Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7-Figures and Beyond eCommerce Marketing Podcast, host Greg Shuey welcomes Anthony Morgan, founder of Enavi, a Shopify-focused CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) agency. Anthony shares his unconventional journey into eCommerce, highlighting the importance of CRO in optimizing the full sales funnel, especially for brands that don’t have large testing budgets. The discussion centers around practical, low-cost CRO strategies that smaller brands can implement to improve conversions without feeling overwhelmed.
Anthony introduces the intersite funnel as a key framework for breaking down conversion steps, identifying bottlenecks, and prioritizing optimizations. He also emphasizes the power of qualitative research—especially customer interviews and post-purchase surveys—in understanding why customers buy (or don’t). The conversation explores overlooked conversion barriers, such as poor product discovery and misaligned messaging, and provides actionable tactics like welcome mats on PDPs (product detail pages) to create a cohesive experience from ad to landing page. The episode wraps up with insights on how eCommerce has evolved toward profitability-focused scaling and the need for brands to master the fundamentals—knowing their customer, refining their messaging, and leveraging financial data to drive sustainable growth.
Key Takeaways
- Use the Intersite Funnel to Prioritize CRO Efforts – Rather than focusing solely on overall conversion rate, break it down into key steps: landing to product view, product view to add to cart, add to cart to checkout, and checkout to purchase. Identify where the biggest drop-offs occur to prioritize improvements.
- Leverage Qualitative Research to Improve Conversions – Talking to just 5-10 customers via interviews can provide powerful insights into why they buy. Post-purchase surveys and onsite polls also help refine messaging and remove conversion barriers.
- Fix Fundamental Issues Before Optimizing for Persuasion – Many brands overlook basic CRO elements like functionality (fixing bugs), accessibility (readable fonts, mobile responsiveness), and usability (clear navigation and product discovery). Getting these right first ensures a solid foundation for CRO.
- Create a Cohesive Ad-to-Landing Page Experience – A major reason for high bounce rates is the disconnect between paid ads and the landing experience. A quick fix is adding a “welcome mat” on product pages—highlighting key value propositions to orient users immediately.
- Sustainable Growth Requires Mastering the Fundamentals – The days of easy Facebook ad scaling are gone. Successful brands now focus on profitability, knowing their customers deeply, and refining their financial strategy to scale sustainably in a highly competitive eCommerce market.
Questions To Ask Yourself
- Where are my biggest conversion drop-offs in the customer journey? (Landing page? Add to cart? Checkout?)
- When was the last time I talked to a real customer to understand why they buy—or don’t?
- Do my product pages clearly communicate the most important value props, or do they assume too much?
- Is my paid ad experience fully aligned with the landing page, or am I creating confusion?
- If I had to improve one part of my site today that would boost conversions the most, what would it be?
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Anthony Morgan LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anthonycmorgan/
Enavi: https://enavi.co/
Intra-Site Funnel Looker Studio Report: https://go.enavi.co/looker-studio-report
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:01.332)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Seven Figures and Beyond eCommerce Marketing Podcast. I am your host, Greg Shuey. I created this podcast to help D2C business owners and marketers who are stuck and are trying to find a way to grow their businesses. My guest today is Anthony Morgan. He is the founder of Enavi. I got it right. I promise you we had a long discussion about how to this name before we started.
Anthony Morgan (00:26.67)
Yes, he did.
Greg Shuey (00:31.06)
They are a human obsessed Shopify CRO agency that focuses on getting to the why behind why your customers buy and leveraging that to produce long-term sustainable results. Our topic today is going to be around CRO, conversion rate optimization.
I know we’ve covered this topic in one form or another over the last year or so, but today will be just a little bit different. Over the next 30 to 40 minutes, we are going to get really practical in terms of the process and how to make it work for smaller brands that don’t have huge testing budgets. I would say that that’s one of the things I hear all the time, right? It’s like, don’t have money to do CRO. I’ve heard it’s really expensive. So we’re gonna dive into that.
Anthony, thanks so much for being with us today.
