D&C episode title with photo of Ryan and Jon

Drive and Convert (Ep. 083): Winning Tests and What the Learnings Can Teach You

In this episode, Jon and Ryan talk about a selection of winning tests and what they can teach other brands. They share how small changes in copy, personalization, specific categories on your navigation, and more.

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About This Episode:

Sharing winning tests isn’t just a way to celebrate success with previous clients. The patterns and insights from winning tests can offer a lot of ideas for other brands looking to improve their conversion rates and boost sales. 

In particular, Jon and Ryan talk about three areas of a site that tests work really well in: category pages, social proof, and website copy. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

  1. How personalization can improve category pages 
  2. Why you need clear and specific labels on your navigation 
  3. How to leverage different types of social proof 
  4. How small changes in copy can lead to big results 

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:

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better eCommerce growth engine, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Ryan:
Hello, Jon. Today, we get to talk about one of my favorite things. It’s no secret, I like winning just generally. My wife is frustrated most of the times playing games, but winning is fun. I’d much rather win than lose. And you document your wins really well. Your team has tons of them. Today, you’ve given me some notes around some of the wins you’ve had recently. So it’s really cool that we get to look through some of these and give some insights to some people listening about what you guys have done in the past. It’s going to jumpstart ideas. I love these things because I can see, oh, that works for that company, it may not work exactly that way for me or one of my clients, but it can get my brain churning. It’s like we’re going to brainstorm, but we’re going to brainstorm only with really good ideas.

Jon:
Hey, I love it. That’s really the goal of this. Right? You know that I’m never one to say, “You should copy your competitors,” or a blanket statement that a test is going to work perfectly for you. That’s not really what this is about. This is more again, jump starting the ideation process, giving you some examples of what has worked well. We do have a library of winning tests. So every single test that we ever run, we store in a database that we formed and we maintain all of the mock-ups, designs, the results, everything goes in there.
So we’ve got this massive database from over a decade plus of running tests that we’re able to sort and see, “Hey, what are the common themes across tests that typically work?” Or we have a new client and they’re having a challenge. We’re able to search our database for that challenge and see what has worked in the past that maybe I’d create some ideas for what we could look at here. So what I’ve given you is three different kind of areas of a site that we often find tests work really well in. So those are category pages, social proof and copy or copywriting. So just three areas. And then I gave you a few mock-ups and some tests that we can look at. I’ll have to do my best to describe what the test was, but I think we’ll be okay.

Ryan:
Yeah. And we might sometime have to do kind of a bloopers reel of like, “Ah, here’s what we thought was going to work.” And oh my goodness, it was terrible because I probably got some on the paid search side too. But one of my favorite… I don’t know. Recently, I’ve just been on this tear on category pages because there’s so much value from an SEO standpoint that it’s coming up constantly for me. And your team does phenomenal stuff on category pages because they should be a very highly trafficked page for a lot of eCom brands. Some of them still have some work to do to get that traffic there, but another conversation.
Today, we’re talking about some of the wins you’ve had there. So how have you featured categories that have really, I like saying forced, but you’ve encouraged people to go through the funnel process without any restrictions, let’s say.

Jon:
Well, I think that’s a good point because I think at minimum, a category page is really just about getting people to that next step in the process. It’s an intermediary step that often gets forgotten about. Right? People are just like, “I’m going to throw all my categories up there and somebody will find the one that’s for them, and then I’ll lead them to a product detail page or into the product page.”

Ryan:
Well, they’re doing so much on shopping that all the traffic’s going to product pages. They don’t think about categories. And I’m like, “No, that’s your slightly below the very tip of the funnel. Category is important.”

Jon:
Right. And if you look at a funnel and you forget any step in that funnel, that’s an exit point, a potential exit point. So you want to plug that hole. And I think categories, if you look at it and think of it as offering kind of a road sign about where the visitors to your site should go next, I think that is really the best way to think about it as, yes, it’s a pass through page, but you need to keep people moving in the right direction or they’re going to get frustrated and leave. So orient them where they are on your site and give them what they need to get closer to where they want to be. That’s really the goal. A category page should just send people in the right direction. And if it’s done correctly, the results can really be extraordinary.

