Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7 Figures and Beyond e-commerce marketing podcast, Greg Shuey hosts Jon Ivanco, the founder of Formtoro, for an impromptu discussion on the significance of pre-purchase customer data in shaping marketing strategies for direct-to-consumer brands. Jon shares his extensive background in marketing, from traditional methods to social media and smart home product marketing, emphasizing the importance of logical thinking in marketing strategies. He highlights the challenges and solutions related to customer journey optimization, including the innovative concept of frictionless forms that automatically apply discounts and reduce customer friction during the shopping process. Jon also discusses the need for personalized and clear communication with customers, the pitfalls of focusing solely on metrics without context, and the future of marketing strategies focused on data and customer experience.
Key Takeaways
- Pre-purchase Customer Data: Jon emphasizes the importance of collecting and analyzing pre-purchase customer data to inform marketing strategies, highlighting that understanding customer intent and behavior is crucial for optimizing the customer journey.
- Frictionless Forms: Jon introduces the concept of frictionless forms, which automatically apply discounts during the shopping process, reducing friction and improving the customer experience. This innovation aims to increase conversion rates by simplifying the checkout process.
- Logical Marketing Strategies: Jon stresses the importance of logical thinking in marketing, noting that marketers often confuse correlation with causation. He advocates for a more analytical approach to understanding what truly drives customer behavior and sales.
- Challenges with Customer Journeys: Jon critiques the current state of customer journeys, particularly the overcomplication and misattribution issues caused by various SaaS applications. He calls for a more straightforward and customer-friendly approach to enhance the shopping experience.
- Future of Marketing: Jon predicts that forms will replace welcome series in the future, allowing for real-time data collection and personalized landing pages. He also highlights the need for brands to adapt their paid marketing strategies and focus on continuous improvement in audience targeting and engagement.
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Jon Ivanco LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jivanco/
Formtoro: https://www.formtoro.com/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:00.954)
Hey everyone, welcome to episode 32 of the Seven Figures and Beyond podcast. yeah, there’s a hand wave right there. Hope everyone’s crushing it today. Today is actually my first impromptu podcast that I literally decided to do yesterday, like last minute. My guest this week, he got sick, he canceled on me, so I reached out to my buddy John to see if he wanted to jam today and lucky for me, he said yes, and that is why he is here.
John’s built a pretty rad company called form Toro and they are really paving the way to help brands collect and analyze what I refer to as pre -purchase customer data to help guide and inform marketing strategy for direct to consumer brands that and he also has some pretty strong opinions and they’re accurate opinions about the industry in general.
and shares them freely on LinkedIn. So if you are not following him, pause this, stop what you’re doing, go follow him and I’ll make sure to include his LinkedIn URL in the show notes. So John, thank you for taking some time this afternoon to chat with us.
Jon Ivanco (01:12.648)
Greg, thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.
Greg Shuey (01:14.778)
Heck yeah, man. So before we jump in, would you take just a couple of minutes and introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story and how you have gotten to where you are today?
Jon Ivanco (01:26.696)
Yeah, so my story begins a long time ago. It almost seems ancient now.
Greg Shuey (01:31.962)
in a galaxy far, far away. There you go.
Jon Ivanco (01:35.144)
And so it’s so funny because a lot of people that find me on LinkedIn don’t realize I’ve been in marketing for almost 20 years now in just different formats. So my journey started as an intern for a marketing agency back in the day when social media wasn’t even popping off because Facebook barely existed. So back those days, it was more traditional marketing of brand building strategy event and print, really. It was a lot of print media and stuff like that.
Fast forward a bunch of years, I got swept up into social media marketing when I was back in school, going to law school, actually during like 2009 and 2011. And ended up partnering up with some people through some internships and finding out about like how different professions were trying to leverage social media in different ways. And it kind of got to the point of realizing that it was booming at such a rate that people could specialize in one specific network, which was pretty crazy to watch. Because in the past, you did a little bit of everything.
and you kind of functioned as more PR and marketing rather than just marketing. But now social media came about. So we’ll fast forward again and then my swap went from working in startups to ending up working for a company called Lifex that was in the smart home space. So we were selling Wi -Fi connected color changing smart bulbs and they started on Kickstarter, they were D to C, but they were backed by Sequoia. So they had a little bit of budget behind them in order to make some good stuff.
happen. And I came on board kind of as a favor to a buddy that was a CFO at the time over there to kind of help out with some marketing stuff because they were without a marketing person. And then ended up launching Gen 2, Gen 3, Gen 4 of their products and really went back from sales into marketing and figuring out, hey, what are people doing and how does this work? Fun fact about this though, LEDs that are color changing do not photograph well.
