Drive and Convert (Ep. 084): Holiday Analysis and Adjustments

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About This Episode:

Each holiday season is different, so how do you prepare for one? As a business, it’s important to use data-driven strategies and think creatively when planning for your holiday campaign. In this week’s episode, Jon and Ryan share a few ideas on how to think about the holidays and what you need to do to stand out from the competition. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why each holiday season is different
2. How to define the holiday season
3. How to use data to determine holiday periods
4. How to prepare for the holiday season
5. When to start advertising for the holidays

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, hit us up on Twitter. We’re @jonmacdonald and @ryangarrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert. A podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon:
Hey, Ryan, it is June. That means the holidays are upon us. Wait, just joking. It means you should be planning for the holidays, as we all know.

Ryan:
Yes.

Jon:
But I’m interested in your take on this because I know you and the folks at Logical Position start planning for holidays, rightfully so, six months early. And you’re meeting with Google, et cetera, quite often about these things about now. So I’m interested, what are you learning? What are you hearing? What adjustments do people need to make this year? I realize that a lot of e-commerce brands right now are in the thick of it. That’s post covid, for sure. Everyone’s gone back to shopping, at least partially in retail and not as much e-comm. And overall spending at least in the United States, with economic factors is down a little bit. So this holiday season is something that I think every brand should be prepping for now and starting five, six months ahead if you can. So with that, I’m interested, how do you prep for holiday? How should you prepare, basically? I’d love to learn from you on that.

Ryan:
This is, I don’t even remember anymore, probably my 15th or so holiday season.

Jon:
We’re just old. Yeah, it’s been a while.

Ryan:
We are.

Jon:
How about that? We’re experienced.

Ryan:
Back in the stone ages when we started this, every year you kind of think, okay, it’s Christmas, it’s Thanksgiving, it’s the holiday period, Q4, we already know what we’re doing. We’ve done this before. And having gone through every one of these in the past, every single one is going to be different. You can have the same business. You might have the new site, you might have new categories, you can have new competitors. Your organic results change, which impacts your paid search results, positive or negative. Your email list, your promotion period. I mean, there’s so much that’s dynamic and changing year over year, that every year you need to come to the table kind of with a blank slate of what are we going to do this year? You want to look back at the last two years probably, to get an idea of where the trends are in your industry as far as when did search volume start increasing in Q4?
Did it increase before Halloween with search volume, but conversion rates dropped, so people were doing research, then they came back and purchased later through email that they signed up for through remarketing. There’s just so many variables that will be different year over year, and a lot of it depends on how are people feeling about the economy, because that determines how much of a deal focus do I have? As we were talking before we turned the recording on, in 2020, if you were e-comm, if you had a website, you did good. It was not difficult to get people to take action at that period. And people had very little price sensitivity. It was probably just a lot of clicking and buying because hey, they got it. I’m on it. I’ve got money. The government’s funding a lot of things. Who cares? ’21 still had some pretty good traction. ’22, we lost some of our covid excitement in money, and conversion rates were lower. People spent less per order. It was just down a little bit.
And so all three of those, very different from an experience standpoint as an e-commerce brand. And then going into ’24, even if couple months ago I figured guaranteed recession by the end of the year. No way, it’s not going to happen. Then we look at the stock market now, we’re like, “We’re back into a bear market.” So there’s probably a lot going on with how people feel about the economy. The reality can be different for each group of people in the US, but there’s going to be vastly different feelings and probably different spending abilities within the space as no matter what the economy’s doing, we are spending more on some basics. It’s food, rent, mortgages. Those costs are up.

Jon:
Yes, inflation.

Ryan:
You have to come in with lots of data when you’re preparing, and at least have a plan to start with, knowing that whatever you plan, it’s going to change once you get into it and you start executing it. For whatever reason, Facebook or Instagram, I can’t remember which. I don’t spend much time on social, but when I do, I just scroll randomly and I like to laugh or look at stupid things. Really have nothing to do with friends or family. I’m the weird social one.
Somebody showed me a Mike Tyson fight with a quote. One of his early fights in the early 90s where he had a quote, “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.” And that’s really how you need to look at holiday. You’re going to have a plan, and then something’s going to happen to change it, and you have to be able to roll with the punches with that and adjust and pivot. Have backup plans on your plans. You should know who your competitors are. You should have an idea of when they’re going to start running promotions based on competing against them last year and how you’re going to compete with that or not compete and hold money back until later. Was it the ’21 holiday season where we had all of the inventory issues, everything was stuck on a boat or stuck in China?

