if I'm wrong, but is it right in me assuming that FreeeUp was something that came out of you realizing that you're really good at operationalizing things and then having people work on them remotely?

Nathan: Yeah, absolutely. So I liked hiring, when I found Upwork, a friend of mine on my softball team told me about it, I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. I was like, "I'm gonna build an Upwork army," and it was called an oDesk army. And so I spent so much time just interviewing these people and finding these all-star workers and a lot of those people still work with me six years later. And they're fantastic. And what I realized is all of a sudden I was hiring more and more. All that time that I was spending building processes and expending the business, all of a sudden switched over to HR time.

And I remember that I was sitting in my office one day after going through three different interviews, and I just hired someone after we had spent weeks interviewing them and they quit after like one day and I was just reading more resumes and I was pissed. And I just threw something against the wall and I was like, "There's gotta be a better way. I cant go to Upwork anymore and post a job and just filter through all these people." So that's when the idea really materialized that I could create a marketplace that was better, that I could use my ability to create good systems to make it more efficient and also to protect the clients. Because I know what clients want, I know what clients hate, I know every single good and bad thing that's happened when it's come to hiring.

So when I created FreeeUp, the concept was instead of being a marketplace where as a client you post a job and all these people throw applications at you and you have to decide, is we'll vet people into that marketplace. So we get hundreds of applicants every week, we have a great interview process based on eight years of hiring. We have 15 pages of communication guidelines our workers have to memorize and get tested on. So there is that standardization, that you always have that same experience. And then we back it up on the back end so if the clients have an issue, instead of having to fire someone and get a new worker, they can tell us and they get a new worker right away and we cover those hours. And if they quit we cover all retraining costs and all replacement costs.

And it's incredibly hands on to make sure as a business owner you spend as little time on HR as you possibly can and as much time expanding and focusing on the things at your business that you want to do. And that's really what I wanted when I was back hiring all these people.

Michael: Yeah, absolutely. It's so interesting to me ... We started out talking about basically creating repeatable systems and then turning those into software products. And I think a lot of people think of that idea as so beautiful because it's so sterile in a sense. You're taking something that could be relational and need a bunch of emails and contact and handshakes and all that, and it's becoming this completely code based thing. But then if you look at where your business has actually gone and what you're focused on now, you've actually gone more towards the helping people be effective. Which I think is cool, 'cause software's one thing but it's ultimately people that we care about right? And it's people that we want to work with and we're relational beings. So how do you, maybe in coming back to the Drop Shipping topic, which is obviously tied in again because we're all mainly concerned about optimizing our businesses, preserving margin, and having a good life as a result. What are maybe some final thoughts that you'd have around Drop Shipping? If you could give people three do's and three don'ts for thinking about using Drop Shipping? Probably as a supplemental thing to their company or maybe there's gonna be still some windows to do a full Drop Shipping model?

Nathan: Sure. So the biggest do is the client isn't always right, but it's in your best interest to make the client or the customer happy, especially your initial customers. 'Cause you're essentially using them as a test. You're Drop Shipping products from this manufacturer. At the beginning you're really crossing your fingers every time you sign up a new manufacturer, when those first orders go out, you're hoping that those work out. So you have to be on high alert. You need to make sure that if the customer complains, you find out why, you figure out how to fix it, and you figure out how to make that customer happy so you can make money down the line.

Two would be creating those manufacturer systems that I told you about. Making sure that they're getting tracking numbers and shipping on time and answering emails and stuff like that. And really holding them accountable and not being afraid to cut off manufacturers that aren't meeting your incredibly high standards that you have to have. And then the third os figuring out where you can actually find a niche. You can't do what I did and just go out and sell everything. It doesn't work anymore. You have to figure out what niches there isn't a lot of competition, what people are buying, what time of year it is, different outside factors that contribute to it. And really find something that you can grab a hold on and really make money on long term.

In terms of the don'ts, everything has to be process driven. You can't go in and just hire someone on day one, throw them into it, and just be like, "Hey, you're processing orders and doing customer service," and you're doing it your way. There has to be a your way to do it. There's your way to get a tracking number and give it to a customer. There's your way to get the client, the customer's information and pass it to the manufacturer. And it should be the same thing all the time. Even down to the hour of the day that's worked. Hey it's 9AM every morning, that's when orders go out to the manufacturer. Hey, it's 11, that's when we check tracking numbers. So it has to be incredibly systematic. Does that make sense?

Michael: Absolutely yeah. That's really helpful.

Nathan: Cool. And then I guess the other don't would just be focus on packaging. It's that one part of the business that everyone forgets about. They have these products, they have a customer base, or they found a marketplace. They've listed everything, they built everything, they know that if the customer opens their product that they'll like it. But they always forget, how is the product being packaged? How is it being shipped? Is the product actually going to arrive damaged? Because especially if you sell on Amazon, Amazon doesn't want to hear UPS messed up, or my manufacturer messed up. It's, "Hey, you messed up. You have to package it better."

So the last thing that we talked about with manufacturers all the time was how are you actually packaging these products? How are you making sure they're safe? Are you selling $1000 products in glass and barely investing anything in packaging? Hey, let's increase the prices and make sure that we don't have issues because I'm the one that has to deal with it at the end of the day. So that's something that I always make people focus on and people who lose sight of that end up dealing with a lot of complaints and ruining a lot of relationships.

Michael: Yeah, not something you want to do when you're starting off, or at any point along the way. Well this has been great. Nathan, I wonder if you could go ahead and leave us with a couple of things? Number one, what's the best way that our listeners can connect with you if you don't mind, if somebody has a quick question about Drop Shipping or something related? Or of course about FreeeUp, is there a way that people could talk to you directly? And then two is are there any other resources or anything else you'd like to plug?

Nathan: Yeah, sure. So right on our website, FreeeUp.com with three E's, my calendar is right at the top, you can book a time to talk with me directly. I'd love to talk to you about your business and how I can help you or even give advice on just pointing you in the right direction, even if you're not ready to hire or use FreeeUp yet, I love talking to business owners and networking and figuring out ways to work together. You can also check us out on social media, FreeeUp on Facebook. You can check out the online hiring mastermind group. We post a lot of great stuff about using remote workers and building processes and systems that actually work. You can check out my book, Free Up Your Business, we talk a lot about that business that I grew up with in college and that I grew. And all the different good things and bad things that happened along the way that really shaped me as an entrepreneur.

And then lastly, right on FreeeUp.com you can sign up as a client, it's free, there's no monthly fee, mention this podcast, you get a dollar off your first worker forever. And you can honestly just keep it in your back pocket and if you want to hire in the future or you just want to meet some workers with no commitment to hire, you're welcome to request a worker at any time.

Michael: And that's a dollar off per hour, a dollar off per-

Nathan: Yup, a dollar off your first worker's hourly rate forever.

Michael: Oh my gosh, I'm signing up right now. Awesome. Well Nathan, this is fabulous. We're gonna include all these links that were just mentioned in the show notes. And everyone, we have something else to leave you with as well. With Sellry, we really want to understand what store owners are feeling in terms of pain right now. Is it wondering how to deal with Amazon? Is it something about new technology? Is it lack of sales, lack of traffic, lack of conversion rate? Obviously it's gonna be different for a lot of people but we're assembling a massive survey that we're going to share the results with everyone with.

So what we want you to do is go to Sellry.com/survey, S-E-L-L-R-Y.com/survey, and there you'll be able to fill out a form and we'll be super respectful of your data we're not gonna spam you or sell your data obviously. And what we want to do is fill out that form and then we'll come back to you with the results once we get enough respondents. That's gonna help us guide the content of this show as we go forward. As well as we might have some ideas in the future to come up with amazing things like FreeeUp, or probably not FreeeUp 'cause they're already doing that, but you get the picture. We want to help people who are listening to this show and in general anybody doing E-commerce to be more effective at that.

So, and I know that Nathan can relate to that. Nate, thank you so much for joining us, second time, that should tell you that we really enjoyed you the first time. And we have this time.

Nathan: Awesome, I appreciate it guys.

Michael: Yep, alright, talk to you later and again everyone you can go to ecommerceqa.com for the show notes. If you want to email us directly you can go to, just send us an email to podcast@sellry.com. Again that's podcast@S-E-L-L-R-Y.com and we'll leave you there. Keep selling.

Show Notes:

Our Sponsor As Always Sellry.com

Gunnar Computer Glasses

Smart Medicine For Your Eyes

Ocular Nutrition Handbook

Dr. Anshel's Website

Transcripts:

Creighton: Hello and welcome to the Ecommerce Q&A Podcast. My name is Creighton and I will be your host. Today we're joined by Dr. Anshel, optometrist and fellow of the American Academy of Optometry. He's also the founder and past president of Ocular Nutrition Society, as well as the current president of Corporate Vision Consulting. Dr. Anshel, how are you doing today?

Dr. Anshel: Doing great. Thanks for having me.

Creighton: Yeah, absolutely. This is the third part of a three part series on eye strain, particularly eye strain caused by computer monitor or active computer monitor usage. Tell us a little bit about yourself. How long have you been working with eye health and in particular eye health around, you know, computer usage?

Dr. Anshel: I've been in the industry for 40 years. Graduated optometry school in 1975 in Chicago, and been in San Diego since then. I moved out to San Diego right afterwards in the Navy. Back in the late '80s, early '90s I had a practice near a university where patients were coming in with these unique types of problems that I didn't expect to see in people their age.

They were having eye strain issues, and dry eyes, and just having different types of different vision problems, it didn't fit the typical patient at that demographic. When I found and realized it, a lot of these people were spending a lot of time on computers. This was a new thing at that time. I realized that maybe there's something with the computer use that is causing these problems. So then I started looking into it and I got hooked up with a colleague of mine up in the University of California Berkeley, who was running a computer vision lab. We started working together on trying to resolve some of these problems.

Creighton: That's great. When did you really realize that monitor usage or heavy monitor usage was having a significant impact eye health, integrating eye health.

Dr. Anshel: Well, what we found is that at the time, people were looking at either black screens with white letters on it or black screen with orange or violet letters on them, the magenta. We found that the technology of computer displays, number one, was not that, you know, the old dot matrix type of letters. The visual system had trouble resolving those. The edges were not so sharp, so it was more difficult to see and people were over-focusing. Their focusing was kinda going back and forth, and doing some weird things.

In addition that people were doing more and more of this work, and actually it's one of the issues we're having today, is that fact that while the images are better that they're looking at, we're looking at computers for pretty much everything. It's more of a time issue right now. We're maintaining our vision at a close viewing distance for longer and longer periods of time and not giving ourselves those breaks that we need to get our distance vision back and get our eyes more comfortable.

Creighton: Right. It's interesting you bring up initially the colors and sharpness of text. Do you think as time has gone on, people have become more aware of better text or color, better sharpness, or in general, better policies on what kind of website design or page, text shape they should be looking at? Or, have people kind of been ignoring that and just been making what looks good?

Dr. Anshel: Well, yeah. It kinda depends on who we're talking to, because I talked to monitor manufacturers and the technology has improved. I mean, take the retina display for example, while it's just a catchy name, it has nothing to do with the retina itself in the way it works, but it is a pretty decent quality image.

That part of it is good, but there's still the fact that there's a little bit of flickering going on there that may affect the visual system that people don't realize. There's also the color issue. Monitor manufacturers say that they're able to generate 1.6 million colors on the computer display, but the visual system can only perceive about half of those.

Creighton: Right.

Dr. Anshel: So, there's a disconnect between those two. Of course, people like to have these colors on their display, but when they're reading text, the main issue that they need to look at is, what is the contrast between the letters and the background? That will distinguish how well the letters stand out so they can see them better.

Because they have so many colors to work with, they may not be working with the best color combination in general. I'm kind of sorry to say this, but the best color combination is black letters and white background. Kinda boring, but that's the best to see the images.

Creighton: Okay. Fantastic. Are there any tools that you know of, software or hardware, people are using now that you'd recommend?

Dr. Anshel: Actually, because we're using mostly the flat panel displays now instead of the old CRT monitors, the images have gotten better mainly around the glare issue. You gotta remember, we're looking through a piece of glass now and glass is reflective. People at that stage were having a lot of glare off the screen and they were having to move around, or over-focus, or under-focus, trying to get around the glare images.

It is much better now, but there is still some glare issue going on there. It's much less obvious for people. Especially actually when people are using touch screen monitors, because every time they touch the screen, they're getting oils from their hands onto the monitor itself. Now were seeing its degrading the image, so the dirtier the monitor, the harder it is to see that image. In general, again, the technology's getting better, but were just looking at them all the time.

The two things that I like are, number one, are privacy screens and being in the healthcare industry, we need these in the offices to be HIPPA compliant so that medial information is passed around. These are screens that allow you to see the image clearly straight ahead, but looking off to the side it looks black or disappears on some level. Those are good to have.