So you are absolutely done when it comes to creating content if you do not have a full army of people touching up stuff in post purchase, post process. So we had a hell of a time getting content created that looked good, which means yours truly went back to old traditional models, which was a lot of partnership marketing, learning how to run that gamut, figure out how you could get social working. We had a great Reddit subreddit at the time and…
Greg Shuey (03:31.77)
Huh.
Jon Ivanco (03:58.216)
build a community around a brand while always focusing on that customer experience. Because it was product, app experience, and there was firmware on the lights themselves. So you had to have the entire teams working together in order to build out experiences that were worthwhile. They sold. And I went back into the world of consulting before doing another product launch for another consumer hardware product.
And we were doing the same playbook. We were running Facebook ads to a landing page, to a sign up, to a survey and the emails. And we started looking at the numbers and seeing where the drop -offs happened. And then we took a look at the problem and I left one day from the office and I said, I’m going to go solve something. And that was kind of like the, the birth of forum tour, which became, could we collect data on the fly during that high intent portion of signing up?
in order to better understand and build a go -to -market strategy. And that’s me here today, four years later of doing form tour and studying data and data analytics to better understand how to build marketing strategies for brands.
Greg Shuey (05:02.234)
Dang, I don’t remember us talking about how long you’ve been doing that for. Four years. That’s pretty awesome.
Jon Ivanco (05:08.04)
Well, we were doing zero party data before that, technically. So I used to run customer support and we used to run type form into Zapier into Zendesk. So we would have choose your own adventure to understand where the drop off points for people and where people are running into problems. So we would take all that data and then change our own customer journeys with an app and support docs in order to solve for that. So I think at its height, we were having, we had…
Greg Shuey (05:13.594)
No.
Greg Shuey (05:18.586)
Ooh.
Jon Ivanco (05:37.672)
1200 tickets coming in a week for a team of four and we had an 85 % self -solve rate simply because of like clearly articulating what steps to take and I think we might have set the record for a company of our size. We had zero new support tickets every single working day for over a year.
Greg Shuey (05:50.042)
Hmm.
Greg Shuey (05:59.994)
What? That’s insane. Wow. That’s awesome. I love that. You’re a data guy. You’re a lawyer who loves data.
Jon Ivanco (06:01.352)
Yep. Zero.
Jon Ivanco (06:09.352)
I love data.
Jon Ivanco (06:14.248)
Yeah. There’s logic. It’s all logic. I think that’s what a lot of people miss is that there’s a logical reason why things happen. And a lot of times we assume, we miss assume marketing, it’s a correlation and causation are usually interchanged incorrectly. And no one trains you to think logically through what might be causing something. And we’re so bad in marketing.
Greg Shuey (06:31.578)
Yeah.
Jon Ivanco (06:41.448)
Because you hear the narratives of, more sign -up SQLs, more revenue. No, that’s not exactly true. There’s all these little things that people just take for granted. Like, 30 % of your revenue should be emails. Like, why? What is contributing to that? We are so bad in marketing, where we just glob onto these little catchphrases that were created by SaaS platforms to sell you their services. And that’s what you end up with.
Greg Shuey (06:57.274)
Right.
Greg Shuey (07:11.162)
I like to, and this may upset some people, I like to say that we’re maybe a little borderline lazy and we just take things at face value.
Jon Ivanco (07:21.448)
If you give me one KPI at a time, I can influence the holy loving shit out of it. You tell me I gotta play with all the KPIs together in order to build like a journey that works for everyone. That’s where it gets a lot harder. Cause then you gotta go like three levels deeper to figure out how they’re all interacting with each other.
Greg Shuey (07:38.522)
Yep. It’s wild. It’s wild. So let’s jump right in, man. I mean, I know that you’re a huge advocate of customer journey and really digging in and understanding that and using that as a way to build strategy and then kind of take a brand to the next level. So what’s your take on the customer journey? Maybe you can walk us through that and why you think it’s critical for brands.
to understand and then to act on.
Jon Ivanco (08:10.152)
It’s been so bastardized. And I hate to say this, but like it’s, it’s SaaS apps that have absolutely made it miserable. And I mean, I see misattribution happening all over the place. And the most recent pet peeve is the amount of people that are doing cross -sells and upsells in shopping carts. And I can’t actually tell what’s in my cart. Like,
There’s just too much stuff trying to be upsold within the individual cart. So it becomes like, I don’t even know what’s in my cart anymore. Everyone’s just trying to get me to buy more stuff. And it just doesn’t make any sense. I think everyone’s like, there’s so much pressure on the customer journey in general. And everyone says, I’m all about the customer journey. And then you look at what they actually do or what they ask. And you realize that they’re actually all about the company journey. And none of that other stuff matters.
