Episode Summary
In this episode of the 7 Figures and Beyond ecommerce marketing podcast, Greg Shuey interviews Will Laurenson from Customers Who Click about customer revenue optimization (CRO). They delve into strategies for direct-to-consumer brands to attract more right-fit customers, increase customer spending, reduce product returns, and generate more value. Will shares his journey into CRO, emphasizing the importance of understanding customer behavior and optimizing touchpoints across the entire customer journey. They discuss practical methods like analyzing free shipping thresholds, relevant upsells, and proactive customer communication to enhance revenue and reduce returns. Will also highlights the significance of customer experience in fostering loyalty and increasing lifetime value.
Key Takeaways
- Customer Revenue Optimization: CRO is about more than just improving conversion rates. It’s about increasing revenue per user by optimizing various touchpoints in the customer journey.
- Effective Upselling Strategies: Successful upselling requires relevant and personalized offers that make sense to the customer, rather than relying on generic AI recommendations.
- Reducing Product Returns: Minimize returns by clearly communicating product details and benefits, disqualifying unsuitable buyers, and providing proactive post-purchase support.
- Importance of Customer Experience: A positive customer experience, including a delightful unboxing and proactive engagement, significantly impacts customer loyalty and lifetime value.
- Utilizing Customer Feedback: Regularly gathering and acting on customer feedback through reviews, surveys, and direct communication can provide valuable insights to improve both products and the overall customer journey.
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Will Laurensn LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/willlaurenson/
Customers Who Click: https://www.customerswhoclick.com/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:01.22)
Hey everyone, welcome to episode 31 of the Seven Figures and Beyond podcast. Hope everyone is having an amazing day and absolutely crushing it. Today’s guest is a friend of mine that I made through LinkedIn and his name is Will Laurenson and he’s from an agency called Customers Who Click. I’ll bet you can guess what that agency does, Customers Who Click.
Their agency specializes in conversion rate optimization and customer revenue optimization. And we are actually going to be talking about the last half of that today. We are going to be discussing how direct to consumer brands can acquire more right fit customers, how to get those customers to spend more money with you, return fewer products and generate more value for your organization.
We haven’t spent a whole lot of time on the podcast yet talking about kind of growing average order value, growing lifetime value, which are two humongous levers that you have to pull in order to start to scale your brand. So I’m really excited about our discussion today. Will, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule to chat today. And I know that you are in London, you’re on the other side of the world from me and it’s getting into the evening hours for you. It’s, it’s, it’s nighttime.
Will Laurenson (01:21.799)
Yep.
Will Laurenson (01:26.311)
It’s coming up to five o ‘clock, so pub time almost.
Greg Shuey (01:28.1)
It’s nighttime. Pub time. I like that. Pub time. We don’t have pubs here. Bars, pubs.
Will Laurenson (01:37.575)
You’re missing out. Pubs are great. Pubs are the best.
Greg Shuey (01:39.812)
That’s awesome. And I’ve never been to London, so I wouldn’t know I’ve never been to a pub. So awesome.
Will Laurenson (01:45.575)
You’ve got to get going to make sure you come over here sometime. Yeah
Greg Shuey (01:48.868)
Cool, will do. All right, before we jump in, would you just take a few minutes to introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your personal story and how you have gotten to where you are today?
Will Laurenson (02:02.951)
Yeah, sure. So yeah, I’m Will Lawrence and I run Customers a Click. Yeah, as you mentioned, a CRO agency. We’re purely e -commerce focused. And I got into CRO, I kind of fell into it, really. I worked for a couple of startups in the earlier days of my career. And oddly, I had the exact same situation at both these startups. They were run by kind of more property sort of people.
They were spun out of bigger businesses. And so they had budgets to spend and they had this idea of, we’ve built the product. Now we’re just going to throw money at it, drive traffic and we’ll acquire customers. And as I’m sure you’re aware, it doesn’t really work like that. There’s a few more steps you have to take. Yeah. So I was running marketing in the UK, both these places and ended up kind of pushing back at them and saying, we’re just blowing money because…
Greg Shuey (02:50.116)
Just a few.