Anthony Morgan (01:26.382)
Yeah, thanks for having me, Greg. I’m excited.
Greg Shuey (01:28.702)
So before we jump in, I ask everyone this question, it’s one of my favorites, is would you take just a few minutes, introduce yourself to our listeners, and share a little bit about your personal story and then how you’ve gotten to where you are today.
Anthony Morgan (01:43.874)
Yeah. So as Greg said, I’m Anthony, founder of Enavi. I went to school for music and quickly failed at that. By failing, I mean, I found out there’s no money in music. And then somehow I stumbled into e-commerce. I think I talk to people all the time and that’s kind of the common trend is we stumbled into e-commerce. We had no intention of coming into this industry. Somehow we got here.
And that was definitely the case of mine. I was literally folding and packing t-shirts in a warehouse and this brand that I worked for found out that I was learning how to develop and they’re like, Hey, we need a Shopify developer. At that point, I didn’t even know what Shopify was, but I said yes. And then it led to a bunch of open doors and opportunities within the e-commerce space. And I figured out.
CRO and had an opportunity to do that with some amazing brands and realized this is what I love. And then decided to start eNavvy and focus in on CRO. Cause I saw massive opportunity in the industry where it’s a very important part of the funnel and improving the funnel is conversion rate optimization. And most brands aren’t doing it. They don’t know how to do it. There’s a lot of misconceptions.
And so that’s why we started ENAVY was to really help brands bring in a CRO process. So they’re not just stuck trying to improve their onsite experience by guessing or focused on just improving creative, but they actually have a full picture of the funnel and can make really incremental impact to their revenue.
Greg Shuey (03:26.888)
I love it. That’s a fantastic story. Working, packing t-shirts, to website development, self-taught, I’m sure, and then to CRO. That’s awesome. Cool, cool.
Anthony Morgan (03:30.766)
Yep.
Anthony Morgan (03:38.306)
Yeah, I like to say it. I Googled my way to where I’m at.
Greg Shuey (03:42.388)
I think that’s probably most marketers, right? A lot of Google. Today it’s probably a lot of chat GPT. that’s the way. School of hard knocks. How about that?
Anthony Morgan (03:45.634)
Yeah. yeah.
Anthony Morgan (03:53.326)
100%, 100%.
Greg Shuey (03:55.708)
I love it.
Greg Shuey (04:41.908)
All right, you ready to jump in? Perfect. OK, so first question. How can smaller brands jump into CRO without feeling overwhelmed by the complexity of A-B testing or large scale experiments?
Anthony Morgan (04:45.07)
Yeah, let’s do it.
Anthony Morgan (05:00.076)
Yeah, I think the most important place to start is by focusing and having a clear priority. think that the biggest problem that we see with CRO efforts, and to be honest, this was very much learned by experience and working with brands and realizing we were getting stretched too thin, chasing a bunch of shiny objects, not having any clear focus, going only an inch deep on problems and not
a mile deep and actually fully solving them. And so that’s where if you have a clear focus and a strategic priority is super important. And the way that we do this is we believe that conversion rate is really a vanity metric. It doesn’t tell you a whole lot. It is influenced by a thousand different variables that are outside of your control typically.
And so what we do is we take conversion rate and break it up by the four steps that lead to a conversion in what we call the inter-site funnel. And so you’ve got landing to product view, users that land on their site, what percentage of them actually view a product, product view to add to cart, the number of users that get to a product page and then add to cart, add to cart to checkout, checkout to purchase. And so those four steps in the funnel, you take those, look at how your site is performing.
And you’re kind of looking at those individuals, those metrics individually, though they work together and ultimately produce what you see as conversion rate. And that can tell you where your problems are at. Cause most of the time we’ll see brands over index into thinking, we need to work on our checkout. But the reality is there’s only so much you can squeeze out of your checkout. And if you’re a smaller six, seven figure brand, it’s not going to move the needle enough. There’s not enough traffic there to really make a difference.
Greg Shuey (06:35.988)
Mmm.
