Video Highlights:
00:30 Welcome Ezra “The Dishwasher” Firestone!
00:55 Ezra awards the trophy to Kurt and Brett out of pity
01:40 As a merchant you can use extensions, apps, and plug-ins to get the most out of your store
02:35 Ezra sheds light on some of his favorite extensions, apps, and plug-ins
04:25 People with similar problems come up with similar solutions, so look at what others in your market are using
06:30 You can so focused that you lose sight of the bigger picture
07:15 If a lot of people are using an app there is a reason for it!
07:45 Ezra will share one new application and tell you all about it every episode he does
08:30 Robin is a super cool customer service app that Ezra loves
10:05 Another app Ezra recommends is Curebit, a social refferal app and it’s free!
12:50 Kurt and Brett break down the Yotpo app
14:25 Kurt stresses that you’ve got to understand how important reviews are!
15:55 Ezra considered making a review app to handle insufficiencies in other review apps
18:05 If you are not doing cart-abandonment follow-up you are losing a ton of business!!!
19:30 You can generate 20-30% more sales from a cart-abandonment follow-up process!
21:05 Ezra talks business prediction and analyzation apps
22:55 There are some really low risk applications and extensions out there
23:50 Ezra is doing triggers based on more data points now
24:40 Brett and Kurt think most websites are like bad sales people, but they want to change that!
25:30 Ezra breaks down one final app for you!
26:40 Kurt explains how fear keeps people from changing their site which cripples their business
28:10 You really want to take care of your customers and that requires change!
29:40 You are going to feel fear. how you respond to it is up to you!
30:00 Ezra leaves you with a concept that he thinks could transform your business!
31:50 Some actionable steps from Ezra and Kurt
32:55 Brett wins the trophy for his contribution to the show and his fancy shirt
34:50 Kurt, Brett, and Ezra signing off
Video Transcript:
Brett: Well, hello and welcome to the Llama Commerce Show, where we are demystifying eCommerce into actionable bites. I’m Brett Curry, lead strategist here at Classy Llama.
Kurt: And I am Kurt Theobald, CEO at Classy Llama.
Brett: And we have one of our favorite guests, a regular, and I think one of the main reasons people tune in. It’s our good buddy from Brooklyn, Mr. Ezra Firestone.
Ezra: Llama Commerce.
Brett: How’s it going, Ezra?
Ezra: I’m doing good, man. How are you?
Brett: Fantastic. Actually, there’s something funky with your name there, man, for all those who are watching the video.
Ezra: Oh, no. Did you mess up the bottom third?
Brett: You’re not going by Ezra Firestone today. You’re going by The Dishwasher.
Kurt: What?
Ezra: Today we’re doing some clean up, man. We’re cleaning things up today. I’m just going to plug in my road podcaster mic, because it’s not plugged in, but it’s time to wash some dishes, man. It’s time to clean up.
Brett: Sweet.
Kurt: Wow, epic.
Brett: I think we need to start the show like we usually do by introducing our good friend OTT. Kurt, you want to talk about OTT and why OTT is on the show every single week?
Kurt: OTT is probably the most important thing that’s happened to us, period.
Brett: Yes. The show, but maybe in our lives.
Kurt: Except for maybe our wives.
Brett: It’s pretty important.
Kurt: Listen. OTT is the one-armed table tennis trophy. We hand him out at the end of every show in order to represent who delivered the most value. Normally we just give it to a guest if we have one…
Brett: Because we feel obligated.
Kurt: …because we feel bad for them that they had to hang out with us for so long.
Brett: But Ezra’s almost like a third cohost.
Kurt: That’s right, so we may not get it.
Brett: [Inaudible 00:01:25].
Kurt: We might withhold it. Ezra, you’re really going to have to bring it, baby, if you’re going to get OTT.
Ezra: I know.
Brett: No obligatory [inaudible 00:01:31].
Ezra: I feel like maybe I should share him a little bit, because whenever I’m on the show, I always get him.
Kurt: I know. I know. I know.