People need to check for glare in the workplace to see if there's lights that are shining into their eyes. I've gone in many workplaces where people are looking at the screen, but there's lights around the screen that are shining right into their eyes and that's gonna be a glaring problem, pardon the pun.

There are computer glasses that are available. Now, that's a general generic term, but there are some glasses that are made specifically for computer use. Actually, I was on the development team for this company called Gunnars and we developed these lenses that help people maintain moisture because they're not blinking enough. Also, to knock out the blue glare that comes out of the screen, so people get a little sharper image and put a little bit of power in there to help sharpen up the image a little bit.

I recommend the Gunnar glasses. Also, making sure that the text is large enough on the screen that people aren't having to lean forward and see it, you know, they have to be in a comfortable viewing posture, mostly for the glare in the workplace. That's one of the biggest issues.

Creighton: Okay. It sounds like there's some things that we can use to improve or actually improve the quality of the image or light that's going into our eyes to help extend moisture in there as well as coloring differences. What are some good eye practices though, in general, for looking at a monitor? What kind of breaks should you take? What are some good practices?

Dr. Anshel: I've narrowed it down to the three B approach. Blink, breath, and break. Now, I'll tackle the breathing first, because that's kinda the most important. We're under stress, have deadlines, and they have to get these papers done or get some projections in, or whatever, people tend to hold their breath. That reduces oxygen to the brain, and makes you tired, and messes everything up.

Blinking is also very important, because we're staring more at the screen and typically the computer screen is higher than reading material is. Our eyes are opened wider and we're blinking less often. There are studies that confirm that. We need to remember to blink often and fully.

The third thing is taking breaks. Now, in the breaks, I've developed the 20-20-20 rule. That is, every 20 minutes, just take about 20 seconds and look 20 feet away. Now, that lets your eyes relax and the 20 minutes, it's been shown that more frequent breaks are better than waiting a couple hours and taking a longer break. That's why the every 20 minutes for just 20 seconds to let your eyes relax. Now, if you're near-sighted or have any other vision problems, it's not necessarily gonna reverse those, but it will help reduce eyestrain for people looking at computers on a regular basis.

Creighton: That's a great rule. I'll have to keep that in mind.

Dr. Anshel: Everybody does and it's easy to remember.

Creighton: Yeah.

Dr. Anshel: Especially coming an eye doctor talking about 20/20 vision.

Creighton: Right. That's fantastic. The next question I have for you is something that people are always talking about. I'm always hearing that you gotta eat carrots. Carrots are the best things for your eyes. I'm really interested in what I can do differently in my diet to improve my eyes, but are carrots the Holy Grail? Is that something that's really good for your eyes?

Dr. Anshel: Well, that's what your mom tells ya, right?

Creighton: Oh yeah.

Dr. Anshel: Eat your carrots, [inaudible 00:09:24] be good for your [inaudible 00:09:24]. Get it on paper, it looks good because carrots have beta carotene and beta carotene is a type of carotenoid. It will convert in the body to vitamin A. Vitamin A is the actual molecule in the retina that converts light energy to nerve energy to start the visual process. It kinda makes sense if you have beta carotene that converts to vitamin A, you have more vitamin A in your retina, you'll see better. Not so fast.

Beta carotene, number one, is a good antioxidant and eating carrots is good for you. You don't want to get too much in there. Number one, we don't convert that beta carotene as readily as when we get older. It's not that easily converted because we age. Also, if your body has enough vitamin A and most people in the U.S. have enough vitamin A stored in their livers. Now, if we're talking some African third world nation or something like that, that's a different story, but in the U.S. for the most part, people have enough vitamin A stored and their liver.

There's no reason for the body to convert more beta carotene to more vitamin A. It just won't do it. Lastly, beta carotene and two other carotenoids, which are lutein and zeaxanthin, they're all in the carotenoid category. Now, beta carotene though, is the dominant one. If we eat too much beta carotene, for example, in your supplements, a lot of times you'll see vitamin A as 100% as a beta carotene. This overdoses beta carotene and it will keep lutein and zeaxanthin from getting to the eye. The two carotenoids that are in the eye are lutein and zeaxanthin and these are prominent in our diet. So, where are they? The number one source is kale and yes, kale is now the poster child for healthy eating. And also spinach.

The third most logical place to get it is actually egg yokes. The yokes are yellow because of the lutein and zeaxanthin and them. That's very important. While a lot of people may be afraid of egg yokes because of cholesterol, the fact is, only 25% of our cholesterol comes through our diet, most of it's made in our [inaudible 00:11:33] anyway. I don't tell people to shy away from egg yokes on a regular basis. They should be having some eggs every day. It's very bio-available, it's a very good source of lutein and zeaxanthin.

Creighton: Okay. That's really interesting. That's fantastic. I'll keep a list somewhere where I'm eating to remember. Egg yokes. Okay. That's good.

Dr. Anshel: Eat your greens and your egg yokes.

Creighton: That's good.

Dr. Anshel: That's the [crosstalk 00:11:58].

Creighton: That's a little bit more fun than just carrots. [inaudible 00:12:00] love carrots. Carrots are fantastic.

Dr. Anshel: Carrots again, they're good, they won't hurt you and you're probably eating ... a bunch of carrots won't hurt you, because, [inaudible 00:12:08] enough to get that beta carotene out of [inaudible 00:12:12] gonna really affect. It's the carrot juice, and the cooked carrots, and the supplements that are the real problems there.

Creighton: Interesting. Well, I think that wraps us up for our general questions. I'd really like to hear a little bit more about you and your personal practice for people who are looking for more consulting or information on this. Where can people find you?

Dr. Anshel: Well, number one, they can find me on Amazon, because I've written several books. The last two are the most popular. One is called Smart Medicine for Your Eyes and the other one is called The Ocular Nutrition Handbook. They both have nutrition in there, but the first one is a more general book about everything about eyecare. Smart Medicine for Your Eyes covers everything.

The Ocular Nutrition Handbook is a little bit more technical, more for interested consumers or healthcare practitioners. Those are both available on Amazon. Also in private practice in Encinitas, California, which is about 20 miles north of San Diego. Love being here, I've been here for most of 40 years. I do lecture nationally on the computer vision and nutrition topics.

Creighton: We'll include those book links as well as a link to your website down in the description in the footnotes, which, if you're viewing on iTunes or Stitcher, you can find it at ecommerceqa.tv. The footnotes there will include links to those books and links there. Thank you so much for joining us Dr. Anshel. I've really appreciated having you on the show today.

Dr. Anshel: My pleasure Creighton, it's good being with you.

Creighton: Thank you.

Dr. Anshel: Thanks.

Creighton: For all of our other viewers, subscribe to iTunes if you've enjoyed the show and please leave us a five-star review on iTunes if you like it. The show notes, once again, can be found at ecommerceqa.tv. If you do have any questions or comments, please send us a message [crosstalk 00:13:58] comcast at sellery.com, sellry, S-E-L-L-E-R-Y.com or you can give us a call at 866-8SELLERY. Thank you very much.

Shownotes:

Tell Us About Your Ecommerce Pains

Email Nick: office@draft.nu

Email Us: podcast@sellry.com

Do-it Yourself Heat Maps

Hire Nick

Get Nick's Course

Nick's Newsletter

Transcripts:

Michael:
Hey everybody. It's Michael, one of your hosts and welcome to Ecommerce QA. This is the show where store owners, directors of Ecommerce, and Ecommerce managers can stay up to date on the latest and greatest in Ecommerce. Today we are joined, very happily, by Nick Disabato, founder of Draft. Nick, welcome.

Nick:
Happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Michael:
Absolutely. Well, this is the second time, a little bit of déjà vu going on, because was it last week? We started ... We actually were recording this episode, and the audio went all crazy, so now we have to outdo ourselves.

Nick:
Software is terrible.

Michael:
Yeah, yeah. Who writes the software anyways? So Nick, just in case nobody's heard of you ... Which everyone being on the show, if you haven't heard of Nick, you'll be very happy to hear what he has to say. I consider him sort of like the modern godfather of CRO, in terms of strategy and just the thinking behind CRO.

What is CRO? CRO is conversion rate optimization, and Nick just has a wealth of wisdom to share with us today. Thank you, Nick, again, for joining us. Where should we start? Maybe we could start at the beginning. Why did you get into conversion rate optimization?

Nick:
I have a design background. I mostly do UI/UX design, interaction design. That sort of stuff. I thought about what is the thing that I could run in my business, that is kind of in the Venn diagram overlap of stuff I can do on a monthly retainer, and stuff that is still kind of UX-y in nature. Still trying to improve software to make it easier to use. That sort of stuff.

I settled on A/B testing, because it's something that is kind of an ongoing process, and it's not something that has to be kind of a self-contained deliverable, right? You're not building a wire frame a month, right? That doesn't really work for people. You're not doing IA research every month, or at least nobody would pay for it.

So that, I launched about four years ago now and it's kind of evolved into more of an end-to-end, research-driven, CRO engagement, where I am talking to your customers, and taking a look at your analytics, and heat maps, and surveying people, and doing everything that I can to understand what their motivations are, and what their actual behavior and practices. I use that to drive new A/B testing insights, so there's very few, if any, call to action button collar tests, or other type of things that you see on Get Rich Quick case study type scenarios.

Michael:
Can you give me a couple of examples of some really cool A/B tests that you've done?

Nick:
One of my favorites is for a ... They're like an everyday carry company called Key Smart, and they used to have like five different models of Key Smarts. Basically like a Swiss Army knife for your key chain and I ran a test that paired back their entire site to one model and ... Turned out inconclusive. It didn't move the needle in either direction. We didn't increase their conversion rate. We didn't decrease their conversion rate. Just basically everything stayed the same, but people were buying one model of Key Smart instead of varying shares of five different Key Smart's. The consequence of that was that they were able to remove those products from their offerings, from their product line and they reduced manufacturing and shipping expenses by something like a third. It was some totally preposterous amount. So it wasn't just, you know, the lesson not of that the CRO and A/B testing, you're measuring the economic impact of a designed decision. And that can often result in the increase of conversion rate. But if your reducing expenses you're still getting a win for the business. The goal is profit right? And so you can do that by increasing revenue the most common part of CRO or also decreasing expenses, so that one kind of surprising thing I've done recently.

Michael:
I love this so much because its really easy for companies to think of, in a sandbox way, about digital and about Ecommerce specifically, it's like, oh that's online but no. In this case you were looking at something that was really a very valuable insight about the customer, essentially, which is people just wanted the product they didn't actually care about the color of the product. Driving down the operational and manufacturing costs around that. That's fantastic.

Have you had any other kind of outside the box cool case studies or experiences like that where you're expecting to maybe drive something that was more just digital but then you found this deeper insight about the company?

Nick:
There was one for the Wire Cutter where ... I can't believe I'm even citing this test but it was a call to action test of all things. It's like, one of the only ones I've run that I've seen work. But it was what you're talking about, kind of that deeper insight and so there if don't know the Wire Cutter they're basically tech blogger currently owned by the New York Times. I was working with them when they were an independent company and they had basically, if you've never seen them, they're basically consumer reports for millennials because consumer reports incorrectly fire walled all their stuff.

The Wire Cutter's business model's oriented around ... We do hundreds of hours of research to find the best thing, much like consumer reports does, but then there's the link out to Amazon and you buy it and get affiliate kick backs and so I think something like 80% of the revenue at one point was affiliate kick backs at least that I know of. A high share. So, we changed call to action button callers so instead of them all being one color, they were like Amazon orange, Walmart blue, Apple Store warm gray. You know, that sort of stuff.

The deeper insight is that people look at that and believe its more trustworthy because it looks like its lightly branded with the stores branding. But it still had Wire Cutter futura in it. It was the seam between the Wire Cutter and the third party vendor. That ended up fairing extremely well and encouraged ... The biggest metric that we have was clicks out in that situation because we don't know whether somebody's bought something on Amazon but we know that it roughly correlates, right? We know that people are able to bee-line to that and they might wish list it and you get the affiliate kick back later, that sort of thing. And it'll bore out in the final numbers.

Michael:
That's great. Good. I wish we could ask you what the final numbers were but I won't ask that.

Nick:
No.

Michael:
So you said something interesting, which was ... You almost didn't want to mention it because it was a button caller test. I know, we've talked about button caller tests because that's like the prototypical, oh we changed our button caller and our revenue doubled, right?

Nick:
Yeah. That's what I was mentioning about. I was kind of subtweeting these like ... People get A/B testing ideas from other case studies because they have a sense that it's what works, but that's not how I go about finding revenue generating design decisions and I found that really the only way to do it is by actually researching and people get very bored or allergic to the idea of research cause you associate it with being at a library and looking at an encyclopedia that exists for some reason and writing a five paragraph essay but for me research is just looking at where there's revenue leakers and listening to customers about their motivations. These are practices that you should be doing in your business no matter what, right? So I often come in and I say, hey A/B testing, CRO, here's a bunch of sexy stuff and then I make you eat your vegetables.