Greg Shuey (08:44.986)
Yeah.
Jon Ivanco (09:05.32)
The one I’ve been picking on recently has been people forcing people into their email to go get their coupon code. Silliest thing in the world. It’s the silliest thing in the world because, and I won’t throw names out there, but there are certain SaaS companies that have this in their official documents to suggest that all their agency partners do not include the coupon code within the pop -up itself so that they can increase deliverability.
Greg Shuey (09:12.346)
yeah, you post about that a lot.
Jon Ivanco (09:33.448)
really what they’re trying to do is take acquisition dollars and be able to attribute them to that welcome flow instead. And it sucks because they don’t care. And most of these platforms don’t even have a subscription conversion rate within them. So you don’t know how something’s performing unless you download a bunch of data points into a spreadsheet and run your own calculation. It’s nuts. But the customer journey in my ideal sense,
I get to a website, I take a look around, everything’s clear and well laid out. That menu is spectacular. There’s no need to go through a quiz to find a couple of products that I’m looking for. I just know where to go. I get there to that product page. I see the product pictures. They’re up close. They’re brilliant. I go down. There’s a nice little description. There’s no trademarked new material weirdness that’s there. They tell me what it’s actually made of.
I see a video of someone actually interacting with the product with up close, you know, B roll over that explaining why they made it that certain way, what the differences that they have in most garments, et cetera. Get down, explain those a little bit in more detail that are broken down into words. And then I see reviews and FAQs around like the buying stuff. What’s your warranty? Sizing, how does that work? And like detail, like real, real detail. Not this is gonna fit you more or less this way.
If it doesn’t fit, we got you covered, you know, et cetera, it’s our process. You’re gonna, we’re shipping like one or two days while everything’s just clearly laid out. Then, I’ll spend some time there. Show me an offer. If I close the first one, show me that offer again. Auto apply that shit to my cart and let me check out with Apple pay so I can have all my information obscured and then get my stuff automatically. Cause I want a one click. Like that’s my customer journey that I want. And.
I do buy products that way. It’s crazy. I posted about like Stant socks the other day. I saw a Reddit post. They were on sale. Went there. Apple pay. Done. Like that’s how I shop and I buy. And it was zero friction on the way of doing that. And God, I just wish more stores were straight and not trying to be cute and not trying to be like overly branded or do too many things with the visuals. Just make stuff that’s functional and works.
Greg Shuey (11:47.258)
100%, yeah. I think most stores go in one of two directions, right? They do it really well, or they just don’t put in the effort whatsoever.
Jon Ivanco (11:56.936)
I look at this, you got a phone in your pocket, I got a phone in my pocket. If I own a store, I got my best sellers, I have them all around my house anyway, right? I’m designing this shit. Take out the phone, film a video. It doesn’t have to, it’s got 4K on it. Go get a tripod or, you know, like just set it up and just start talking to the camera. Does it need to be perfect? No. Are you going to be better than 99 % of the stores out there? Yes. The barrier is so low to like…
just be better. And I talked to so many stores and I was asked the same things. I was like, that’s your best seller? Why is it just to have a description and then go to reviews? Like what happened to the video and what happened to all the other stuff that you could just add? Would you just show me… If I met you in person, would you just show me pictures and then like bring out reviews? No, you would explain it to me. You’d be like, this is why we made it. You give me some backstory to it.
Greg Shuey (12:28.026)
Go.
Jon Ivanco (12:55.144)
You’d like show me around it. We can’t do that online. There’s nothing stopping you from doing it via your camera and a tripod. Please spend the 10 minutes taking a rough cut. You’re going to be fine.
Greg Shuey (13:05.082)
And that it literally takes 10 minutes to do the video, build out the FAQs, build out the product description. It’s 10 minutes. Do a few each week.
Jon Ivanco (13:13.512)
But you know how lazy we are. We’re so lazy that we have meta fields in Shopify to move the same description across all of our products. It sucks. And I’m not going to lie, it does suck. But if you have like 100 SKUs, odds are 20 of them are driving all your revenue. Build out 20 templates. It’s going to suck for like approximately two days. But then you’re going to be done. And then once you’re done, you’ve got 20 products, 10 minutes of
Greg Shuey (13:21.882)
Yeah.
Jon Ivanco (13:39.848)
You got like four hours, less than four hours of total film that you have to do. And then you’ve got two days of whatever you are literally done in. Shit, less than a week and you’ve got everything completely done. You just don’t do anything else during that week and it is fully set up and your conversion rate is going to skyrocket just because you’re doing something that not everyone else is doing.
Greg Shuey (14:00.154)
I love it so much. Sweet man. Well, you know, the main reason that I wanted to have you on is because I wanted to talk primarily about one of the features that you just launched on platform, which you’ve dubbed as frictionless forms. So.