Ezra: So you can keep him today. He’ll hang out with you guys and I’ll take him next time.
Kurt: So what are we talking about today?
Brett: Our topic today is I think going to be really relevant to everybody regardless of what platform you’re on. As a merchant, you need to think about how can I leverage my store with the feature sets that I have to get the most out of it? One of the ways to do that is by using really good apps, extensions, and plugins to take something that used to cost a lot of money to design from a custom standpoint. Now it’s neatly packaged into a plugin, an extension, or an app. Now you can use it for little to no cost.
Kurt: Yeah, and there’s two things that we found really important about these. First of all, you have to make sure they’re good ones, because there’s lots and lots of bad ones out there.
Brett: Lots.
Kurt: You try to plug them in…
Kurt: …and they torpedo everything. The second thing is you’re getting hundreds or thousands of man hours of work for the cost of, like, one or two or three. It’s pretty ridiculous what can be done. You just have to be careful that you don’t go extension crazy. That’s why we have our good friend Ezra on the show today, because he’s going to shed some light on some of his favorite extensions and how to get the best results from leveraging the power of extensions, apps, and plugins.
Brett: We’re going to look at different platforms. Obviously, we live mainly on Magento, but Ezra has stores on multiple platforms. We have friends and other merchants on multiple platforms. So we’re going to hit it from every angle.
Kurt: Ezra, you want to take the floor and blow us away and try to win OTT for the day? Good luck.
Ezra: I actually have changed my mind. I’d love to take OTT home with me today, so let’s do it. Before we even get into what plugins and what third party applications are good, I think it’s worth talking about just the concept of third party applications in general, which is basically, have you guys heard of the hundredth monkey rule? The hundreth monkey test? Have I talked to you about this?
Kurt: I’ve heard of it. I can’t remember what it is though.
Ezra: Here’s what it is. It’s the closest they’ve ever come to proving scientifically this concept of the collective consciousness. They have these monkeys on one side of the world who are dipping potatoes in salt water for flavor. At the time that the hundredth monkey has figured out how to do that particular thing, monkeys on a whole other island that have no connection to these other monkeys discover the same thing.
They discover that, hey, you can dip these potatoes in salt water for flavor. It’s like by the time 100 people are paying attention to one thing, it spreads. It’s like how it’s the tipping point, if you’ve read these Malcolm Gladwell books and stuff. Ideas and concepts and things spread from people to people. However you want to describe that phenomenon, if you want to say collective consciousness, if you want to talk about science and energy and that kind of stuff, this is a phenomenon that happens. People come up with…
Kurt: I call it psychedelic.
Ezra: Psychedelic, man. It’s freaky. But it happens. People come up with similar things at the same time. What happens when a specific group of people is paying attention to one particular topic all at the same time, they tend to come up with similar things. They tend to come up with similar things because they are facing similar problems. We’re having the same problems.
We don’t have a good review system or we don’t have a good social selling system. We all need this as eCommerce merchants. The beautiful thing about the app markets and third party developers is like these are people who have decided to spend their time, instead of being eCommerce merchants, a lot of them were eCommerce merchants.
I’m a guy who develops apps, and I’m an eCommerce merchant. I develop them because they handle problems that I have in my business that nobody else can handle for me. Then I sell that service to other people.
It’s really cool to look at what’s out there and have your attention on what’s being developed, because this is all stuff that can help you take your store to the next level, because the problem that you’re having that someone is spending all of their time focused on solving for you. I’ve got a couple applications that I want to share, but the applications are- it doesn’t matter. The point is not, use these applications. The point is begin to put your attention on what applications are available for your platform, because most of these applications are cross-platform. They’re platform agnostic.
But there are going to be applications that are available for your platform. If these applications, some of these might not be Magento. Some of them might not be Shopify. A lot of them are all, but if they’re not, start thinking about the kinds of things that they are doing that you could potentially integrate into your platform.
It’s just the fact that you have this platform, you’re making money, you’re making sales. I could be looking at the camera. You’re making all these sales and you’re doing all this work to generate customers, to build your business, and just plugging these little things in and integrating some of these tools could get you a substantial increase in your bottom line.