Ryan:
Yeah. I have yet to see a checkout button on a category page. I mean, maybe that’s coming, maybe there’s a reason for it. I doubt it, but it’s get them to the page.

Jon:
Well, yeah, people aren’t ready to buy at that page. Right? They need more information. All they’re doing, again, it’s a path to the conversion to along the journey to pass through page. So I think ignoring it is a challenge, but I do think that there is a lot of opportunity here as well. So one test that we ran here was where we promoted categories and offers on the category pages that this test resulted in $2 million from creating a better landing page just around page search.
So I know you’ve talked a lot about driving page search category pages can be beneficial. So what we saw was that users were getting lost on the category page. Right? And what that means is there were just so many products on the category page, they just didn’t know what to do next. Right? So what we did is we dug in to find the experience and adjusted based on how people came to the page. So this is something that some would put under personalization, but really, what we were saying is if they clicked on a certain ad, they should see something a little different than if they just came via the homepage or other, some type of path on that journey. Right?

Ryan:
So a different category based on if you come from navigation versus from an external traffic. Interesting. Okay.

Jon:
Exactly. So for example here, visitors couldn’t see the product categories clearly, and they just weren’t getting a sense of urgency delivered by the homepage hero banner. So if they came via the homepage, they saw something that was trying to create some urgency around that banner on the homepage, but they’d get to the category page and there was no urgency left because that message was not carried through. Right?

Ryan:
Got it.

Jon:
And same thing if you’re running an ad, you want the messaging in the ad to align to the messaging on the page you’re driving that traffic to. Right? And Google appreciates that too. That’s a part of how it gives you a better score. What do they call that, ad rank score? Or what is that score?

Ryan:
Yeah, got to have similar content on the landing page that you do in the ad text.

Jon:
So the test we ran here was to guide users towards promoting categories from top paid search landing pages. So each of those landing pages that had a category, specific category in them, drove them to a landing page that was acting like a category page. And the goal here was to increase engagement and visibility of their products to that new user audience. So people who came from the homepage saw a message that aligned with the message off the homepage. And people who came from ads saw a message that aligned with the ads.

Ryan:
Now, is that a call out, like free shipping today?

Jon:
So really, what we did here was to create a special section, a banner at the top of the page. Right? So not like a free shipping bar. It was below the navigation, but before the listing of all the products on that category page. And what we did there was call out special categories.

Ryan:
Like subcategories of the main category. Okay.

Jon:
Exactly, to help filtering a little bit, but also, those categories were ones that were mentioned in the ads. So what would happen is you say, “Hey, this line of product has a small, medium, and large variant.” And in your ad, what you’re promoting is that you have a sizing that fits for you when most competitors don’t.

Ryan:
Got it.

Jon:
Okay? So your competitive advantage here is that you offer better sizing and more customizable product. Right? That is what aligned with the content we put on the landing page. And so doing this, not only did it produce a lift in transactions, but the revenue impact came in at over $2 million.

Ryan:
Holy smokes.

Jon:
So from doing a little bit of personalization, putting a little bit of effort into some landing pages here, this brand sell $2 million in additional revenue. So I think the goal here is to ask yourself as you design your website, how are people getting to that page? Then cater that on onsite experience to them. And some people call it personalization, but I don’t think it goes that deep. So rather than leave all that work to the shoppers to figure out, just make it easier for them to get to that next point in the funnel. Right?

Ryan:
Yep. For me personally, I have a pet peeve, right or wrong, the infinite scroll on a category page. If you’ve got 500 products in a category and you don’t have solid filters, or I’m just going to scroll that, if I’m trying to get to your footer, for example, and I can’t get there, I just hate that. But it also tells me, 500 products, there better be a subcategory somehow to better filter quickly. See, oh, I want this piece of your products where there’s only going to be a hundred, and then maybe there’s another sub cat. I don’t know, but I can see how this would be a great place to test for a lot of Shopify collection companies.

Jon:
You have provided the perfect segue into the next test I want to talk about. And I’m not sure you knew that, but you just did. If you did know it, amazing job.

Ryan:
I’m going to take credit, but I actually didn’t. It’s logic, I think, but I’ve been through this all day.