Greg Shuey (06:49.182)
Got it.
Anthony Morgan (06:49.294)
And so what we’ve seen in the data is like over 70 % of brands struggle with product discovery, which is that landing to product view. And they’ll have, they’ll drive traffic to their homepage or their collection page, or even blogs, sometimes pages that aren’t like your typical custom landing page that almost acts as a PDP. And then those users aren’t actually viewing products. You know, only 30 % of them get to a product page and that’s a massive bottleneck. And so that is really the first step.
Greg Shuey (06:55.048)
Hmm. Yeah.
Greg Shuey (07:14.068)
Okay. Yeah.
Anthony Morgan (07:18.446)
is finding focus by using the inter-site funnel. And that can tell you, okay, this is where we should focus our efforts. We should be looking at the homepage. We’ve got 30 % of traffic going there, but only 25 % of them are getting to a product page. So we need to look at that area and the different elements that are ultimately going to influence that.
Greg Shuey (07:32.595)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (07:39.46)
I love that. actually was listening to a podcast this morning that was talking about why individuals and businesses keep failing to hit their goals. It’s because they’re focused on that like lagging indicator of conversion rate. But if you go up funnel, you can identify other problems that are more like leading indicators that then you can start to apply some pressure towards. That is awesome. I love it. Cool. So on the podcast, we’ve talked quite a bit about
Anthony Morgan (07:51.906)
Yeah.
Anthony Morgan (08:00.834)
Yep, exactly, Yeah.
Greg Shuey (08:08.018)
research and using qualitative data. So in your opinion, what role does that qualitative research play in CRO, especially for brands that have limited resources or some may even have limited data? And can you walk us through some examples of low cost qualitative research?
Anthony Morgan (08:28.354)
Yeah. So when it comes to CRO, and it’s the reason why we call our approach human obsessed CRO is because really at the core of CRO is you’re trying to influence a human to take an action. And in order to do that, you need to understand why do they take the action in the first place, those that actually do, and why do they not take the action? If you have that knowledge, you can then increase the likelihood that they do, increase the motivation that leads them to take that action.
decrease the friction that reduces the likelihood they take that action. And really the way that you can get to that why is through qualitative research. And so it is by far the most powerful thing you could do within your e-commerce brand. It’s the most powerful activity, I believe. Because in business, you only exist because of your customer, right? And the truth is you wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for your customer. And so we like to say this and we like to think about this whenever we’re
working with a brand is knowing your customer is far more important than your product. Like it’s far more important than your product. And so when it comes to actual qualitative research methods, especially ones that are like lower effort, if you don’t have a lot of resources or time to do it, if you do have the time, talk to your customers. Customer interviews are super powerful and literally, yeah. And I’m not saying like you have to talk to 20 customers.
Greg Shuey (09:52.254)
Pick up the phone.
Anthony Morgan (09:57.73)
You could talk to five or 10. it doesn’t even, you don’t have to talk more than 10. You’re going to see the same trends after you talk to 10 and it’s going to, you’re going to have diminishing returns. Like 10 is probably the max. And anytime that we do customer interviews, it’s somewhere between five and 10 is the sweet spot. But there’s so much power in that. like we worked with an outdoor brand a couple of years back, they were expanding into e-bikes when e-bikes were kind of really hitting the market hard.
And it was struggling. was really hard expansion for them. They were just struggling to get their paid social to really scale like their other campaigns had. And so we conducted some customer interviews and we learned so much about their customers. We ended up pairing it with also interviews of competitors, customers too. So it gave us like this fuller picture, but just in that scenario, we were able to learn like,
Greg Shuey (10:50.206)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Anthony Morgan (10:55.874)
how knowledgeable the customers were when it comes to actual eBanks, how they’re using them. Because the reality is every customer is purchasing your product to ultimately complete a job. They’re hiring it for a job. So whether you’re selling toothpaste or baby swaddles, there’s a job that they’re trying to complete, and understanding that job is super important. And in my opinion, customer interviews is the best way to do that. Now, if you’re not willing to put in that time in to
Greg Shuey (11:16.563)
Yeah.