I’m going to share with you why and what, specifically a couple of the different ones. But that’s why I’m so excited about the app networks and third party applications and developing them and being in touch with what’s happening, because it’s a really cool thing.
Kurt: Yeah, I was…Sorry. Go ahead, Brett. We both want to say something so bad.
Brett: We’re so passionate.
Kurt: Wow, that was amazing, Ezra.
Brett: It gives you an idea of what you’re missing as well. You get so focused on your business and you may forget these little touches, these little enhancements that you could be missing, that someone else has discovered. So by looking at the app network, you can figure out some things you’re missing.
Kurt: Yeah. I’m wondering, Ezra, because I know one of the problems that I’ve seen merchants have is they’re so focused on the core business that it’s like there’s so many of these what I call peripheral services and applications out there that do solve these niche problems, that do have these really, really amazing functionality and value offers. But the problem for the merchant is how do we get focused on the right things? How do we look in the right direction? It’s overwhelming all the options that are out there. Do you have any words of wisdom, and where do you start?
Ezra: I think that one of the easiest ways to start, frankly, is social proof. What I mean by social proof is like if a lot of people are using it, there’s a reason. If you look at your particular app network, which is whatever platform you’re on, every platform has a place you can go and look at the apps that are on that platform.
Then you see the ones that are being used the most and have the most reviews. That’s the first place to start looking, because you can see what other people are using. Then, if you want to get crazy, you just get niche. You go and you start looking at other ones that are new and that are up and coming and that maybe don’t have as many reviews. You just research them and maybe play with them.
But I think what we could do here on Llama Commerce for all you Classy Llamas out there is every time that I come on the show, and perhaps when I’m not even on the show, but every time I come on the show I will have one new application. I’ll show you how we’re using it, why it’s good, what’s cool about it, how it works. Then, look. If you added one application every three months, that’s fly. Now you’ve got four or five apps that are working for you and helping you and your business over the course of a year, and that’s a good thing. I think we could make it a little segment on the show where we just do an app.
Brett: Love it. Let’s do it.
Kurt: Sounds great.
Brett: Let’s dive in. I know everybody’s wanting to know what are the top apps that you recommend, Ezra. What should people be considering right now?
Ezra: Well, there is a new one. This one comes out. This one goes to Bigcommerce, Magento, Shopify. I think it might even plug in to Presta and some of these other sort of legacy carts that we’re on and stuff. It’s called Robin and it’s super cool. Basically, it streamlines all of…
Brett: Can you spell that, Ezra?
Ezra: R-O-B-I-N. I’ll grab a link here, but what it does is all of your inbound communication, email, chat, Twitter, whatever, it’s all streamlined into one dashboard. When it pops up, it’s got all the customer’s details. Your customer service person has one dashboard, and people are potentially communicating with that dashboard from multiple platforms.
It plugs in all these other platforms. Your email, your site’s live chat, your Facebook and stuff like that. Then they can see the customer’s order history and where they’re coming in all on one dashboard. It’s really cool. It’s a customer service thing.
It’s called Robin. I know for a fact that it at least plugs in to Bigcommerce, Shopify, and Magento, because we’ve got it on those three platforms right now. Very, very cool…
Brett: This would be at your customer service level. I love it.
Ezra: Centralized social customer support, basically what it is. It makes…
Brett: Wins with that, you’re seeing an edge being gained as you plug that in.
Ezra: Well, what you’re doing is making it super easy for your customers to connect and communicate with you. It will hook into your ticketing system if you’re using one of those. It allows you to better track what’s going on with a customer when you first receive that engagement. Now you’re not searching for their order history and doing all this stuff. It just streamlines the support process. It’s very cool. You should check it out.
Brett: Awesome.
Ezra: Also, the sales video is good. They did a really good sales video. The next one is Curebit. Curebit is a referral system. It’s social selling. If you’ve ever seen LivingSocial Buzz, this is essentially the platform that they use. After you buy, it’s like, “Share this link on Twitter, Facebook, and email. Get three more people to buy using this link and then you get yours free.” It kind of incentivizes your customers to share.
