Happy Sunday! Today I’m en-route to San Diego as I write this newsletter. On Wednesday, I have the pleasure of speaking at ECF Live. If you’re a Limited Supply listener, you’ve heard me praise the eCommerceFuel community — if you aren’t in it, I highly encourage checking it out. Today’s newsletter is going to answer a question I got 3x this past week — so I figured why not share it with everyone. I hope you’re feeling relaxed, you’re cozy on a couch, you have a beverage in your hand, and you’re ready to dive in.
Speaking of Limited Supply, did you see our episode this last week? Normally, Moiz and I record together in NYC, but we recorded this episode in... Inglewood, California. Yes, that Inglewood. We talked about ad moderation, Starbucks having 3.3BN dollars in “Starbucks cash” loaded on their app, Costco and the Costco samples model, the Aritzia quarterly results, new Shopify features (Ashley was a fanof it). If you missed it, check it out on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube! I did my best Peter Griffin impression.
Last thing before we get started... I want to create a network of angels I can send deal flow to. I’ve put together SPVs in the past for Feastables, Chamberlain Coffee, Okendo, Cadence, etc. and I want to open that network a bit more. I have one brand I invested in the pre-seed stage that is heavily celebrity-backed/involved, and they’re raising their series A & looking for angels. If you want to get dealflow, fill out this form.
Ok, so back to today’s newsletter... One question I get asked from basically every brand I know is “How can I get more value from my existing traffic?” Just like you and Beyonce both have the same 24 hours in a day, your site and your biggest competitor both have the potential to convert more customers — it just depends how well you do at walking someone through your store. The more you do FOR your consumers, the better you will convert — but if you have the “if we build a good product, they will buy it” mentality, you will fail.
When you compare your Shopify (Plus) storefront to the shelf at Target, there’s 1 fundamental difference. In Target, to win, you must own the shelf space and shelf real estate. But online, it’s not about the slotting fees, it’s a game of who is the best at getting people to their shelf in the first place. When I worked at Hint, I always felt that we had no competition, because at the time no beverage brand was really flourishing, direct-to- consumer. In Target, different story. But online, we were the Coca Cola of the internet.
Unfortunately, when 3 out of 100 people who come to your store make a purchase, that’s a healthy metric. This past week I spoke with a haircare brand that had a 7% conversion rate. I also saw a 6% CVR for a supplement brand. Generally, the higher AOV or more “out there” a product is (compared to a commodity), the lower your conversion rate is. But there’s ways to get around it... I’m going to share my top 3 favorites below. I have a much fuller list that I’ll send out next weekend. Let me know what I missed below:
Improve the first-party data capture experience
You’re most likely firing an email pop-up when people come to your site. Then you might also have a phone number collection option, too. The average pop-up conversion rate (CVR) is 3.2%, according to Klaviyo. Candidly, that’s pretty terrible — you should aim for a 10% conversion rate. Most of our clients land around 8- 11%. If you have the mindset that you can always get 1% better with your conversion rate, you’re going to win.
When Cadence first launched, we would optimize the email pop-up on a weekly basis as we found things that worked better — better imagery, better copy, % off vs $ off vs free gift, better CTAs, even so far as adding the ability to copy the coupon code. The CVR for this pop up puts it in the top 1% of pop-ups for data capture. Click here to see the current Cadence pop-up flow.
To take this to the next level, start using your pop-up to gather zero-party attributes (think of these as “adjectives” to your customer record, aka the “noun”). You’ll see great examples of this on sites like Fabletics or Jones Road Beauty when the box pops up.
And if you want to take it one level further, then instead of offering something like a free product, you offer something more like a digital product as a lead magnet. Your margins on digital products are... well, they should be nearly 100%, if not totally 100%. My favorite example, till today, is the Jolie Water Report. You enter your name, email and zip code on their pop up, they create a Klaviyo record that pulls your local water contamination data based on your zipcode, using the EPA’s API, and they send you an email telling you how bad the water is. Try it here. You’ll never want to shower without a Jolie, or drink tap water, again. That’s the beauty of why it works so well — the “visitor-offer fit” is immaculate; fully aligned to serve the site visitor, even if they never buy the product, but most do.
Other options for great digital products/offers include: FB Groups, Wallpapers (free, but you get the customer record), a 30-day fitness challenge PDF, etc. The more valuable it is, the higher your overall conversion rate will be. Jolie’s water report was 80% at one point.
Forget value-props... speak with angles, not even benefits!
If you’re a regular reader, you’ll think I’m beating a dead horse here (what a horrible visualization that was, I love horses) — but stop leading your copy with value props. In fact, a lot of times when a HOOX client says, “Oh, but we’ve built landing pages before... they didn’t work for us,” it’s because the internal team that built it was drinking their own kool-aid. And when you’re drinking your own kool-aid, you speak in value props (it’s all your hear in your meetings, in internal emails, slacks, etc).