Anthony Morgan (11:24.43)
In this case, it’s probably if you’re talking to five, you’re looking at five, I would say 15 minute conversations and then leave yourself an hour or two hours to analyze. It’s really like half a day’s worth of work. So it’s not that much. But you could look at post purchase surveys.
Greg Shuey (11:39.209)
No.
You do need to read that much analysis time so you can just take the transcript and put it in ChatGP and probably get you halfway there.
Anthony Morgan (11:49.568)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. mean, no doubt, no doubt. could probably do it at all. If you’re talking to five customers at 15 minutes, you could probably do it all in less than two hours. And so in my mind, it’s not that much effort, but when people think about having to actually pick up the phone, you got to get the customers and their phone numbers, call them or set up customers who are willing to do interviews. There’s a process there that has to happen, but…
Greg Shuey (12:00.19)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (12:10.174)
Yeah.
Anthony Morgan (12:18.378)
It’s the best way to do it. You can do post purchase surveys. Those work well too. You can do onsite polls. That works well because you’re talking to non-customers, those who haven’t purchased yet. And you can identify some maybe layers of friction that you didn’t know exist when you talk to customers who have purchased. So there’s other methods to that work that are probably lower effort. But in the end, I think you’re going to get to the same kind of.
results and start to really paint a clear picture of why your customers buy and why they don’t buy, then you can take that, improve your onsite experience, really improve your creative. There’s so many added benefits to qualitative research beyond just CRO.
Anthony Morgan (13:51.468)
Yeah, I mean, I think it all goes back to the Intersite Funnel. So what we talked about at the beginning is understanding from your Funnels performance where the opportunities are. And then based off of that, you’re going in and saying, okay, what are the elements that ultimately influence users to take the action that we’re trying to create? Right? So if you’re struggling with landing to product view and you drill down on that to
you know, users by landing page. And you see that, okay, we’ve got a high percentage of traffic landing on our homepage that aren’t viewing products. And you’re going to look into that, right? That that’s where you’re going to focus. You’re going to focus on the homepage and the elements within that that could be affecting that. all going to vary based off of how your site is structured, the size of your catalog, those types of things. But your homepage hero, that’s going to play a massive part. Most brands don’t orient well. You land on their site and you’re like, wait, what do they sell?
Why would I buy here? Where am I at? Like, what is this? And so that’s an important area. Then right below that, whether it’s above the fold or near the fold, that below hero section is super crucial. That really should be driving a lot of product discovery. Whether that’s driving users into featured collections or best sellers, whatever makes sense for your brand, your product line, and how your customers discover products, that is a crucial area.
Greg Shuey (14:51.06)
Yeah.
Anthony Morgan (15:20.61)
your navigation, tons of brands are going to have navigations that are cluttered. When we look at navigation, you shouldn’t really have an about us blogs, you know, all of those like non sales related navigation items should be buried in a secondary nav. It should be below and separate out your primary nav so that it’s focused on shopping and keep it simple. Like usually no more than five is what we try to do.
Greg Shuey (15:39.699)
Interesting.
Anthony Morgan (15:49.544)
There’s different scenarios where you got massive catalogs where you need to have more of that. But typically, when it comes to navigation, the more simple, the better. Those are going to be the three elements when you’re looking at home page in particular that you would focus in on. It’s obviously going to vary based off of where the intracite funnel says you’re struggling the most. And then you’ll just think about the elements there that are ultimately going to influence that action the most.
Greg Shuey (15:49.553)
and
Greg Shuey (16:19.036)
Interesting. All right. Cool. So what are some of the most common conversion barriers that really go unnoticed that have a significant impact?
Anthony Morgan (16:31.052)
Yeah, that is a great question. think when we’re, when we’re looking at brands in the six and seven figure range, the most common conversion barriers we see is brands not getting the fundamentals, right? So when it comes to conversion optimization, we like to think of it kind of like in this five step pyramid and really the three foundational areas.
Greg Shuey (16:49.0)
Yeah.
