Writing Product Page Copy That Converts With Rishi Rawat (Frictionless Commerce)

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About this episode:

In this episode of The Ecommerce Insights Show, we got together with Rishi Rawat of Frictionless Commerce to talk about all things product detail pages. He and his team help ecommerce brands improve their product page conversion rate by 20% in 90 days.

With over a decade of experience in the laser-focused world of ecommerce product page design, Rishi shared a treasure trove of ideas during our conversation. In the episode we talked about writing your copy based on nine buyer psychology themes, which Rishi outlines in detail here.

During the episode we cover topics like: 

• What makes a winning product detail page design
• Whether or not discounting is a good strategy on your product page
• Rishi’s framework for crafting product stories rather than product descriptions
• How to differentiate your product and the page it lives on
• A case study where personalization resulted in a 30.56% conversion lift

So if you’re interested in improving the conversion rate on your product pages and learning how to do it, then this is the episode for you. 

Learn more about Rishi and Frictionless Commerce: 

• Connect with Rishi on LinkedIn
• Sign up for his newsletter
• Visit the Frictionless Commerce website

Want to be a guest on our show? Have feedback or ideas for how we can improve? Send your thoughts over to podcast@thegood.com. We’ll be keeping an eye on that inbox. 🙂

The Ecommerce Insights Show is brought to you by The Good, a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) consultancy specializing in helping ecommerce businesses accelerate their growth through better research, testing, and design. Learn more about our team, our work, and our services at www.thegood.com.

Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] James Sowers: So here’s the question. How can you, ecommerce leaders make sure that they are producing a great product, providing a world-class customer experience responsibly managing the finances and still reserve time, energy and resources for marketing their products. My name is James Sowers, and you’re listening to the e-commerce insight show.

[00:00:16] The podcast that gives you specific, actionable advice for growing your e-commerce business. Every Monday, you’ll get a conversion rate optimization tactic that you can implement quickly to make your business 1% better, every single week. Every Thursday, we sit down with industry experts to go deep on a specific aspect of running a successful e-commerce business.

[00:00:34] It’s the perfect blend of learning and application, which means that you maximize the value of every single minute you spend with us. We’re just as committed to growing your business as you are. So if you’re looking for a partner to help you crush your revenue goals, you’ve come to the right place. Roll up your sleeves and grab a notepad because it’s time to get to work.

[00:00:52] Rishi, welcome to The Ecommerce Insights Show. Really excited to have you on today to talk. Product detail, page design, conversion, copywriting, customer research, you know, everything that goes into supporting that and really looking forward to tapping into that brain of yours and sharing some of that knowledge with our audience before we get into all of that interesting stuff, let’s get into something else.

[00:01:12] Interesting. And maybe get we can get a two to three sentence overview of who you are, what you work on today, and the story behind frictionless. 

[00:01:19] Rishi Rawat: Sure. Well, thanks for having me. I’ve followed you for a while and, you know, I love all the work that the good does. And you guys have been doing it a long time. So this is quite an honor and a privilege.

[00:01:29] I have a somewhat strange ache on conversion optimization, which is that I don’t actually work on any page on the client’s website, except for the best-selling product page. And I don’t know how we kind of came to that journey, but it’s been in the works for the last 12 years. I’ve been kind of nudging myself towards that and now that’s all we do.

[00:01:51] So I would say that’s in a nutshell. Our definition is that we work with clients. We identify their most important product page, which based on principles like Ziff slaw, typically the best seller sells significantly more than your second best seller and third best seller. So in 99% of cases improving the better seller sales by 20% is something that clients care about deeply.

[00:02:15] But because they want to focus on all aspects of marketing, that isn’t a singular. On just that one product. And I think we’re the only agents, the world that just does that one thing. And when we’re done, we say goodbye. Yeah. 

[00:02:29] James Sowers: I think that’s a universal challenge with marketing. Um, is there shiny new objects coming out all the time?

[00:02:34] Algorithms are always changing. There are new channels emerging, like clubhouse or tick-tock or whatever. And we want to be the first there to get that first mover advantage. But the fact of the matter is usually if you just take what’s working and double down on it, you get better results or at least more reliable results.

[00:02:48] So I think it’s super smart of you guys to kind of plant your flag in terms of we’re going to help you sell more of your best-selling product. And if you’ve been doing it for 12 years, it must be working. Right. So, you know, originally I was like, what am I going to talk to Rishi about today? I can talk about just copywriting in general or talking about customer research.

[00:03:03] But I think like, Obviously, when you specialize in product page design and optimization, I just kinda want to orient the entire conversation around that. And maybe the best place to start is you’ve been doing this for a long time. Sounds like over a decade. So in terms of page structure, the high level sections and the flow of a page for a product detail page, what are some of the best practices you’ve seen across your client work and your work on maybe even your own sites or pet projects, sites that you have on the.

[00:03:27] Rishi Rawat: You know, it’s a great question. And I’ve seen so many different designs. I’ve seen some really innovative layouts. They want websites. I worked on directly, but I really loved how innovative and gambling busting. They were. One of the things that I find really unfortunate is that. There is this general Amazon effication that’s happening with how we define product pages to be laid out.

[00:03:50] So we have the product images on the top left corner. We have the name of the product and the price and the add to cart button. And maybe even the promo on the discounts at the top, towards the right-hand side. And then below that we have essentially the product description, which, you know, unfortunately for a copywriter like me, it’s sad to see how over the last five years.

[00:04:10] Product descriptions have been cut in half across the board, and then we have social proof. So that is the basic implant, which was essentially stolen from what Amazon was doing 20 years ago. And I think everyone is using the same variation of that. I think more design focused or I would say branded websites like jewelry, websites, and fashion websites, the way they would play with it as.

[00:04:32] Increase the real estate for their product images, because it’s more important to them. But I would say effectively the temperature, the same. I have seen a few examples where there’s been radical reimagining off the product page, where essentially they’ve broken all convention, but it’s been few and far in between, but you know, none of that really matters to me because you know, this is the other thing, is that not only am I only, not only my focus in the best selling baby.

[00:04:55] I’m actually focused on just one part of the best selling page, which is the part where we tell our story, which is the part of the deal part. So I don’t even look at the layout as much. In fact, nine times out of 10, we don’t change the layout for clients best-selling page for reasons around consistency, because you don’t want your best seller page to be laid out completely differently than all the other pages.

[00:05:14] So we have limitations there. So I don’t look at the layout too much. So I’m going to focus on the words. 

[00:05:21] James Sowers: Right. That makes a lot of sense. So I guess it’d probably be safe to assume that you would say the most important part of that page is that detailed, that product description, where you’re telling the story, maybe is there an area that you think gets too much attention and I’m guessing you would say the product description probably doesn’t get enough.