Will Laurenson (03:02.343)
the landing pages you’ve given us are bad, the product’s not doing what it needs to do, our email system’s not set up properly, we’ve got to fix these things. We need this data coming through into emails so that we can personalise them better. The marketing team actually needs control of these landing pages. We need to be able to change the copy, the messaging, the images and things. And after a little while, and actually gathering customer feedback on this as well, I was able to show this.
back to kind of this C -suite and the product team and say, look, we have to start doing things differently because we’re just burning money. I remember for one company, the first one, it was a subscription service. And I think we were at, I don’t know, probably about seven, 8 % of our entire database were actually paying subscribers, which I think is pretty terrible. But we knew the product was good. People actually did like it.
Greg Shuey (03:52.088)
my gosh.
Greg Shuey (03:56.132)
Now.
Will Laurenson (04:00.423)
but there were just problems with it and problems with our acquisition. And anyway, basically the exact same thing happened at this next business that I went to. Again, like we weren’t in control of landing pages. We weren’t really in control of product at all. We were just told we’ve built this thing. You guys need to market it and sell it and growth is your responsibility. Yeah. So if you’re gonna make growth and revenue the responsibility of a team, they’ve got to be able to control it properly.
Greg Shuey (04:18.87)
Figure it out and grow it.
Will Laurenson (04:27.943)
So I started doing more and more customer research, learned about CRO, A -B testing, started to apply some more of that. And then I decided that’s the route I wanted to go. The advertising side just didn’t interest me. And I wasn’t interested in looking up keywords and coming up with creative and ads and things. I was really interested in, if we can get people to click, how do we get them to actually use the website properly? Find what they want, buy what they want.
Greg Shuey (04:44.356)
Yeah.
Will Laurenson (04:57.639)
have a great experience, and then some of that post -purchase stuff as well, to make sure they actually had that good experience and they would buy again. And so I was head of conversion for a gambling company for about 18 months over here in the UK, which is a very different, interesting experience. And then, yeah, I left there in November 19, just before COVID, to set up Customers Who Click. And yeah, I’ve been a guy never since, so about four and a half years now.
Greg Shuey (05:23.556)
Timing.
It’s awesome. Good stuff, man. Well, I appreciate you sharing some of that history. I love this. One of my favorite parts of the episodes is to be able to hear people’s stories and how they got to where they are today because it’s always so unique and, you know, it’s very common to hear, I kind of fell into it. I mean, that’s how I got into marketing. I fell into it, right? So that’s cool. Very cool. All right. Are you ready to jump in?
Will Laurenson (05:35.239)
Yeah.
Will Laurenson (05:53.191)
Yeah, absolutely, let’s do it.
Greg Shuey (05:54.756)
Cool, well let’s start out talking about customer revenue optimization and what it is. I would assume that most people probably have never heard that term before or they’ve heard it and they’re just not quite sure what it is. So can you help our listeners really understand what that is from your perspective and why it’s critical for their business?
Will Laurenson (06:16.167)
So I think it comes partly up the fact that conversion rate or CRO, conversion rate optimization, doesn’t do justice. The name doesn’t do justice for what we actually do. We don’t come in and just deal with conversion rates for a brand. It wouldn’t make any sense. I could increase your conversion rates by sticking a big discount on there, making sure everyone gets free shipping, free returns, and making a bunch of other claims that might not be entirely accurate.
Greg Shuey (06:27.684)
Right.
Will Laurenson (06:46.215)
That’s not going to be beneficial for a business. Yeah, exactly. So when we’re actually testing with a brand, we use revenue per session or revenue per user as our primary metric for tests because that blends both AOV and conversion rate. So if conversion rate comes, it goes up for a test, but your AOV comes down, revenue per user, revenue per session tells us whether you’re actually making more money or not from that test.
Greg Shuey (06:46.468)
or will erode your profits, right? I mean, we can do that all day long.
Will Laurenson (07:15.431)
And likewise, if we run an AOV focused test, if we see conversion rate come down too much because of that, it’s not beneficial for the brand. We don’t want to move ahead with that. And then, so it got us thinking about this and we were like, well, if we’re not even using conversion rate as our primary metric for testing, why do we talk about conversion rate optimization? And it makes sense for B2B, right? When you’re really, really focused on getting quotations.
Greg Shuey (07:43.044)
driving a lead. Yep.