Jon:
Okay. I agree. And that’s why I put this one next because proper categorization in the menu around categories really can have a huge boost. And so you’re saying there needs to be not only the categories, but proper subcategories or variants along the way. And so we ran a test that had over a $100,000 in revenue gains based on just having the proper categories added to the navigation. So what we did here is one client came to us with a menu that basically said things like shop, discover, connect, rewards, wholesale, really generic terms. Right? We talk about this all the time.

Ryan:
Yeah, we do. Let’s discover. I don’t know. I’m going to go discover. It’ll be great.

Jon:
Yeah. What are you discovering? How are you connecting, right? I don’t want to connect with you. I want to buy your product. I’m on your website. What else do you want me to do, give you a call? And I don’t know. So on top of that, the shop dropdown listed product categorization with labels of things like collections, themes. It really was not helpful to the end user. I don’t know what a collection is. I don’t know. What do you mean theme, right? It was so generic, it wasn’t helpful. And this is where I think Shopify can get in the way because there’s so many Shopify themes out there that you can apply that are trying to be something for everyone, that if you don’t customize it, you’re going to end up with very generic terms in your navigation, et cetera, because they don’t know how you’re going to use that theme.
So they give you some starter content in the navigation. If you don’t really go in and customize that, you’re left with something like collections as a navigation item. And to your consumer, that doesn’t mean anything. So what we knew was that this wasn’t clear enough for new visitors. Right? It felt obvious to us. We ran some testing, user testing. We found that out very quickly. And we had an opportunity to raise the awareness of the product catalog. And really, we did that by just surfacing the top categories in a persistent navigation. So what we did was we added top product categories into the top level navigation of the menu. So what I mean by that was instead of saying things like shop, discover, connect, rewards, wholesale, et cetera, we actually now say things like, “Here’s your category one, category two, category three.” Right? So it would be like T-shirts, shorts, shoes. Right?
So it was, okay, I’m a consumer. I’m on your site. I saw a pair of shoes on Instagram I really liked. Now I know what I’m going to click on a category and get there. So the goal here is to eliminate an extra step in the funnel. That’s really what we’re doing at a high level. And I think that’s what people should take away from this. That old nav was injecting extra steps into the funnel for no reason. People didn’t want it. They didn’t want to discover. They didn’t want to connect. They weren’t concerned about rewards. You’re concerned about rewards after you’ve purchased before. Right? So let’s not put that in the main navigation. The first goal of your navigation, let’s get that first purchase out of people. So what we found was that we increased the conversion rates, but we also saw about $100,000 in revenue gains just from running that test. So definitely look to eliminate steps in navigation and drive people right to the category pages.

Ryan:
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s just a punchline for all online businesses. Right? I tell people all the time, if you’ve got somebody looking for your shoes, you don’t send them to the homepage to then find your shoe category. You send them to the shoe category page because there’s a step in there. I hate extra steps. If I can take one step, I’m not taking three.

Jon:
There you go.

Ryan:
Just generally.

Jon:
Makes sense. And this is where I say it’s really hard to read the label from inside the jar because you’re so close to your categories, your products, you just know everything. It’s easy for you to be like, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to click on shop, and then the right categories or whatever.” As a consumer, you’re like, “Well, I got to wade through all this to get to that.”

Ryan:
And I do think that’s where it is important to have almost an external web person helping some of these conversations. If you’re a small business, I get you want to start with a theme and make it easy on Shopify or BigCommerce, but it’s probably even worth paying a few hundred dollars to have somebody help modify it. Even I did that with my businesses. I know I’m not the best web developer, period, but it’s also helpful to have somebody else. Well, you don’t know my business, so if you’re doing this, what are you asking me? I love it. Great help, removed frictions. And I will add, if you have a shoe category at the top, and then a bunch of subcategories, let me click shoes just because I like to. And then take me to that category page where I can visually see your subcategories maybe [inaudible 00:13:39] better.

Jon:
Yes. And don’t just have those scroll products on that category page. Have filtering. Please have filtering.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on eCommerce growth. Your hosts are John MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with eCommerce brands to help convert more of their visitors and buyers. And Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, the 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.

