In my latest How’d They Do? post I do an analysis of StayblCam, an ecommerce store that sells camera equipment for iPhones and small cameras.
If you’re new to this video series, here’s how they work: I buy products online, and then I break down for you how the business is doing from an ecommerce perspective. How are they doing with customer acquisition? Is their website optimized for conversion? And what are they doing post purchase to build relationships with their customers and encourage repeat business?
These video are proving really valuable for ecommerce store owners, and people who want to learn about customer acquisition and retention—and I’m so glad to hear it!
So okay, StayblCam: How’d they do?
They did some things really well, and some things not so well.
They clearly understand direct response. They targeted me with a great Facebook ad that had a really engaging video. It showed me product features and how the product is used, and the production value was really solid.
On their website, they had some good assets in place that pushed me toward a purchase: A phone number, website navigation, image carousel, social proof section, etc. And these things worked very well for them.
But they had a big issue with their website design. Many of their pages were cluttered, and the content was difficult to consume. From a Conversion Rate Optimization standpoint, it is clear to me that cleaning up their pages would boost conversions significantly.
And on top of the site’s overall clarity, their selling techniques lacked elegance. Once you’re on the site, they try really hard to sell you on a purchase and it’s pretty off-putting.
In addition to these issues, StayblCam also fell really short on their post-purchase marketing. Their Thank You Page and post-purchase emails did almost nothing to encourage customer engagement and inspire additional purchases.
What you do post-purchase in your business is so important. You need to put as much attention on customer retention as you do on customer acquisition—if not more—because repeat customers are how you sustain and grow a business.
That means leveraging your Thank You Page to establish familiarity and maybe getting them to like your Facebook page. It means using your post-purchase email sequence to give them content relevant to their purchase and your brand, as well as to gain conversion assets like selfies and reviews.
For a full breakdown of my shopping experience with StayblCam, and to find out whether or not I’d buy from them again, watch my video!
Video Highlights
0:27 Stayblcam Product Packaging
0:48 50% of eCommerce traffic utilizes your homepage
1:27 Video Ad Content
1:56 The product detail page
2:42 Reviews and Social Proof
3:55 Cross selling related products
4:20 The post purchase thank you page
5:00 Post purchase emails
5:56 Referrals and incentives
6:31 The package insert
7:38 So how’d they do?
9:06 Would I buy from them again?
Click Here For Video Transcript
So this is their homepage. It’s not where they send their traffic but I did navigate here because as we know, 50% of your e-commerce traffic or traffic to your website will end up back on your homepage and the reason that happens is because, like, 60% of all online transactions are happening on the top 200 or so websites and those websites are training consumers how to buy and they’re training consumers to go to the homepage to look for what they need because everything’s available from the homepage. So I went to their homepage and it was atrocious. I mean, it was super kinda busy and it didn’t, it wasn’t mobile responsive very well, and there was a lot going on. It’s hard to consume and this is a sort of trend with their website, very hard to consume. Now we look at their ad and the ad was brilliant. I mean, they did such a good job on this ad. It was a video ad. Really showed how the product worked, told me how much it was, gave me a little coupon, told me the sort of features and benefits of the product, had a little headline. I think their headline was bad because it kinda cut off and they have no sub-headline, but the video they used in the ad sold me. It was engaging. It was really well-done.
Now it went to this product detail page and there’s a lot of things right about this product detail page. Let me show you. You have the phone number, free shipping, unique selling proposition, navigation at the top. Beautiful product imagery, big, bold, no left navigation, carousel of other images I could consume, social proof right at the top, little buy box. Look at the use of the isolation effect, that Add to Cart button pops because it’s the only place on the page where there’s a big block of green.
Now this is where it gets a little busy, where all this content, this sort of sales content, shipping content, return content, really a little too busy. Very hard to consume. Doesn’t fit in well. I would open that block up and put it down here. They have live chat, which they did really well. It went off after I’d been on the site for a while and then going down the page, the next section was more social proof. Lots of five star reviews. I notice that they didn’t publish any negative reviews. Now on our site…and you know if you’re an e-commerce business owner, you get control over the reviews and, you know, you don’t wanna be too biased in the favor of your product because it’s like, “What are you not telling me, dude? Or dudette gal?”
So I like to publish some of the negative reviews on my store, three star, two star, one star. These were all five star. Going down, they used a lot more social proof, which I thought they did really well. They showed the product sales video yet again. Going down the page, still kinda busy. Not particularly well laid out, text was hard to read. Like, whoever’s doing the style, the design here, could really use an upgrade. The design aesthetic is very just stick everything. They get direct response, right? They get direct response, sales videos, social proof, testimonials, multiple images. Like, they understand how to sell, but they are way too aggressive and I think that they could really use a little more sort of elegance in their marketing.
And then going down the page, they had some long-form left-right content, except for it was hard to consume. The images were all over the place. The text you couldn’t read. I mean, it’s just poorly designed, but it was good marketing if it was laid out better. And then down the bottom, they had a cross-sell section to cross-sell you related products, which was cool. I thought their footer was terrible. I mean, they have their social proof images, they had an opt-in. The links were all over the place. Like, just poor design, just really poor design on the site. From a conversion rate optimization standpoint, I could probably double the conversion of this website. Maybe not double, that’s sort of an aggressive claim, but improve it significantly, I’m sure.