Jon:
Yep. 2021, yeah.

Ryan:
’21, I think. Because my wife and I did I think, almost all of our shopping for all four of our kids, by the middle of November, we were done. I was like, “Honey, if we don’t get it now, we might not get it.”

Jon:
I remember that conversation, and I was jealous because I hadn’t even started.

Ryan:
Yeah. It’s like in certain holiday seasons, you got to decide, all right, we’re going to go and get everybody quickly and be done, and if we run out of inventory, we just get to turn it off and we take a couple weeks off before Christmas. Again, plans you have that if you start selling quicker than you expect, why would you not take the sales? Why would you hold to a plan that says, well, we were only going to spend this much money before November 15th. So? I mean, take the sales when they’re there. So start preparing now. Have the conversations with the CFO and the finance team. What did you spend last year? If you’re the owner, have it with your wife or your husband that helps talk through the finance things with you. Make sure you know what you’re planning to spend. Have some excess that you can pull through if things are going really well and there’s more sales to get. No reason not to spend more.
So just go. Look at the calendar dates, have a plan, make sure your team knows when the dates are that you’re turning things up, or you’re starting to get some influencers playing in through social. If you make the plans now for holiday, know that some of the SEO things you’re doing now will be having an impact later in the year. So right now, you probably wouldn’t be focusing your SEO on summer terms unless you’re already focused on summer ’24. But if you’re focused on holiday now, hey, be getting some content out. Be getting the links built to your winter pages now, even if the inventory’s not there.

Jon:
That brings up a really good question for me, which is how do you define the holiday period for online businesses, right? Because most people hear holiday and they think, well, it’s Christmas, it’s that week. There’s Black Friday, Cyber Monday. That’s really the big ones. I was even just talking to a very large furniture retailer today, and they were saying, “Hey, we try to turn every single day holiday into a week long event or two week long event, because all of our furniture sells. We’re just conditioned in America, to buy furniture around holidays.” Which blew my mind because I’m like, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense.” But furniture stores have done that to themselves. They’re always saying, “Big President’s Day sale.” “Memorial Day week.” They do all of these types of things.

Ryan:
But they need an excuse.

Jon:
Right. It reminded me of a TV show, I forget what it was called, but it’s about a kid growing up in the 80s, and his dad and his grandfather owned a furniture store. The Goldbergs. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this show-

Ryan:
I have not.

Jon:
… it’s a hilarious sitcom. And the grandfather used to always run… For years, he would always run a going out of business sale. He had no intention of going out of business. It just drew everybody in because they’re like, “Oh, there must be great deals.” He would sell a lot of inventory and then be like, oh, a week later, back to business.

Ryan:
Back to normal.

Jon:
Nobody would ever question him about it. No one ever questioned him, like, “Wait, you’re still here. I thought you were going out of business.”

Ryan:
Or it feels like my college day is like, “We need an excuse to have a beer. Oh, we’re going to celebrate Memorial Day today.”

Jon:
Yep. Yeah so I guess, how do you define the holiday period for online businesses?

Ryan:
Good question because yeah, when I say holiday in this period of time, I’m usually talking about holiday prep for Cyber 5, Black Friday, Christmas. But if you’re in the aftermarket automotive space, your holiday period really isn’t until mid to end February in through May, usually. Tax return season. That’s their Super Bowl, their holiday season. And Super Bowl, that’s another one. That’s a big one for TVs, electronics. So holiday in its simplest form is when you see on your site, elevated conversion rates and generally increased traffic or searches with increased competition. Because for most companies, the holiday is not just theirs. You might have a friends and family sale, that can be a little bit different. Yes, it’s a holiday period for the brand per se, but Google Ads team probably doesn’t have to really ramp up strategy to getting involved in this. That’s more for email, loyalty, fulfillment, merchandising.
So holiday, you can look at analytics and figure out… I recommend people look at a 12-month period. If you’re preparing for your year, look back the previous 12 months. Look by week. Set your analytics by week and just look at conversion rates by week. And what you’ll do is you’ll see some outliers that are like, “Oh, those are the holiday periods generally, we can look at.” And overlay traffic just to make sure that there were some traffic peaks as well there, because you don’t want just a random, hey, we had 100 people that randomly got an influencer to come to the site and ended up doing really well. Because that wouldn’t be a normal holiday for you. And so each holiday period is probably not going to be the same or need the same level of preparation.

Jon:
Yeah. I was going to ask you, should you prepare for them all the same? I mean, I assume the answer is no.