It sends them an email. It pops. It does the whole pop-up thing. It’s got a lot of different features that basically incentivize your customers to share their purchase and a coupon code with a friend. You can integrate a coupon code with a friend.
Then based on how many people take whatever specific action you’re asking your customer to make happen, then your customer receives a prize. They receive a discount. They receive a free order. They receive $10 off the next order. So it gamifies social sharing for your customer.
Brett: How have you seen that working? That’s a fascinating concept, but I know there’s always going to be a percentage of your customers who don’t want to do that. They just want to buy the product and move on.
Ezra: But there’s a percentage that does. It’s given us, like, an 8% boost in social…Not that we could even really track this before, but now we’ve got some way to track social word of mouth and there are sales coming in via that channel. Who knows if people were previously sharing.
I doubt it, because we weren’t incentivizing them previously, but who knows if people were previously sharing the purchased they made on our store with their friends, and their friends were coming to buy. Now I’m incentivizing them to do that and I’m tracking sales through it. I’m happy with that.
Kurt: Well, I think if you just think psychologically or just from your own experience and for those that you’ve heard about, how many times do you buy something and you’re like, “Oh, I bought this and I’m going to go share it on my social network because it’s so cool that I bought it. I want to tell my friends, ‘You should go buy it too.'” It just hardly ever happens. The incentives, I know it’s a small leap of assumption here, but the incentives drive sharing.
Ezra: Yes. Absolutely, absolutely.
Brett: Sometimes just asking alone will help. I mean just being in front of a customer and saying, “Hey, we really want you to share this.” That at least can help a little bit, but the incentives and the gamification really drives it. You’re right.
Kurt: Is that all just, the extension, does it take care of how it gets implemented on the front end? Are you having to actually do work to specifically guide how you want it presented on the front end?
Ezra: Yeah. You log in to their back end database or you log in to their just like a little- their membership website or whatever.
Kurt: Sure.
Ezra: Then you just customize your little emails and your little forms and customize your coupon codes and hook it right into your coupon codes. It’s a really cool system and it’s free. Don’t have to pay for that one. The only way you can get it, like if you want, basically you’ve got to be willing to pay them a very large amount of money or you just use their free service, and their free service is great. It’s cool.
Kurt: Nice.
Ezra: Okay, check this one out. Yotpo. Yotpo. You guys know about Yotpo?
Kurt: Oh, yeah. Very familiar.
Ezra: Okay. Why don’t you guys talk about that one?
Kurt: Well, Yotpo. Here’s the last time I checked in with them. It was probably a year ago at the Imagine conference last year, which we’re about to go tomorrow- not tomorrow, Sunday.
Brett: Yep.
Kurt: We’ll be live from Imagine this next week. This past Imagine, where they’re at is they’re driving the reviews. Right? That’s Yotpo?
Ezra: Yep.
Kurt: They’re making it to where once someone purchases something, then they have a followup email that goes out to that person that asks for the review instead of just hoping that someone comes back and gives a review, which is so unlikely. They’re doing a really good job of drawing the review from people that have purchased before. I don’t know how they’ve evolved.
Brett: There’s a social output there as well.
Ezra: New features is they’ve now gamified reviews. You can click on the person who’s done the review and it will show all of their social profiles that they have integrated. It will also show how many reviews they have and what their review score is. You can, as a reviewer of products, move up the rankings and be a sophisticated reviewer, just like Amazon has a ranking algorithm for how powerful the reviews are based on how many reviews the person has done on the platform.
They basically created essentially what Amazon has inside the Amazon platform, which is like ratings of reviewers and that kind of stuff across all platforms for all eCommerce stores that use Yotpo. It’s sort of the external decentralized social ranking. Decentralized in that it’s platform agnostic. Right? Yotpo goes into any platform. The reviewer can be the same reviewer across multiple platforms.