Jon Ivanco (14:17.608)
We trademarked that three years ago and honestly I think we weren’t quite there to use it in our things until the other day. So I mean a little bit of foreshadowing on making that happen.
Greg Shuey (14:27.77)
That’s amazing. So I’m sure you’re going to pull a customer journey into this, but can you can you share what led to this change and why brands should be thinking this way and moving this direction?
Jon Ivanco (14:33.48)
Hehehe
Jon Ivanco (14:42.888)
So it’s really ironic because it’s what everyone says, you know, if you ask people that had carriages, what they wanted, they’d say faster horses. And we started to get requests of the normal feature that already exists. People started to be like, hey, can I have a button that adds a coupon code if they click on it, et cetera? And I was like, yeah, sure, but that doesn’t make any sense. Why aren’t we just auto adding it behind the scenes so no one ever has to worry about doing that extra action?
Greg Shuey (14:50.042)
Yep.
Jon Ivanco (15:10.536)
And then we started really looking into why things existed the way they existed. And pop -ups, for the most part, are dominated by people that have an incentive to not be customer friendly. They want your email, they want your SMS, because they make all their money off sending that stuff. And then we realized…
Greg Shuey (15:31.962)
whether it’s an in -house person or an agency, they’re looking at that number and reporting that back to marketing leaders and that’s how they show their value.
Jon Ivanco (15:39.272)
It’s not even that KPI though. It’s the KPI of your ESP or your SMS sender because they want as many profiles in there as possible so they can charge per thing sent out. They have zero incentive to let people drop off or to allow people to transact on site because then they lose out on that revenue that’s attributable to the thing. It’s a fundamental conflict of interest between those that are using that data to communicate and those that are
Greg Shuey (16:00.282)
Interesting.
Jon Ivanco (16:08.04)
that are providing the data because everyone is inherently selfish about what they want to get out of things. As a company, we don’t do the sending of the emails, we don’t do the sending of the SMS, so we have no stake in this. It doesn’t matter to us, which caused us to rethink what that journey should look like. Ideally, if I come to your site, and I do this all the time, I always go to sites that I track a lot of golf brands. So I…
sign up for their newsletters, and so it was two -step. The first step, so it was email. I don’t mind ever providing that. Then I get to SMS, and I noticed that I never provide SMS, and that I would never know or be notified if I was sent a code. And it always made me feel like I had to submit both to do it, but then they just give it to me anyway. So that’s kind of misleading and fraudulent. So we looked at this and we said, well,
If 50 % of people are dropping off on that second step and you go to a blank screen, that sucks. You’re forcing me to leave the website to check and see if maybe I got an email. I signed up for a discount because I wanted to use it, and now you’ve just taken it away from me. So the whole notion behind this was, OK, well, what if we change the behavior of the close button?
And we got a lot of pushback on this internally. I posted on Reddit and I got absolutely skewered on this. But I was like, you know what? It’s terrible UX UI to do that. But you know what? This is surprise and delight and the benefit far outweighs the downside of messing with someone’s ability to close something out. And we built so much logic into this. It only happens on certain steps after certain actions are taken. We back tested all of this stuff.
So it started as like, wouldn’t it be cool turned into, my god, there’s so much logic behind this to make this work right. But when it works, it becomes magic. Because even if you X out, it just tells you that it’s automatically applied. And the kicker to this, though, for me is, how many times have you gotten a coupon code, and then you have to wait till checkout to apply it to see what your total is?
Greg Shuey (18:23.322)
It’s stupid.
Jon Ivanco (18:23.336)
And then you go back to the store and you say, is there anything else I want? Because now I’m below the free shipping threshold or something else like that, because it’s all done on purpose. Now it’s because it’s auto applied. It shows in the cart as you shop. So you get that running total with the discount. And if there’s anything I’ve learned about shopping online is I’m never going to pay full price. But waiting to get to that last step, if you don’t have a coupon code in there, or let’s say you go through a pop up and you dismiss the SMS that you don’t have anything in there.
Greg Shuey (18:38.778)
Yeah.
Jon Ivanco (18:53.48)
Where do you go? It’s either your inbox or you’re going to Google. Usually it’s Google before your inbox because you don’t know if you were sent anything and you’re looking for coupon codes. Yeah. Yeah. But that’s what we do, right? We, by default, our journey as customers is to look for a better deal if we’re shopping online. We’re all fighting this notion of, we shouldn’t, don’t leave it on the site, you know, all this other stuff. It’s like, do you guys not realize that this is the internet?
Greg Shuey (18:59.706)
I’m clicking my honey app or my Rakuten app.