Ryan:
Yeah, you know what? They’re not all-

Jon:
Beyond assets and the language you use, right? But what are other ways you’re preparing?

Ryan:
Yeah, so if you look at… The gifting business is big in the holiday periods. If you’re focused on gifts, and that’s the main reason people come to your site, like gift baskets, for example. You look at Valentine’s and that’s a very condensed gift basket period where you’ve really got a couple weeks leading up to the holiday, and then two days before the holiday, nobody’s going to buy a gift basket a day before, usually online because of the fulfillment issues, you’re not going to get it there. So you’ve really got that two week window. And you also have to change that window a little bit because if you target men buying for women, your window is smaller and closer to the event. And if you’re targeting women buying for men, and this is obviously using the heterosexual relationships, women will usually research longer and have a longer window in there and then be done earlier than the men in the buying process.

Jon:
Okay.

Ryan:
So, understand your market. Understand the holidays. There’s not a lot of Valentine’s searches beginning of January, this doesn’t happen. But there’s going to be Christmas gift buying searches in October. So know the difference of that. A lot of it’s going to be in your data. If you look year over year and you look at your Valentine’s peak, you’re going to see, oh, January 20th nobody cares about Valentine’s yet, they may be looking for Super Bowl. And then once they get past Super Bowl, they’re looking for Valentine’s.

Jon:
So as a side note learning here, takeaway for me personally, is to start preparing for Valentine’s Day earlier.

Ryan:
Yes, but there won’t be many as many deals.

Jon:
Yes. But I also will be a much better husband because of it.

Ryan:
Yeah. At Valentine’s if you’re requiring a deal, your wife might have something to say about that. Just spend the extra 10% and get it out of the way.

Speaker 1:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers. And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon:
So how do you start the conversations with your clients about preparing for this? Because I imagine you’re having a lot of these conversations, you’re starting to now.

Ryan:
Mm-hmm.

Jon:
So I hear from a lot of our customers, “Hey, if you’re optimizing for conversions now for holiday, you’ll see some gains. But if you come to me in October, forget about it. Let’s just wait until next year and call me in June.” Right?

Ryan:
Mm-hmm.

Jon:
So how are you preparing people now? How are you starting to have those conversations?

Ryan:
Well, it’s fairly easy to get into holiday prep conversations now, largely because Google’s forcing something called GA4 on everybody next month. And so that conversation alone says, “Hey, you’ve got to have GA4 ready to be capturing data, and you got to have your tech stack really ready to go for this new system.” And this is a great time, a lot of companies are thinking more about attribution than they have in the past since GA4 is already “weird” to them at this point, because it looks so different. So hey, you might as well also start looking at an attribution system if you’re going to be investing more in social, to see how that’s pushing searchers down through the funnel. Triple Whale, Northbeam, even little data, some modified attribution light. That’s an important thing to have in now.
And so when you’re preparing for holiday, most companies like you’re talking about, have a tech freeze or a code freeze. They’re not going to make changes to the site or implement anything other than modified price changes or inventory adjustments once October hits. And even as a smaller business, you probably don’t want to do anything either. That’s a best practice I would probably adopt. Don’t decide to randomly change platforms October 15th, if the holiday period in Q4 is important to you.
And so preparing now, getting all of the things out on the table that… I start usually with a giant wishlist of if we could do anything, nothing’s impossible, what do we do? And what does that look like? And then the finance team usually takes half of that and says, no way. And then you’re left with something else. You’re like, “Okay, how do we push piece this together, figure out what’s more important than other things? What can we execute in time can’t execute in time?” And then even delivery or supply chain for some industries is still an issue. Don’t ignore that. Hey, we might not have this inventory, so we can’t necessarily base a holiday period on that one product or that leading the way.

Jon:
Right. So I’m sure you have some general rule of thumbs around these, right? You’ve seen enough of these industries. So for gifting things, how soon should you start preparing?

Ryan:
So every year it seems, at least for the last five, it’s always been Google’s pushing everybody to ramp advertising up sooner. And the first few times they did that, I’m like, “No way you need to start advertising in October for holiday, that’s just Google doing a money grab.” And I think the first few years it probably was. But the last couple… I think there’s been a lot of data we’ve seen, that by pushing your spend earlier in the holiday season allows you to capture eyeballs sooner. The power of audiences and remarketing lists in Google Ads in particular is pretty massive, especially in this new world of performance max campaigns where the more data you give it, the more audiences you give it, the better chance it has of actually working for you and finding these users again or finding like audiences.