Kurt: Let’s all go back to the core of understanding the importance of reviews. If you don’t understand how important reviews are to your business, then you’re not going to understand how important something like Yotpo is that drives those reviews. I have seen statistics, and statistics are only as good as the sources, but I’ve seen statistics as high as 65% of buyers will read reviews as a critical part of their purchasing decision. It makes a huge difference. I know it does in my own personal experience, but that doesn’t mean necessarily a lot.
Ezra: Well, I would consider the three of us to be extremely sophisticated online shoppers. Right? When you look at the average bear, we’re sort of paying a lot more attention to online shopping than most people and when we purchase, we’re paying a lot more attention to online shopping than most people. I know that I always read reviews and that I watch those reviews.
Kurt: Absolutely.
Brett: How legitimate is this review?
Kurt: Yup.
Brett: Is this just a grumpy person that every review they leave is negative?
Kurt: Yup.
Brett: Is this someone with experience, or is it just someone who’s happy with everything?
Kurt: I think a lot of times some of the most sophisticated buyers are those that actually take the time to write reviews, and that shows how much they value them. I write reviews because I value reviews so much. They’re critically important.
I know that they’re used wildly just from experience with our clients as well. They’re being used. It makes a huge difference. It’s something you really need to be taking and making an investment in. How are you going to drive that user generated content that’s specifically attached to your products.
Brett: How easy is Yotpo to install, Ezra, because I know you install on multiple applications?
Ezra: It’s really, really easy to use. The interface is sweet. These guys…One of the applications that I was considering making was a review application that made reviews quite streamlined in that it automatically added rich snippets or hypertext markup to the pages so that you’d be getting review starts hooked into your AdWords and hooked into Google. You guys obviously know about rich snippets and metadata and schema code and stuff.
Also, one of the things that I don’t like about Yotpo and that I think could be improved, and maybe I’ll just talk to them and get them to build it in, would be to widgetize reviews. Basically, someone leaves you a review either through Yotpo or through a form that they click an email and then they leave a review. It hooks into their Facebook and stuff like that.
Then on your site you can put a javascript widget where it will show the person’s face and three stars, or you’ll have just the stars, or you’ll have another widget that’s like a full page that has the person’s face, the stars, basically allowing when someone puts…Because what happens is people enter reviews. People will email us testimonials and will give us all your stuff so great on Facebook, but then we just never put it on our website.
There’s a ton of eCommerce business owners and website owners in general who get positive feedback, but have no automated way of that displaying on their site. So what I think would be a cool plugin to a review application would be when a review comes in, it automatically is fed into whatever widgets you have rotating through your stores. You guys follow me there?
Kurt: Yeah, it’s not just about gathering the user generated content. It’s also about how you then take that content and leverage it.
Ezra: Right.
Kurt: It’s that whole…We talk about this in the structure of content marketing. You’ve got to have your sources for content. You’ve got to have your modules for content. Then you have to have your syndication network. How are you taking that and blowing that out in the right ways and in the right places in order to actually derive value from the content that you’ve spent so much time and energy gathering?
Ezra: That’s right. How are you marketing the reviews you’re getting, essentially. This was an app that I was going to build, and then I found Yotpo. This was a long time ago. I was like, “Damn, these guys have done a really good job.
Kurt: Yeah.
Ezra: “Maybe I just want to tell them how to make it a little bit better.”
Brett: That’s the beauty of being plugged in to the app network though. You’re going to see all these things that other people have already thought of, you’ve been thinking about, and now you can just leverage it.
Ezra: Yeah.
Brett: Cool. What’s next?
Ezra: Next we’ve got…Well, first of all, let me just say I don’t even have an application for this because there’s one for every platform. If you are not doing cart abandonment followup, then you’re losing a good portion of your sales. What is cart abandonment followup? Essentially someone comes to your site, any site. It doesn’t even have to be a traditional eCommerce site. It could be a services business with just a one-page cart.
They click “add to cart” and they’re now taken into your shopping cart. How many people have engaged with your website and your offer enough to read through it and be like, “Oh, I kind of want this,” click the “add to cart” button and then bail out of the shopping cart for some reason? The statistics are like eight out of 10.