Michael:
So talk to us about that because you've ... As you mentioned before there's two types of research that this involves. Qualitative and Quantitative. I think most people on the call know what that means. Qualitative has to do with the quality of the difference or how something feels, looks, that sort of thing. Maybe simply something to measure, or maybe not, and then quantitative would be like the classic number of clicks, number of this, number of that revenue and so on. How does that work on the research side?

Nick:
So for me, quantitative is more like what you're typically doing with Google Analytics or with Heat Maps or something like that so you have a certain number of people that are clicking on a thing or going in a certain path and that sort of thing. So, there are numbers you get out of it, right?

Your conversion rate is a quantitative insight. The share of people that are going from your home to your pricing to your product to your cart to whatever. That funnel is a quantitative insight. Now the share of traffic that you're getting from your Facebook ads is a quantitative insight. I'm taking all of those things and I'm thinking about what it is people are actually doing, right? It's the what and the how.

The qualitative insights are the why, right? It's the more squishy things that are what drives a person. What is the value proposition? What are we saying to them, right?

You need roughly equivalent shares of both of those things. It's very easy ... Like I'm a nerd and I was a math major. It's very easy to just retreat to the numbers for a lot of businesses that I work with. It's the same aversion to getting on the phone and actually having a conversation with somebody, especially a stranger you've never met before. Qualitative responses can include, yes I'm actually literally getting on a Skype call or Facetime call with somebody or I'm asking them a bunch of questions but it can also mean doing post purchase surveys or life cycle emails and mining responses for what's going on. It can mean talking to your support team and understanding where the pain points are with certain things.

In Key Smarts case we got a lot of insight out of the support team dealing with like assembly. We didn't have an assembly guide. So we put that pretty front and center on the product page and it sold more because people felt comfortable being able to actually assemble the dang thing. Fewer people were returning them later saying I don't know how to work with this thing. We inserted assembly guides in the actual physical product so when you get it in the mail you get a little business card that shows you how to do it.

Those are things that they're the practical considerations like that and then there's kind of broader higher level things like, how are we communicating as a brand? What is our voice and tone? What problem are we specifically stating that we solve? A lot of people come in the door thinking that they know the answer to that and we never end up in the same place after qualitative research. We always end up a little bit further afield or maybe with a refinement of those insights and we end up coming up with something that works better not only for the business but also for the customer because then they feel more comfortable buying the thing. It's not a matter of manipulating the person. It's a matter of making them feel more empowered by the product that you have to offer.

Michael:
I think its interesting that in Ecommerce, a lot of the decisions are made by very scrappy people. I love scrappy people. I would most of the time consider myself a scrappy person. What I mean by that is just getting there and trying things. And throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks and saying, oh that didn't work, I'm gonna start throwing meat balls at the wall. Oh, those stick better. Great. But I think what were running into with Ecommerce is that it's becoming the men verses the boys and to really compete you can't just guess anymore. You actually have to have data like your saying. Let's say that somebody wants to get started and they ... I mean, they're probably gonna want to just hire you for your excellent services but lay it out for us. What are the three steps lets say to get started in conversion rate optimization?

Nick:
So the first thing is get everything configured and fix all the bugs. That's the first step. Usually your analytics have been gathering dust and cobwebs or ... That's in the worst case. The next worst case is you have analytics but they're not configured correctly. If you go into your goals, your funnels or something like that, they're busted. After that you take a look at your analytics and you realize that your conversion rate on mobile is one third of what it should be and even that is one third of what it should be compared to desktop. So you have a lot of bugs to fix, right?

There was one client I worked with where ... I didn't even run an A/B test for this. I reduced their page rate by something like a third and their page load time was initially like 16 seconds. Some preposterously high number. Right. Right. It was some preposterously high number and we got it down to like 9, which is still bad. Like that's not okay but its not like stage and intervention level, it's just, this is bad. Their conversion rate went up by 9.12%, right? I hadn't run a single A/B test yet.

You've got to prepare the sight and do the one off optimization stuff that is just unsexy, dumb, scrappy grunt work that you know you should be doing and you're not doing. If it requires you hiring a really fancy consultant in order to do that, fine. That's how I have a job in part but also I wish people would just do it. You know? I have a million how to guides out there that I've written and I've cited in other sites like Conversion Excel and Copy Hackers that do this stuff.

The first thing is prepare the site and get it working correctly and the best thing about that, not only are you making ... more money, but hopefully your conversion rate goes up which means you'll be able to get to statistically significant A/B tests a little bit better.

Michael:
Getting to a good base line ...just a crazy point. Reasonable point to start with.

Nick:
Yeah. You think you can skip this step. A/B testing is how the ... It's not how the bad get good its how the good get better, right?

Michael:
I love that.

Nick:
So you have to get to a point where at the base line ... Best practices in order to be doing this. The second thing is to start researching. You have to do kind of a blend of quantitative and qualitative research as I mentioned. The easiest and dumbest ways to do this are both by looking at your analytics, taking a look at peoples funnels, that sort of thing, but also running Heat Maps. Kicking off a Heat Map involves signing up for an account with lets say, hotjar.com and entering a java script tracking snippet. Then five minutes of typing in the right URL to be like, do Heat Maps here. Then you have Heat Maps, congratulations. The other thing that I like doing is adding in a post purchase survey. So if you're on Shopify, there are a ton of plug ins that allow you to do this that on the confirmation page they say okay, great. What was the last thing that held you back from making this purchase or how do you feel about this transaction? Something like that. Something open ended.

Michael:
I love that.

Nick:
Then you just sit there and embed a Google form. Something as stupid as that.

Michael:
You can do Hot Jar too for that.

Nick:
You can do Hot Jar for that as well, yeah. It's a little more sophisticated to be doing that. I do the Hello World thing. I embed a Google form or a WooHoo form because it takes me 10 minutes. If you're that lazy or busy or whatever, do that and just get the outcome there. Now, congratulations you have a blend of quantitative ... Heat map and qualitative ... I'm getting actual free text responses back from my customers insights. I wouldn't stop there. That's the base line there, right? You start the researching.

Then the third thing you're doing is, once you get the research back there's a process called synthesis where you're taking the research ... and for me this is the fun part. I kind of have a three step process within this. Research synthesis is the process of taking research and turning it into revenue generating design insights that you can test on your site.

So, the first part is you try and identify places where you're leaking revenue or opportunities for improvement. Let's say you run a Heat Map and a lot of people are just bee-lining to the about page and then they bounce off. That happens a lot, right? You can speculate as to why that's happening, right? So you identity the problem. That's the first part.

The second thing is, you come up with an inference as to why that might be happening, right? People are doing that because it wasn't expressed on the product page. That might be one thing. It might be because they're just show rooming and they're trying to go to Amazon to buy your thing. That's another possible speculation. It's a little bit harder to address. If you come up with the answer being I don't know, you go back to step one and do a little bit more research. And you figure out, okay well, maybe I need to run a usability test where I go to user testing.com and I get somebody to vocalize their internal monologue as their going through trying to make a dummy purchase on this site. Something like that.

No matter what, once you get to the point where you have enough research to have a hunch about it, the third step is coming up with a design that addresses the hunch. I know this is easy to say as a designer but for me this is the very easy part because I already have some degree of clarity about what it is the thing is and I've come to a consensus maybe with the rest of my team about why it is that why. Because that speculation, that's what it is. You're coming to an inference about it. You're trying to make a conclusion on it and that's scary and possibly unsubstantiated. Once you get to a design solution ... Usually once you have the guess, the design solution kind of naturally falls out, right?

So in this case I might add an assembly guide or a little bit of an about stuffing on the actual product page and I would address it in that way. That's something that I test and I determine if it increases the add to cart rate. The goal is to get people to kind of the next step in the funnel. Of course your tracking other things like ARPU, AOB, that sort of stuff. All the key metrics that you would be doing.

Michael:
ARPU?

Nick:
Average Revenue Per User. That's basically-

Michael:
I can't believe that I have never heard of that metric.

Nick:
Don't worry about it. It's basically-

Michael:
Those guys.

Nick:
Other people that ... Yeah. ARPU, he's my friend. Yeah, he ... No. Check his blog.

What was I saying about that? So basically you take the whole ... Everybody that hits this page and divide it by the amount of revenue that that page generates. Or it's the other way around. You divide the amount of revenue by the amount of people.

Michael:
I know why. Because it's a four letter acronym man. I only remember three letter acronyms. ARPU.

Nick:
Yeah. Those TLAs, man. You're getting all of these metrics back and then you're trying to figure out what the impact of the design decision was.

Something you may be noticing in all of this is that one ninth of the process is in A/B test, right? It's not about the actual test even though that is the sexiest thing and usually why you're hiring somebody like me.

A/B testing is the tool, right? Like, if you're building a house, it would be like focusing on the hammer as the really cool thing and not all of the materials and process and blueprints that are necessary to get to the point where you're using the hammer effectively to create a house that won't collapse or leak. I think that eventually people will kind of clue into this process but for me that's kind of how I follow it.

Michael:
That's really insightful. I used to build houses or I was going to build houses as my career and actually really love framing but bailed on that. But that whole idea of focusing too much on the tool is so important because so much of the time it's like, what's the easiest solution? Is it to use this tool? Is it not? It's so easy to get budget for using some fancy acronym.

What is it this year? Its AI. There's a lot of companies that are like, we need to be doing something in AI. Why do we need to be doing something in AI? What problem are we actually solving?

So I think honestly, I think a lot of the reason why people who actually understand anything about math and statistical analysis, conversion rate optimization and these other disciplines is because it feels like, oh we're going to have numbers, we're going to be able to use these numbers.

What I find is that it usually hits a wall. Conversion rate optimization programs usually get started and then they just kind of peter off and it never goes anywhere. Which, I feel is leaving so much on the table. You know? If you think about it, redo your website lets say and it looks great. Chances that there's a lot of things that if you'd make slight adjustments, things would really fall into place. People would understand it so much better. I'm kind of wondering if that's one of the problems that you solve is helping people not have to feel like their conversion rate optimization is going nowhere. Is that-

Nick:
Sometimes. Sometimes. I mean this morning I gave a client a report that was basically like, here are three tests. They were all inconclusive. I don't like giving bad news. It's even worse to have inconclusive tests than to have outright failing tests because inconclusive tests teach you functionally nothing other than we probably shouldn't do that approach.

A lot of it is, you have brick of marble and you're trying to carve the David out of it. Okay, then carve out everything that's not the David. That seems very counterintuitive. At the same time you're doing that and trying to convey the results of these tests ... Trying to convey the mind set shift that's necessary to think about it in a truly research and design driven way, right?

A lot of people hire me, at least, because they want their conversion rate to go up and I get it, I understand that. That is why I'm here. Hopefully after a certain amount of time your conversion rate will go up. If not, I should be firing myself. It's not just that, you have to kind of come in a different direction from what you're necessarily thinking. It's not a situation where you're testing to settle a debate internally. That is not going to make your conversion rate go up. You're not testing because an agency came up with a comp and you think it's interesting. That's not a good use of my time. It's not a good use of anyone's time.

Testing time is finite because you have one page, usually, and you're testing that page and its load bearing on the rest of your funnel, right? I know that there's a lot of pages in your funnel but you can only test a store page at one time. You can only test a product page at one time. You're running into a situation where if you're wasting test time on this, just wheel spinning that's not research driven, you're wasting time on several fronts, right? It's not even just that you're paying a lot of money on an A/B testing tool but also other people that are competitors are doing this right. They're going to eat your lunch eventually.

Michael:
I have two practical questions for you. One is, I find that ... I have a client where they are amazing at conversion rate optimization. They've taken several years and methodically CRO tested every single part of their website with the result that their website looks horrendous. Now, we're familiar with this problem because-

Nick:
The frankentest.

Michael:
Yeah. How do you address that? Because it seems actually like a lot of people feel like there's this situation where you can either do the thing that's the best for conversions by having flashing yellow banners all over the place to get people to sign up for the email or whatever it is-

Nick:
Please don't do that.

Michael:
Yeah. Or having a pretty website.

Nick:
So, those aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. I think the second question is the difference between beauty and conversion driven design. I'll address that in a moment. Let's talk about the frankentest for a moment.

Part of researching your test ideas is so that you can understand what battles to be fighting, right? Another thing about A/B testing in particular is that you can't cheat statistics. So if you have a test that wins at 55% confidence, that actually tells you almost nothing. So it's not that the neon yellow background won, it's that you had slight noise in your sampling. You need to be getting wins or losses with 95% in up confidence. Even that is conservative for some of my clients. I run most of my biggest clients until 99% confidence because it's a matter of two more days of testing. That gives us more certitude in what we're doing.