Will Laurenson (07:45.255)
getting people to fill in the lead magnet, whatever, requesting a demo, whatever. Conversion rate optimization makes sense because that’s all you’re trying to do. But for e -commerce, there’s so much more to it. And even beyond the conversion rate and AOV piece, you’ve got to look further and say, well, again, if we increase conversion rates and your revenue per user goes up, great. But if your returns rate doubles as well, that’s a bad thing. Because then that’s…
it’s going to cost you a lot of money because returns cost a lot of money. So the way we look at it is more, what are the touch points that we can get involved with for a brand and help them either make more money or spend or lose less money? So that’s where we came up with the term custom revenue optimization because we’re looking at maximizing the value of everyone who comes through your website.
Greg Shuey (08:39.62)
I love that. That’s awesome. I say it all the time to people I talk with, like we can go out and acquire customers all day long, but are they one -time buyers? Are they heavily discounted focused? Like you need to look at so many other things to bring right fit customers in the ones who are going to spend more on their first purchase, come back and buy over and over again. And then also help spread word of mouth as well. And those.
are the types of customers that you need to go out and acquire. Conversion rate’s just a very small piece of that, so, yep.
Will Laurenson (09:14.631)
To give you another example actually, from that first startup I mentioned, it was a subscription through an app. We had this agency who said, we’ve got this incredible cost per install rate of price of like 50 pence or something, which was insane. Even what was that? Like 10 years ago, that was still an insane cost per install for something like that. And they positioned it as, that’s incredible. We’re doing such a great job. We’re getting you all these cheap installs.
When you look at the data, it was like, I think we spent, I think it was about $10 ,000 on this campaign, on these ads, before we actually started really analysing the data. I don’t think we had a single paying subscriber from that user base. I know exactly why. It’s because we were actually doing, the advertising was perfect, but it was the wrong audience. They didn’t want the value. They didn’t get the value from the app.
Greg Shuey (09:57.06)
man.
Greg Shuey (10:07.588)
Yeah. Yep.
Greg Shuey (10:13.924)
Yeah.
Will Laurenson (10:13.927)
that most people got because they were using it in a different way. And so it didn’t make sense. So that’s the sort of stuff you’ve got to look into with this sort of thing.
Greg Shuey (10:23.46)
Cool, awesome. So let’s move into kind of our next question and or topic, whatever you might call it. So as you’re working to really increase the amount of revenue generated per customer, one of the ways that most brands do that is by aggressive upselling and cross selling. It helps us increase average order value. It also helps us grow lifetime values. So.
There’s a lot of ways to do that. You know, there’s a zillion apps out there on the Shopify app store, like that claim that they can help you with that. But as you’ve worked with clients, like what are some of the most effective ways or strategies to get customers to actually spend?
Will Laurenson (11:13.191)
We’ve had a lot of success with probably, I don’t know about all the different methods, that’s probably claiming quite a lot, but we’ve tried a lot of different things for a lot of brands and we’ve had success. I wouldn’t say there’s one or two particular methods that I would point to and say that’s going to be a winner for you. Obviously, we’ve got the standard ones like really analyze your free shipping threshold and whether you’ve got that set correctly because…
Greg Shuey (11:39.14)
Yep.
Will Laurenson (11:42.631)
you can make more money by moving it either way. A lot of people think, well, could you shift that from $70 to $100 or even $80? But actually, we tested it with a client and actually their free shipping threshold was just way too high in the first place. So we brought it down, which then brought more people up towards it. So their conversion rate went up and people were spending more. And then we’ve done upgrade bundles.
Greg Shuey (11:58.692)
Hmm.
Greg Shuey (12:06.756)
interesting.
Will Laurenson (12:11.271)
where someone’s bought the hero product and we’ve said, why not buy the full kit? We’ve done in cart, we’ve done post purchase, we’ve done all these things. But I think the most important thing to consider is does this upsell make sense to this person? So, you know, go through the journeys on your website, look at what people are buying and make sure that upsells and post purchase upsells, whatever, are relevant to those people. Because too many websites…
Greg Shuey (12:36.484)
Yep.
Will Laurenson (12:38.407)
They stick an app on there, they use the AI recommendations, and it’s just rubbish. There’s nothing that’s actually personalized there. That’s why they see really low take rates and really low revenue through those apps. But if you said, the printer is always the example that I use and pops up everywhere, which is a terrible example to use because no one really uses a printer anymore. Really, thinking about it.