[00:05:37] And that’s why somebody should bring someone like you in to help them out with it. But is there an area that they’d like people maybe over prioritize or over-invested. You know, 

[00:05:45] Rishi Rawat: that’s a great question. I think generally speaking, the areas that I see a lot of attention is around discounts and promos.

[00:05:55] And I know John from your team talks a lot about how discounting is essentially giving the user a bribe. It’s, it’s the least interesting part of marketing, but I find a lot of emphasis on discounting. Urgency and scarcity tactics around kind of quantity available and stuff like that. So I think that the general price area gets a lot of attention over attention.

[00:06:17] I would argue, and we’ve essentially trained our customers to kind of look at that. And because all retailers are kind of screaming in that area, it’s like an arms race where other retailers have no choice, but to double down as well. And I think that is a perversion of marketing because of that. So I feel a lot of focuses in that area.

[00:06:36] Which is the right-hand side above the add to cart button. And I think it’s somewhat unnecessary, but that’s where I think a lot of focus. 

[00:06:44] James Sowers: Yeah, I can understand the struggle there because you know, we literally wrote the book on the subject called stop marketing, start selling. When somebody gets to your product detail page, you don’t need to market them anymore.

[00:06:53] You need to start selling them and getting them to that conversion point. So, you know, we can say that out of one side of our mouth, and then at the other side, it’s like, well, if we put the story up front and we bury the actual call to action too deep, then we are sacrificing that conversion. We are making it.

[00:07:10] To complete the purchase for somebody who’s already made that decision that, yes, I want to move forward with this. So I empathize with the e-commerce leader who has to decide where on the page to physically place these things. Because on the one hand I can say, yeah, you want to tell that story. That’s powerful.

[00:07:23] And for the folks who are on the fence, like that can be all it takes to move them from a prospect to a customer. But at the same time, the folks that already ready, like, do you really want to move the CTA down below a block of text, a couple of paragraphs. I don’t know if you have any thoughts on that and the best answer to that.

[00:07:41] But I guess my point here is like, I can empathize with the e-commerce leader. Who’s saying, yeah, I hear what you’re saying, Rishi, but I don’t know if it’s really over-investing in price because am I leaving money on the table to move that behind something like social proof, product description, any of those other elements that we talked about?

[00:07:55] Pre. 

[00:07:57] Rishi Rawat: I mean, I think it comes down to asking a very simple question around where your growth is headed towards where your growth is coming from and the reality of your existing data. So for example, if the number of people that are coming to your, if the number of seals that you’re getting on your best-selling product page, let’s say 40% of them are from repeat buyers then, Hey, I totally agree.

[00:08:21] You, you do not fit the more that I’m designing for what I am focused on. Is converting first-time buyers. So if you have 99% or 98% of people that are buying your best self for the very first time, then I don’t understand how docking and justifying your price point is unless you’re selling a commodity.

[00:08:40] And this is a, this is another distinction we make in the clients that we work with. We don’t work with lines that are. Or sending a commodity or sending a fashion item stuff where the story is really not as relevant even though of course I would argue that story is still relevant for fashion brands, but I don’t think it’s as relevant as it is for consumer products.

[00:08:58] So if you’re selling a room, air purified, if you’re sending a dog Wheeler, If you are selling a pizza baking machine, these are highly technical, highly considered purchases. I can’t imagine how you can make that sale or even prime the user towards making a purchase if they aren’t sold on your sales page.

[00:09:16] And the reason why I focus on the product description part is because that is typically where the sales page is. Now. I will say that there might be certain use cases where. The retailer already has, they might have a different funnel. Right? So sometimes what retailers do is they’ll take people to a landing page, which is not the product page, and they essentially are telling the product story there.

[00:09:35] And then from there that taking them to essentially a watered down product page where it’s just a mechanism to complete the transaction. Now in that scenario, You don’t need to repeat the story again, because you’ve already told the story and they wouldn’t have clicked through to the next page if they hadn’t bought that story, but that’s an architectural kind of consideration.

[00:09:52] But if you’re taking someone from a Google PLA and directly dumping them on your bestselling product page, I don’t see how you can expect to get them to click on the add to cart button, unless they’ve overcome the most important stuff. Am I emotionally convinced that this is the best product that will allow me to make progress in my life.

[00:10:12] And that happens with the Brooklyn. 

[00:10:14] James Sowers: You have to support them through that consideration stage where they’re kind of bought in, but they’re not ready to buy yet. You have to kind of give them that last little nudge and not necessarily force them into a sale, but help them realize if it’s right for them or not.

[00:10:26] And if somebody gives that visual priority to price and leads with price, that’s really the only lever you have to pull. And there’s really only one way to pull it and that’s down, right? You’re not going to raise the price and generate more sales that way you’re going to reduce the price. Not only hurts you, that cuts into your margin.

[00:10:41] And when it comes to competitors, if they’re also reducing the price and you get into this race to the bottom, but if you prioritize the product description, for example, there are a hundred different ways you can tackle that. You can take an educational approach, you can take a storytelling approach, you can take a benefits or like a desirable outcome, life goal, kind of aspirational approach.

[00:10:59] There are a bunch of different ways that you can try to. Move the needle there. I hate that term, but there’s a bunch of ways you can try to drive results. Whereas if you lead with price, that’s kind of all you got. And the only thing you can do is reduce it to try to compel that person into a post. 

[00:11:12] Rishi Rawat: Yeah.

[00:11:12] And you know, the other thing is there’s a lot of lions on, we talked about what is the emphasis on? We talked about the price, but there’s also a lot of reliance on social proof. And so we’re trying to draw attention to the customer reviews and look in general. I think this is a good idea, especially with.

[00:11:27] Your concern is that people will not notice the product reviews, which by the way, I kind of argue, I questioned the question that thesis now, because people are very used to that. Like I said, the Amazon application of the product page, they know where reviews are. They’ll if they care about reviews, they’ll find them.

[00:11:41] But I actually have a principle concern with reviews because if you look at the data, we know we talked about bias. We talked about priming. Imagine if you had 12,000 reviews and it just luck of the draw, the last three reviews that you got. Three stars out of five. And the last review was actually, this is a really bad product.

[00:11:59] Can you imagine what impact that has on conversion rates? Because those are the first three reviews that user saw out of the top five, that one page, one of the reviews, and this is a real big problem because we can’t control for reviews. And so I actually don’t like that. Over-reliance on reviews because it means that I’m relying on luck of the draw.

[00:12:19] So for me, again, it brings back the focus to, okay, what we can control. We can. If I noticed as a copywriter that the last three reviews were negative, I can actually tweak the part description in a way, which kind of diffuses, maybe the criticism that was brought up in those reviews. So I can control the product description.

[00:12:36] I can’t control the price. I can’t control the discounts. I can control the part images. I can’t control anything except the. And again, that’s why I can bring my focus to the thing that we need to really triple down on things that we can control and just stop worrying about things that we can’t control.