The next level is to speak in benefits, which you can figure out by answering: How would my customer describe their new purchase to a friend? 2 other easy ways to get hefty benefits for copy:
- What does someone say when they unbox or try the product for the first time? Think of this as the first time someone opens a box and feels the material of what they bought, or they drank their first bottle of a chilled bottle of hint water.
- What does someone say after experiencing the change in their life that the product gave them? Think of this as someone bought a cookware set or an Eight Sleep bed, and woke up the next morning without any pain from their plantar fasciitis.
Here’s an example for one one my favorite HOOX clients:
Value prop: Lundberg cakes are low-calorie, light, and easy to prepare.
Benefit: Lundberg cakes are the perfect on-the-go and zero-bloat snack when you’re in a rush.
Angle: Lundberg cakes are the perfect after-school snack that every mom can get behind!
As someone progresses through a web page, or a landing page, your copy can get more specific to value-props and explaining them, but when you’re trying to win someone over, focus more on upper-funnel-friendly copy, which are angles and benefits.
Improve the quality of your social proof.
When you go to a brand’s website, you’ll likely see a couple of sections dedicated to social proof of the brand or the efficacy of the product, itself. In the past, I had two rules to decide which types of press outlets you should feature, depending on your audience:
- If you have a younger audience, use publications that relate more to younger folks: Insider, Bustle, BuzzFeed, Refinery29, PopSugar, etc.
- If you have an older audience, use publications that relate to older folks: Town & Country, New York Times, MSNBC, Good Morning America, etc.
There’s now a third rule as it relates to putting social proof on your site: short-form video content.
All of the landing pages and websites our team builds now focus heavily on short-form content — it has the highest signal of trust for a site visitor. Publications... everyone knows they can be paid off to say what you want them to say. Customer quotes... well consumers know that you can pick and choose your favorites to display (or hide). But short-form video... that is something that always works so well, because you can see the genuine reaction from the customer. You’ll notice on the homepages of both Love Wellness and Solawave, we added a nice cushion of customer review videos. The same idea crushes on landing pages.
Another version of this I love, is Eight Sleep’s Wall of Love (you’ll even see Elon Musk there). It plays on a concept that we use at 1180 Media called, Secondary Presence — the combination of first party insights, data, targeting, content, and storytelling with third-party social proof and validation.
If you have no reviews, customer quotes, testimonials, or publisher quotes on your web pages, you’re already behind — get those live. If you’re lazy, you can do what Jolie does on their PDP and put screenshots of iMessage conversations or Instagram story reposts as your reviews (it crushes).
What else should be on here that I didn’t put? Reply and send it. I’ll pick my 3 favorites and buy you a coffee (aka send you a Starbucks card code)!
On to some fun stuff...
Vendor of the Week:
Particl — The secret tool that Kitsch, Cuts, and Rhone use to accelerate learnings of what products are most likely to sell through and which products they should sample and launch.
I know this sounds almost too good to be true, but let me explain how this works... Particl tracks sales and inventory numbers from over 500 million products across 80,000 online stores. How? That’s their secret sauce, but it's fairly accurate when I checked the numbers against some stores I have access to.
With this information, you can quickly identify product opportunities, market trends, and competitors’ best- sellers to understand which pricing strategies drive the most ROI. If your business sees spikes in revenue when you launch new products or variations of products, I highly recommend getting a demo of Particl.
It’s the secret genie in a bottle for every brand, figure out what sells, how big of a volume, and if you should launch it yourself — get a demo of Particl today!
LP of the Week:
This week’s page is one that our team ran a few weeks ago for Long Wknd, a personal care brand with a focus on being plastic-free. As we update the brand identity, and produce new formulations, we wanted to run a sale to sell through existing inventory, and it worked.
Click here to see the landing page!
This page got traffic mainly from email, SMS, and organic social, and it was beautifully made with 2 main options: a best-sellers bundle or a BYOB section (with such a UX-friendly design).
If you’re ready to stop having FOMO of an amazing advertising funnel, then book a demo with us at HOOX. You’ll join a roster of brands like Crocs, Anheuser-Busch, Hedley & Bennett, Solawave, MarketerHire, and others.
That's all for this week
I hope this week’s newsletter inspired a few actions for you to execute tomorrow morning. It sounds repetitive, but even with the stuff that should be “obvious,” there’s always room to get 1% better.
If you’re in San Diego, DM me on Twitter and let me know; maybe we’ll find a way to hang out or get a small crew together. Until next Sunday, I hope you get 9 hours of sleep for at least one night — you’ll feel like you can run through walls!! Have an incredible week, get a sweat in, text someone randomly, say hi, and I’ll see you on Twitter!!