Within this entire consideration is you chose to test the background because you hadn't tested it before. That's not what your customers are telling you. Nobody gives a crap about your background, right? They don't care about the individual elements. They care about overall what it is you're trying to solve. They care about probably the text more than anything. In my experience, they care about the usability and the functionality of your cart. They care about the ability to pay you well and the ability to get free shipping and other incentives. That sort of stuff. That's the kind of things that you need to be testing. You can do that on a pretty website. If you are finding yourself running out of test ideas, the answer is to research more and not test things that don't matter. That's my take on that.

As far as the tension between data and beauty and functionality, I mean I even wrote about this on my mailing list a couple weeks ago ... But there's a famous anecdote, in like 2009 or 2010 where Doug Bowman who was a very high up at Google in design there who quit and became the design director of Twitter. He was reporting directly to the CEO ... Whomever it was at the revolving door at the time there. He wrote a thing about why he quit Google and one of the big reasons was that they ran an A/B test on 42 different shades of blue for the primary link color. He said it just drove him batty, right?

The problem is that both Google and Doug Bowman are right. Google is right to be doing that because that will probably set the link color into perpetuity and frankly Google gets enough data that they can run a 42 variation A/B test, right? Doug Bowman is right because if you want to run a classical design practice, that's not the way to go about doing it, right? If you care about that kind of beauty and functionality.

Fortunate thing for you, dear listener, is you probably don't work at Google. You probably don't work at a business large enough to run 42 branch A/B tests. You should be trying to embrace that. So you should be having a style guide in place. Be flexible with it of course. It might be that data doesn't back up having a low contrast ratio or poor functionality or usability and stuff like that.

I've personally found that I can have my cake and eat it too on this front. The best way to go about doing that is ... Shocking no one, through researching customer motivations and realizing that changing stuff to ugly nonsense and doing things that are predatory from a UX standpoint like putting a huge modole in or a huge blinking. It's like a sugar high. You get a short term boost from it and then in the long term it doesn't actually benefit your business and it results in a reduction of credibility or people kind of abandon that mechanism that you've tried as a short term fix because all of the evil people have glommed on to something else. So you look like yesterdays news. I've seen that quite a bit. There are a lot of structural disincentives to do that. If you're gross and unethical, by all means throw a bunch of nonsense on your page and do that. I can't stop you. It makes it unlikely that I'll work with you.

Michael:
Yeah but the physical where we spent months and months and we brought in ... actually a mutual friend of ours ... Rob Williams. We collaborated on this project. He did the most beautiful design I've ever seen on any website. They trashed it. And I just felt like, wow, you're vandalizing your own website. Why? To get a few conversion points? Ultimately you're damaging your brand? I mean they were trying to be a luxury brand and I was like, oh my gosh you guys don't get it.

Nick:
I mean, especially with luxury brands or brands that are meant to communicate with anybody like my age or under. You're hurting yourself really severely if it doesn't play on insta. I'm dead serious. If you're going to go and trash it, that's just a sign that designers should be on retainer to make sure that that doesn't happen. Then they get to be the fun ruiner by constantly defending themselves against ... The problem is probably the toxic culture in that situation where their constantly averse to design and that'll bite them eventually.

Michael:
It will. The funny thing is ... The sad thing I should say, they won't even know it. They'll be wondering after five years ... In a similar way that we all found out 10 years ago with blackout SEO. Don't do blackout SEO. It will kill your business eventually.

Nick:
Google will be very sure of killing your business, right? It's, yeah it'll come back to you.

Michael:
Very insightful, thank you. The second thing is, how can people learn more ... How can they do CRO right? Maybe some of them will want to work with you. I hope they do. I've seen the results that you're able to drive and I definitely want everybody listening to go and see what you offer.

Nick:
You can go to my website at draft.nu if you want to hire me tack a row slash revise onto that. That's basically the quarterly A/B testing that I use. That's draft.nu/revise. If you never want to actually see my face you can go and buy my course called the A/B testing manual at Abtestingmanual.com. That will teach you everything you need to know and spares you the expense of having to work with me.

Michael:
Although if you go through that course you're going to be like, wow whover wrote this is really smart so I should probably, better hire him.

Nick:
That's probably likely. That's happened.

Michael:
Well cool, Nick. There's so many questions I have but in the interest of time we'll have to do this again.

Nick:
I would love to.

Michael:
If... here, we're going to include all of the notes in the show notes. Do you think we could get the copy of the email you mentioned that you put out?

Nick:
Yeah. I can definitely provide that.

Michael:
Alright cool. I'll run a link to that so that everybody can learn from that. Everybody, this has been great. In the show notes you'll find everything. Just go to ecommerceqa.com for those show notes. We've got a little something ... Speaking of research and all that, we want to understand all of the listeners pain points are right now in Ecommerce. So if you're running an Ecommerce store or you're thinking about doing it, what we've done is we've put together a little survey that we're just going to share all of the results with everybody who signs up. We're not trying to push something. We just want to understand what you would like to hear us talk about more on the show. We talk about lifestyle stuff, we talk about consumption psychology, we talk about really practical Ecommerce, strategic and practical matters. Your Ecommerce matters are important. To get to that survey, what we want you to do is go to sellry.com/survey. S-E-L-L-R-Y. Two L's in there, dot com forward slash survey. If you have any questions for us or Nick, send an email to podcast@sellry.com our end or Nick do you like people to email you?

Michael:
Yeah. They can email me at office@draftnu and that goes to everybody in the company, which is a very small company and I'll answer it or somebody extremely qualified will also answer.

Nick:
We're so honored that you could join us today, Nick. I've been following you personally for a really long time. I've learned so much from you and now I've just learned a whole lot more. Thank you so much.

Michael:
Thank you so much for the kind words, I really appreciate it.

Nick:
Yeah, absolutely. Alright, everybody. That's a wrap. Talk to you later.

Shownotes:

Can you tell us about your ecommerce pain points?
http://sellry.com/survey

Want to learn more about scrum?
https://www.scrum.org/

Check out this TED talk, recommendation courtesy of Noelle.
https://www.ted.com/talks/bruce_feiler_agile_programming_for_your_family

Transcripts:

Michael: Hello, folks, and welcome to eCommerce Q&A. This is the podcast where store owners, directors of eCommerce, and eCommerce managers can stay up-to-date on the latest tools and technologies in eCommerce. I'll be joined on the show by my colleague and partner-in-crime, Dillon Holst. Our goal is to handle one or two questions per episode. You can check us out on the web at eCommerceQA.tv. There, you'll be able to get in touch, ask us questions, and just generally participate.

Dillon: Hey, everybody, my name is Dillon Holst, and I am joined today by Noelle of Sellry Commerce. Noelle, how are you?

Noelle: I'm doing great.

Dillon: Glad to hear it. Today, we're going to be talking about project management methodologies, specifically agile and the Scrum methodology of project management. Really, what we want to do is give you guys an overview of Scrum, but more specifically, as Scrum is a methodology designed for software development, we want to give you some ideas on how you might be able to use Scrum outside of software development or even technical development itself. I can tell you from personal experience that, as somebody who's been through Scrum training -- I have a Scrum certificate -- I have found the principles to be extremely helpful, not just within the project management field, but also in your daily routine of either business management, sales, whatever it might be. There are philosophies and methodologies within Scrum that can help you in pretty much any area in terms of being more efficient, using your time properly, and all that fun stuff. Noelle, I know you have some questions that you're going to ask ...

Noelle: I do.

Dillon: ... and we can just have a conversation about agile and Scrum in general.

Noelle: Awesome. Yeah, and I totally agree with you on Scrum's principles being applicable to whatever it is we do, so I'm excited to get to it.

Dillon: Sounds good.

Noelle: The first question is ... We're just going to give a little brief on Scrum ...

Dillon: Sure.

Noelle: ... so could you just explain the difference between Scrum and other PM methodologies?

Dillon: Sure. The easiest way for me to do that is to describe the methodology that I'm most familiar with aside from agile, which would be a waterfall style of management. I'm sure a lot of people out there listening, they understand waterfall and how it works. Pretty simple. You start with a scoping process, where you figure out all of the components that need to go into your project. You create a road map and a plan for how you're going to execute, and then you go from point A to point B, point B being the completed final product that should be theoretically available to release to whoever the user base is.

Noelle: So it's like one step for everything.

Dillon: Yeah, exactly. Right. Point A to point B. One shot, and you're done. You hope that you've got everything you need upfront because otherwise, at the end of the project, you're gonna have a bad time. Scrum, on the other hand, is designed to be a more iterative -- wow, I did not say that correctly -- iterative method of development. Really, what the goal is is to ... At the end of each sprint -- and Scrum defines a sprint as around a 2-week process -- at the end of each sprint, you're gonna have a minimum viable product or an MVP that is usable in some way. As opposed to saying point A, point B, you're developing something on the go. You've got a team of people that are dedicated to, at the end of each iteration, if you will, creating an actual working product.

Noelle: Yeah, I already like Scrum more, just from what you're saying. It sounds better. Moving on, with understanding Scrum, can you explain the three components of the team and their functions?

Dillon: Sure, yeah. When you say the three components, we're really talking about roles within a Scrum team, the first being the product owner. The product owner is the individual who basically gets to decide what is going into the product. What does the MVP look like? He doesn't do this just by himself, but ultimately he is the one responsible for what the end product is supposed to be defined as.

The next person is the ScrumMaster. The ScrumMaster is the individual responsible for actually running the sprint, making sure that the team is on track, that the team has everything it needs to develop properly, whatever it might be. The ScrumMaster also interfaces between, to some extent, the product owner and the Scrum team, although the product owner should, in my opinion, make himself available to the Scrum team should the need arise in terms of defining a product feature, that kind of thing. The ScrumMaster is the person responsible for making sure that the minimum viable product is completed at the end of the two-week sprint. That doesn't mean that necessarily you're gonna have done everything you said you would do at the end of the sprint, but that's the goal.

Noelle: So does the ScrumMaster basically interface with the product owner and the team, and then the ScrumMaster keeps everything rolling. Is that ...

Dillon: Exactly. Perfectly said. The ScrumMaster's job is basically to make sure that everything is, in terms of a timeline, on track, and he also runs the daily stand-ups that happen within a Scrum sprint. He is the guy that runs the kickoff sprint meeting and then also the retrospective at the end of the sprint, where the team comes together and talks about things that went well, things that didn't go well, and what things might change in the next iteration, the next sprint.

The last component is the team itself. In my opinion, the most important part, although they're all equally important. A ScrumMaster would say, "We're all equally important," but the Scrum team itself is the heart and soul of the development process. The product owner and also the ScrumMaster have to rely heavily on the team to actually understand the concept and to build the concept out as the sprint progresses.

Noelle: Would the product owner and the ScrumMaster really rely on the team to be the experts in a sense?

Dillon: The experts and also they're the ones that are, at the end of the day, going to say ... most likely, in most scenarios that I envision, they're the ones that are going to say yeah, this is possible, no, this is not possible.

Noelle: Gotcha. Okay. Cool. It looks like the next point is the five principles of Scrum. Can you outline those and explain how they're used?

Dillon: Yeah, of course. I don't know that I can do it justice in the amount of time that we have, but the first one is the idea that our decision-making processes are based on the knowledge that we've gained from our previous experiences. In the context of Scrum, this means the planning phase before the first sprint starts. Then you move on to the next sprint, and you've got two weeks of time to develop an MVP product, right? Well, when you go into the next sprint, you're going to have all the knowledge that you've gained from your experience in that previous sprint to decide what's going to happen in the next sprint. It's the idea of empiricism, right? All the knowledge that we had ... I mean not all of it, but a lot of it comes from the experiences that we've had, and you want to try to make decisions based on that because it's more scientific.

Noelle: Yeah, and I think it also provides an element of trust for the client that they know we're not just shooting from the hip, but we're actually delivering stuff that has, to a certain extent, been tried and tested in past experience.

Dillon: The next one is the idea of self-organization. For me personally, this comes into play when you're thinking about your team as a whole because your team isn't doing it. You've gotta have everyone on the same page, That means when you put them in a position where they have to be self-organized, is that going to ... are they going to step up to the plate, or is that going to be a problem? If it's a problem, then it affects the rest of the team in a negative way.

Noelle: This whole self-organization is so important, not just in Scrum, but obviously for any team because if you can't ... Basically, if they're not going to step up to the plate that's the point where a lot of times you just have to let them go because you have to have that ... Basically, there has to be that performance, on-time, organization, everything in sync to get the right kind of results.