[00:12:50] We can’t control what our competitors are doing and stop obsessing about what they are doing, because first of all, Just because you look at a competitor and these seem to be going gangbusters. And because there’s a lot of mention for them online or whatever it is, does not mean they’re a profitable business.

[00:13:06] I mean, that’s just the reality of it. And I’ve looked at 200 e-commerce website data, and I know that a lot of the assumptions I made based on what I thought they were doing and how well they were do. Was different when I looked at the analytics data. So I think it’s going to point us to obsess about your competitors.

[00:13:22] And I think you need to really focus on what your product does and how it’s different and just triple down on that and just focus on your story. And I think you can have a big effect on conversion rates by just controlling the narrative around the product. 

[00:13:35] James Sowers: Yeah, I love that point. We talk about that all the time.

[00:13:37] There’s a reason that race horses wear blinders, right? And so you don’t want them to see the horse to the left or the right, because that doesn’t matter if you run your best race and you’ve trained adequately coming up to race day, you’re probably going to win. So we say that to our clients all the time, don’t worry as much about competitors as you probably are, run your race, make the decisions based on the data that you have in your situation and the context around that.

[00:13:57] And you’re gonna be just fine over the longterm. So I love that you made that point. If I had two or three other consultants on here, somebody that runs a. A photography studio and somebody that runs a social proof, a Shopify plugin. They’re going to tell me that those two elements are probably the most important on a product detail page.

[00:14:13] And that’s understandable. They bring some bias. Let’s assume that you and I are sitting here today and we both agreed that the product description is the most important aspect of the product detail page. I’m guessing when you take on a new class. You don’t just jump into a word doc or a Google doc and start writing.

[00:14:27] You probably start with some kind of research. So I’m curious, like you have somebody come in and you do an audit, you say, yeah, there’s a lot of room for improvement here. We can make this better. Where do you start in terms of figuring out what the most important messages to communicate through that product description?

[00:14:42] Rishi Rawat: You know again, and I don’t want to overemphasize being unconventional here, but I also have a very controversial view of research. I’m actually not a fan of it. I know that. I think that every CRO person loves research. I think there’s an over-reliance on research. I actually don’t like it. We don’t have to get into that.

[00:14:58] But what I do though, is it’s kind of like a, well let’s think of it as a continue. Step number one is notice at all, which of course is not a good idea. Step number two, or step number three is essentially doing detailed consumer research, which is too expensive, too convoluted. I don’t like to do it. I don’t like to do it early on in the relationship, but what I like to do is something called interrogation of the founder.

[00:15:19] So basically what we do is we, our thesis is pretty simple. We only work with inventors. So all of our clients have invented a better consumer product. And so the intellectual properties in their head, unfortunately, you know what happens is, and I’m sure you have experiences as well, is that the creator is so close to their creation, that they stop seeing how spectacular it is.

[00:15:40] And as an outsider, I can look at that wheelchair and say, mark, this is like truly amazing, man. And he’s like, really, you know, and he’s been doing it for like 15 years. And so you kind of, the shine goes away. So what we do is we start interrogating our client and we have a very specific format of interrogation.

[00:15:56] We call this the hotel scenario where the setup is that we meet you at a bar in a hotel, and you’ve had an incredible day, you’re drinking a cocktail and you’re relaxing and I’m sitting next to you. And it just so happens that the product that you sell is exactly the product that I’ve been breaking my head.

[00:16:13] Over trying to buy over the last couple of months, I’ve been all the view websites and I’ve seen so many options that I have analysis paralysis. And so I asked you if I can look at your website and basically that’s the setup. And then we get into very uncomfortable, tough questions. You know, it’s funny you, when you ask clients about why your product is better than say, it’s the most effective and it has.

[00:16:34] The most competitive pricing, this is the worst response possible. So we keep on interrogating, like what makes it effective? Why should I care about effectiveness? And, you know, you keep on peeling the onion. Eventually you get to that aha moment. Like I totally get it now. And that’s what we want to bring out for people that have just landed on that product page.

[00:16:54] So the hotel scenario process is our mechanism to kind of start unpacking some of that. 

[00:17:00] James Sowers: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And maybe we’ll have to have you back to have a friendly debate with somebody on the research subject, because I know that is kind of a contentious or an antagonistic opinion to the popular culture, which is like sit down and interview 10 customers, ask them a set of questions and then you’ll see the big picture trends.

[00:17:14] And you kind of like. Design your copy around the rule, not the exception. Right. And try to appeal to the vast majority of customers. You know, I think there’s some nuance there it’s like, yeah, you don’t want to spend all your time researching and take no action. That’s obviously not right. But at the same time, like I would say my personal opinion is that founders are great when it’s early, but the longer the business has been active, the more propensity they have to be removed from the true customers’ problems.

[00:17:38] Because like you said, they’re working on this thing every day. And like DaVinci looked at the Mona Lisa and saw how it could be better. People are looking over his shoulder saying like, what are you doing? It’s perfect. Don’t touch it. And he’s like adding an eyelash, right. Or some minor imperfection that he sees.

[00:17:51] I think that’s kind of a, an example of how founders look at their product. They’re looking for how it can be better and they’re not necessarily great anymore talking about how it is great and how it appeals to the end user. So, but thanks for sharing your approach. I think that’s really compelling. So are there a handful of strategies or tactics that you take?

[00:18:08] Like one of the things I’ve heard. About getting to the real meat of especially benefit statements, right? Like the value of the product is it pays to have a three-year-old or a four year old running around your house because they ask why, why, why? Right. Like blue whales are the biggest animal in the world.

[00:18:22] Why? Well, because they’re bigger than anything else. Well, how big are they? You know, they ask all these questions. And what I found in cooperating is you have to ask why or how the five times before you get to the real thing that the customer cares about, like in your example, You know, they say the founder will default and say, it’s the most effective product.

[00:18:38] Well, why, why is it effective? Right. I don’t know, because it helps these dogs get back to the lifestyle that they used to be. Well, how does it do that? Well, you know, it doesn’t require a surgery to attach it to the dog. You can install it yourself, whatever, like you get three or four layers deep. And it’s like, okay, it’s not the most effective.

[00:18:51] That’s kind of soft, right? Like that’s not super compelling. But if you say like, This is something that you can buy today, having your home in three or four days and hook up to your dog that same day and get them out to the dog park. Like, whoa, I can go from my dog, stuck on the couch in a lot of pain or whatever, to back to playing at the dog park or taking a walk again.

[00:19:09] Like, yes, if I can solve that in a week, that’s super compelling. Right. So do you have any kind of tips or tricks? I know you probably have a hundred, but are there any of your favorites that you go to in terms of like, do you start with storytelling? Do you start with a benefits approach? Do you start with technical specifications?