Anthony Morgan (17:00.094)
our functionality, like does it function? Is there bugs? Like just fix broken stuff first. Like that, that should be what you, you make sure that your site actually functions as it should, right? The second thing is accessibility. This obviously could talk about ADA, but there’s stuff that stretches beyond ADA. Like a lot of brands have really small, small font sizes that on mobile, it’s actually not that easy to read for many users. or
Greg Shuey (17:17.576)
Mm-hmm.
Anthony Morgan (17:28.142)
Accessibility could also be responsiveness, your mobile experience as a whole. if you’re looking at your inter-site funnel and you’re looking at how mobile performs versus desktop, typically higher up the funnel, like landing to product view, product view to add to cart, we’re looking for very little parity. We’re looking for parity between both of those metrics. So like maybe desktop outperforms by 10, 15, usually no more than 20%. If it’s more than 20%,
it kind of creates a red flag for us. Like, hey, maybe there is something in the mobile experience that is actually hurting this step in the funnel. Like users are seeing something in desktop that they’re not seeing in mobile, especially when we’re looking at the same segments. Like if we’re looking at direct or we’re looking at paid social and there’s, you know, desktops way outperforming mobile, then we should really try to understand what’s going on. Yeah. With that mobile experience. and so that’s the second one there is accessibility. And then the third one is usability. Like
Greg Shuey (18:02.718)
and
Anthony Morgan (18:25.226)
Is it actually, does it actually make sense how it’s set up? Is it usable? Can the user navigate it? Can they complete the job that they’re trying to do in the buying process? And that, those are like the foundational things. Before you move on to having an intuitive or persuasive experience, you have to get those things right. And most of the time when we’re working with brands in that seven figure range, a lot of our like initial
three to six months with them is getting some of these foundational things right. Because those are often overlooked or missed in the process of trying to move fast as a brand.
Greg Shuey (18:56.414)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (19:04.468)
Yep. I see a lot of the time is, you know, when you’ve got your customers and you know the problem that they’re trying to solve and having a mismatch with your messaging, your positioning, that being a huge issue as well.
Anthony Morgan (19:20.334)
yeah, no doubt. And that’s where the qualitative research comes into play, right? So knowing your customer and understanding like what they actually care about, what matters to them is huge. It’s massively important. And like a simple activity, if we’re going back to that previous question you asked is I would challenge a brand to think about, when you think about your, let’s just focus on like a core product or your
Greg Shuey (19:29.416)
Yep. Yeah. Yep.
Anthony Morgan (19:49.838)
core value props as a brand. What are those? Let’s go five things. Those five things that you think are most important. Throw those in a post-purchase survey, and then ask your customers, why did you buy, pretty much. Don’t use that exact question, but something like that. And you could allow them to select multiple. You could allow them to rank. You could allow them to select one. However you want to do it doesn’t really matter.
Greg Shuey (19:53.054)
Mm-hmm.
Anthony Morgan (20:20.078)
But beforehand I challenge you to rank them what you think they’re gonna be because most of the time we actually see brands are missing it and I go we did this with a cookware brand and they sold ceramic cookware and they were pushing the heirloom durability of the product as like what was what people really cared about and the customer did did not care about that the
Greg Shuey (20:24.424)
It’s just.
Greg Shuey (20:42.003)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (20:45.276)
and the customer doesn’t care.
Anthony Morgan (20:49.742)
And in fact, the three things that the brand thought was most important ended up being in the bottom three of those top five. The top, the top thing, it was like 95 % of customers said this was non-toxic. And it was not only customers, we took that same survey and then did it as an onsite poll. Uh, and so these were non-customers, people who hadn’t purchased and they were saying the same thing. The biggest thing is when you actually looked at their experience, when you looked at the.
Greg Shuey (20:55.804)
fuck
Greg Shuey (21:09.619)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (21:17.47)
Mm-hmm.