Ryan:
Okay. So the next point you have here is all about the social proof. And in knowing that other people like it, therefore, I will probably like it. In fact, I was just in a meeting yesterday with our Amazon team. They came down from Seattle to talk to us and we had lunch with them. And I was hearing from our head of Amazon how he searches and buys products on Amazon, and he actually probably spends more on Amazon daily than anybody else in the company. And he talks about how he looks at reviews and the social proof, because it’s Micah, he’s got science behind his brain and how it works. It would blew me away, but he uses social proof constantly in how he tells our clients about it. So we know it’s undeniable, but how are you leveraging that social proof to improve revenue?

Jon:
Well, right. I think that’s fair. Have you ever clicked on a product link and you were like, “I’m going to buy this product,” but then you saw zero reviews and you’re like, “Yeah, I don’t know. Do I want to be the first?”

Ryan:
Yeah. Do I want to be that guinea pig?

Jon:
Right. You’re not alone. Our stats say 60% of shoppers take time to read product reviews before purchasing a product, 60%. So I’ll take my chances on that. Better than half, right? I’m going to take my chances and I’m going to say, you need reviews. Right? And this goes back to the psychological phenomenon that people make decisions based on past experiences and the collective actions of others. Those two things combined. Right? So you as a consumer, know that your past experiences matter. So you inherently believe others’ past experiences matter too. So you want to understand what type of experience they had. I think that’s fair. Right?
And so positive experiences from past customers really, the goal here with social proof is to gain more confidence in purchasing your product. And that’s all you should really be thinking about. So the first test we ran here was to elevate customer quotes. Right? So if you have good social proof quotes from your reviews, you could use those throughout the site. And we did this and it gave us a 19% boost in conversion rate, 19%. Now, I’m not saying we went from a 1% conversion rate to a 20% conversion rate. I’m saying this is a percentage gain in conversion rates.

Ryan:
Yeah. One to 1.2 is still… That’s 20% more sales.

Jon:
That’s right.

Ryan:
That’s great.

Jon:
I think the key here is just even a little bit of social proof can go a long way. So just adding quotes to the homepage gives people confidence to continue down the funnel that they’re not going to be the guinea pig. Right? So one of the tests we did, the goal was really to increase add to carts and transactions by just putting these quotes throughout the site.
So we added the quotes from the reviews throughout the customer journey, and there’s two ways to do this. One was just on the homepage. A lot of you see that a lot. The second is a really underutilized one. On your category page, now this is mixing both of these, but on your category page, we do something we call quality tiles. And quality tiles is interspersed in between products. Every third, fourth, or fifth product tile have a tile that is a quote from a consumer. And it’s not a product you can click on. It is just adding that in to the tiles, so that as you’re scrolling through, all of these products on a category page, now you’re being reassured that other people love these products too, and you’re having that social proof effect come into play. The combination of those two things boosted conversions, as you said, 19%.

Ryan:
I love that.

Jon:
So, big gains there.

Ryan:
For most merchants on that, is there an app that can take some of that automatically? Or is it, all right, I like this code, I found it, and I have to go get my graphic team to create the image?

Jon:
There is not an app, but that’s a great idea. If anybody wants to build that, please send it to me. I will use, start sharing that with our team. Maybe we’ll build that. This is something that we actually have as part of our test library of code. We have this prebuilt for Shopify, so we can deploy these quality tiles, if you will, pretty quickly. Yes, you do need to create the graphic with the quote, but there isn’t anything out there that does this automatically that I’m aware of.

Ryan:
Got it. There’s power of different types of reviews. The reason I like Amazon reviews is it’s very easy to filter and sort.

Jon:
Yes.

Ryan:
And I think some of it is because Amazon doesn’t have a horse in the game and they’re like, this is what it is. Who cares? Find it. But as I was sitting here listening yesterday in these Amazon conversations, Micah is like, “100% of the time, I go to the one star reviews first because I want to see how recent they were and what were the problems. Because if it’s a major problem, it was constantly happening, I’m just going to go away and get another one.” If it was a dumb thing, it was like somebody in garbled English was like, “Don’t like.” I’m like, “All right.” So you obviously… or a competitor or somebody. But responding to those as we’ve talked about before, yeah, one star reviews suck as a brand, but when you’ve showed that you’re making it right, can’t remember the study, but I think those are almost more valuable than just a five star review.