[00:19:22] Like what’s your default when you approach a product detail? 

[00:19:25] Rishi Rawat: I have a very specific actually structured process for crafting the product story. And the way we start off is we identify there are two aspects to a product story. So what you’re calling storytelling or product description, we call product stories.

[00:19:39] There are two aspects to it, why we exist and why this product must exist. I want readers to actually take a mental note of these two dimensions because they are fundamental to the entire process. Now why we exist is essentially the words. Compelling explanation for why the user should give a damn about the fact that you have an online business and we don’t spend enough time talking about this.

[00:20:04] And so if I’m buying jewelry from blue dial blue dial and a say to me that, look, this is a beautifully cut diamond. It’s four carrots. It’s beautiful. Your wife will love it. Well, that’s fine. I’m not even ready for that pitch because I don’t even know if I trust blue Nile. So I have to overcome that barrier first.

[00:20:22] So why we exist is the step number. Which is completely typically it’s under-emphasized in my opinion. And then this, the second aspect of it is why this product must exist. Just keep in mind the words I’m using, why this product must exist. I’m not saying why this part is good. Why this part is 20% cheaper than your competitor witnessing why it must exist.

[00:20:41] It’s like an existential question. You have to build a case that says. Then the world would not be a good enough place if our wheelchair, or if our room air purified did not exist. That’s what Salesforce did. Salesforce basically said that, you know, the word would be a worse off place. If our cloud hosted software did not exist.

[00:21:00] And that’s kinda how they build their case. I think it’s important to have a compelling reason for why this product must exist. So those are the two things that I think need to be there that can attend polls on which we build this. The next step of that process is what we call product story angles. And I would say in, in simple language, it’s essentially developing hooks that are designed to essentially connect with your buyer because, you know, just putting on a page why we exist and why this product must exist.

[00:21:25] It’s somewhat kind of boarding and the username and ask for it. You need to kind of express the essence of those ideas in your copy, but it’s not something that you’re not just going to put in a page and expect conversions to take place. So the hooks are really important. And we come up with 20 different hooks for each product sometimes more, sometimes less, but there’s a lot of opportunity.

[00:21:45] Now. I know some of the readers might be confused about what you mean by a hook and in very simple advertising agencies understand hopes really well. That’s what that’s the whole business is based on. Right. So think of it from that perspective. That’s what a hook is. So to give you an illustration, if I’m working for a class.

[00:22:02] That sells a room, air purifier. One of the hooks that you could talk about is that if the machine is designed to catch allergen, remove allergens from the room and remove pet dander and stuff like that, we can’t physically see those things. Human beings can’t see those things. So the machine is actually doing some thing that you see is one of the hooks could be this machine can see what your eyes can see.

[00:22:24] That’s a hope you can also have a variation of this. While your eyes are closed. This machine is still working. There are so many different ways of slicing and dicing this. You know, you can have a hope that says this machine is quieter than having a conversation in a room. So if what you’re doing basically is you’re identifying hooks based on some of the.

[00:22:45] Resistance. You’re either basing hooks based on things that people will have resistance with. For example, one of the narratives people might have is that this machine is going to be really noisy. And if that’s the case, you can come up with a hook that talks about how we spoke white. It is, and it’s a clever way of framing that.

[00:22:59] Or if you’re trying to dramatize it, you can say that this machine can see what your eyes can’t see. So I’m giving you a couple of examples of what hooks are. I’m sure your audience understands what hooks are, but I don’t think we develop enough hooks. So typically what retailers will do is they’ll. Well, let’s come up with one big thematic hook for what this product does.

[00:23:17] And my view is that no, let’s go with 30 micro hooks all across the copy from the top to the bottom for this, because, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom and let’s see what works and what doesn’t work. So I let come with multiple hooks. Some of them are very small hooks and some of them are just interesting framings of something.

[00:23:36] You talked about features and benefits, but just framed in an interesting way, but I like to come up with lots of hooks. And so the next step is to identify a whole bunch of hooks and then the third step and the final. Is to then frame this entire story around bio-psychology. At the end of the day, nobody gives a damn about your wheelchair.

[00:23:55] Nobody cares about anything that you’re doing. So we really have to get what they want is they want to make progress in their life. They want to visualize that progress and your product is a way for them to make that progress. So ultimately, as a copywriter, I need to tell a story in a way that matches up with their worldview and their.

[00:24:14] Uh, opinion about what the future looks like. And in order to do that, I have to focus on their buyer’s psychology. Now buyer psychology is a universe in itself and in the last 12 years of testing, we’ve been able to identify nine different triggers, the buyer psychology, and then that’s what we use to essentially shape.

[00:24:34] James Sowers: That’s a super detailed and comprehensive framework. If I were to recap it, maybe. So you have this, why do we exist as a company story, then you have, why does this product exist? And then you have your must exist and why it must exist. Okay. Even stronger language. And then you have your hooks or your PSA’s, which is the attention grabbing, like why the actual consumers should care about.

[00:24:56] And then you have this buyer psychology aspect, which really makes all of those messages relevant to the customer in their specific context, their life experience, whatever is that an accurate kind of recap of the four big. That’s exactly 

[00:25:09] Rishi Rawat: right. And what we can do is, you know, maybe in the show notes, we can include some resource references.

[00:25:13] So readers were interested, for example, understanding what are these nine different triggers they can actually read up on them. And I have examples for all of those, so you can include those. 

[00:25:22] James Sowers: Okay. Awesome. So what I love about this model is it’s kind of a forcing function, right? If you sit down and you just get a blank sheet of paper, a blank, Google doc, and you type in.

[00:25:31] Why does this company exist? Or why does this company need to exist? And you have trouble answering that question. Well, you got to do some soul searching there. Why does this product need to exist? If you can’t answer that question, your product’s probably not differentiated from other things in the market.

[00:25:43] Maybe there’s no product market fit. There’s no demand for this. Maybe this is a problem that’s not really worth solving. You know, if you have trouble answering these things, that’s a trigger to have a moment of reflection if you’re even heading in the right direction. Right. But even beyond that, okay.

[00:25:56] All of a sudden I have trouble coming up with compelling hook. If you can’t get creative and come up with 20, then you might have to go back one more step and get the product, right. Maybe the product isn’t differentiated enough. Or if you have trouble tying this to consumer needs through the buyer’s psychology, maybe you don’t know your customer well enough.

[00:26:13] And maybe that’s the trigger to go do some customer research. So you know, those individual elements and you can tie the hooks to the lifestyle choices, that kind of thing. Have you ever like considered. Your model is the forcing function for the e-commerce founder to kind of clean house and get everything in order and make sure that they’re checking all these boxes, like maybe a better way to phrase that question is, do you ever come in and introduce this model to one of your clients?