Anthony Morgan (21:19.694)
the, website, when you looked at their emails, when you looked at their creative, it was not talking to that non-toxic. They weren’t beating the customer over the head about the fact that it was non-toxic. And so it was a massive miss. That’s a simple activity that can help you like get to that exact disconnect that many brands have is they just don’t quite know what’s most important to their customer. And then they’re, they’re preaching on the things that don’t really matter.
Greg Shuey (21:33.929)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (21:48.764)
It’s wild that that one little change can have such a drastic impact with conversion rate as well. Just creating that alignment and helping it to be like more resonating with the customer, right? It’s crazy.
Anthony Morgan (21:56.792)
Yeah.
Anthony Morgan (22:02.062)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and then what you do is once you learn that you not only take it and you go out and test creative, but you then take that and you say, okay, on our product page, how can we include imagery that pushes non-toxic? How can we improve our sales pitch? So it hits on non-toxic. How can we amplify product reviews and social proof that touches on non-toxic?
What are the different ways that we can hit on that same important key motivator for customers and make sure that they’re seeing it? Because customers digest content in different ways. Some look at images, some look at video, some read. And so it’s really important to hit on those important things over and over again to make sure that your customers are actually seeing it and it’s actually sticking.
Greg Shuey (22:57.524)
That’s fantastic, I like that. Okay, so I think we’ve hit on it a few times. A lot of times small brands don’t have a lot of money to invest into this kind of stuff. So as they’re thinking through either getting started with CRO or just starting a business in general, right, and putting up there for Shopify, like what?
can they do to create a customer-centric experience without that budget for research tools or to have agencies to help them? Like, what’s that process they need to walk through and think through?
Anthony Morgan (23:32.814)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so for most brands, unless you are, you know, I would say really CRO doesn’t make sense until you’re like the full CRO process and which includes AB testing. Does it make sense until you’re like 2 million plus a year? If you’re smaller than that, it’s probably not going to make sense. It’s probably not going to produce a return that you’re looking for.
Greg Shuey (23:49.79)
Okay.
Greg Shuey (23:59.316)
Okay.
Anthony Morgan (23:59.448)
But there’s elements of the CRO process that you can instill in your everyday. And so that’s where, if you’re a smaller brand and you don’t have the budget, it doesn’t quite make sense in terms of your traffic volume or revenue to A-B test. That’s where the IntraSight funnel, like we have a free report. Like if you wanted to include it, Greg, they could just literally, it’s one click. It’s a Looker Studio report.
You just select your GA4 property, and it’ll populate with the inter-site funnel. And then it’ll show it by different segments. So you’ll see those four key metrics, and then broken down by device, channel, landing page. That can help give you direction. Now, if you’re a brand that doesn’t have a lot of data to work with, that’s not going to provide that much value for you, because you might over-index into areas that aren’t that important yet. And so that’s where I would say, really focus in on your customer.
Greg Shuey (24:29.748)
Hmm.
Greg Shuey (24:34.782)
That’s awesome.
Anthony Morgan (24:55.304)
make sure you understand your customer and the problem you’re solving and speak to that problem over and over again. That’s what’s going to help you really dial in your creative from the paid side, create a cohesive congruent experience all the way through the journey. And then you won’t be over indexing or focusing on things that ultimately your customers don’t care about and doesn’t really matter to them.
Greg Shuey (25:21.204)
Yep. I like that. Um, I always tell clients and prospects, this is not a one and done thing either. Right? Like you should be talking to your customers every 60 to 90 days. They change their needs change their wants change. And, know, even if we look back a year, right, we live in a very different world in February of 2025 than we lived in 12 months ago.
Anthony Morgan (25:29.323)
No.
Anthony Morgan (25:35.266)
Yep.
Greg Shuey (25:48.948)
Things are so different. so making sure that you stay close to that customer over time is absolutely critical and should be done regardless of if you’re thinking about CRO or not.
Anthony Morgan (25:49.469)
100%.