Jon:
They are. I look at those. I encourage brands to look at one star reviews or negative reviews of any kind as an opportunity, not a detractor. It’s an opportunity for you to step in and say, “We hear you. Here’s how you get ahold of us. Just so you know, we have a satisfaction policy.” Other people are going to see that and they’re going to be reminded that you care and you are available. If they have an issue, you’re going to help resolve it.
That’s what most people want to see out of a one star. Because if there’s just a bunch of one stars like you’re saying with Micah, if he’s seen a ton of one stars with no responses and it’s the same issue over and over, then yeah, you’re not going to buy that product. And you shouldn’t, because it’s pretty clear what’s happening. But if you’re grand and you’re responding to each of those consumers, then I think you’re in a good spot because you could very easily say, “Hey, you know what? Yes, we had a defective batch. Everybody that got that batch, we are replacing them for free. Here’s how you get ahold of us.” People will be okay with that. They’re going to understand mistakes happen.

Ryan:
I love it. So this next social proof one, it has to work because it’s worked on me. It just makes me mad that I’m like, “No, that’s great.” But when you put best seller badges on products, what are the numbers you saw around it that I probably helped contribute to these numbers?

Jon:
Yeah. I’m sure. Here’s the thing. I mean, badging is great, and it’s one way to do this. This is just even simply elevating best sellers. And putting badges on them is one way you can definitely do that. We did this a little more subtly, just to make sure that it would even work at all. And doing this resulted in $287,000 of additional revenue. I promise you it did not cost us near that to build out this text. So, big return on investment here. But I think you said it right. Customers want options, but they don’t want too many. That infinite scroll, et cetera, creates too many problems. So this is one way around it, how to narrow down what customers see and want to basically cut in decision. That’s what we’re trying to cut through here, by elevating these.
So we want to offer some guidance and show what has sold the most. And there’s ways to do that. But this acts as social proof, and we’re putting it under that category because it really shows your product’s worth buying because other people have already bought it. So that’s the social proof aspect of this. So really, what you’re doing is you’re not having consumers go out and search for the best option. They can see it because it’s right in front of them. And that’s really the goal here.
So telling people what the most popular items are makes them more confident. So what we did with this test is we just elevated what were the most popular items, and then we included the social proof around stars and how many reviews each of those have. So it wasn’t always the best seller. It was often even the most reviewed products. Because the products that have the most reviews often are best sellers, but also, it means people like them the most. So you’re more likely as a brand to have a better experience for your consumers if you’re selling a highly reviewed product, more of that and you’re boosting that. So again, just raising what were the most popular items. So simple, $287,000 in additional revenue.

Ryan:
Got it. So you just don’t want the category page to bubble up anything, any product it feels like. You want to have some control there. And often it’s like, “All right, you’re on the category for this. You can see all of my products, but I know you’re going to want one of these three.” So make sure those three are up at the top.

Jon:
Yeah. And there’s two sides to every coin. Right? So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and in the sense that you’re pushing the highest selling product and it’s going to sell more because you’re pushing that upfront. So you have to consider that as a brand, and that’s part of why you should test this on your site.

Ryan:
Got it. I love it. Okay. So we’ve got social proof. So obviously, making sure that you’re getting reviews, number one, and then making sure people can easily find what they probably want or what you’re trying to encourage. And then after we’ve already fixed the categories and fixed some of that navigation to help some of these phenomenal ones, we’ve already generated probably $10 million for these brands that are listening, but we’ve got another one that has to do with website copy. So what are you actually saying on the site that’s going to have an impact for conversion? Because you should have content on your site, product descriptions, category descriptions, content everywhere. And so where are you showing your wins on website copy? Because I don’t pay much attention to website copy. I just say, have to have it.