Jon:
That’s a great point. I never thought about that, where the retargeting aspect alone could be valuable. Because retargeting is much cheaper, and so you have a much further spend down the line.

Ryan:
Yeah. Or if somebody’s been to your site in October and you have kind of these general research terms for whatever product it is you’re selling, when that person comes back in, let’s say the first week of December, doing a search for a product, you can bid more aggressively on them than a competitor could because you’ve got some data that says, this person searched this, they’ve already seen my site, they’re more likely to find me again and buy from me. I just have to make sure I’m there. And so those bid modifiers become massive levers for you.

Jon:
Am I also accurate in thinking… And maybe I’m not, but I would think that if you spend earlier, it’s going to be cheaper because you’re going to have less competition earlier in the season.

Ryan:
Very true.

Jon:
Come November, everyone’s going to be advertising. If you start in October, that could be a month of advertising at a much lower rate, so your spend goes much further too.

Ryan:
Yes, exactly. Well, you might be spending a little now, but it’ll allow you likely to spend more later because you’ll have more data points for these customers, your conversion rates can be higher because they’ve already seen you or heard from you. Or if you got them in October and they happened to sign up for some lists or emails to get holiday discounts coming, things like that. I know discounts can be good, can be bad in this world, but if somebody’s researching… And it’s pretty obvious if I’m searching, let’s say on gift baskets. All right, if I’m looking for a holiday gift basket in October, I might not be executing that purchase then. But if I’m seeing the page and it’s like, “Hey, sign up for exclusive holiday inventory or specials.” It doesn’t have to be discounts. Like, “Oh yeah, I’d like to hear about exclusive holiday specials.”
Because your special might not be a discount. It could be this basket is in a pre-release and only you get access if you’re on our email list. And we’re going to email you when it’s available. And it’s a really cool basket that maybe has something that nobody else is going to be able to get. So exclusivity can work really well because sending an email, keeping them from searching in November means you’re not paying for those clicks through email. I mean, email’s cheap. You’re keeping them away from your competitors. So getting creative I think, is going to be something I really want brands to start thinking about this year rather than trying to brute force something on Google and keeping some of your money for that potential. It’s like, well, you should be thinking, how do I keep somebody from searching Google? Because then your competitors don’t have a shot at them. It’s not a conversation a lot of brands I’m coming up with now, or talking to now have even thought through that. It’s so conditioned like, well buy them on Google. Buy them on Google. Buy them on Google. Why?

Jon:
That’s another great point, right? If you’re on Google early enough, you’re able to capture that lead at that point and then reconnect with them, right? Yeah. So make it make an add into an owned list that now you can hit up for free later and hopefully keep them off of that competitive search.

Ryan:
Yes. And don’t do the easy button discount. Think about being creative, so it’s not just sign up for 10% off. May or may not be compelling enough.

Jon:
Okay. We have a whole episode on that, I’m sure.

Ryan:
We do. Probably have a few of them.

Jon:
Probably multiple of me ranting about that. So you found your holiday periods.

Ryan:
Yes.

Jon:
Do you need to do anything more than that? I mean, are they going to just spend on Google no matter what? So now what?

Ryan:
Most of the companies I’m talking to you on Google, they’re going to spend no matter what. But again, thinking creatively is one, but then you want to be able to set the expectation for what that spend is going to do and be able to get some flexibility with your finance team. I think flexibility is extremely important in a holiday period because you’re going to go in with a plan until you get punched, and then you have to be flexible and pivot and change your data and change your goals. So a rigid goal that finance says, “This is all you can do and don’t do anything different than this,” almost guarantees frustration and failure across all channels during a holiday period.

Jon:
Yeah. And I’ve heard a lot of horror stories of AmEx cutting people off during holiday, things like that. You have to call and talk to everybody. And when you say finance, immediately I thought, CFO, finance role, whatever. But I have seen a lot of direct to consumer brands last Christmas basically saying, “Hey, my ads just got cut off today because my card got declined, because it was a $100,000 charge that AmEx wasn’t used to seeing, they assumed something was wrong.” And you have to call them and give them a heads up before that, “Hey, I’m going to be spending a lot of cash on ads that’s going to generate revenue because it’s holiday season. I need you to make sure this is going to be okay. Tag my account, do whatever you need to do.” And usually that resolves the problem. But I think that that’s something brands need to be doing as well.

Ryan:
And have a backup card. You shouldn’t have a Google Ads account without a backup card that’s working. Somebody have expired backup cards. I see that more often than I should. But two valid cards on Google Ads to make sure that you don’t go down and can easily back up their coming on.