[00:26:36] And they say, I don’t really have a good answer for that. Like, can you help me with that? Can you help me come up with the hooks? Can you help me come up with a compelling story around why this product should exist? Because I feel strongly about it, but I don’t know how to put that into words. Like, do you ever have anybody encounter a problem like that or.

[00:26:52] Rishi Rawat: Well, I mean, that happens all the time. I mean, that’s kind of why they would hire us. I just want to add one point over here, which I think is very important. The product market fit is already dead for my clients. So like I only work with retailers that are doing between 2 million and 50 million in sales.

[00:27:05] That’s a viable business. So what I am really helping them do is, you know, like I’m helping them chisel away at the patina that set in. So I already know that there’s a compelling look. I’m working for a client they’re selling, you know, 500 units a month of their best. 500 people, every 30 days are taking out their credit card and buying this product.

[00:27:26] So there is a product market fit there. I think what’s missing though, is we’re not emphasizing enough. I mean, maybe we should have had 720 people buy it. And those 220 that didn’t buy, that’s the group I’m trying to affect. And so my view is that, Hey, if we can like really zero in and our story and you know, you bring up a really good point here.

[00:27:47] And I think this is the other problem that I run into is. See what happens is marketers are very good at adding stuff. They’re very bad at removing stuff. So let’s say you do a customer survey and you identify that a five more hooks that you had not even thought about that you figured out by mining the customer reviews or looking at chat logs.

[00:28:04] You had a young marketer who came in and you’re like, oh, I got five more hooks. So let’s add these five hooks to the product page. Well, you can add the five hooks if you’re not willing to remove five units of cognitive load net page, otherwise you’re basically making the. Unbearable for everyone, but you’ve covered it as by saying, well, we’ve put everything in the beach now that the user can have navigated and figured it out.

[00:28:23] So, you know, I think that’s a really important point as well as that the idea isn’t to just cover all the points, the idea is to cover the points that matter the most super compellingly. In fact, what we do is we apply a principle called redundancy, where we repeat the most important points a couple of times, and sometimes clients would even say to us, didn’t you mention this earlier?

[00:28:45] And my answer to them is just like with TV commercials, the consumer has to see a commercial 15 times before the message registered. So if there is a really important hook that is pivotal for that conversion capitalism, I need the user to have noticed it. And nine times out of 10, they will ignore it the first time I mentioned it.

[00:29:05] And so as a copywriter, of course, I want to write it in a creative way. We then notice it for sure. But as an insurance policy guy, I also want him to repeat it again because I don’t want to risk my entire pieces on the fact that the person didn’t pay attention to it. The first time. 

[00:29:19] James Sowers: You see that advice across multiple disciplines like public speaking, they say, you have to tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you told them.

[00:29:26] You have to hit it three times in a presentation like this. So, yeah, that’s super insightful. And I think a lot of people are afraid to say the same thing. Multiple times on the same product page, thinking that they’re beating a dead horse. Right. But the fact of the matter is we’re distracted and we’re moving quickly and we’re scanning.

[00:29:42] We’re not really reading before retention. We’re trying to catch the big pieces, the headlines, the bulleted lists, the bold text, whatever. So if you have one thing you want to get across, you need to make it stand out, maybe top, middle, and bottom of the page, even to make sure that it hits home. So I want to get into your thoughts around actually testing some of these messages.

[00:29:58] But before I do that, I want to make sure I ask. So are there any specific. Industries or product types that are maybe a little bit harder to follow this process for. Like, I’m thinking, I, you, you said you don’t work with commodity products. I don’t know if this would fall into that category and if it does feel free to disregard it, but like I’ve worked with a client in the past that sells coffee.

[00:30:16] Right. And everybody’s selling like, how do you differentiate coffee besides like saying flavor? And I bet the same thing is said of all the different coffees. Like everybody has a unique flavor. How they tackled it is they have an exclusive right to export beans from, I think it’s the democratic Republic of Congo.

[00:30:32] And they worked with the government there, they’re the only people who can export those to another country. So that was kind of their unique selling proposition. And then they had a social good mission where they take some of their revenue or the profits and put it back into that community. They give people jobs, they build Wells or whatever schools.

[00:30:47] So, I mean, they differentiated a product that is largely commoditized, but I’m curious. It’s something like apparel and area where it’s harder to write a compelling product description, because at the end of the day, it’s just clothing and everybody has clothes and a shirt is a shirt is a shirt, right?

[00:31:01] Like I know somebody out there screaming, that’s not true and that’s fine. But to the average consumer, maybe it is. And so are there any industries or product types or maybe a single product store or something like that that makes it a little bit harder to do your. 

[00:31:13] Rishi Rawat: Well first, it’s a great question.

[00:31:14] First of all, you know, the thing you talked about, the coffee example, the single source coffee example. So that’s an example of a product story angle, right? So you’ve identified an angle that you can now use, and that’s what they’re doing. What you’re calling a USP, we call it product story angle, you know, you bring up another good point.

[00:31:29] So I actually, you know, would love to work for a coffee brand. I actually think there’s a lot more opportunity for storytelling for a product like coffee, which I don’t think commodities that I’d worked on for it. Here’s where I would draw. If I’m working, if that coffee brand has 75 different flavors and they have an even distribution of sales, then it doesn’t really economically make sense for me to improve your best seller by 20% 90 days, which is the only thing I do, because it’s not going to make economic sense for you.

[00:31:58] So I would say in that respect, it doesn’t make sense. That’s why I would walk away from product from retailers that have a long tail distribution of. Because they don’t have one big juicy head. And for me, I want to have that one big UC had that said if that specific client had one flavor of coffee, that was like, you know, 80% of their sales or 60% of the sales was something Medina for them.

[00:32:21] I absolutely think in fact, I would say that there’s a huge opportunity to inject the story. Even though the consumer to your point may not be looking for a story, but I think stories would be extremely relevant in those cases. But you’re right about the fact that, you know, like I said, that’s one scenario.

[00:32:37] If it’s a long tail distribution, I think there are certain products as well that have disproportionately strong visual aesthetics. So for example, if there’s anywhere. And the t-shirt has a print of a superhero, you know, or maybe baby Yoda, for example, that image is making the sale. I don’t really think telling a story around how you thought of adding a baby, you the image to the t-shirt or why you chose that screen printing technology versus some other, I don’t know if that’s really relevant because it’s almost like a black hole that baby you’re the image is such a strong black hole.

[00:33:10] It’s kind of pointless for me to add some more gravitational bodies around it because it’s not going to make a difference. So I would, of course, and that gives it’s such a highly visual product that I would actually move away from that. And I also don’t think it’s hard for Judy websites, again, jewelry websites, where there’s a long tail distribution, which is typically the case because you’re coming up with new designs all the time and it’s really like, you know, flavor of the month and you and people come to it.