Jon Ivanco (19:20.232)
people are just going to go look for a code somewhere else, and that there’s a 90 % chance that one of them is generic and valid somewhere. And if you’re on affiliate platforms for sure, those are the first 10 links on any page because they outrank everything else. We’re fighting over minuscule margin. And this is just in the post today where the question was, that’s going to kill margin. I was like, price that margin in. 50 % are going to check out without. Just let it happen.
Greg Shuey (19:47.802)
Yeah. Yep.
Jon Ivanco (19:49.416)
Just adjust to the normal buyer journey that is today where everyone wants to feel like a winner. Make everyone feel like a winner.
Greg Shuey (19:55.93)
Because I mean, what’s the alternative, right? I go to Google or I click my Honey app, it picks up a coupon code that probably came from an influencer. Now you’re compensating the influencer and you are just getting hammered.
Jon Ivanco (20:08.712)
But I mean, so this is the debate and this was another debate token. There’s a lot of these people that are coming out with ways to universal IDs and all this other stuff to track people across in order to like minimize the amount of margin we’re giving up through pop -ups. Greg, everyone signs up multiple times using different email addresses, using incognito windows, using everything else. This is not a problem we’re solving. If you try solving this problem and you’re actually successful doing it, you’re adding more friction to someone that was ready to buy a second time.
take the margin hit. We send out so many sales every 90 days, et cetera. This is actually, I will talk about this part too. Because what we notice is that when everyone got obsessed with the margin they were getting from pop -ups, we saw cash back pop -up. I love the concept of cash back two years ago when we were running it. I hated the concept of cash back.
a year and 11 months ago after we stopped running it, because the liabilities on the books are absolutely crazy when you’re giving this stuff out. And then the cheat sheet to doing that and the way that our friends at Fondue now Postscript did it is that they withhold that cash back until after your return period, which could be 30 or 60 days. But when you look at the data, that repeat purchase rate for the highest intent people happens in that first 30 to 60 days. Flip side of that is,
you’re giving someone literal cash so they can wait till your next sale and then they can double dip on that discount. So the discount you gave up or you decide not to give up on the first one gets absolutely smashed and there’s nothing you can do to protect against it because you cannot exclude gift cards from being used as cash during a checkout. So we’re huge fans of short -sighted, like little statistics when we should be looking at like long -term impacts across everything.
Greg Shuey (21:52.73)
Yeah.
Jon Ivanco (22:03.816)
My newsletter had that and I called out Jordan West a little bit on this with his data that he had running his giveaway. But I mean, this is the thing is a lot of people that are claiming that you should do X, Y, and Z for your client actually do not understand the larger implications of doing X, Y, and Z for the business because it makes their individual stats look amazing.
Greg Shuey (22:08.282)
I got a good laugh about that one this weekend.
Greg Shuey (22:27.706)
Yeah.
Jon Ivanco (22:32.008)
but they’re skewed and flawed every single time for the most part. If you see a spike in something working, you have to ask what the downriver effect of that’s going to be. And we’re so bad as marketers for doing this because everyone likes flashy, quick wins instead of consistent business building through real logic and understanding of how variables interact.
Greg Shuey (22:55.578)
Yeah, it’s wild. That’s wild. So how has this, I mean, I’m sure you’ve rolled it out to clients or are you just using it on your own brands?
Jon Ivanco (23:05.256)
We are rolling out to clients currently.
Greg Shuey (23:08.314)
How’s it being accepted?
Jon Ivanco (23:11.208)
It’s a mix. People didn’t realize they had this big of a problem. Now, for us, our forms are pretty well convert, but a lot of people I don’t think want to admit that people were dropping off at that rate on certain steps. We’ve run internal tests with some of our clients about the impact of collecting SMS during sign up, and we found it to be net, it’s a negative, but long term, because you get it upfront, there’s less friction of collecting it upfront, and it turns out to be a positive if they go on and purchase.
Greg Shuey (23:14.586)
Got it.
Greg Shuey (23:23.898)
Yeah.
Jon Ivanco (23:41.256)
is nothing more than a marker of intent, though. So they’re willing to take the hit. The hit’s about 10 % revenue by asking for SMS on signup. This is hopefully going to negate that quite a lot with the restructuring of the logic around that. We expect it to kind of negate what the drop that they’re taking so it becomes a net positive. This is one of the few features that we’ve rolled out where people are like, I don’t even need to A, B test this. This is better. Because people can think.
Greg Shuey (24:08.858)
Done. Putting it up, done.
Jon Ivanco (24:10.568)
They can just relate. They can relate to like the fact that they’ve been through this process before and the frustration and the friction that went along with having to go check another app or do something else. And none of that matters. I’m sure I’m going to upset a lot of other pop -up makers and force them to change maybe, or a lot of ESPs that aren’t going to get the, not the kudos on the welcome series, but at the end of the day, your job is to make people money. It’s not to like pad your stats and figure it out. Right. Like, but.