Jon:
And if you need a backup card, call Ryan, he’ll help you out.

Ryan:
Yes. Got lots of contacts for those. To simplify that conversation, a lot of times I tell marketing teams leverage a well known finance graph, the supply demand graph and talk through that with your finance team because it usually helps put everybody on the same page where you’re looking at a general supply demand graph and you say, look, as we get more aggressive and move down the demand chain, we’re going to get less margin per order, but we’re going get higher volume of them. And I get really complex on this when I’m presenting on stage with visuals. But to keep it simple on a word picture, just think about you’re moving to the right on that. And yes, that marginal utility, the next order is going down. Some of you listening are stuck way over on the left side of the supply demand curve on from a marketing standpoint, and you’re taking way too much margin per order.
You need to experiment, and even in a non-holiday period pushing to the right, because you probably could just maximize profit rather than just talking about how you maximize orders and market share to say, hey, if you’re getting… I’ll make a number up. You’re getting a 10X, you spend a dollar and get 10 and your margin’s 50%. Yes, you’re getting 100 orders at 10X. Good job. You might be able to get 500 orders at a 6X, which would give you drastically more profit within your business and fill your email database for nurturing and lifetime value and getting people on your email list before they search on holiday periods. I mean, there’s a lot you can do when you’re getting a higher order volume. So leverage that and try to get finance or executive buy off on Google itself as a marketing channel. Google Ads shouldn’t necessarily be looked at in a holiday period as a profit driver. It is a customer acquisition module that gives you a high volume of customers that you can often bank on at pretty reliable rates for lifetime value through email and loyalty.

Jon:
Interesting. Because I think if I’m a CFO, that’s not the argument I want to hear, right?

Ryan:
No. CFOs and I may have a lot of tension on some calls. Because it’s a marketing channel. Marketing historically on PNLs has driven profit. If it’s not driving profit, what kind of marketing is this? And it’s funny because we’ve swung so far from finance side onto marketing drives profit rather than, let’s go back 50 years where very famous marketer said, “50% of my marketing is wasted. I just don’t know which half.” When you’re marketing in TV, newspaper, billboards or magazines, you really didn’t know what was causing all of the sales, down to which view or which specific ad? Was it this magazine? Was it this billboard? Was it this TV commercial? Because TV was just nationwide TV or small regional TV, you just didn’t have a lot of options. Now in marketing, we’ve been spoiled with so much last click attributed revenue, that we’re starting to move back away from with the iOS updates, which I think is good. But finance teams haven’t adopted or adapted well to a world where maybe Google Ads is not a profit driver.
And I look at certain industries are like, play catch up. Some lead the way, some fall in line afterwards. The ones that have multiple really large advertisers tend to evolve much quicker and get to a point where everybody else is going to get to eventually. And that’s where I go with our gift basket world, which is just a brutally competitive world where we really cut our teeth in LP with this finance team of a company called Harry & David, that just… Their finance team was really smart. I mean that that CFO went off to do some really cool stuff, Michael Schwindle. Really, really smart CFO.
We worked with him to create some of his models around how do I look at Google Ads and customer acquisition because of my email team and lifetime value team bringing them through loyalty? They knew during a holiday period… Because gift baskets are pretty gift dependent. There’s also sympathy gifts, but that was put off in another bucket because if your dog dies and I send you a sympathy basket, I don’t necessarily want to be reminded in a year that, “Hey, you bought a sympathy basket for Jon. Do you want to send him another one?” No, no, [inaudible 00:24:13].

Jon:
Yeah.

Ryan:
I’m not going to go sending another gift.

Jon:
And that’s unpredictable, right?

Ryan:
Yeah. So sympathy had to have a little bit of profit or that wasn’t a bankable customer necessarily in how they nurtured. So if you buy between November 15th and December 20th, that was a gift person. If you bought two weeks before Valentine’s, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, graduation dates, Easter, holiday person. That person could take it to the bank, they were going to come back and buy two times over the next 18 months through email.

Jon:
Wow. Okay.