Dillon: This ties into the next one, which is collaboration. Specifically, within a development or a project management framework, when you're working with a group of other people, you have to be aware of what everybody else is working on because context matters, right?

Noelle: Big picture, right.

Dillon: Exactly. You have to know how your work is going to affect not only other people's work, but a project as a whole. That means communicating effectively with your team members as to what you're working on and making sure that you're using all the tools at your disposal to develop effectively or make decisions effectively. It's as simple as making sure that you're aware of what's going on around you and the context of the situation and making proper decisions, decisions that are not going to negatively affect the rest of your team members.

Noelle: Or the product.

Dillon: Or the product. The next one is this idea of timeboxing, which Scrum talks about quite a lot. Basically, the idea is you want to allot certain amounts of time to fix certain problems. Obviously, this is going to help manage your time better, but specifically, when you go into a planning phase of any project, it gives you the opportunity to allot certain amounts of time to certain things. You're not the only one making the decision on how long something should take. It's a collaborative effort to decide this should probably take this amount of time. You get estimates from all your team members, and then you maybe make an average or something. Whatever it takes to come up with something that everybody is comfortable with and make sure that you are not sending too much time on one particular thing and you're forgetting something else, making sure that you're not spending too much energy on something that you don't understand fully.

It's a time management framework that makes a big difference. It goes a long way, not just within project management, but also if you're doing it from a sales perspective, if it's your sales team, or from your marketing or business development teams, this idea of allotting certain amounts of time to certain things, and then holding yourself to that -- that's the important part.

Noelle: I think it is two things. One, like you mention, it makes sure you're not spending too much time on something, but two, let's say someone gets discouraged and they want to give up, they want to quit. If they have timebox, they're literally held to it. It can kind of help people get over that hump of, "Dang, this isn't working." It can help push them over that, and there's real benefit to that.

Dillon: Agreed. And then the last one, Noelle, is this idea of iterative development. We've been talking about this concept; we haven't really put a name to it. But it's this idea that everything that you're doing, you're gonna take that, and then that's what your base is for the rest of your decisions and for the rest of the product development phase. Let's say you have X product that has a certain number of features and you complete it, and now you're gonna move on to the next set of features. Well, all those features are gonna be based off the previous features that you've already developed.

This is not something that happens within a waterfall project management scenario, but that concept gives you the ability to build something that people are going to use and be comfortable with. It describes that as a process as opposed to just trying to throw darts at a dartboard and hope that they stick. Because that's what's not good about waterfall, often, is we think we know what our clients want, we think we know what the users are going to want, and we build it, but at the end of the day we're not 100% sure who is gonna matter.

Noelle: There's one point several years back where I was actually writing a cookbook. It was amazing for me to see how what you have in your mind is so different than when you're actually holding a tangible or virtual product, is so different. So the benefit that we deliver to clients through doing one round, then another round, then another round ... it's tremendous because it really allows you to cut out what doesn't need to be there, perfect what is important, and just create a product that's really killer, so I love that.

In a minute, I want to talk about Scrum's values, Scrum's five values, but first I want to jump to ... there's a lot of good things about Scrum, okay, but what type of project does not need Scrum?

Dillon: I would say that any project that you understand the technology that you're working with completely, and you know exactly what your users are going to want or what your client is going to want. If you know those things upfront, then maybe you don't need Scrum because ... It's true, building iteratively is not going to be as fast as scoping a project out from the beginning and just building it in one shot. It's not going to be as fast, so maybe you don't need it. But if there's any doubt as to what your users are going to need or what your client is going to want, or if you don't understand the technology completely and you're learning it as you build, Scrum is just absolutely invaluable.

Noelle: So Scrum basically gives the padding for the unknown or gives the padding for the change, whereas waterfall doesn't give that padding, so you've gotta know what you want, exactly what you want ...

Dillon: Yeah, exactly, but not only does it give it the padding, it sets the expectation that that padding is the point of why we're doing this.

Noelle: Which is so good because then the client is expecting it, then it's not like, "What are you doing?" It's expected, and it feels more gentle. To me, it feels like it's more of a gentle process of handling the new, the unknown, figuring out what we want ... it's maybe more relationally beneficial as well.

Dillon: That's a great way of describing it. I would say that collaboration in general is a more genuine development process. Rather than you having this idea ... you, as the provider, having this idea of what you think your client wants and then building it, working as a team with your client to first describe the product and then build the product. Though I think that if you've gotten to the place where you've sold your client on ... or maybe your client wanted you to use Scrum in the first place, but if you've gotten to the place where you've sold your client on the idea of Scrum, you're in a great place to build a really fantastic product.

Noelle: Yes, yeah, totally agree. One more question before we touch on the values. What is essential to have in place for the Scrum management to work?

Dillon: I would say having the right people. By that, I mean people that understand the Scrum process, that understand it, the agile methodology, and that bought into it. If you understand it, but actually understanding the value of ... not understanding the value, but knowing exactly why we're choosing this over something else, knowing why we're choosing agile over waterfall. People that understand that are gonna be better equipped to be a part of a unit, be a part of a Scrum team. I would say that's probably the most important thing, is to have everybody bought into the system, client included.

Noelle: Yeah, definitely. Before we wrap up here ... Couple more questions. Can you touch on Scrum's values?

Dillon: Sure. And again, these values are subjective in the sense that one team may look at values a specific way and they may utilize them or talk about them in a specific way, and some other team, some other person, they might do it completely differently. It's really how do these things apply to you. I'll explain how they apply to me, the first one being focus. It's not a mantra, but it's a way of remembering that what I do affects other people, and it affects the project as a whole. Focus on the things that I know to be true, the things that I know are important, such as making sure that what I'm doing matters in the grand scheme of things, making sure that what I do is visible to my teammates, making sure that what I do isn't conflicting with what the stated goals of the project are, that kind of thing. The second ...

Noelle: It's almost discipline. Discipline almost seems to merge with that.

Dillon: Keeping the goal in sight at all times.

Noelle: Yes, yeah. I love that. Yeah.

Dillon: Number two and number three are connected to each other, in my opinion. Courage and openness. The courage to be open and say, "Look, this is not working for me," or, "I think we could do this a better way," and explaining that to your teammates in a respectful manner. Also, being open to listen to what other people have to say and accept what they say at face value. I think often we forget that people are going to react to things differently than we would naturally react to them, so just keeping that in mind and focusing on maintaining the relationship of the team and the cohesion of the team and putting that above our own personal opinion or our own personal agenda is super important.

The next one would be ... we've discussed this, but the next one is just commitment. Be committed to the process, be committed to the product, be committed to providing something of value. And then the final one is just respect. Respect your team members -- I sound like a broken record, I feel like, but you can't understate how important these people are. You have to respect the people around you for this kind of process to work.

Noelle: To me -- focus, courage, openness, commitment, respect -- all of those are crucial, again, not just for Scrum, they're crucial for building a team, period. I would say especially when you're in a virtual team and you're working over the wires, you're not face-to-face, these things are so important to implement. Also, this makes me think of families. So much of this stuff applies to a family and how ... Basically, business principles relate to family; family relates to business. They're core, good values. It doesn't matter what you apply them to. They're just good.

So wrapping up here, Dillon, I wanted to get a couple thoughts from you. More personal, not just on the Scrum methodology, but your take on it. For someone who's new to Scrum, what would your favorite element be and what would your least favorite be?

Dillon: I'll say that when I was new to Scrum, the collaborative environment was not just novel, but an extremely welcome change. I came from a waterfall background, so being in an environment where people are actually working together ... Not that people aren't working together in a waterfall environment, but it's designed specifically with collaboration in mind, Scrum, that is. That was the best thing to me; the thing that was most valuable to me. The thing that I don't like ... if there's anything that I don't like, it's the fact that if you don't have the right people, in the sense that you've got people that either ... they have to be the center of what's going on at all times, or they have too much to say in every single meeting, then it's not going to work. That just comes back to the values. Do you have people that are going to respect the process and respect their teammates? If so, it's going to work, but Scrum is only as good as the people that are within the system ...

Noelle: Yeah, that's interesting.

Dillon: Yeah, it's only as good as you make it, or as the people that you bring in.

Noelle: One last question for you is ... It seems like so much of the success of a project that utilizes Scrum is based on the ScrumMaster, and I don't think everybody would be a good ScrumMaster. I don't. What would you say ... You are a ScrumMaster ...

Dillon: I'm actually a product owner.

Noelle: You're a product ... really?

Dillon: Yeah.

Noelle: What character traits or qualities would you say a company should really keep in mind when they're looking to hire a ScrumMaster?

Dillon: You gotta find somebody who understands how to make sure that everybody's voice gets heard, number one, and number two, finds a way to make team members useful. Not just in the context of the project, but useful to the other team members. You're almost like a counselor, right? You go in, and you find the problems, and you fix the problems, in the context of team dynamics. You gotta have somebody that's A) willing to do that and B) capable of doing that to be the ScrumMaster.

Noelle: Cool. Awesome. Well, any closing thoughts, or are we good?

Dillon: Closing thoughts ... I would say, do your own research and find out whether or not you think this is something that would be beneficial to you. I don't know that it's going to be beneficial to everybody out there, but I will say that understanding the principles, at the least, will give you a feel for what a lot of people are doing in terms of creating a productive environment for their clients, creating a productive environment for their projects. Maybe at some point in the future, you're going to have a project where you need an agile methodology to pull off a successful project, so keep this in mind and ... Keep it in mind.

Noelle: Yeah. One little note. I am going to try to include the link below. There's a TED talk that talks about how agile can actually be implemented into the family, and it's awesome. So just kind of gives a little bit of a taste of how agile or Scrum principles can be implemented in more than just what they're for.

Dillon: Cool.

Noelle: Anyways, well, it was awesome talking. Thanks for sharing your knowledge, Dillon, and I appreciate the time.

Dillon: Yep. Thank you, Noelle.

Noelle: All right-y, take care. Buh-bye.

Show Notes:

• Subscribe on iTunes/ https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/ecommerce-q-a/id1053721778?mt=2
• Timeless UX Principles Part 1 of 3/ http://ecommerceqa.com/soundcast_music/timeless-ux-principles-part-1-of-3-whitespace/
• Free Text Readability Consensus Calculator/ http://www.readabilityformulas.com/free-readability-formula-tests.php
  -The Flesch Grade Level Readability Formula/ http://www.readabilityformulas.com/flesch-grade-level-readability-formula.php
• Subject Line Tester/ http://subjectline.com
• Talk to us/ podcast@sellry.com

Transcripts:
Michael: Hello and welcome to eCommerce Q&A. This is the show where we address the needs and interests of eCommerce store owners and operators just like you. During the show, we'll cover such topics as how can you maintain a healthy lifestyle while growing an internet business, how can you optimize your shipping, and everything in between. That's right, folks, we're going to address lifestyle, as well as the tactical nuts and bolts of growing an eCommerce business. Now, eCommerce Q&A.

Dillon Holst: Hello ladies and gentlemen, it is Dillon Holst once again with eCommerce Q&A, and I'm joined by Michael, as always. Michael, how are you?

Michael Bower: I'm good.

Dillon Holst: Great. Today, we're going to be talking about UI/UX. We did one of these podcasts previously, so this is going to be part two in our UI/UX series. Today, we're going to be talking about how to effectively communicate on your website. More specifically, we're going to be talking about what should your copy look like. Not only what it should read like, but what it should actually look like on your site, as well.

Michael Bower: Just to clarify, we're talking about the text on your website.

Dillon Holst: Yeah.

Michael Bower: We often talk about visuals and stuff like that. Today, we're just talking about text, the copy, the written words.

Dillon Holst: So, Michael, tell me, what is the easiest website out there to understand?

Michael Bower: I don't know. I was thinking Google, though. It's so simple. It's a little search box. You can just plug something in. Honestly, it's not that easy to understand if you have never used a search engine. Have you ever seen someone that comes to Google for the first time?

Dillon Holst: I haven't. That would be an interesting thing, though. I don't even remember the first time that I went to Google.

Michael Bower: I remember when I ... Well, I don't know if it was the first time.

Dillon Holst: All right, tell us about it, then.

Michael Bower: I thought really dumb name. Really silly having a rainbow color scheme. Nobody should ever have a rainbow color scheme. For eCommerce, it's actually kind of easy to figure out what's going on, usually, if you're doing your job right. It's like you're selling a product, right?

Dillon Holst: Sure.

Michael Bower: Problem is you're not the only person selling a product of the type that you're selling, probably, so you have to be a cut above in your communication style. People have to be able to figure out immediately not only what you're selling but how it's going to be better for them. We're not just doing expository writing when we're writing a website. We're trying to persuade someone of something.