Jon:
Whoa. Here’s the thing. You’re not alone in that. Most consumers are just skimming content. I don’t know about you, but I don’t read nine tenths of the internet. I skim. I’m looking for what’s important for me. And we’ve done so many eye tracking studies that back this up. You have a paragraph of copy. You can see the left side of the paragraph is bright red. A lot of eyes are happening there. By the time you get to the end of the paragraph on the right, you see that it’s completely void of the eyes. Everyone starts reading the sentence looking for that key point, and then by the end of it, they were like, “Yeah, there’s nothing here for me.” And they just move on.
So they’re skimming the content very, very quickly. So how do you play with that? How do you use that to your advantage? Well, what we did was twofold. We found one of our clients that they sold handcrafted, really quality goods. And what we found was that if we included the care instructions in there that were buried in copy before, but we raised those up into their own section higher up on the product detail page, we saw a 21% increase in conversion rate.

Ryan:
What? How to take care of something, or what… I would never have guessed that.

Jon:
But here’s why. It really makes it clear that this is a specialty craft good, that it’s something that needs some care, and that means it’s more valuable typically. Right? You’re going to care for that Birkin handbag way more than you are for the one you bought it.

Ryan:
Ross, dress for less.

Jon:
Yeah, whatever. Here’s the thing, is that before we did this, the value of the product just wasn’t clear to people. Right? So how do we make sure that a value is communicated by adding more of a story to it around care instructions? We could really portray each item as something worthy of delicate handling. In turn, this increased the add to carts and purchases.
So what we did is we added this copy around how to care for an item right below the product price and on the product detail page. And the idea behind this was elevating that content, clearly calling it out in its own section would make it more valuable. And it did. It increased conversion rate by 21%. We saw way more cart ads and it also even increased the average order value. So there was a ton of value here out of this test.
And I think this is a reminder that customers, they won’t automatically know that your product is quality. You got to tell them this and show them. So I think that this is something that it’s a small tweak with copy that can have a big result. That’s really the end goal of why I’m telling you this, not so that you go add care instructions to your page. Maybe it works, add as a test, but really just saying, there’s such a small gain that could be done here and really just small changes make a big, big difference.

Ryan:
Yeah. Well, I think on this one, know your product, know your audience. If I’m buying a T-shirt and you’ve got extensive care instructions for a $30 T-shirt, I’m like, “Yeah, I’m not going to do that. Nope, next one.” But if I’m spending $200 on a T-shirt and that’s my market, I’m like, “Okay, I do want to know that there’s some specific instructions. I’ve got to dry clean this because it’s such a good…” I don’t know, whatever happens to be that’s really cool.

Jon:
Yeah. Maybe the print would come off or it has some detailing to it or something. Right?

Ryan:
Yeah.

Jon:
Hand wash, right? Clothes that you have to hand wash, you typically feel like they’re more valuable.

Ryan:
Yep. That’s why I don’t get-

Jon:
I thought they were more annoying personally, but yeah, exactly. We’re on the same page here.

Ryan:
If they can’t go into my washing machine, I’m sorry, it’s not me. I’m not fancy though. My wife may be on the other side of that.

Jon:
There you go. Exactly. Yeah.

Ryan:
Okay. But then you have another one too about focusing on some benefits that led to astronomical numbers.

Jon:
$5 million in additional revenue. 5 million.

Ryan:
Man, I got to get my kids to learn how to write well.

Jon:
Yeah. Well, hey, I think that writing, it’s an unsung hero of just… It’s a life hack to be able to write well. But here’s the thing. By adding this benefit focus language to long shipping lead times. So what we’re doing is we’re taking a negative and trying to make it into a positive. Change the sentiment around that. So we want customers to understand what they’re waiting for. Right? Because normally, you would see, “Oh wow, six weeks, nine weeks. Wow, I’m not waiting nine weeks.” And they move on. Right? But what we did is we made a simple change and this is what made 5 million in additional revenue. So I’m telling you this for two reasons. One is this is the power of iterative optimization, right? Small changes over time in learnings can really help make a big difference. You just don’t know what’s going to work until you try it.
So you got to test and iterate. And copy is an amazing place to do this because it’s so easy to do. Right? Changing copy typically does not take a huge technical lift. You can do it fairly easily. So what we did here is on a product detail page, it did say as shown in the prices, $1,200 or whatever, and it takes nine weeks. But then we just added a simple change to that. We said, “Made for you, ships in nine weeks.” And now, you’re changing something that was, “Oh, I have to wait nine weeks for that,” to, “Oh, they’re going to make it just for me? How cool is that? Oh yeah, I’m going to order it with whatever features I want and they’re going to manufacture it and ship it to me.” It’s a total change in the psychology.