Kurt: Huge.
Ezra: 80% of people dip out on your cart process.
Ezra: What we were doing back in the day before all these applications existed is we had our first step on the cart be like email form. Then we had a script that was scraping that email and the value of the cart. Then we were following up with people based on the email that they had put in, even if they hadn’t clicked submit to move on to the next page or submit their email and the value of that cart, and sending them an email being like, “You had this in your cart. It was worth this much. Here’s a coupon code,” and the coupon code was dependent upon the value of the cart.
That was like old school. We were scraping. It was just back in the day before these cart abandonment applications existed. Now every platform has a cart abandonment application where essentially if someone enters your shopping cart, you can followup with them with emails based on that particular order. Then you can recover of those eight people sometimes up to two to three of them. Right? We’re talking 25-30% more sales.
In most cases you’re going to get between one and two of those sales. In some cases, if you do a really good followup and you paid attention to the different kind of offers you’re making in that followup series and how long you make that followup series, and if you have good videos in there, you can get that higher. We pay a lot of attention to cart abandonment and how to reengage with people who’ve gone far enough in the process to see one of our products and add it to the cart, but not actually go through with the order.
In your case, if you’re a new retailer, you can just implement that and immediately, you don’t have to do anything. Just press play, turn it on, and set up the one email that’s in there or whatever, and you’ll get more sales. It’s just a super important one.
Kurt: Yeah. That’s one of those things that’s far enough down the line now where we’re probably 50% into the adoption curve. There’s tons of applications, extensions, service providers that empower this. It’s ubiquitous at this point. It’s one of those fundamental things that you can do and you can do extremely easily. It’s like five years ago if you had a database of email and you were just sitting on it and you weren’t doing anything with it, well, that’s what it’s like not doing shopping cart abandonment at this point.
Ezra: Yeah, totally. It has to be done. I don’t even have one for you because it’s out there. You can just Google it, any platform.
Kurt: That’s right. Yeah. Just like any email provider is going to have it. Any software provider to manage email is going to have it as well as some specialized extensions out there. If you Google it for your particular platform, you’re going to have tons of options.
Ezra: The next one that we have is one called RetentionGrid. This might be only for Shopify and Bigcommerce, but I know there’s another one out there called Conversion Sciences and yet another one which I can’t remember the name of. But essentially what it does is it predicts business for you. Essentially what it does is it monitors, analyzes your repeat customers and the patterns, like when they buy and when they repeat buy.
Then it will create opportunities for you. It will notify you and say, “Hey, this person is at this stage, and they bought this product here. Here’s what we recommend that you try to sell them next.” Then you can actually followup with customized, personalized product recommendations for that customer based on their pattern and the pattern of all your other customers. It’s really cool.
Conversion Sciences does something. So that’s RetentionGrid. Now, Conversion Sciences. That’s specifically about repeat customers. Right? Once someone buys, when should you followup with them based on the history of all your buyers and what should you offer them next based on what they purchased? Your skew count will dictate this. Right? The different skews that you have. It takes all that stuff into account. Very cool.
Conversion Sciences does something that’s different. It analyzes your user behavior on your site. So people who are browsing through your site, what links do they engage with? Do they engage with live chat? Do they engage with your product page, your category page?
Then it starts saying, “Hey, we recommend that on this page after this amount of time, you pop up this coupon. We recommend here you do this.” It’s sort of, as intelligent as automated conversion optimization can be, it is. If you’re not doing any split testing or anything like that, it’s worth…
Kurt: At least be doing that.
Ezra: Yeah, at least be doing that. Even just throw it on there to check it out, because it’s pretty cool.
Kurt: Yeah, see what it does. You know what? That’s the interesting thing. We’ve run across a lot of extensions like that where they don’t cost anything to implement. You’re going to get some interesting information out of it.
If you just want to dip your foot into the water of putting some of these things in place, there’s some really low risk extensions and applications you can put in place and just see what comes out of them and start looking at the data that at least is produced by them. You can decide whether you’re going to act on that data or not. There’s a lot of extensions out there like that.