Dillon Holst: Right, and Google doesn't have to do that, right? Google, just, it's there. You use it. It's a tool, right? When we're writing for our eCommerce sites, we have to persuade people. We're not just trying to inform them, although that's part of it. Usually, the goal is to persuade them that your product is better than another product, or your product is the product that they need, or any number of different things that it could be considering your target market.

Michael Bower: Yeah. When I'm thinking about website text, first thing I think about is how good does this have to be? Do we need to go and hire a copywriter? That's a real common question. Do we need to have an editor? Can we just kind of not? Some of our clients don't even have descriptions on their products, and in those cases, it's because that particular market doesn't need the description. They already know exactly everything about the product, and they know exactly which one they want to buy. In that case, you just have to be able to identify the product. Most people don't find themselves in that category. It's more of a you need to say something about your product.

Dillon Holst: I think it's easier to break this down into two different types of communication, really. There's, on a more broad level, we can call them universal truths of communication. We can talk about those first, maybe. Then, maybe we could go a little bit deeper into communication for the web and eCommerce web specifically. Let's, first, though, talk about these universal truths. We were just talking about, before we started recording we were talking about, something called the Flesch readability index and basically how we can optimize that to whatever our target market is. You want to talk about that a little bit?

Michael Bower: Yeah, exactly. This is something you may have heard about when you were writing papers in school or something like that. The Flesch-Kincaid readability tests are ... There's actually two tests, the Flesch reading ease and the Flesch-Kincaid grade level. The basic idea is that if you have a really high score on the reading ease test, you should have a lower score on the grade level test. Which makes sense, right? If you use smaller words and it's easier to read, then that means that it would correlate to a lower grade level score. It's a little bit disappointing, but the average, according to this website I found, the average user on a website is probably able to read on a seventh to ninth grade level, so 12, 13 years old-ish. The Huffington Post, for example, they have an average grade level readability of about grade seven. If you think about the New York Times, it's above that.

Dillon Holst: Part of me wonders when you're reading for school or you're reading for, I don't know, your job or your work or whatever, it's a little bit different. You're going to have an easier time concentrating, because your mind is just in that place, but when you're on the web, I wonder if people just automatically ... They don't want to try as hard. They don't want to think as hard. They just want things to be easier to read, so that's why when people do tests to find out what grade level should writing be for people on the web, is it just really that's the reading comprehension level? I kind of don't think that it is. I think it's more just we're lazy when we go on the Internet. We're just browsing the web. We're not wanting to be in that head space where we have to concentrate. I wonder how much of that it is.

Michael Bower: I know we don't want to jump ahead to the web specific stuff yet, but I'm going to anyways.

Dillon Holst: Right, right, yeah.

Michael Bower: It's like when you're on the web, it's a little bit harder to read stuff, typically, because you have so many things on your screen. Displays actually make it a little bit harder to read. In general, your website should be easier to read than, say, a piece of paper that you have somebody's full attention when they're reading.

Dillon Holst: Not that I'm trying to make excuses for people and their reading comprehension level, but sometimes you just don't want to have to focus as hard. That's why us as store owners or people in eCommerce, it's good to realize that we should make an effort to make our communication easier to read and understand. That's why the Flesch readability index is a good way for us to figure out are we making things too difficult for people? Is it too easy for people? Are we projecting the confidence and the idea that we know what we're talking about? It's a fine line to walk, I suppose, there, as well.

Michael Bower: It's cool, because there's ways you can test your website for your readability, if you just type into your Google search engine "Flesch-Kincaid ", you can find a few different ones. We'll include a link to one, the where you can just plug in your URL, and it will tell you what your readability scale is. Another thing that concerns universal legibility, if you will, is typography. There's well-established rules of how to put text together. A lot of this you learned in English class, which you may not remember but you do intuitively like you should use words to emphasize in sentence structure rather than putting things in italics or bold all the time. Exception, perhaps, with calls to action. You can use formatting to call those out. Fonts should work well together. They should feel like they go together. If you don't have a sense for that, then grab someone who does, and they'll tell you, "That looks horrible with that font."

Dillon Holst: How often is it when you're reading a book that you'll see a book with a font that looks significantly different from another book? They're all pretty much the same, right? That's how it is on the web, as well. You don't want to differ too much from what people are familiar with, because it can cause confusion. Vice versa, with things that are italicized too much or you're using too much bold or something like that. It's good to save those things for when they really matter, aka the calls to action on your site as opposed to just the copy or your product descriptions or whatever it might be.

Michael Bower: I think there's two types of confusions users experience when they're reading the copy on your website. The first would be they don't understand what you're saying, whether maybe you're just not writing at a level that would be easy for them to understand, or perhaps they aren't familiar with the background information that would be requisite for them to really understand. The second is it's just hard to read physically. Paragraphs are too long. Let's dive into the website. Aside from the universal truths about written communication that are well-established and have been known for over 100 years, there's a lot of things about writing for the web specifically that I still find a lot of people slip up over constantly. The truth of the matter is when you're writing for the web, and this applies for email as well, you don't write in the same way as a college paper.

Dillon Holst: Because it's just not as easy to understand at first glance, and you want people to be able to look at it and understand what you mean with minimal effort.

Michael Bower: I think that was really key, what you said, at first glance. The truth here is that people don't typically read web text; they scan it. A lot of times people have heard of the F-shaped reading pattern. This was back when desktop devices were the predominant form factor, but read across the headline, then you read down the left, then you read somewhere in the middle, and that was kind of a pretty commonly observed pattern using heat mapping. Nowadays, with mobile devices, actually I'm seeing different patterns, but you can't just assume that you have a captive audience with the web, right?

Dillon Holst: Right, yeah.

Michael Bower: A couple of things that you do-

Dillon Holst: I think for me, when I scan ... I totally agree with you. What a great point that is. You shouldn't assume that people are just going to read from start to finish whenever you're writing on the site, and you have to think about it in that context, as well. When people are scanning, try looking for something that's going to capture their interest from a glance. At that point, you may capture them into reading the rest of what you've written for your page, but that means that you don't know at what point their eyes are going to land on something that they find interesting or captivating, right? So the whole thing has to be written in that context.

Michael Bower: I would actually say the inverse is true, as well. I think it's very common for me, when I'm considering buying something on a website that's not something that I've already shopped at, I'm looking for anything that would falsify, anything that looks like it was poorly written, bad grammar, just like a missing period. The classic one for me is the word "its." If I find an "its" that has an apostrophe when it shouldn't or it doesn't have it when it should, all these things indicate to me either someone didn't take appropriate care in preparing what they were saying or they're just going on and on and on for no reason. Maybe they used a third party to write their copy and they didn't edit it. Basically, you're asking for trouble when you have copy that's not very carefully edited. This is really a common problem, because with larger and larger product catalogs, it's very easy to just lift existing content, perhaps, from the manufacturer and then just tweak it a bit. Those are the things where the discriminating user, which is who you want as a customer, because they'll be your most valuable ally when you manage to win them over, they're looking for things that don't seem quite right.

Dillon Holst: Within that context, Michael, how should copy be laid out on a site? We know that people scan. They're not going to read the entire thing, most likely. Does that change how we actually lay out the copy on the site?

Michael Bower: Yeah, and I think it depends on the product. Or maybe based not so much on the product but the level of commitment to buying this particular product that your customer is already at. If someone is coming to your site and they just want to buy your product already, all you need is a buy button. If they're on the far end of that spectrum, and we'll go into this in another podcast, basically it's the level of awareness at that point. If somebody doesn't even know that they need what you have to buy and they just chance upon your website, or maybe they have some kind of vague awareness that, huh, I've heard of this thing called aromatherapy, or I've heard that riding a bike is good and I kind of want to buy a bike, or something like that and considering it. At that point, you need to educate them before you can expect to convince them to buy what your particular offer is.

Let's take a middle-of-the-road approach, because most people's sites are at that point where their product is being considered against some level of another supplier or manufacturer or brand's product. In terms of the middle of the road, I know I said we weren't going to talk about this, but you need to have an image that represents the product, and then you need the text that supports that image. The text, usually, you should have your short description. Best practice would be short description on the right. I sometimes will not put the short description on the right and, instead, have it be a summary statement that goes almost the full width of the page underneath the picture and the add to cart section on the right. I'm speaking of desktop. Then, below that, what I like to do is break up the copy into sections. Typically, it's great to have reviews higher up the page, so you have your reviews there as common ways to do that. People are familiar with how to do reviews. Larger italics on your reviews, left to right with the smiley face, so you can see the person who left the review.

In terms of the description, which is really the body of text where you want to make sure you don't lose the customer in, this is going to be your more valuable user, the user that's really interested in actually buying this product or might be interested. I think that you want to adhere to certain things. Like, for example, use short paragraphs. This is a very important thing that a lot of people don't do, is they go on and on within a paragraph. When you're writing a paper, you want to have three, four, five sentences in a paragraph. When you're writing text for web, you want to have one, maybe two, sentences in a paragraph.

Similarly, you don't want to have huge columns. We don't need to fill it, we talked about this in the last show, with white space. If you have a lot of text to present to someone to read, your column should actually be fairly narrow. If you look at sites like medium.com, which have long-form articles, you'll see that the columns of readable text are actually fairly small compared to the available width of the page. Let's say you have a page that isn't full width. Let's take your tablet breakpoint. Your tablet breakpoint, your text should probably be not more than half the width of the page, and that will bring that feeling of ease in reading and not a lot of pressure and heaviness that you don't want. So, narrower columns.

Another big thing, this is huge, you want to summarize and reiterate, but in a different way. You're above the fold. Well, there's multiple folds on a page, right? Nowadays, we have long-form pages where we scroll down and down and down and down, and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I recommend that. Every fold should have the same call to action or summary statement or main point that you have to make or something that is close to that on every fold so that someone can be continually reminded, as they're scrolling down, they see the same thing presented different ways. Again, try going to scan. They're going to jump around. They're going to go the bottom. They're going to go to the middle. Then they're going to see another product, and they're going to come back to the description. Very disorganized is the best I could say about most users that are reading the website.

Then, there's one other thing that I think is really crucial, which is that we can learn a lot from the info product people, from the content marketing people. One of the main things that you learn in content marketing is to spend 80% of your time crafting headlines. You've probably gone through these courses where it's talking about email marketing, and they're saying spend 80% of your time working on your headline. There's tools that will help you. You can just Google this, email subject help or something like that. It'll tell you how good this headline is, how likely it is to go to spam. Well, on your website, it's not going to go to spam, but it kind of is, right? People see a dumb headline or a headline that doesn't mean anything to them. Think about all those magazine ads that you flip past where you see them and you just kind of go, "Groan. I'm never going to buy that product." What if the magazine ad just had product name, size? That would be even worse. For some reason, we think that on the web, oh, we can just have a product page that says what it is without saying why you should even buy it.

Look at the classic example, top selling product of 2016, the Amazon Echo. Just go to Amazon. I don't actually recommend following Amazon's usability principles, in general, because they kind of just do their own thing and not necessarily the best example. Their flagship product pages aren't so bad in terms of things like readability. They're obviously making an argument for why you should buy the Amazon Echo. Waiting for this page to load.

Dillon Holst: It is a no-brainer, though, if you think about it. They say spend 80% of your time crafting headlines and call to actions. What are the first things that somebody's going to see when they go to a page, right? Well, they might look at the product photography if you have that or whatever image you're using, but they're going to be looking at the things that are popping on the page, the things that are eye-catching, and those are going to be, hopefully, your call to actions and your titles, your headlines, whatever that's going to be.

Michael Bower: With the Amazon Echo, you can see the product headline. Amazon Echo Black. Super boring, right? Everywhere else on the page is telling me a bunch of powerful reasons why I should buy this Amazon Echo. Even on the product photo. The product photo says, "Always ready, connected and fast. Just ask."

Dillon Holst: It makes sense that you would spend 80% of your time on the things that are actually going to get people to end up buying the product, right? You want to spend the time where it counts. People scan. They're not going to be reading every little thing that you're writing on the page. Focus on the things that are going to count and the things that are going to matter.

Michael Bower: Yeah. On your home page, you have to convey something that will draw people into your product, which means that you have to know a bit more about your user than on the product page, potentially. Meaning on the home page, you need to make a statement that will draw a particular type of user into your general whatever it is that is the reason for your existence as a company, as a store. What is it that makes you special? Why are you here? Why should they consider buying from you? Not just free shipping or great products at a great price. Those statements are going to be the hardest to craft. On the product page, it's actually a little bit easier, because any product that you're selling on your site, I'm sure you have a reason for selling it. Well, say what that reason is. Low-hanging fruit here. Pick one or two or three. We talked about this a lot. Pick your flagship product line, flagship products, and spend an hour crafting some powerful copy for your page. It can just be some headlines and calls to action, and you can have a copywriter or an editor take it from there.