[00:33:32] There’s a lot of serendipity people come to jewelry, website, browse around, they find something they like, and they’re like, oh, I’m going to buy it. They don’t really care about the story as much, because they’re like, you know, Hey, this looks kind of cool. And the images do most of the storytelling in that case.

[00:33:45] So in that case, I would say the photography is doing better storytelling than the copy. Anyway. So please fire me and invest in photography because I think that’s where the, the opportunity. Yeah. 

[00:33:56] James Sowers: Okay. So I’m curious, we go through the process. We come up with 20 hooks and you don’t just all 20 on the page because we just talked about marketers are really good at adding, not so much redacting from, so I guess you probably want to test one, maybe two of those at a time, maybe one is a primary headline and one is the section header or whatever.

[00:34:13] What’s your approach to testing the viability of the ideas and the concepts that you come up with, because I imagine you have your existing description and you want to test some kind of variant. And if the variant doesn’t, when you want to step it back and go back to the original or try a new variant or whatever.

[00:34:27] So just in terms of like maybe technical setup, the kind of tests that you run, how long you let them run, what’s your approach to figuring out which. Genius ideas that you have is the one that actually needs to be implemented and held onto long-term to see that lift in revenue or conversion rate or whatever they’re trying to target.

[00:34:45] It’s a 

[00:34:45] Rishi Rawat: really good question. Again, I’m going to actually step back a little bit and just respond to, I didn’t finish one thought about the previous section. So when does this approach of, we talked about where it doesn’t necessarily apply as much, but let’s talk about brief. Where product stories work really, really well.

[00:35:01] And I mean, it makes me dirty. I think he monitored, but if you are selling a ethical product, if it’s a consumer product and you know, I don’t work with too many B2B brands, but I would say the same principles apply. I hate that distinction we have for B2B the B2C. It just so happens. I work a lot in the consumer product space, consumer electronics, consumer products, if it’s a technical product, oh my God.

[00:35:22] That is so much opportunity for storytelling and to develop a super strong product story. So any listener of yours that is directly working with consumer products, they need to know that this is something that they can apply very effectively to that existing strategy. Moving on, you talked about developing.

[00:35:40] PSA is product story angles, and then applying them to the page. So I have a very controversial view on AB testing as well, and I’m not trying to be controversial. I just want to be as authentic as I can. I’m very dead opposed to this whole idea that marketers have is that we need to identify the specific variables that are causing a shift in before.

[00:35:59] I couldn’t care less. The only thing I care about is did the neck, totality of the concept, the treatment we designed destroy the control. I don’t need to know within that treatment. It did the headline matter more than the copy in the second paragraph who cares. It doesn’t matter. We can do up tests and we can test against those treatments.

[00:36:21] But I honestly do not care. So you are correct in the sense that. Maybe to minimize cognitive load or to kind of let me put it this way. If we come up with 20 products already angled, see I’m a big fan also of the fact that 80% of what we do is either average or garbage. So the principle of coming up with 20 products, three angles is a very good idea because it allows you to do what we call freewheeling of ideas.

[00:36:43] Good ideas come by, essentially disengaging a cell from reality and saying, okay, well, if I could just do whatever I wanted and the world has made the marshmallows, what angles would I come up with? It’s interesting. We started the process by coming up with angles that we know are wrong. So the first I’m going to come up with always is that this product is the best product in the history of mankind.

[00:37:03] And I know it’s not true now I’ve already kind of disassociated myself from reality and I’m kind now floating in space. Now I can kind of say, okay, well, what other angles can I, and I’m trying to get, I’ll come back to reality. So, and I think stand-up comedians and comedians in general, do this as well.

[00:37:18] Artists do this as well. They start off by being. Extremely kind of abused and then they work backwards to reality. So we applied that same approach. Now, when we come up with 20 product story angles, when we do the run through for them, we realize that, okay, 12 of these are like really not good. So we get rid of them.

[00:37:35] We left with eight, then we kind of cut 50% of those as well. And we’re left with four product stories. But it’s possible, I guess, for someone to have 10 extremely good products, three angles. And if that’s the case, what we would do is we would either put all 10 on the page as a treatment contested against the control, or we would put five in one and maybe five and another one.

[00:37:55] And then test both those variations. The control. We don’t really have any set rules on how park story angles need to be kind of used. Um, as long as they, as long as they, the test result is positive. I don’t need to know if PSA one made the difference of PSA seven made the difference. I don’t care. And as far as the testing methodologies and so on, so we use visual website optimizer, and we don’t touch the test.

[00:38:17] We set it up obviously very accurately, but once we run the test, we don’t stop it until we have a statistical winner or until the client says that stop the test. It’s not a winner or whatever it is. We’re not statistician. So we rely on that tool to calculate all of these photos. Once the tools is that it’s been running for four weeks and you have an absolute winner, we say, great, let’s implement it.

[00:38:36] And that’s our 

[00:38:37] James Sowers: process. Yeah. Are you doing any kind of testing around heat mapping or anything to measure like depth of scrolling or time on page? Anything like that? Cause I know the. Decision point is, did the conversion rate go up? Are we generating more revenue? Are we converting more prospects into buyers?

[00:38:52] That’s true. Is there any kind of engagement tracking that you guys recommend or that you do to see? Cause I imagine because we’re working specifically with text and the location on the page tends to be under the fold. It seems to me like it would be interesting to you and to your clients to know how much of that is actually being consumed and where you might be able to trim some of the fat because it’s not getting read and get them to the next section, which might be social proof.

[00:39:14] For example, 

[00:39:16] Rishi Rawat: Yeah. So we do rely on heat maps, not as much as user recordings, they tend to be there’s too much data being collected. One of the other techniques that we used, and this is a very effective mechanism, is that we don’t just show the whole product story. As one block of text, we essentially. We forced the user to interact with the poppy.

[00:39:34] So we have their technical active participation where we’ll kind of put in little buttons or little widgets where you have to click on it to reveal certain contents, certain snippets of content. And we’re doing the sort of whole bunch of reasons. One reason is to reduce the cognitive. But the other reason is from a refinement perspective because we have tracking built into all those clicks.

[00:39:52] So when we notice that there is a disproportionately high or low number of clicks for one of the products or the angles, we can try and get it to say, this is a product story angle that they don’t really care about as much because no one was clicking to investigate further and then we can in subsequent desk remove it.

[00:40:07] So we use those custom coded click track. To figure out how that story is being consumed. I care deeply about the consumption of our story, but we don’t rely on custom coded. 

[00:40:19] James Sowers: Yeah, that’s interesting. I think that’s super smart to get kind of those micro-commitments open the dropdown to see reveal the information that you want to see.

[00:40:26] I think that’s super smart because just from a conversion copywriting perspective, like getting micro commitments, like I don’t have to buy, I just have to open this widget and then open the next widget. I can just picture the session recording in my head where somebody scrolls in they’re scrolling really fast because they’re expecting to see a bunch of texts and they go back up and they go, wait, that kind of looked like an FAQ section, but it’s not a vacuous.