Brett: Have you uncovered some surprises with that one, Ezra? Getting some feedback from some of your sites that you thought, “Oh, wow. I never thought of that. That’s really…”
Ezra: Sorry, these noise canceling headphones are weird. They kind of freak you out because you’re in this bubble. It does some pretty interesting stuff. We’ve started doing a lot more. Kind of one of the things that it’s really inspired us to do is a lot more, what are these things called where you’re like, attention grabbers. You know how if you have a live chat and you can ask based on a certain number of pages they saw or whatever, you can pop…
Kurt: Right, right. Pop up. Yep.
Ezra: We’re doing triggers based on more data points now. We’re triggering based on time on certain pages. We’re triggering based on page view, and we’re triggering based on interaction. We’re triggering based on more levers than we were before.
Kurt: Yeah, and all that is, what you’re doing with those triggers, I really like that word. It’s personalizing the experience and tailoring it for the individual’s behavior, the user’s behavior. That is the holy grail of user experience, is making that tailored experience for the individual. Just like Jeff Bezos said. He said, “I have 24 million customers. I should have 24 million websites.” It’s very much that same mentality of how do we create that reaction to that.
Brett: It’s kind of like a good salesperson in a retail store. If you’re walking around buying a suit or whatever, that skilled salesperson is going to read your body language and what you’re looking at and adapt their pitch a little bit based on your behavior. It sounds like this app gives you that ability online.
Kurt: Brett, that’s actually brilliant. It’s kind of like most websites right now are like bad salespeople. They give you the same pitch over and over and over again. But we want to help make websites into good salespeople that will actually react to the problems that you have.
Brett: Boom. I’m going to steal that OTT.
Kurt: Well, Brett, oh my gosh. I don’t know, Ezra. You may struggle with getting OTT this time. That was epic.
Ezra: Damn, Brett’s just throwing it down over here.
Brett: I know. I know.
Ezra: You’ve got to respect the game. I recognize Brett’s game. He can have the statue. I’ve got to give love to Brett. Listen. Last one, okay? Last one for today. It’s called Time To Buy. It triggers incentivized time constraints based on user behavior. So based on they’ve been on the site 30 seconds. They’ve visited six pages. They saw this product. So these same sort of whatevers.
It’s going to trigger a little popup coupon in the bottom hand corner that’s like, “Hey, check out within the next 10 minutes and get 5% off.” It’s crazy. So you’re incentivizing them to take action with a time constraint and a coupon. You get this coupon if you check out in the next 10 minutes or so.
It really increases, boosts your conversion rate. They’re seeing up to 16%, 17% increases in conversion rate just off those coupons. I’m not seeing that high. I’m probably more like 6% boost since we added them, but it’s cool, and it’s a brilliant…
Brett: Are you getting feedback from that at all, people annoyed by the countdown, or is it mainly positive?
Ezra: We haven’t received any negative feedback on it. Why would you be pissed off about a coupon? It’s sweet.
Kurt: Well, I will say, I think it is a fair point though, Brett, because in the mind of the merchant, we’ve found that there is that resistance to making these kinds of changes and changing the user behavior or rather the user experience, because they’re afraid of messing up what has worked for them and what is working. They’re like, “Well, what if everyone starts hating us all of a sudden?”
Brett: People think through that.
Kurt: I will say I understand it, and there’s value there in terms of not getting too crazy outside. But if that’s keeping you, if that fear is keeping you from making any changes at all or making any significant tests or doing anything like that, then your business will eventually fester, implode, and die a horrible death, because if you’re not changing, if you’re not taking those risks, you’re not really doing business. You’re just resting on the past things that you’ve done, the past risks that you’ve taken, and business is something that requires present risk.
Ezra: Yeah, man. Fear of change is sort of a goofy thing to do, because things are going to change. The algorithm’s going to change. Your cost per click is going to change. Your customers are going to change over time. Change will be happening to you. Was there a whole quote about those who adapt to change are those who survive. Right? Survival. It’s not survival of the fittest. It’s survival of whoever can adapt to change the most effectively.