Greg Shuey (24:36.89)
Yeah.
Jon Ivanco (24:38.792)
We’re seeing good results. So we tested for a while beforehand and we saw an increase of between 15 and 20 % subscription to conversion rate, which was great to see. I just like watching people. I’ve even had people write in a customer support. They’ve been like, I forgot to add my coupon code. I’ve taken a screenshot. I mean, like, we got you. It’s already added. But that’s the other thing that’s been coming back. So some of our clients have older clientele. They always forget to put it in. But then,
Greg Shuey (24:58.01)
Dude, it’s already in there.
Greg Shuey (25:04.986)
Mmm.
Jon Ivanco (25:08.456)
customer service, you always add it by default to the order. You don’t mess with that. You say, go on and use it on your next purchase. You’re passing forward that value to the next purchase. Now you don’t got to worry about it. It’s automatically added in. Those long strings too, because every one of our clients, a lot of them use unique codes for the honey problem and everything else. It’s just easier and better for attribution too, like long -term. There’s no need to copy and paste that string anymore. And they’re like, whoa, wait, what?
We can use uniques, plus there’s no string involved. So people can’t mess up a zero and an O anymore because a lot of people don’t put in monospace for their coupon codes. I don’t know why yet, but like there’s all these little things that you would hear about, but marketing teams wouldn’t hear about it because they don’t run customer support. They don’t talk to each other. And unless you run your own thing and you’re running both, you start seeing some of these problems that frequently come up. And there’s so many little things like…
Greg Shuey (25:44.57)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (25:56.922)
Yeah.
Jon Ivanco (26:06.76)
That’s just it’s just a better experience if you can figure it out
Greg Shuey (26:10.682)
Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s so great. All right. I know we’re kind of coming up on time here. I do have kind of one question for you and it comes back to metrics. All right. I threw out a couple of metrics. You’re like, hang on, but this, so when it comes to subscription rates, when it comes to getting people to opt in and turning them into customers, like what?
Jon Ivanco (26:21.48)
Okay.
Jon Ivanco (26:29.608)
Hehehehe
Greg Shuey (26:40.154)
in your opinion, are the most important metrics that a brand should be monitoring.
Jon Ivanco (26:46.632)
That’s a great question. So take a step back. What influences your initial metrics? It’s audience. And it’s the quality of the audience that’s going to be determinative of whether or not people are going to sign up, purchase, et cetera. And I think for the longest time, we’ve completely forgot that it all comes up to is the audience quality or not? And how am I driving that audience? If you’re driving everyone through SEO, like for your brand,
and everyone’s coming in through SEO and they’re coming in for specific track parts and they got that nailed down, you’re going to have a high quality audience. You should have an incredibly, yeah, and you should have an incredibly high opt -in rate. Incredibly high. You should be juicing that for as much data points as you can to improve your SEO on that flip side. That’s the way that works. Now, what really bothers me is that there’s been certain narratives that have existed within our own space of SaaS where everyone’s like, opt -in rates, all that matters.
Greg Shuey (27:23.93)
and great conversion rates. Yep.
Jon Ivanco (27:46.472)
Sure, if I get 1 ,000 people to opt in and 100 convert, that’s a 10 % conversion rate. That’s not bad, but I did good stuff. My list is fat. I’m paying for every single email I send out. Let’s do a calculation how much that’s costing me. Sweet. But I don’t know anything about these people. So I don’t know what differentiates a high quality person from a low quality person. Sweet. OK, all right, that’s something, I guess. Subscription to conversion rate. How many people are signing up and actually purchasing something? OK, that’s.
That also counts for something. How much are they spending if they sign up? Are they buying like one or is the AOV creeping up? How do we figure that out? I had that conversation with someone the other day and they’re like, AOV doesn’t matter in sign up rates. I was like, I don’t know what you’re looking at. It plays a role. I like to know what that number is because if that number is super low on one of my forms, then I got to figure out where is that form hitting someone in the journey. And do I need to be?
eliminating that form entirely and waiting until they’re deeper into the journey? Or does the offer change for that person if they’re coming in? And we’ve messed around with this. If you’re running paid ads or Facebook ads, et cetera, sometimes it’s better not to give the standard offer, but to have that reposition them to unlocking an offer that’s only available for that channel. You sacrifice margin, but you’re not giving it away via coupon code, and you can change that journey. For me, though, it’s…
Greg Shuey (29:00.506)
Hmm.
Greg Shuey (29:07.482)
Yeah.