[00:40:44] What is it? You know? It’s compelling me to go one step further in the story. Super smart. So if we were to try to give the listener some kind of like quantifiable. Measurement of potential, right? So it’s like they have a million things they could do. They could go get new product photography, they could add a social proof widget.

[00:41:00] They could try to launch a new product. They could do a hundred things in terms of marketing and product development. If we were to try to build a case for taking a look at your product descriptions and some of the copywriting on your page and the story for your brand and your product line, do you have maybe a case study or something like that?

[00:41:15] That kind of says here’s a realistic potential outcome in terms of lift of conversion rate or lift of revenue, whatever you want. Say. Well, 

[00:41:22] Rishi Rawat: I have tons of case studies, but in terms of like the fact that marketers have so much on their plate and you know, what should they take from this interview and apply as a starting point, I would say start off with step one.

[00:41:33] The step one of our conversion process is to build a compelling watertight case for why we exist. And oftentimes I find that, that there isn’t a compelling reason for why we exist. So I would start there. And then, you know, I think what the biggest motivator for a marketer are marketing results. So you come up with a compelling why we exist.

[00:41:52] You AB tested, you see some sales lift. I guarantee you, it’s going to motivate you to say, I want to dig deeper into this frictionless commerce process. And then you get into buy. This product must exist and you keep on doing it until you reach to a point of diminishing returns. But you know, if it doesn’t work for you, then don’t even follow my process, but start there.

[00:42:09] And I think you’ll be surprised by the kind of results. Yeah, that 

[00:42:12] James Sowers: makes a lot of sense. One more question I have for you before we bring this in for a landing, is, is there a new or an emerging marketing technology and e-commerce technology that you’re seeing out there that kind of has you excited because it has the potential to impact some of the things that we talked about today and make them even more effective.

[00:42:28] Like something that comes to mind to me is there’s some tools out there around personalization and collecting some data upfront to personalize the messaging on that product description. And maybe that’s something that you would have defaulted to, but does anything come to mind is like an emerging technology that has you excited about how it might influence your business and the work you do for your.

[00:42:46] Rishi Rawat: You’re a very good marketer yourself, because when we were kind of thinking about some of these topics, the two things you brought up by, the two things I actually think are emerging trends, which is personalization and quizzes. I think these are really interesting teams that are developing quizzes are extremely important because we talked about cognitive load, especially for mobile shopping, where real estate is a problem.

[00:43:06] I think quizzes can be very effective in narrowing the consideration set. And I think there’s a lot of interesting work that’s been done around quizzes, and I think there’s going to be a lot more that happens. I see promise there. I think personalization is also very interesting. We are in favor of user driven personalization versus using third-party data or whatever cookies.

[00:43:27] And what I’m going to do is, again, in the show notes, I’ll include a link that shows an example of how we would able to use user driven personalization for one of our clients to improve their conversion rates for their bestseller by 30.5, 2%. And essentially it just to, just to give users a perspective of what I mean by this is that what we did was on the product page.

[00:43:48] One of the challenges marketers have, is that how much copy should I have on the page? And as you can imagine, You know, shoppers that are just looking for the quick story are looking for fewer words versus people who are methodical and say, I want to learn everything there is to learn about this air purifier.

[00:44:04] And I’m a lazy marketer. So when we were confronted with this problem, instead of trying to serve your customers and figure out, okay, maybe 80% of them get about more details, let’s just show more details. Cause that’s more popular. I said, I don’t want to throw it off anyone. So we just simply added two buttons.

[00:44:19] We wrote the basic description and right below that. We had two buttons. It said I have two minutes and I have time. And the basic idea was that this was a self-selection mechanism for someone who says, I just want to get to those main points. They would click on. I have two minutes. And then for people who are methodical, we’ll click the other link.

[00:44:37] And when we AB tested this, we found that there was a 30.5, 2% improvement in conversion rates off their already best-selling air purifier. So this is an example of user driven. Because we didn’t control that personalization. We pulled a user, you personalize it based on what you care about. And this can have a dramatic effect on a big fan of this approach.

[00:44:57] So I’ll include a case study for that as well for your. Yeah, 

[00:45:00] James Sowers: that’s really awesome. That’s almost like a, those choose your adventure books where it’s like, do you want to go left into the creepy house or do you want to go right into the dark woods? And then you go on your own journey from there? I think that’s super smart.

[00:45:10] Now, one of my good friends, Joel Clark, he runs a service called case study buddy. And I believe it’s his company where at the very top of the. It says, just show me the price. You know, you would, there’ll be so counterintuitive to the average service business, but he knows that he doesn’t want to get on the phone with people who don’t have the budget for him.

[00:45:26] And they don’t want to waste their time going through the sales process only to find out that it’s cost way more than they thought. So it was like, just show me the price and then I’ll scroll. Up, which is counterintuitive because we’re used to scrolling down, but show me the price at the bottom of the page.

[00:45:37] I’ll scroll back up for more details. If that kind of meets my criteria. So kind of the same concept. It’s like I have a lot of time or I have a little bit of time, let me choose the best way to consume this message for my use case. So I think that’s super smart. We’ll definitely link that case study up in the show notes.

[00:45:51] Is there anything else that I maybe didn’t cover today that you want to make sure that we talk about in terms of. I’m thinking about the listener at home. Who’s like, okay, this is all great. I got the framework. I’m supposed to start with my, why we exist story. Is there anything as far as, like, if you just take one step this week to get a little bit better in terms of your product descriptions or your brand story, what should the listener do after they finished this podcast episode?

[00:46:14] Rishi Rawat: You know, again, I’m a one trick pony, I would say, just go focus on the why we exist already. Start writing it down on a piece of paper and see where it leads you. It’s almost like journaling, you know, it’s like I journal every day and I never know what I’m going to write about. I just, and I hate doing it by the way.

[00:46:28] I hate the idea of like having to journal before I go to sleep. It’s so annoying. And yet every time I start writing, the first sentence is always hard, rough down. Like, oh, I got things to talk about. So it’s, what’s going to happen to you. I know that you’re listening to this thing right now. Oh, man, I do not want to sit down and try to explain why we exist.

[00:46:48] And I would just say, fight that resistance. That’s your lizard brain talking, you know, don’t do that. Just write it. Don’t have to share it with anyone. It’s your personal document. And if you’re not happy with the outcome, scrap it and just say, forget this, but get started with the process. I do have one question for you though, because I know that you are a very serious marketer and I know you care deeply about these things.

[00:47:08] And I am hoping that some of these things that we talked about were new to even use. I am curious because I can’t talk to your users, your listeners right now, from your perspective, because you didn’t know what I was going to talk about in this detail. Was there anything that kind of stood out to you based on what I discussed, I want to know what you found most.