Anthony Morgan (26:01.024)
Yeah, no, that’s so true because especially in e-commerce, but just in general, but especially in e-commerce, it’s fast moving. The market’s changing. Your competitors are changing. If you’re growing as a brand, you’re expanding into new customers. You’re potentially expanding into new marketing channels, to new sales channels, to new products, categories. And with all of that, there’s changing customers. And so really,
staying on top of who your customer is and why they buy is so crucial. The ground’s constantly shifting below you.
Greg Shuey (26:40.372)
Yep, 100%. All right, so what are some of the very small and simple CRO tactics that small brands can implement quickly without sophisticated tools, without even like a developer to help them or big budgets?
Anthony Morgan (26:58.156)
Yeah, that’s a good question. I would say the first thing to do would be making sure that your landing page and your ad creative. So if you’re driving a lot of traffic from paid, most brands are starting out and they’re driving traffic from paid social. That’s pretty normal. If that’s what you’re doing, even if you’re not, you should have a cohesive experience between the ad and the landing page.
And most brands don’t. They’ll drive traffic to a PDP and they land on this standard PDP that’s got like this gallery, a product title. Yeah, there’s no sales pitch until like 50 % down the product page. And so it’s really important. And actually Google the other day came out with something that they’re going to be doing. I think it’s with
Greg Shuey (27:32.978)
Yep.
Greg Shuey (27:38.515)
on
Greg Shuey (27:41.972)
Yeah.
Anthony Morgan (27:57.262)
it’s going to be affecting their SEO. And also their paid ads is cohesiveness between the either the when it comes to your Google ad, the actual copy that you’re choosing there within that and cohesiveness between that and landing page. Like if that doesn’t exist, they’re going to dock your ad as a result. I’m not, I’m not a paid ads expert, but read that thought that was really interesting. And so
Greg Shuey (28:20.18)
interesting.
Anthony Morgan (28:27.458)
That is, you know, it’s not only important for your customers, but it’s going to be important for Google. And so it makes a massive difference when you have that cohesiveness, because when the user lands, they’re then oriented. know, what can I do here? Why would I do it? You know, what can I buy? Yeah, why? Yeah, seriously, why waste my time when I’m doom scrolling and then hop on your website when I can hit this big X button? Like, you create cohesiveness between the creative.
Greg Shuey (28:43.753)
Why not?
Anthony Morgan (28:55.574)
in your landing page, you decrease the likelihood that users bounce, that you increase engagement. That has positive downstream impact. And so I didn’t really give a tactic there. But if you want a tactic, like one of our favorite approaches to this in creating cohesiveness is if you’re driving traffic to a landing page or to a product page, and you don’t have the budget to create like a custom landing page, you don’t need to.
Well, I’m not like a landing page fan, a custom landing page fan. But what you can do is if you’re driving traffic to product pages, you can create what we call a welcome map. And ultimately, this is just like take what you would use in a custom landing page, like a hero, right? And then you’re pairing that hero with a brief description instead of the product title, some type of description, that’s your header. And then you’ve got like
Greg Shuey (29:28.274)
Yeah.
Anthony Morgan (29:52.426)
three, maybe five bullet points that hit on the most important things, and then a call to action that then drops the user down into the product page. And this sits on top of your product page, and it orients the user. So there can be cohesiveness between the creative and to the landing page. And they’re not just landing on a product page where they’ve got a gallery or a slider of images that maybe don’t even look anything like the ad that they saw, the video, or the
Greg Shuey (30:00.052)
Yeah.
Anthony Morgan (30:21.42)
the image. And so when you do that, welcome that, you can create that cohesiveness. That’s a really easy way. We’ve seen that consistently win from an A-B testing side, especially when it’s congruent and cohesive with the creative that you’re leveraging. And you can spin that up super quickly in any landing page builder and just drop it on top of your product page. You could probably do it within your theme right now. If you’re just running Dawn, you could probably just drop it in there. And it’s one of our, you know,
favorite approaches to improving the cohesiveness of your creative and your landing page.
Greg Shuey (30:58.824)
That’s a great tip. Thank you for sharing that. We’re just gonna take everything home and wrapping it all together. Like, where are you seeing e-commerce go this year? And how should you be thinking about CRO in relation to some of those changes that we might be experiencing soon?