I actually realised I’ve got one up in, I think it’s in that cupboard up there. And that was a surprise to me. I’ve been here almost three years now and I’ve completely forgotten. It went up there when I moved in, it’s never come back out. But anyway, if someone is buying a printer, if they’ve got a printer in their cart, the most obvious upsells to sell them are more ink and more paper. And then if there are any other relevant, you know, accessories or whatever, that sort of stuff, or you might say to them, well, actually,
Greg Shuey (13:29.028)
Yep. Yep.
Will Laurenson (13:38.183)
Amazon do this really well. They say there’s a newer model of this, which is always more expensive because obviously you would do that. But for some people, they will look at and go, well, depending on the category, again, context, they might say, well, if I’m going to spend this money, I might as well spend 10%, 15 % more for the newer model, which I would assume is going to last me longer or is going to be better at this. So yeah, I think that’s really the key to it.
Greg Shuey (13:41.444)
Mmm.
Greg Shuey (14:02.084)
Right. Yep.
Will Laurenson (14:08.615)
Obviously, if you’re a fashion brand with hundreds of thousands of skews, you have to be a bit more general with it. But a lot of brands out there, you will be able to look at what people are buying, what they buy with those products or what they buy next. And you’ll be able to build out manually a lot of the time these upsell flows from after add to cart, in cart, post purchase, and really see a big uplift by just recommending products that people will want to buy.
Greg Shuey (14:37.732)
Yep. Absolutely. Anytime I’m having a discussion with someone about helping them with their email marketing, it’s a very similar conversation, right? They come to us and they’re like, my email isn’t working. I’m not, I’m not getting people to come back and make more purchases. And it’s important to understand that customer journey. And then more important to understand what is the next logical purchase. And I think if you can take that and you can also work that into your upselling and cross -selling strategies on wet on the website and in the checkout process.
That’s when a lot of magic can start to happen as well.
Will Laurenson (15:13.895)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I don’t know if it’s a message, mentioned this someone on LinkedIn earlier today, actually. For a lot of brands, I don’t know if there’s a lack of expertise or a lack of resource, which means that a lot of brands don’t do this. Because you see a lot of a lot of brands, like so many brands, send out generic emails. It’s the same email to everyone. Here is a product that we that we think you’d like. And actually, they send it to everyone. So
Greg Shuey (15:30.18)
Yeah.
Will Laurenson (15:44.167)
I don’t know, do people not know to do this stuff? Or is it a case that, which I think is maybe more likely, people have got really big targets, they’ve got so many responsibilities that they have to handle, then at the time to figure out what these relationships are and what these different paths should be. So they end up just saying, well, I’m just going to send out one email.
Greg Shuey (15:55.652)
Yeah.
Will Laurenson (16:11.943)
I’ll stick a discount on there to make it hit a bit harder.
Greg Shuey (16:15.268)
Yeah, I think it’s probably a blend of the two. There’s a lot of people out there that do have the knowledge gap that they just don’t know. And then there’s a lot of people that are just, I am the marketing department. I’m wearing five different hats and you know, I have a limited amount of resources and I’m just going to do my very best and right now spray and pray and that’s the way it is. So I don’t know. But I do feel like there’s a lot of money left on the table when it does come to this.
this kind of approach.
Will Laurenson (16:46.823)
I mean, and this isn’t just small brands we’re talking about. There are some big brands out there who seemingly like they’re putting no effort into it. But they also put no effort into gathering that data. Can you imagine if like the billion dollar, billion pound retailers actually sent out an email to say, tell us what you’d like to hear about?
Greg Shuey (16:51.648)
Go.
Greg Shuey (16:57.764)
Yep.
Greg Shuey (17:11.396)
Yeah.
Will Laurenson (17:11.783)
They’d get so much data from that, they’d be able to personalize those messages so much better and then make so much more money. And they could do it on autopilot because you just set up a load of automations for it.
Greg Shuey (17:17.028)
Yep. Right?
Greg Shuey (17:23.844)
It’s wild. It’s wild. Cool. So let’s talk about product returns because it’s one of the things that you brought up as we were kind of starting the discussion. And I think it’s also something that not a lot of brands think about as a way to optimize revenue. So as you’ve worked, you know, with brands, what are some of the things they are doing to minimize their product returns with?
Will Laurenson (17:25.127)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (17:53.444)
out compromising customer satisfaction.