Dillon Holst: We've kind of talked about two different areas of communication. Let me ask you this, Michael. Looking down into the future here, how do you think these principles are going to change? We're at the beginning of 2017, but 2017, 2018, and maybe 2019. How do you think these things are going to change?

Michael Bower: Well, I think people are mainly looking for conversations now, and they're wanting to be able to engage with and interact with content. I just saw this thing that someone that I follow, Andrew Warner over at Mixergy, he found it. He was getting an 80% response rate with Facebook Messenger. He stopped sending emails, just as a little test, to try Facebook Messenger, and he got 80% response rate.

Dillon Holst: That's crazy.

Michael Bower: Why would that be? It's because people, they love the idea of a conversation, of being able to be taken very easily to right where they want to go, and that's the whole idea of a concierge, like, "Hey, what time is it?" Asking your phone. Or like, "How long will it take to get home?" I ask my phone that all the time. Couldn't I just look it up on a map or remember it in my head? Of course I could. I could be like I think that ... No, no, no. It's way too hard, right?

Dillon Holst: Yeah. It's not the same thing.

Michael Bower: Especially on a mobile device, it should just be simple. Basically, it makes it way harder, right? It's harder to write a three-minute speech than it is a three-hour speech.

Dillon Holst: Very true. Good thoughts.

Michael Bower: Along with our previous show, I would say it's, again, a big emphasis on making things simpler and better.

Dillon Holst: Conversational eCommerce. That's a topic unto itself. I think we should do a podcast on that coming up here in the near future, because I agree with you. There's a lot of companies out there that are experimenting with different ways of selling people via live chat or even people that are using artificial intelligence to start conversations and sell products. Yeah, that'd be a fun thing to talk about. All right, guys, so that is the end of our podcast here today. I'm not sure how you guys are tuning in. We'd love to hear how you guys are finding the show. You can send us any comments or questions to podcast@sellry.com or you can give us a call at (866) 8-SELLRY. That number is (866) 873-5579. If you're not already, we'd like for you to subscribe to us on iTunes or Stitcher. If you enjoyed the podcast, we'd love it if you'd leave us a review on iTunes. Thanks for listening, and have a good week.

Michael Bower: Thanks, everybody. Keep selling.

Show Notes:
TED talk about the Quantified self
https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_wolf_the_quantified_self
Why Some People Respond to Stress by Falling Asleep
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/why-some-people-respond-to-stress-by-falling-asleep/282422/
Here is more information about Jawbone Trackers
https://jawbone.com/up/trackers
More Info about sleep
sleephub.com.au
Sleeptalk Podcast
http://sleephub.com.au/podcast/
National Sleep Foundation
https://sleepfoundation.org/

On this episode of eCommerceQ&A Podcast; Michael talks to Dr. David Cunnington of sleephub.com.au about the unique problems regarding sleep that face the eCommerce business owners of 2017

Transcript:

Intro: Hello and welcome to E-commerce Q&A. This is the show where we address the needs and interests of e-commerce store owners and operators just like you. During the show, we'll cover such topics as how can you maintain a healthy lifestyle while growing an internet business? How can you optimize your shipping? And everything in between. That's right, folks. We're going to address lifestyle as well as the tactical nuts and bolts of growing an e-commerce business. Now E-commerce Q&A.

Michael: Hello, folks, and welcome to E-commerce Q&A. This is the show where we talk about all things e-commerce. Today, we're talking about a topic that you don't normally hear on a podcast about e-commerce, sleep. As you know, we've been on the kick for a while, talking about health related concerns, because if we're honest with ourselves, when we're running these internet companies and these companies that are always on and are never off, there's that temptation to always be working. It's very easy temptation to give in to. I'll totally admit that that's something that I constantly fall prey to. I'm joined today by a very special guest, Dr. David Cunnington. He's a sleep physician and director at the Melbourne Sleep Disorder Center in Australia. David, welcome.

Dr. David: Yeah, thanks very much.

Michael: This is very much a guilty as charged situation. You know? We're talking about a topic that I already know I'm personally not doing well in. I have this belief that oh you know, I know that one day, I'll have more time to sleep, supposedly, or if I just can fit in a little bit more work today, then I'll be ahead of the game tomorrow. Then I'll be able to be more productive next week. It's just horrible now, because I'm only getting six or seven hours of sleep on the best of days. Before we launch into that, I just want to acknowledge that I think my beliefs are completely messed up about this. I'm very curious to know what you think on this topic.

Dr. David: Yeah, a lot of your beliefs are messed up. They're ones that are almost universally held in modern western society. Don't feel too bad about that.

Michael: I don't know that I feel bad. It's one of those things where you know that you have a lot to learn, right? Let's start at the beginning. Can you tell us how you've gotten into sleep medicine?

Dr. David: Well I trained initially as a pulmonologist from Australia. You can tell from my accent. Then for some of my post fellowship training, I actually went to Boston and worked at Harvard, doing some research in the area of sleep. At the same time, the big research group there was looking at how the brain works during sleep. I really got hooked on everything to do with sleep. That was about 15, 16 years ago. I've really ever since worked in the area, pretty broad area of sleep. Because sleep is not just about the medicine, so my day job is as a sleep physician, seeing patients in my practice. Sleep's also about what we do through the day and lifestyle and social factors and cultural factors, which means I get out of the office a bit and do these type of thing, talking to people about sleep and the importance of sleep.

Michael: That's very interesting. I'm really hoping we have time to discuss that. This is a topic where it's kind of like we're spending a third of our day, at least we all know we should be, sleeping. We hardly ever think about it or talk about it, but it's something we're doing every single 24 hours. We're all doing this. What is the correct amount of sleep for most people?

Dr. David: That's such a hard question. It seems easy at face value, but it's actually a really tough question, because it varies so much from person to person. The latest research shows that there particular gene types where people can sleep much shorter and not seem to be tired or suffer ill consequences. Whereas other people need 9 or 10 hours of sleep.Our professional bodies, like the American Academy of Sleep Medicine put out recommendations saying it should be at least 6, and might need to be up to 10. That's actually not that helpful a recommendation, because if someone asks me how much sleep do I need, they'll say, "Well somewhere between 6 and 10 hours." Like, "Yeah, come on. Help me a bit here." In a sense, what we try to work for working adults is an average of 7 hours sleep eachnight across a week, recognizing there may be days when it's a bit shorter because of late night functions, or you have to get up early for other things. But then trying to program in some catch up later in the week.

Michael: So speaking of catch up, if you can't get whatever the ideal amount of sleep for your own personal body is on a particular night or a series of nights, let's say you're at a conference, is catching up a real thing? Is that even possible to do?

Dr. David: Yeah, absolutely. The good news is it's not a payback in a one to one ratio. If you lose four hours of sleep, it doesn't mean you got to pay that four hours back. It's sort of a bit of a win in that respect. We've all had weeks or even months where we've been busy for work reasons, but then if we take a holiday or take some leave, we'll sleep longer for a day or two, but after that, we're not feeling sleepy and we're not sleeping longer. We've essentially burnt off or paid back that sleep debt.

Michael: Interesting. In technology, we talk about tech debt. It's very much where the more you neglect it, it gets exponentially worse. You know? It's good to hear that if you're behind on sleep, it's not like you're doomed or something. You're going to have to take five years just to catch up on sleep. I believe that for this last year and that was kind of overwhelming for me.

Dr. David: Yeah, absolutely. Someone I saw a couple of months ago, an engineering type, so he's a software programmer actually, had developed his own sort of graphing program, where he was graphing his cumulative sleep debt over the last year. It was just off the charts. It was just something that he felt like he would never be able to overcome, this enormous sleep debt that he calculated that he'd accumulated. Fortunately, that's not how it works.

Michael: Are you familiar with the quantified self movement?

Dr. David: Yeah, absolutely.

Michael: I'm barely familiar. I just met someone who told me about it. It start to make me think, "Oh well if you can catch up so easily, then is it okay to kind of try and optimize your sleep schedule so that you only get as little sleep as really needed for you?

Dr. David: We'll get into that, but no.

Michael: Okay.

Dr. David: One of the helpful things I wish we can measure more variables around health and sleep is using it to make sure we're not running behind. Rather than getting the sense of I'm going to sleep the absolute minimum that I need to, more getting the sense that I'm going to make sure I'm tracking in the mid range of where my sleep need is so that I'm not going to fall below the former or put my health at risk.

Michael: It's kind of like a financial budget, almost.

Dr. David: Yeah.

Michael: You don't want to running on the edge all the time. Okay. We came across an article on the Atlantic saying that excess fatigue can come from having almost a mental overload and therefore needed to to process a lot of emotions, memories, and things like that. Is that true? Does sleep help with processing kind of big mental things?

Dr. David: Not really. So this is one of the things I come across all the time, is people see sleep as the antidote to everything, tired, fatigue, burn out, your emotionally unstable. It's just the place to hide. [Where it's actually 00:07:15] effective where a lot of fatigue can be burn out, stress, worry, mental overload, external circumstances that we feel are like outside of our control. A lot of people I'm seeing in my practice are wishing for sleep to fulfill that function.

Michael: This is another pill for them.

Dr. David: Yeah. Whereas in fact, so much I'm trying to recalibrate them and say, "You know what? It's not about the sleep. Sure, your sleep's disturbed, but I'd expect that given how much stress or how much nervous energy you've been running on. That's the focus, to work on that.

Michael: I really want to come back to that in a few minutes, because I'm very curious about that. A few more questions about sleep itself and then maybe we can discuss these broader topics. Sleep tracker, you started to talk about this. Do you recommend a specific sleep tracker? Do you recommend using like a sleep diary, things like that?

Dr. David: Yeah, so sleep diaries are pretty simple. The good side is it's down and dirty. You don't need any tech. The bad side is we're not always that great at estimating how much sleep we get. If you take a look at people that aren't great sleepers, we can tend to underestimate how much sleep we're getting. I do like sleep trackers. The one I used to like is the Jawbone range of trackers. In essence, they're a victim of their own success. They were so good as a consumer device that they've now sort of withdrawn from the market and repackaging and rebranding as a professional device. They're going to reappear in the professional market. The other ones, FitBit, I don't mind. They do a reasonable job of measuring total amount of sleep. The light sleep, deep sleep, that sort of stuff, man, they're not so good about that, but it can give people an idea of how much sleep they're getting, not just each day, but it's actually really helpful to look across a week and across a month to make sure you're not behind. The key is to be pretty much a disinterested observer of it, like a financial budget. Make sure you're just tracking on range, not to be riding the rollercoaster of the, "Oh my god. I only got four hours sleep last night. It's going to be terrible today. Am I going to get through the day?" Not looking at it in that emotive type of way.

Michael: Let's talk about supplements. We can talk about pills, but given the definition of a supplement is something that's going to support in an overall-y good thing that you're doing. I think I just made up a word. Are there are any supplements that you recommend for promotion of sleep, or maybe I'll broaden it, boosting energy generally.

Dr. David: So a view for each side, so in order to try and improve sleep or to boost energy. People are trying to do lots of things already, particularly on the boosting energy side, caffeine's the sort of drug of small business and the drug of entrepreneurship to help with energy levels, [inaudible 00:09:59] sleep, but both in awake and asleep sense.It's interesting, that term supplement or natural. If anything works, it's working by changing brain neurochemistry. Don't kid ourselves that because it's a supplement or it's herbal or plant based that it's working via some sort of pixie dust or magic type of phenomenon. It is working by changing brain neurochemistry, in the same way a prescription product might be. I'm therefore somewhat cautious about supplements, even though I'm less concerned about risk, because one of the things that can happen with supplements is people get a sense of outsourcing the sense of responsibility of sleep or energy to the supplement, rather than looking at what other things they can do to help manage sleep or help manage their energy levels. That often means they don't get a satisfactory response, because they'll still be eating poorly, working too many hours, not managing stress, not have the right behavior around sleep, and just expecting the supplement to patch over those ills or deficits.

Michael: You know, you've alluded to this idea that there are better ways of handling things like lack of energy, lack of clarity. Maybe we should transition at this point and talk about what those are. How do you generally start off with clients who are coming to you with these types of concerns?