Anthony Morgan (31:19.65)
Yeah, I think the biggest thing that we’ve seen over the last, like, I mean, let’s just say five years in the e-comm space is the days of like 2016 through 2020 where Meta or even before it was Meta was super easy. It was like easy mode. You literally turned it on. You didn’t even have to have product market fit. Honestly. they would just, you know, Meta would find you, the algorithm would find you customers.
Greg Shuey (31:43.028)
You
Anthony Morgan (31:48.856)
Those days don’t exist anymore, right? It’s a lot has changed in terms of what the algorithm has to work with with data. And then a lot has changed in terms of how saturated the market is and how competitive Facebook ads are. And so what I’ve seen consistently happening is every year brands are like working their way back to getting the fundamentals right. Like I would say 2022 brands were like, we got to figure out our attribution. Like where are we actually driving?
revenue, what’s actually driving revenue, right? And then 2023 was like, okay, let’s start to focus more on profitable growth. Like we need to be profitable. Like for a long time, top line was everything. you know, traffic was cranking, top line is everything. And then now it’s like, okay, we’ve got to get our profitability in line. We need to scale profitably. We can’t just
And that’s where you’ve seen all of the newer terms start to take place. Mer, contribution margin, all of these things have popped up over the last two to three years that were never really used previously. And they all have to do with trying to scale profitably. And so that’s the biggest trend that I’m seeing is brands are focusing in on the fundamentals. And that is, I think, more important than ever because there’s a realization that
to compete nowadays in such a saturated market, you have to have the fundamentals right. You have to know your customer, you have to have a good product that solves their problem, and then you have to have your financials in a place that make it so you can scale profitably. And so that means answering questions like, do we need to be first order profitable? Or do we have the LTV slash repeat rate that we don’t quite have to be first order profitable?
but we can still be profitable and scale well. And then, yeah.
Greg Shuey (33:49.8)
the truth is smaller brands don’t have that data and they’re not using it to make the right decisions.
Anthony Morgan (33:54.124)
Yep.
Anthony Morgan (33:57.89)
Yep. Yep, exactly. And if you can get that data early on and start to understand that, it makes it way easier for you to scale. it’s probably a nice peace of mind too, if you can just understand and answer that simple question. And I think another thing is, especially for like six and seven figure brands is it usually doesn’t really take more than one paid channel to scale well.
to eight figures. Like if you can get in one channel, do that well, that can make a a massive, you can grow massively as a brand. don’t have to think about a dozen different channels to do it right. Especially if you’re thinking about that channel in the context of a whole entire customer journey. And so to me, it’s fundamentals, like financials, focusing on one channel, understanding your customer, understanding the customer journey.
Like those are all things that I see more and more brands realizing that, you know, even like nine figure brands that we work with, recognizing that they had foundational issues and they got to get those right to get on track, to be able to really be able to scale in today’s market. They can’t just continue on in the way that they previously did things. And so it’s a really good thing.
Greg Shuey (35:22.308)
It’s mind blowing to me that some of these large brands are no more buttoned up than these small brands and got fundamental issues. Like it’s crazy to me.
Anthony Morgan (35:30.594)
Yep.
Anthony Morgan (35:34.35)
Yeah, people see them and they’re like, they’re the darling of EECOM. They’re like, wait till you get inside and look at the data.
Greg Shuey (35:38.341)
Actually
Greg Shuey (35:43.54)
man, I love that. Well, Anthony, thanks so much for being with us today. I I learned a lot. I’m not a CRO guy. And there’s definitely some things that I need to start taking back to clients and getting them to start thinking about. So thank you. I appreciate it.
Anthony Morgan (36:03.416)
Yeah, thank you, Greg. It was a blast.
Greg Shuey (36:05.33)
Awesome. To all of our listeners, I hope that you’ve taken away two or three really good nuggets of wisdom. Take those things, execute them with excellence, and make sure to tune in next week. Thank you everyone for joining.
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.