Will Laurenson (17:58.055)
So there’s two things that I see working really well. The first bit is disqualify people from buying, essentially. Don’t let someone buy if they’re gonna be buying the wrong product. I know it sounds difficult, but essentially all you have to do is get the right information on the page and make it really, really clear what this product is, how it works, what it does, how it’s gonna benefit them. And people will look at it and be able to say,
Greg Shuey (18:06.372)
Yep.
Greg Shuey (18:12.324)
Yeah.
Will Laurenson (18:28.007)
know what? That’s probably not right for me. I need something slightly different. So they’ll either try and find that on your website or they’ll go somewhere else. And I think people get obsessed with conversion rate, right? Again, so that’s why I don’t like conversion rate optimization because the amount of conversations we have where it starts with, well, what uplift do you think you’ll get to our conversion rate? I’m like, well, firstly, if you drive a load of bad traffic to it,
Greg Shuey (18:32.26)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (18:52.004)
Yeah.
Will Laurenson (18:56.327)
I can’t do anything about that. You’ve got seasonality, but also conversion rate just doesn’t matter that much. The point of that was you need to be willing to let some of that traffic go rather than let them buy and then they return the product and you have to spend all that money and time on that product return. So then not only have you had to give that money back in the first place, but you’re spending more money. I think the stat that I’ve seen is returns cost up to 66%.
the order value. So yeah, two -thirds of your order value as an additional expense because that person has returned it. And even if your brand, it’s 20%. That’s still 20%. So for every $100 that you have to give back to someone, you’re spending $20 on the return. So I think that’s a great example of why…
Greg Shuey (19:27.652)
Wow.
Greg Shuey (19:41.892)
Hmm.
Greg Shuey (19:50.468)
Wow.
Will Laurenson (19:54.887)
you can find ways to disqualify people. I think disqualify people sounds a bit harsh and sounds a bit more B2B really, but essentially what I’m saying is I’ve got a standing desk. I would be disqualified if this desk had been a different size or if it had a different weight load capacity or if it hadn’t been electric. Very simple things that I would have gone, that’s not right for me, so I’m not going to buy it.
Greg Shuey (20:01.572)
Sure.
Will Laurenson (20:24.583)
Okay, so that’d be the first way of doing it. Just make sure people know what they are buying and they’re going to be happy with that. And the second part would be, be proactive after that purchase. So something we really like advising clients to do is, once they’ve sent that order out, get in touch with someone. Ideally, if you’re order tracking, you’ll know when delivery’s happened. So trigger it on that. Send to them an email and say, your package should have arrived.
How is it? Is everything okay? Have you got any questions? Do you need any help setting it up or using it or whatever? Proactively get in there because if they are unhappy, they will appreciate the fact that you’ve reached out and they can speak to someone about it. They’re not going to sit there moaning to themselves or to their partner about it. They’ve got the ability to get back in touch. But then also, if people do have problems, don’t just immediately accept a return.
Greg Shuey (21:23.812)
Yeah. Find the solution.
Will Laurenson (21:24.103)
If I speak to them, find out what’s going on, see if you can find a solution. It might just turn out they are using it wrong. I think there’s a meme I’ve seen which is some guys phoned up a pizza restaurant saying there’s no toppings on the pizza or something. no, it’s an email complaint about a frozen pizza. Or live chat, sorry. God, this is getting worse and worse as a story, isn’t it?
I think it’s a live chat of a frozen pizza thing and he’s complaining about it and then it ends with something like, my bad, I opened it upside down. Right. And that’s it. So it sometimes is as simple as, I hope it’s not as simple as they’ve opened the box wrong, but you know, they could just be trying to use it wrong. Right. And if you can just help them, help them overcome that, they’re not going to return the product and they’ll appreciate the help. So yeah, but then also,
I would say is you can then use that information. If you come across a load of people who are getting in touch with you complaining about a product for a specific reason, and that reason is something that can be fixed, fix it before they buy or fix it in the box. Give them instructions on how to use it. There’s a brand called Air Up, which is like a… I still don’t know if I fully understand it. It’s like a water bottle, but it’s scent -based rather than… So you know like cordial?
cordials and things that you put in water to flavour it. There’s a scent -based thing. So I think you put that thing in the lid so that whenever you’re drinking, you get the scent of the flavour as well. So you’re only drinking water still, but you get that scent. And what they realised is so many people were having difficulty getting that initial setup correct. And they were complaining about it and saying, I
Greg Shuey (23:16.612)
Hmm.