Jon Ivanco (29:10.28)
The bottleneck of looking at all of these in a silo or in a vacuum is what gets people in trouble. Because if you’re running an A -B test, and I love it, like, I won’t, Klavi is a great partner. I love everyone that does this in their forums. It’s them, Sendlay, and everyone that’s ever got pop -ups in their forums, they always do their A -B test based on opt -in rate, and that’s how they pick their winner.
yet they never naturalize the amount of views relevant to other statistics. And we have no idea what source of traffic those individuals came from broken down to figure out. Now there are certain ways that you can get to it, but it’s like an absolute bitch to look at and try to figure out. But like when I’m looking at something and I really want to test an offer, it’s one Facebook ad, one campaign, one ad set, one ad to one landing page.
Greg Shuey (29:38.106)
Hmm.
Jon Ivanco (30:02.888)
And then I will run my A -B test on that because it’s clean. And then I’ll naturalize the numbers at the end based on the percentage signup rate, percentage subscription to conversion rate, and number of orders. So I can naturalize all the numbers across because when you work with really large stores that are doing like an absolute lot, you can’t run a standard A -B test the same way. You have to run it across all the different variables to figure out, hey, this is giving me more revenue.
Greg Shuey (30:06.138)
Yeah.
Jon Ivanco (30:30.216)
But honestly, over time, this is probably going to be better for you. And then the crazy stuff that happens, and we’ve toyed with this. We’re not there yet with it. But then you start figuring out, what’s the version, what’s that person that converted? What data path did they have? What data points do you have to that? How do those data points relate to sales and products purchased first and second time in between? Because then you become predictive. And you’ve shifted from,
My opt -in rate was 10 % to my quality of audience via opt -in was 5 .6 % and they have a likelihood of repurchasing in the first 90 days of 75%. I want to find more people like that, but we’re not there yet. And that’s the problem is like, I think where we’re at right now is can I get a higher opt -in rate? Yeah, change the offer. You know, the highest opt -in rate we got was 40%.
Greg Shuey (31:09.466)
Yeah. Yes, we do.
Greg Shuey (31:20.698)
Yeah.
Jon Ivanco (31:25.608)
And we gave away a $10 gift card for anyone that signed up and checked out with that gift card. You know why we stopped running that offer? We were attracting a lot of people that just wanted free stuff. And this is the comment that I had on the giveaways. Giveaways are never going to be a good thing. And anyone that says gift with purchase, I didn’t come there to buy the gift. I know it might give you better results for right now, but I.
Greg Shuey (31:36.858)
Yep.
Jon Ivanco (31:51.976)
It’s always a percentage. It’s always less than Black Friday and more than a bundle. That’s how I do this stuff all the time because Black Friday, you’re going to go deeper and no one’s going to use that. A bundle is already available to everyone. So you’re signing up and you’re kind of fooling someone that doesn’t leave a good taste in people’s mouths. But if you hit that sweet spot more often than not, that’s going to be your highest quality customer because they’re incentivized to spend more. Anyone that says cash off or $10 off your order or $50 or more. I am not incentivized to spend more than $50.
Greg Shuey (31:55.834)
Yeah.
Jon Ivanco (32:21.768)
My biggest benefit is spending $50 and then capping it. Like we’re artificially setting up our own psychological blocks under the guise of A -B testing stuff, which I don’t think most marketers actually understand and it drives me nuts.
Greg Shuey (32:38.778)
No, for sure. Yeah. Those are some great insights and suggestions. Before we wrap up, do you have any predictions for the rest of this year and in the next year in terms of customer journey, forms? What’s the landscape going to look like?
Jon Ivanco (32:56.552)
Yeah, I’ve seen what a lot of people are doing and I think some of it’s pretty interesting. Forms are going to replace welcome series. I already know that’s going to happen because we’re already working on it. So the old model was collect an email, do a welcome series, collect a little bit of data about those people and then hope to put them on like a drip campaign with something good. With forms and data collection, when someone’s going through a form, they’re going to give…
Greg Shuey (33:07.45)
Interesting.
Jon Ivanco (33:23.496)
parts of data and then we can just logic map on the back end that drops them on a contextual landing page at the end with an offer. And I think that’s going to 100 % replace the need for like a welcome series. Because statistically speaking, most people purchase within the first five hours anyway, like of signing up. So if we can figure that out for on page, and as you can see, if you got auto apply coupon codes,
straight dismissal plus logic mapping, there’s no need for anyone to ever go to their inbox for a welcome service to make a purchase. If we can reduce all that friction, conversion rates are going to skyrocket as long as the quality content like videos on those pages, et cetera. So that’s my prediction for where forms are going to adjust to. Everyone’s been talking about, I want to personalize pages based on that. No, you don’t. There’s only so many variables that you want to focus on.