Ryan:
Total psychology, Jon MacDonald, the psychologist.

Jon:
$5 million.

Ryan:
5 million.

Jon:
I promise you, we did not charge that client $5 million. So the return on that is a massive.

Ryan:
That’s massive.

Jon:
Massive gain.

Ryan:
So made for you.

Jon:
Made for you.

Ryan:
That makes nine weeks palatable. So that’s a great, I think, just a way to look at, “Hey, there’s an issue with something on the site.” Hey, shipping in this case like, “Gosh, we’re nine weeks right now. Our competitor is two,” for example. How do we make nine weeks sound better or express the value of that better, I guess in that just saying, “Hey, this is custom.”

Jon:
Right. Exactly. You could say, “Hey, you know what? If the two weeks is an off the shelf, you’re going to get something that’s in a box and you’re going to have to assemble it. You can go to IKEA today and buy a sofa. Or you could wait nine weeks and have a sofa that you customized just for you with the exact fabric you wanted, et cetera, and it will ship to you in nine weeks because it’s made for you.” Which one do you want?

Ryan:
I would’ve gladly taken nine weeks when we were building our house, because I think we were at 12 months for a couch. I was like, “Please, can I get my couch?”

Jon:
Stories of what happens when you build a house in the middle of a supply chain meltdown.

Ryan:
Yes. It had nothing to do with the customization, but just nobody could get anything. Okay. So lots of really cool wins for seemingly made up numbers by Jon, but I know they’re not, when you can change the copy on a website for 5 million, but you’ve got categories focused on that. That is such an easy one that all of these are relatively easy, but changing the categories, changing your navigation, making sure that it’s following some logic and you’re removing some steps, you can kind of get people to where they want quicker. Social proof. If you’re not getting reviews, pause, go get a review company. You need reviews. But then helping people see the best sellers easily, bubbling them up can be something to test on your site. And then your tile, “your map maker,” let’s automate creative those tiles for those category pages. But you’ve used tiles for a lot of other things too, which I like, at the previous podcast.

Jon:
But in terms of reviews, this seems like an easy ad for any of the reviews platforms. None of them are doing this. So add that in. You have the data.

Ryan:
I mean, even my wife on Canva can make a review tile probably pretty easily like, “Hey, take this product overlay, the textable review.” It’s not even have to be clickable, it’s just going to take up space. It’s going to be great. It’s going to increase conversion and print millions of dollars according to Jon. It’s going to be great.

Jon:
Yeah. There you go.

Ryan:
And then copy. Don’t ignore copy in what you’re calling out. You can take negatives and turn them into positives. You can just simply increase the value of your product by talking about it better and bubbling that up closer to the top on a product page.

Jon:
Yes. Awesome.

Ryan:
Jon, you’ve just made us all lots of money.

Jon:
Yes.

Ryan:
Well, maybe not us.

Jon:
Again, well.

Ryan:
Listeners.

Jon:
Yes. Here’s the thing. I want to reiterate one thing before we sign off for the day, which is that we don’t encourage brands to focus unhealthy amounts of energy at competitors and copying what they’re doing. But I think what the goal is today again, is to spark some ideas for you of ways that you can incorporate some of these things into your site. Take these as examples around category, social proof and copy, and just say, “Those are three areas I know I can improve on.” And that’s really the goal here. So take the lessons from today, figure out how you might incorporate that into your specific store and for your specific customers and go from there. But yes, big results in all three of these. Really excited to share those, and I appreciate you walking through those with me today, Ryan.

Ryan:
Yeah. Or you could just take the easy button and hire Jon’s team to do this for you. That’s another option for anybody listening.

Jon:
Always an option.

Ryan:
Jon, thanks for the time.

Jon:
Thank you, Ryan.

Ryan:
Bye.

Announcer:
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.

About the Author

Angel Earnshaw

Angel Earnshaw is the Marketing Coordinator at The Good. She has experience in improving brand awareness through digital marketing and social media management.