Will Laurenson (23:18.823)
doesn’t smell of anything or it’s not very strong or whatever. So they’ve put so much work into the email onboarding that they send out, the instructions that go with the pack in the first place to make sure people get, they call it the perfect first scent. So yeah, I think, yeah, to summarize, disqualify people, make sure they’re buying it because it is actually the right thing for them. And then just be a bit proactive and try and fix problems.
rather than just accepting returns and assuming that there is actually a problem.
Greg Shuey (23:53.348)
Yeah, a hundred percent. one of the things that always blows my mind is, you know, when I look at a, a product listing page and the product descriptions, like super small, it’s like two sentences and there’s no other information on the page, right? That is a perfect example of not disqualifying someone below that thing out. Have FAQs on the page. Make sure you have reviews on the page to hear what other people have to say about it.
add videos of how to use the product, anything that you can do to be able to help people say, yep, this is for me. I know what this is and I know how to use it. It’s going to be absolutely critical. So I’m glad that you, you bring that up. And then we talked, we talked about, sorry, go ahead.
Will Laurenson (24:43.527)
I was just going to say, I think people don’t think about how many percent of customers don’t actually think these things through when they’re buying. There might be some kind of long -term stuff that they don’t really consider on a day -to -day basis, but does actually disqualify them from buying. I’m trying to think of an example off the top of my head. I don’t know if you’ve got an allergy to something.
Greg Shuey (24:53.284)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (25:02.148)
Yeah. Yep.
Greg Shuey (25:12.004)
I do not have allergies, nope.
Will Laurenson (25:13.583)
If it’s something you’re dealing with on a day -to -day basis so much that it’s just become habit, it’s become your life, you might not think to ask the question, is this product going to affect my allergy? And then actually, you might buy it and it turns out it does. So that’s where you just need to think about these things and say, well, for what reason could this person possibly have a problem with this product?
Greg Shuey (25:27.172)
Right.
Greg Shuey (25:31.264)
Yeah. Hmm.
Greg Shuey (25:40.388)
Yeah.
Will Laurenson (25:42.311)
example of fashion, right? Make sure you tell people what the size is and make that size experience as good as possible because the majority of websites are terrible at it. So if you can find a really good way to explain that and help people with that, it’s going to massively help you.
Greg Shuey (25:53.316)
Yep.
Greg Shuey (25:59.332)
And fashion is a higher return product because of that very reason, right? It doesn’t fit quite right. It was too small. It was too big. Didn’t like the colors. So absolutely. Cool. So the last half of that, you know, you talked about user experience, right? Like how, how do you onboard a customer, educate a customer? And that ties right back into the next question is what role.
does customer experience play in helping a brand to grow their lifetime value?
Will Laurenson (26:32.455)
I think it’s super important. A lot of brands treat it as once you’ve got the conversion, that’s it. Job done. This person has bought the product. Therefore, they’re going to be happy with it because we know our product is good. They bought the product. There’s so much more going on. I guess, have a think about how many times you buy certain products.
Greg Shuey (26:43.652)
Yep. Job done.
Will Laurenson (27:00.551)
and how many times you’ve bought similar products from different companies because you don’t have that go -to brand in mind, right? Because you’ve never had the custom experience that’s made you go, I’m always going to go back to this brand and buy. Right. So, you know, I think there’s various ways to do it, whether it’s part of the purchase experience itself, if you’ve got something that’s a bit more custom or maybe requires some contact with the business, or it could be that unboxing experience.
Just, you know, what’s the term I use? Surprise and delight is something that, you know, it doesn’t make up for problems, but it’s something that just adds a little bit for people. It makes them happy. You know, if they open that box for the first time and there’s something extra in there, or that experience is a little special, people remember that, right? And then they’re immediately going into your product experience with a positive attitude, right? Because they’ve already had a bit of a delight. So,
I think it’s worth putting the effort in initially, especially for smaller brands, even for bigger brands, because you can just take a sample size, put the effort into manually do some of these things and call customers or do things that aren’t scalable to figure out if they work and how they work and get some feedback and then figure out how you can automate it and just let it run.