[00:47:26] James Sowers: Yeah. So a couple of things there, one, I think that last point we just covered about kind of the choose your adventure approach to product description, writing or conversion copywriting. I’ve heard that conceptually, but usually the way that I see personalization done is through a tool like a quiz on the front end.

[00:47:41] And it says, would you say you have dry or oily skin? Would you say that you do your routine in the morning or at night? And they asked several questions like that, and then they pump that data into some kind of email marketing software. And they attribute it to the email address. So you start to build out this customer profile and then if you’re really savvy, you use a tool like, right.

[00:47:59] Message, which will let you customize the copy on the actual page, based on the data that you have in your email service provider and say, all right, this person told us they have oily skin. So on, I don’t know anything about makeup, but like on our foundation or a moisturizer or what. We need to make sure that the headline version is number three, which says, want to fix your oily skin.

[00:48:17] You know what I mean? Or dry skin, or like, so you dynamically swap out those headlines based on the customer data, your approach, which is, as you said, user driven was different and felt intuitive to me. I would definitely like to test it against kind of that data. Versus user-driven because I think there are probably merits to both.

[00:48:37] And I’d just be curious to see, obviously our business is very data-driven and we’ve talked a lot about, most of my questions were, how are you tracking this? Like what kind of tests are you running? You know? So we lean on the numbers a little bit more than you seem to. So I’d be curious to put those two things next to each other and see some of those session recordings and stuff like that.

[00:48:54] You know, the other thing that jumped out at me in terms of like, maybe something, maybe a gap, right? And maybe you have this on your site and we can link it up to is in terms of putting together this why we exist. Story. Totally understand how that is uncomfortable and might seem low value, like not a great use of time.

[00:49:10] And it just like your journaling practice or. You know, a lot of people don’t like to exercise, but if you can get into the car and you can drive to the gym and you can walk in the door, odds are, you’re not going to turn around and leave without working out. You’ve gone through, if you can force yourself through that first step, you’re going to get some kind of workout and it might not be an hour long.

[00:49:24] It might be 30 minutes. It might be 15 minutes, whatever, but you still went and you did something, right? So that’s how I look at this. It might be an uncomfortable exercise, but if you can just get started, then you’re unlikely to abandon it all together. One thing that I think could help, there is some kind of a worksheet or a template with questions, ask yourself to spur that production.

[00:49:41] So why we exist is a question in itself, but like, okay, where did it start? What problem or pain point were you trying to address in the beginning? Did you experience this or did somebody in your family experiences and that like just gets kind of the words coming out of your brain and down onto the page?

[00:49:55] Maybe you already have that and we can link it up. But if you don’t, that’s something that jumped out at me is like, I better listen to sit in here. Like I want to write my story about why we exist, but I don’t like looking at that cursor on the blank page. I’d like to see three questions that I can just type a response to.

[00:50:07] And then those kinds of start to congeal into a little bit of a story and I can refine it. I can put it in front of my editor. I can put it in front of somebody else in my team and say, Hey, does this make sense to you? Does this have a linear progression? Does this have an arc and a resolution and all that kind of stuff?

[00:50:20] So yeah, those two things jumped out. I 

[00:50:23] Rishi Rawat: will send a link for that. Cause we actually do have a worksheet for the why we exist in the widest part of must exist questions, uh, bot of our hotel scenario. I’ll mentioned that in the show notes for you and then your readers can actually, that’s a great point.

[00:50:35] It’s a great starting point because I know it’s hard to kind of get started with a blank canvas. And if you have like five or six questions laid out for you, at least as a starting point that you can choose your own adventure. Once you get. 

[00:50:45] James Sowers: Yeah, super savvy question for you. And thanks for asking it before I let you go.

[00:50:48] Where can folks go to learn more about you personally, and also what you’re working on at frictionless? 

[00:50:54] Rishi Rawat: I’m very, somewhat argue far too active on LinkedIn, but I do find it quite fun to talk about things that we’re testing and things that I’m fragments of ideas that I’m thinking about. I know you’re active on Twitter, so I would say LinkedIn is a great place to see what I’m up to.

[00:51:08] I would also say that I have a weekly buyer’s psychology newsletter where it’s. Brief chunk I share one or two interesting ideas. One of the things that I do is I would say I study at least 50 different e-commerce websites every single week as part of my job anyway. And so I notice a lot of amazing marketing insights that I had never considered, or maybe versions of it that I’d never seen before.

[00:51:32] And I just take a screenshot of it and I kind of record all of that. And then in my weekly digest, I discuss some of those ideas. And there’s a lot of marketing innovation that’s going on and your listeners while I’m sure they are, you know, keeping up with what’s happening with marketing. There is no one human being who can actually track all of this and I’m already doing this.

[00:51:50] Anyway. I look at those 50 websites every week. And so if you’re interested, I have a newsletter it’s frictionless dash commerce forward slash join. I’m sure will be included in the show notes as well. You can sign up and then you can get those weekly insights as well. So I think those are the two best ways of seeing what.

[00:52:07] James Sowers: Let’s get that worksheet in the show notes and we’ll get that signup link and you guys will be off and running, adding Rishi to kind of your professional network here online and leveling up your professional skills. So Richie again, thanks so much for your time today. Really appreciate the insights that you shared and some of the counterintuitive approaches that you brought to some stuff that may or may not align with the popular culture.

[00:52:25] But listen, I almost started a podcast on the personal side called unconventional. And it was going to be exactly those kinds of things. Everybody says to Zig. Here’s why you need to zag. And so I love different perspectives when they’re brought to the table like that. So thank you for taking time out of your day to share it with us.

[00:52:39] And we’ll have to have you back again sometime in the future. Thanks for 

[00:52:42] Rishi Rawat: your time. I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much. 

[00:52:45] James Sowers: Hey everybody, this is James again. And before you go, I just wanted to invite you to join one of the coolest things I get to work on as director of marketing here, right? It’s called the e-commerce insiders list.

[00:52:54] And it’s a private version of this podcast feed that gets you access to tons of additional bonus content, like extra interviews, Q and a sessions, website, tear downs, and anything else we can dream up. It doesn’t cost you anything, but your email address. And we promise to always respect your inbox. This is just our way of forming strong relationships with our listeners and making sure that we produce content that is actually valuable to you and to your business.

[00:53:15] If you’re in. You can join the rest of the e-commerce insiders by going to the good.com/podcast and dropping your email into the form at the top of the page, we’ll follow up with directions for how to access the private feed and you’ll be off and running. Like I said, this is one of my favorite things that I get the opportunity to work on because it lets me interact directly with e-commerce founders and leaders.

[00:53:34] Just like you. If you’re interested, I’d love to see your name pop up in my notifications until then keep an eye out for the next episode of the e-commerce insight show. And we’ll talk to you soon.