Ryan:
Very, very profitable over email. So they would say, we’re going to invest on new customers because our email is so set, we’re willing to lose some money on that first order because of how good we are after that first order. They had a set budget saying, hey, we can invest this much money because we know the return and it’s a better return than we could get if we put it in buying a building or putting it in the bank for some interest rate or buying a CD. They just knew.
So having those conversations with finance, trying to get some of that flexibility built in saying, hey, we might not be driving a lot of profit on that first order by unit, but we might over a larger volume, produce more profit. Or we might be banking on, hey, we’ll break even because we’re going to take market share, we’re going to take it from a competitor and we know that we’re going to be able to get them to come back and buy in the next three to six months. They’ll buy a gift now, but we know they’re going to come back and buy something for themselves later.
In fact, yesterday I got a great email from a company called Sonos. They sell some great speakers, I have some of them. And they have two pretty different product lines. So if I’m putting wall mount speakers and I’m buying those, generally speaking, those are going to be for me. Because I’m putting them in my house. I’m not going to randomly buy you some Sono speakers not knowing what your house looks like or where they could go, right?

Jon:
By all means, buy me Sonos speakers. I will never complain.

Ryan:
That’s true. That’s true. Most people wouldn’t. But I’m going to do it, sorry. But they have these really cool mobile speakers and their name is really good. So for 150 bucks you can buy a mobile speaker. I’m going on a trip to Mexico with a bunch of adults, we’re celebrating a 40th birthday. Take those down there because they’re super fun to have at the house you’re staying at. So that’s pretty obviously, hey, if… That’s a gift, often or could be. But if you bought that for somebody during a holiday period, it’s probably not for me, but you might nurture me with, “Hey, get one for yourself.” Or maybe you need one of these TV speakers. And if you nurtured me with a picture of parents with their kids on a couch watching a movie with one of their soundbars, I’m like, “Oh, I do need that.”
So again, thinking through how you just leveraged that, well, you might not make a lot of profit on that first order a little, but if you nurture me properly, I can really be a great customer. And it doesn’t have to be nurture with discounts, but nurture in a unique enough manner that I’m like, “Oh!” The fact that I open an email when all I do is get spam and delete it and unsubscribe from lists, means you’re doing something reasonably well. Can get me to open it and the chances are higher than I’ll make an impulse purchase too.

Jon:
Yeah. Sonos is actually great at this too where, unrelated, if you open the Sonos app and they have a deal running, they push everything into that Sonos app. So that’s the app you’re using to play the music. So you are always getting upsold for new speakers, new versions, like the move and that you’re talking about all these ones that are coming out.

Ryan:
Yep.

Jon:
It’s really interesting to see.

Ryan:
It is. And it does highlight too, that if you can get people into an app for an experience, it’s good. But at least have a reason for it. I think too often now, there’s so many companies who are like, “Got to have an nap, got to have an app.” Because they hear about Sonos. Well, Sonos has a real reason for me to get an app, because it’s controlling music, going to speakers, and I want to play this speaker different than this speaker. But if you’re a clothing brand, a fast fashion, you’re like, “Yeah, I have to have an app.” I’m like, “Yeah, I don’t know.” Don’t just have for having-

Jon:
Have a purpose.

Ryan:
Purpose. Just understand why it’s-

Jon:
Well, yeah, that’s where I keep hearing a lot about Tap Card and these folks that will turn your Shopify store into a mobile app pretty easily, working with the Shopify API and everything. And it’s fine. I have no issues with brands having a mobile app, but there should be more of a purpose there than just replicating exactly what’s on your website because I’m not going to download an app that’s going to live on my phone if I just want to make a one-time purchase.

Ryan:
Yeah. I don’t want your push notifications.

Jon:
So give me some reason to… Right.

Ryan:
I’ll let one brand post me because they’ll sell me that are exclusive, that I can’t get elsewhere.

Jon:
I love it.

Ryan:
But if I’m buying my pants from you, I don’t care. You’re not going to get on my phone. You’re not going to send me push notifications. I’ll go to your website.

Jon:
So we now know the holiday way to your heart, Ryan, is trough Jordans.

Ryan:
Red Jordans. Yep. I just bought a pair of Red Jordan 5’s.

Jon:
Nice.

Ryan:
The new speaking Jordans.

Jon:
Oh, I love it. I can’t wait. When are we doing our next event? I want to see this.

Ryan:
August. We’re doing that.

Jon:
August.

Ryan:
17th.

Jon:
All right.

Ryan:
I’ll have them on.

Jon:
All right, Ryan. Well thank you for sharing all about holiday analysis and adjustments. I think there’s a lot of great stuff here. It’s a perfect timing to start thinking about this, I’m convinced. Need to start thinking now, June, July. Don’t let this go too far. So thank you and we’ll chat soon.

Ryan:
Yeah, thank you Jon. Appreciate the time.

Speaker 1:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.