And it comes back to the returns thing we were talking about with how can you use the feedback you’re getting from customers to then deal with those problems before they become a problem. You can almost do that in the same way with that customer experience piece. Do things manually, get in touch with people, figure out what they like, what problems they have, what they’re trying to achieve, and then use that feedback.
to then help you build out the automated experience in a better way.
Greg Shuey (28:59.428)
Yeah. And gathering that customer research data can also help kind of inform the whole kind of buying cycle, right? The buyer’s journey as well, and not just specifically for customer, experience and satisfaction, but can also bring you right back to the top of the funnel again, and provide insights into the people who are driving the traffic and how do they drive it and where are they getting traffic from and those types of things. So it’s really a big closed loop, right?
Will Laurenson (29:26.887)
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Now it’s something we make a big point of with every client. We’ll obviously do our tests. We’ll work on upsells, post -purchase. We’ll work with the team on returns and stuff like that. But we’ll also make sure that everything we’re learning gets fed into the marketing team, the acquisition team, the email team, SEO, whoever needs to know about it, whoever would benefit from this information. Because if we can say, we ran this test on the website,
and we’ve got a really, really positive response, we might be able to say, well, email guys, try using this messaging in your emails or stick it on an ad, right? Or it might just be the landing page, it doesn’t have to be the ad itself, but how can we feed this in? Because if we can get that message, that strong message in right at the start and then reinforce it through the journey, it gives you a much better chance of connecting with those people.
Greg Shuey (30:03.844)
Mm -hmm.
Greg Shuey (30:21.604)
Yep, I love it. I love it. So to start off the conversation, you did talk about a single metric that you like to look at. What other metrics should brands focus on to measure the success of their customer revenue optimization efforts?
Will Laurenson (30:42.151)
I mean, you’ve obviously got like returns rate. You know, we want to make sure that’s at least staying stable, ideally coming down a little bit, but you’re always going to have a minimum percentage of returns. You’re never going to escape that. We want to be looking at, you know, lifetime value, making sure that’s always going up. Because again, like if we make some changes and we start to see lifetime value come down for those cohorts, we need to think, you know, what have we done wrong? Right? Have we over -promised something?
Greg Shuey (30:53.636)
Yeah.
Will Laurenson (31:11.975)
and then not delivered on it. And then.
I mean, it depends on which stage you want to look at and how granular you want to get, right? We like looking at the purchase funnel on a website. Well, actually, instead of conversion rate, we tend to look at that purchase funnel. So, how many people, out of the people who visit the website, how many people view a product? How many people of those go on to add to cart? How many people start checkout, complete checkout? And then obviously how much they’re spending. That’s the important thing because that’s really where we can actually target stuff.
and that’s what matters. So I think when you’re looking at what metrics you want to actually pay attention to, I think you’ve really got to think, well, can you actually influence that easily? And I think people think you can influence conversion rate quite easily. Actually, it’s quite difficult to impact because it’s affected by so many things. But what you can do is you can add some social proof to a product page, put some better imagery on there, describe your product properly.
and see your add to cart rate go up.
Greg Shuey (32:21.732)
Cool. I like that. So as we wrap up here, one of the questions that I love to ask everyone is what are your predictions for the rest of the year and then to 2025? How do you see customer behavior changing? You know, we’ve had a couple of weird years. We’ve had lots of inflation, you know, people’s budgets shrinking. Like, how do you see things moving, you know, for the next 18 months, I would say?
Will Laurenson (32:43.847)
Yeah.
Will Laurenson (32:53.415)
I think, yeah, people on the custom side, people are going to be more cautious with their budgets. They’re really going to think through, you know, do I actually need this product? And there are not many brands out there who should be that concerned by that if they do things properly. Because whatever you’re selling, if you want to sell it properly, you should be convincing people that this is something they need. Right?
Greg Shuey (33:19.268)
There’s an audience who has money and has a need and they are ready and willing to buy.