Dr. David: Yes, so one of the things to talk about is if someone's tired and not sleeping well is to try and unpack and work out is it a predominantly not sleeping will the cause of the tiredness. It really is. The times when that is true is when someone's got a genuine medical sleep disorder, so something like obstructive sleep apnea or restless legs or a really difficult insomnia, something that's evolved over a number of years. Lifestyle factors haven't been able to fix it. For the majority of people, the not sleeping well is tied up in what they're doing across the day, whether it's how they're managing energy levels, and I'd like to use the term nervous energy, rather than stress, because then if you think of that as nervous energy, it can come from a range of different things. It can be behaviorally. We're all proud of running like a busy bee. Go hard, so that you're sort of running ahead of everybody else. That is actually harnessing the sympathetic nervous system. It's turning up, deliberately turning up that nervous energy drive now sstafo that we can feel like we can get more done. That has consequences at night. If you're running on nervous energy right through the day, you shouldn't expect to be able to just go into bed, feel calm, feel quiet, drop readily to sleep, and during the night, stay asleep for prolonged periods, because that nervous energy is still going to be ticking along the under surface. I try to look at how people run their day. If people's day is from the time the alarm goes in the morning until the time they're getting into bed at night, they don't stop, and even once they're in bed, there's that thinking about their business. People with small business, you know, you're working in the business during the day and thinking about the business and what you're going to do with the business at night. It's a real challenge. It's trying to look at what people do across the day, and often, making them take a break through the day and try and work on ... If these people are pushing harder, it can actually reduce their energy levels, reduce performance. The way to move forward sometimes is actually building in some down time.

Michael: How much down time would you recommend building in for an average day, week day?

Dr. David: It really varies from person to person. I also think of it as you've got to have a period of skill acquisition or learning a new behavior. When we're teaching someone, one of the techniques we might use is mindfulness space meditation. If we teach someone that, we might give them a prescription of about 30 minutes, 6 days a week. We might do that for 6 to 8 weeks. People then get a sense of some confidence in that skill and feel like they've got some skills. Then someone in there will match it then to their working day. For someone who doesn't really have their own office, or doesn't have defined down time during the day, it might be little one to three minute breaks periodically every one to two hours. That's sort of just a minute movement, where for one minute each hour, it's just pausing, taking the foot off the accelerator. For someone who's work has a bit more structure and they've got a break in the middle of the day, it might be taking 10 minutes out to like walk. Just leave the office. Get out of there for 10 minutes. Or it might be some time at the side of the day, or transitioning at the end of the day, having a defined period where I'm home. I've now got the kids in bed. I've done a little bit of work to just square out the day. Now I'm going to take 10 minutes just as a transition to mark that transition from I'm mentally active, get things done sort of person, to now I'm transitioning into the I'm winding down. My day is done.

Michael: I think this is kind of the [nub 00:14:58] of the issue, in a sense. I have a six year old daughter. She's very similar to me in her personality. One of the things that I see in her that I also struggle with myself is a tendency to seek stimulation. My wife and I look at her. When she's being hyper and crazy and not obeying very well and things like that, we say, "Oh she's over stimulated." We're just going to give her some downtime. Then a little bit of extra sleep, some more napping, just kind of calming her life down. Then after a while, she's fine. It's made me think about my own life, because I think ... I read an article which was saying that it's possible to get addicted to overstimulation. The idea being that this really just wanting something to change kind of like the whole idea of a change is as good as vacation, but wanting a million vacations during the day. Just almost seeking to become distracted. I'm curious. Is this an actual thing? Is over stimulation a real problem? How does that play into all this?

Dr. David: Absolutely. It's part of our modern society. There's different terms people use. It might be distractibility, lack of attention, divided attention. I struggle to watch television, in particular the major sort of channels or cable channels, because there's so many moving parts on the screen at one time. It's just feeding that whole divided attention. People I see would say things like, there's no way I could read a book. I couldn't even read a chapter in a book. Once an article goes beyond 500 words, they think, where's the next thing? When I talk about mindfulness space meditation, really what mindfulness is is training us in a skill of maintaining observation in the present moment. That's a really nice skill for just training people to focus on the one thing, and sit with that one thing. It's not something that comes naturally, because we're trained to actually be looking for the next thing, even while we're on the one thing that we're doing. Practicing that skill is the bit that takes time, is getting people to be much more comfortable in order to focus on the one thing for a period of time. I say it too in people, who come to my office, who report that they're not sleeping very well. I'll ask them, "How long could you sit still for without a phone, without a book, without a screen before you felt you needed to get up and do something?" Often that's a very short period of time.

Michael: Right. I have a friend that has insomnia. He was recently diagnosed with cancer. I'm just kind of curious if sleep disorders are ever linked with really serious diseases like cancer.

Dr. David: Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes it's hard to work out what's the chicken and the egg. Most of the research that's out there essentially shows that if you take cross sectional data, that people with sleep disturbance then are at higher risk in the future of developing medical illnesses. The problem with that data is that lead time's pretty short. What we actually think is that maybe that's it's part of an early sign of the cancer was the sleep disturbance.

Michael: Oh wow.

Dr. David: It was only when the cancer got picked up some months later. I think of sleep sometimes a bit like the canary in the coal mine in terms of health. For someone who they're used to sleeping a certain way and their lifestyle's exactly the same, but sleep changes, that for me is a bit of a red flag. Something changed with health. Is there something that's shifted, and therefore, we're going to see something else appear in due course? Don't think of it so much as someone with long standing insomnia that's going to cause them to have cancer. There is a small signal with that. A data set of nearly 70,000 women who worked night shift over 30 years, so we're talking of very big stimulus or very big impact os sleep disturbance over a very prolonged period of time had a small and very small increased risk in breast cancer. That's where some of that sort of statements about poor sleep will cause cancer comes from, but the magnitude of the risk is pretty small, and the amount of sleep disturbance they had was really big.

Michael: Now you said something that I'd like to key in to for second. You mentioned that them working at night constituted a sleep disturbance. Can you expand on that?

Dr. David: Think of that as working, and where we think the risk comes from is you're working at at time when your body clock is expecting to sleep. Your behavior is out of sync with your internal body clock. Whilst we can all do that if we need to pull an all nighter or if we need to work a night shift, we can do it, but our intrinsic body clock will still be expecting us to sleep. Your immune system, your immune surveillance, regulatory mechanisms that control appetite, feeding, fasting, activity, energy levels are all expecting you to be asleep. When we constantly are out of sync with our internal body clocks, that's where we see impacts on health. Not just in terms of health risk, but chronically feeling tired.

Michael: Then that's based on basically when is the sun coming in, when is the sun coming down. That's what he circadian rhythm is ultimately based on, right?

Dr. David: Yes, so that's ... We're biological beings and sort of grew up in a very natural environment. That's where we've sort of evolved from. Our own internal body clock is synchronized by those external cues. Everybody's clock is slightly different. There will be some people who are early birds, prefers to go to bed at nine o'clock, for example, and be up at five. Others are more night owls, preference to go to bed at one and be up at 9 or 10, and be in the office at 11. Recent research shows that rather than the early bird gets the worm, and those early morning types are the hardworking ones, which some of the belief in modern industrial society sort of [betrays 00:21:14] that belief, in actual fact if people worked according to their own intrinsic clock, the night owls started work at 11 and worked until 7 PM, they perform equally well as the early birds that start work at 8 and finish at 5. It's a matter of, for a given individual, recognizing their preference and making sure they're roughly in sync as best they can with that preference.

Michael: Interesting. We've discussed mindfulness and meditation. Are there any other lifestyle focused remedies for lack of a better term, or practices that you can advocate?

Dr. David: Yes. On the sort of slowing down side, it doesn't have to be as structured as mindfulness. Particularly for small business owners and entrepreneurs, it really boils down to permission, you know, guilt free permission. That's the key. To pause would take some time out. In recognition then, in the business and leadership literature, there's good research showing that people who sleep less, because they've traded off sleep for work or other activities, make worse decisions, have less happy employees, have workplace cultures that aren't as positive and have greater staff turnover. A really good research showing that for business owners, managers, and leaders, taking a little bit of time out, allowing enough opportunity for sleep, makes a big difference in terms of their performance. It's not just about hours at the desk or hours at the wheel, it's about how well rested we are. They're trying to get people around that so that they can guilt free give themselves permission to take some time out. It doesn't have to be as formal as meditation. It can be, you know, I'm just going to go for a walk. Just going to spend half an hour with the kids, and not half an hour with the kids where you're then taking phone calls and planning things and on the phone, but actually half an hour with the kids, focused on what the kids are doing. That's on the sort of slowing down side. Then on the boosting energy side, there's really good research from the depressionliterature, but also in the fatigue literature about a technique called behavioral activation. You can sort of summarize that as get up and go. First thing in the morning, people are still feeling a little bit sluggish, rather than that, you know what? I'm just going to rest here a bit longer. Actually getting up, but not getting up and starting work, but getting up, getting outside because that helps cue in the body clock to the natural light dark cycle, and moving, because the physical activity wakes up a lot of the body functions and gives energy.

Michael: Interesting. So it seems like there's a productive cycle and there's a vicious cycle. You can correct me if I'm wrong, I'm just trying to understand this, but the vicious cycle that I'm thinking of is when you're not getting enough sleep, you're just stressed out and then you can't sleep as well. Your body is wired, because you didn't slow things down before you needed to sleep. Is that correct so far?

Dr. David: Yeah, it is correct, but it's not on a day to day basis. It's not a case of if we've been busy over months, we slow down one day, we'll get the return that night. It takes weeks for that to unwind.

Michael: Then there also seems like a healthy productive cycle, where even if you feel a little bit tired, going ahead and getting up, getting your body moving, and then towards the end of the day, slowing down, taking time off, that will aid in having more energy the next day.

Dr. David: Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes it takes a bit of a circuit breaker to see that. That's, what I say is, we talked about, before we started recording, you know, I'm on retreat at the moment. I'm having a week out at a health retreat, partly so because I'm teaching guests about healthy sleep habits and managing energy. They'll have that recognition that actually taking some time out, then when they get back into their day to day lives, are much more confident that taking some time out's going to help them make better decisions.

Michael: Interesting. Dr. David, I'm wondering if you can share with our guests a bit about how they can learn more about these topics and potentially benefit from your services going forward as well as your podcast.

Dr. David: Yeah, so we've got an online site that's got information about sleep. That's sleephub.com.au, and also on that site, we host a podcast called Sleep Talk. Sleep Talk's available on iTunes and Google Play and other podcast apps or podcast catchers. If people are looking for information, there's information there. I also write for Huffington Post, so there are articles on Huffington Post that are written about sleep with these sort of message. Some other good sources of information about sleep, the National Sleep Foundation in the United States provides a good source of information about sleep as well.

Michael: Do you do things like coaching or individualized therapy with folks that are maybe not in Australia?

Dr. David: No. My day job or my regular job is I'm a medical practitioner in Melbourne, Australia. Because I'm a credentialed medical practitioner, my medical indemnity and medical registration doesn't cover me offering services to people outside of Australia.

Michael: We may need to solve that problem. Well, very interesting. [inaudible 00:26:32] fun kind of question which is at what point should someone who thinks they're having sleep problems, at what point should they actually seek something a little bit more strong, like concerted services from a practitioner such as yourself or sleeping pills. I don't even know if sleeping pills are a good idea, but when do you need to escalate your treatment of your own sleep problems?

Dr. David: Yeah, so if you feel like you're not sleeping well and have done some of the commonsense things, like implementing some good practices around sleep, allowing enough time to wind down, reflecting on the degree of busyness and balance and making sure that it's not just a case of going 24/7, and still not sleeping well, that's the time to go and talk to your health professional.

Michael: Okay. Makes sense. Well did you have anything else that you'd like to leave everyone with here?

Dr. David: Yes, a couple of other points. Some of the language around sleep, often I also find with people that are running businesses or entrepreneurs, they want to absolutely squeeze the most out of sleep. They're trying to get sleep to be absolutely perfect. For sleep to work well, it's got to be good enough, not perfect. If people strive hard to get sleep absolutely perfect, they can paradoxically develop a bit of an anxiety about sleep. I'm constantly tweaking it, monitoring it, putting in place mechanisms around sleep. We really need to just step back and let the body do its thing with regards to sleep. The second point would be embrace napping. Although napping's not necessarily part of the business culture, you've seen large companies now introduce nap pods and those types of things, but it works for people in small business and entrepreneurs as well. It doesn't have to be as structured as going into a pod, but again, giving yourself permission, feeling a bit tired, not making headway, actually take some time out. Close your eyes for a bit, even if you just rest. You'll find you're much productive when you then get back to it.

Michael: I'm so glad you discussed napping. I was feeling like, "Hmm, I could use a nap about now."

Dr. David: I encourage that.

Michael: Yeah. Well thank you so much for your time today. I've learned quite a lot. I'm surprised by a lot of the things you said and that's great.

Dr. David: It's a pleasure.

Michael: Oops. Sorry, folks. We lost Dr. David's audio at this point. So here I am recording the ending later. I did get nap. It was very refreshing. I've started taking more naps since then. In fact, I just got up from one just now. I encourage you take one whenever you're feeling down. It will help your perspective. So Dr. David's podcast is linked in the show notes as are the other resources like you can expect. If you have any questions about sleep that you'd like us to forward to Dr. David, send those to podcast@sellry.com. That's S-E-L-L-R-Y. As always, thank you so much for listening. Have a good week.