Greg Shuey (33:56.314)
Yeah.
Jon Ivanco (34:20.68)
came up in a call the other day. They were like, I want to personalize everything. I was like, you have six variables. It takes two hours to build those pages. Please just go build those pages. I’m not doing the extra work, but like that’s what’s going to happen to forms. I think sales are going to continue to decline for people that are relying on paid. I think there’s going to have to be a shift in the way that we approach paid generally. I’m watching it on LinkedIn and you can see people start to talk about.
Greg Shuey (34:43.578)
Yeah.
Jon Ivanco (34:49.448)
more, not more advanced features, but more gimmicky features as a means of trying to like pull out this bad situation. But I’m not going to lie. I’ve had a lot of our own clients reach out to me recently and be like, my sales are down. Like I can’t, I can’t fix this and we’re not an expensive product, but for them, it’s too much in the scheme of things because they, they’re just not in that place to make it happen. And it’s happened in the last couple of weeks and I reached out and I’m like, have a feature for you.
Greg Shuey (35:03.45)
Right.
Greg Shuey (35:19.482)
you
Jon Ivanco (35:19.816)
I think it might help you a little bit. If it doesn’t help you, we got some really big problems to work on, right? Like, maybe that’s one of these things where…
Until we can stop looking for silver bullets and until we can reframe how we go to market and always be going to market and treating every day as a launch day, we’re all going to run into problems. Because every day is a launch day. Every day is a chance to launch your products into a new audience. It’s just a matter of figuring out who those audiences are and where they hang out. And we’re so bad at doing that. We’re so bad.
we like UGC and we like all the same stuff everyone else is doing and we like copying what all our people are doing. But we also glorify very large companies that brag about success and we have no idea what their internal stats actually look like. And this is my biggest point of caution to anyone that’s an e -commerce marketer or anyone else looking at this. Just because a company says they’re having super success and has a ton of revenue does not mean they’re making money, profit, or anything else. And that is the hardest part for people to understand.
It’s, and, but we were so bad at it because we want the case studies with all these big brands. And I could, I could see a case study of like, could you imagine seeing like Casper like having Casper as a client back in the day? I’m sure someone watching this had them as a, as a client. Right. And they’re like, we did all this stuff and Casper made so much money. And then they went public and then you fast forward three years and you’re like, they were never profitable. They were making, they were losing a ton of money. Your agency made more money than they made per customer. Like.
Greg Shuey (36:42.074)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (36:53.306)
Oops.
Jon Ivanco (36:58.46)
But that’s what’s going to end up happening in this next cycle. We already see it happening. The last thing I’ll say in terms of what’s happening, Team Lynchine are real, and we’re not giving them the credit they deserve. And I do strongly believe that because they’re sourcing from the same places that everyone is sourcing their goods from. And at the end of the day, they can do volume that.
All these small brands can’t, so you’re going to pay different amounts in terms of margin over the raw cost of the good. And that increase in margin that they have, they’re gapping up to spend and compete with you on social media. It is a losing battle. It’s honestly like, it’s a very much a losing battle.
Greg Shuey (37:38.202)
It’s coming.
Greg Shuey (37:43.226)
Yeah.
Hmm.
Jon Ivanco (37:48.552)
That’s all I got.
Greg Shuey (37:49.69)
That’s all you got. Mic drop. I love it. Well, thanks, man. I appreciate you taking some time. You’re a busy, busy man, so it’s awesome.
Jon Ivanco (37:58.904)
I always enjoy the conversation. It’s the tough ones that we have to have though. And I wish that we heard more of them, more than anything else. I just wish that we didn’t sugarcoat everything as being hunky dory all the time and raw rawing stuff. And I wish that we questioned more things and that we asked for the raw data in every case study that you see, because you can spot like, it might sound really great, but a lot of…
Founders specifically in the SMB space and e -commerce, they’re not finance people. They don’t have the requisite experience with marketing necessarily. They don’t understand the way all this stuff works. And a lot of them, I was talking to some of them the other day, they don’t have experience with retail. They don’t understand what that’s like. They don’t understand that you have to have fun offers from your retailers and that you are responsible for all the stuff that comes back and you have to eat it.
Greg Shuey (38:37.914)
Yeah.
Jon Ivanco (38:54.856)
Right? And I think that was the big claim, like, just do wholesale to offset your paid. It’s not the answer. You got to clean up your own house first before you can figure out how to do it for everyone else.
Greg Shuey (39:02.33)
No, not so much.
Greg Shuey (39:09.818)
Awesome. I love it. It’s good closing. So thank you. Thank you so much, man. Okay. You’re so welcome.
Jon Ivanco (39:15.848)
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.