Will Laurenson (33:26.087)
Yeah, it’s your job to persuade them that they need whatever it is, a new TV more than they need a new refrigerator, for example. I’ve got $500 to spend. What am I going to spend it on? TV is much cooler. I can deal with the fact that my fridge maybe isn’t so great at keeping things cold anymore. Or I’ll deal with that next month. So I think that’s…
something to bear in mind, but also, yeah, it’s the fact that people now can’t necessarily can’t afford both of those quickly, right? So you’ve got to be able to capture that attention, convince people quicker. Yeah, it’s not just about convincing someone that they need to buy your product. You need to convince them to buy it now. It’s going to make a difference to their life if they buy it now. On the business side, I think we’ll see a lot more, we’re going to see a lot more use of AI. AI is getting a lot better, but this is going to be good and bad.
Greg Shuey (33:57.124)
Yep.
Greg Shuey (34:17.572)
Mm -hmm. Yep.
Will Laurenson (34:21.543)
All right, so the good side is AI is fantastic at helping you analyze data and analyze research and helping you summarize things. And, you know, it does a load of the hard work for you. What it’s really bad at, and what I hate seeing it used for, is telling you what to do. Because it can’t do that. It’s never going to have, well, anytime soon, it’s not going to have the data. It needs to be able to do that.
Greg Shuey (34:42.084)
Yeah.
Greg Shuey (34:51.204)
Yeah.
Will Laurenson (34:51.463)
So for CRO purposes, if we’re trying to optimize your website, we would have to feed in huge amounts of data and research for it to be able to actually suggest some ideas. And even then, it’s probably not going to have the creativity to come up with real solutions based on this. So…
Greg Shuey (35:08.932)
love this because I was in chat GPT this morning. I see it every freaking time. I try to run something chat. GPT can make mistakes. Check important info. I mean, that’s AI is going. It’s not going to be perfect. And I think people trying to cut corners and save time, just take it and run with it.
Will Laurenson (35:27.239)
Yeah. There’s also a lot of tools out there that, you know, they are CRO backed by AI or AI tools to write your emails automatically and stuff like that. And yeah, it’s shortcuts, right? But it means you actually end up going back down that route of this is super generic and it’s not great because it’s not tailored to your audience because it doesn’t know your audience. Because none of these tools ask you to provide that information.
There’s a few tools that will say, load it up and go through the initial settings, put your fonts in, your colors in, your brand guidelines. But I’ve not seen any that ask you for customer research on what your customers care about or the data, how your website’s performing and how things have changed over time and all the stuff that would be required to help you actually optimize your website. So…
Greg Shuey (36:14.82)
Yeah.
Will Laurenson (36:26.183)
It’s really great for helping you analyze stuff, do a lot of that kind of heavy lifting. But yeah, just don’t rely on any tools at the moment that are designed to tell you what to do because they’re not there yet.
Greg Shuey (36:39.748)
Yeah. So smart. Awesome. Any final words of wisdom before we wrap up?
Will Laurenson (36:50.471)
Listen to your customers. Yeah. Customer feedback. Reviews, customer service, email surveys. I’m testing out something with a client where it’s technically not a client because they’re not paying for this. We’re doing it as a little free project. We’re trying to get video or audio responses from customers for feedback. My feeling is this is going to work really, really well because we’re going to get…
Greg Shuey (36:53.796)
It’s easy, just listen to them.
Will Laurenson (37:18.087)
We’ll get more people giving feedback than we will on customer interviews because people don’t like to commit to 30 minutes, 45 minutes. We’ll get fewer results than an email survey, for example, but we should get much better, richer feedback than the surveys. So we’re going to test this out. I think this would be really cool.
Greg Shuey (37:21.412)
Interesting.
Greg Shuey (37:36.9)
That’s awesome. Well, Will, thank you so much for spending time with us today. I really appreciated our conversation.
Will Laurenson (37:43.943)
No problem, thanks for having me.
Greg Shuey (37:45.508)
It was awesome. You dropped some really good knowledge bombs, I would call it. I’m excited to be able to get this out and get it into the hands and the heads of our listeners. So yeah, awesome. Thank you. So in our next episode, we’re going to be chatting with Mike Begg from AMZ Advisors. They are an agency down in Mexico and they specialize in all things Amazon.
We are specifically going to be talking about Amazon funnels. And that is a topic that one, I don’t know that I’ve ever heard someone say Amazon funnel and I don’t know anything about. So I’m really excited about learning how they view the marketing funnel from an Amazon perspective and how those selling on Amazon can really leverage this strategy to continue to drive growth. And that’s it for today. So take what you’ve learned here.
and make a plan and take massive action this year. 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.