And so I purchased, right? Because I wanted the product and I thought it was a good product. And post-purchase Thank You page, nothing, you know? Just a “Thanks so much” and a little, you know, “Our phone number.” No Thank You video, no, “Here’s how to use your product,” no excitement builder. No, “Like us on Facebook,” nothing. And so I thought that was poor, you know? They should have done something here. This is like the best real estate on your entire website. Someone buys from you, you know? They’re in, they’re juiced up. You wanna give them something to do, something to consume, content to consume about the purchase, a next step. So post purchase Thank You page, very under-utilized, from like everyone I shop from. And we make a lot of money and create a lot of intimacy and engagement and get people to join our social network and get reviews and all this kinda stuff off our post-purchase Thank You page.
Now I got an email from them, which was extremely poorly laid out. It was just the standard template Shopify email. It was, like, no HTML. It was really kinda bad, bad email and it just said, “Hey, you can track it.” Not even a thank you. Nothing, right? Then I got another email from them, which was a good thing they did, which was they’re using Receiptful. So Receiptful is an app plugin to Shopify and it gives you 10% off your next order, it gives you a little coupon code, cross-sells you on other products, that kinda thing. So this was really good. I think it came probably not at the best time. I would have liked some sort of education about the product I just purchased or some sort of pre-arrival excitement or something besides just a pitch, although this was really good. I’m sure this makes them some money and gets them some additional sales of other items, as well as, you know, maybe more of the same item they just bought. So this was well-done.
Then I went back. I actually went back to track my package and I saw that they were doing Refer a Friend and they were incentivizing me to share, so they were doing some things well, but again, man, I discovered…I’ll show you what I discovered…they have a lot of content that they could have gotten me excited about the product, shown me how to use the product, given me reviews of the product. They could have done all kinds of stuff to get me much more engaged with the product I just purchased in the post-purchase email sequence and they did nothing and, like, it’s the most important thing. Engage with your customers. Deliver value. Educate them. Excite them. None of that happened. I had to go to their website to find it and it turns out they had it, which is kinda cool.
So back to their package insert right? So I haven’t actually got a chance to use the product, although I’m already disappointed as a customer because I received no education. I couldn’t get the thing in or out of the package. This package design is terrible. They could really use an update of that. It doesn’t fit very well. It doesn’t zip open all the way and then this postcard, I mean, you gotta not even send this thing. “Thank you for purchasing. Go out there and create some awesome videos. If you’re happy with the product, we would love a five star review. Your help is very much appreciated.”
It doesn’t tell me where to review, doesn’t give me any reason to review. It just says they would love it. It’s, like, okay, that’s great, but I’ve not been incentivized. I don’t know where to go. The design is like someone laid it out on Microsoft Word and now I did really like this, where they’re, like, okay, here’s a little bit of what you need to do, you know? Here’s where you can go to see how to use it. So on their package insert, they actually did give some content, but I almost missed this thing. So they need to be doing that in the emails. So this, you know, this part is good. This is really bad. So you got a little bit of good, little bit of bad. I think this could use a lot of work, but I’m happy that they had it in there, so that’s a step.
So how’d they do, you know, how’d they do? Well, they did great pre-purchase. I mean, the ad was phenomenal. Really, really good. The sales page was really in line with direct response. I enjoyed the sales page. It needs some work, a little aggressive. It just needs less clutter. It’s just, everything’s all over the place, hard to consume. I feel like, ah, I get, like, you know, a little nervous looking at the page. Way more education on the email sequences. I’m sure people opt in pre-purchase. They’re not emailing these things out. They’ve got so much content that I’ll show you in a moment. Opportunity for cross-selling. They could sell me something else if they have another product that was relevant to someone who is purchasing a thing for their iPhone. I mean, they really could have educated me, engaged me in some content, and cross-sold me. Content and relationship-building, we talked about this. No relationship there. Dynamic email sequences would really help. I wanna see a selfie request, I wanna see a video review request, I wanna see a review request, you know, to review their product on Shopify, review their product on Amazon, etc. None of that stuff was happening. No education, none of that.
They also re-targeted me on Facebook with the same ad for the product I just bought and it’s because they’re not excluding their buyers from re-targeting. So when you’re re-targeting someone who purchases from you, when you’re re-targeting actually people who visited your website, make sure to exclude people who already purchased. Otherwise you’re re-targeting to them for the same product they just purchased and it’s probably not deliberate. So you wanna re-target people who purchased but you wanna be deliberate about how you do it. And they’re not.
So would I buy from them again? Probably not, you know? I’m not excited about the product. I haven’t used it yet, but I’m not excited about the packaging of it. If the product’s phenomenal, maybe I’d consider something else they might have to sell, but I didn’t see any other products they had, so you know, wasn’t super-excited about the potential of purchasing from them again. And when I say all the content they had…I mean, man, they had how to use it, they have videos on how to use it, they have pages on how to use it. They had, you know, people giving reviews of the product. They had social proof pages. They had so much good stuff. They had this FAQ. All this phenomenal content that could have been used pre-purchase, post-purchase. I mean, really great content assets that are just not being leveraged and again, the pages are pretty poorly designed. I think they’re doing a good job overall with their knowledge of direct response and I think there’s work to be done.
Ezra here from SmartMarketer.com. Hope you enjoyed this little review of StayblCam. If you are the owner of StayblCam, hope I didn’t offend you. I think your product is probably pretty sweet. I’ll let you know once I actually use it. Thanks for watching.