I think that it’s good to consider your customers, and obviously you’ve got to consider your customers. You really want to take care of these people. They’re the ones who are buying your stuff and engaging with you. You want to really make sure that you are providing them with value.
I think that testing new ways to get them to engage with your offer, if you truly believe, and you should not be in business if you don’t believe this, by the way, if you truly believe that your products and your offers and what you’re offering your customers are better than everything else that’s out there and that you provide the best customer service, then you should be doing everything that you can to have them engaged with you rather than someone else, because you know that you’re going to provide the best experience for them.
Kurt: Yeah.
Ezra: If you can’t really say that, then go sit down and figure out why you can’t.
Kurt: Yeah, that’s true. That’s absolutely right. But if you pivot from that faith in what you offer and the value that you bring to the market, then actually the fear of change actually becomes selfish if it paralyzes you, because now what you’re trying to protect is your own self, whatever, your own position. But really, you have to continue to change. There’s always a way to make it better.
It’s either selfish or it’s outrageously arrogant to think that you’ve arrived and that you have the perfect thing. You don’t have the perfect thing. Business is imperfect. It can always be better. So how are you going to change to make it better?
If you don’t, not only will other people be doing things differently and making it better, but because the world changes around us, your business will get further and further and further away from what is perfect. It will become more imperfect until it implodes, and now you’re no longer serving those people. So it’s actually selfish. I guess fear is a selfish thing if it paralyzes you.
Ezra: And you’re going to feel it. It’s an emotion. It’s something that you are going to feel. You are going to be afraid of certain things at certain times.
Kurt: Yep.
Ezra: We all experience fear. How you react to that emotional state and that trigger within yourself is your decision. You can decide to be paralyzed and scared or you can decide to feel that and say, “Wow, that’s fear and that’s intense, and I’m going to move through that.”
I’m going to leave you guys with one last concept here that I feel like could take your eCommerce business to the next level, could really help you deliver high quality customer service and slash your return or refund rates, and really kind of make you stand out from the crowd with regard to your eCommerce business in your market that most people are just not doing. What that is is the pre-arrival sequence. Now, what’s the pre-arrival sequence?
Kind of like your- a lot of people know about pre-purchase sequences and post-purchase sequences. These are automated messaging that happened to people based on whether or not they’ve bought from you or if they’re on your abandoned cart list or if they’re a customer or whatever. But imagine that they buy a product from you. You know it’s going to be a couple of days before that product’s delivered. It’s like hasn’t shipped, got to ship out and stuff.
So you send them a little series of videos that’s like, “Hey, George here from xyz.com. This is what you just bought.” You have one specific for each product. “Check it out. It’s in this box. It’s going to show up looking like this. Open it up here. Here’s what you do with it.”
Then every day you’re like, “Oh, it should be there in a couple of days. Okay, you should have got it by now. Here’s what you do. Pull out that package insert. Go ahead. Take that coupon code, rip it off and give it to your friends,” because you obviously want to have coupon codes in your package inserts to refer friends. We’ll get into all of that sort of post-purchase followup marketing later, but integrate a pre-arrival sequence.
Kurt: Yeah, I think that’s brilliant.
Brett: That’s awesome.
Kurt: That’s actually really similar to what we were talking with Tyler Headley about a few shows ago, where he follows up and makes sure did you actually get your order right. Does it actually fit your vehicle?
Kurt: I think that makes a huge difference, and he has tons of awesome reviews as a result of that.
Brett: Yeah.
Kurt: I think that’s fantastic. When it’s all said and done, Ezra, what we’re talking about with extensions and apps, what’s the takeaways here? What action, what are the actionable bites here that you would recommend for our audience?
Ezra: Well, I think action step number one, find out what the app marketplace for your platform is and go there. Look at what people are already using. See if any of those are relevant to you. Just do that much. Don’t do anything else. Do that. Report back to us. Let us know what apps you like. Let us know what you want built that doesn’t exist so that I can build it.
Kurt: Yeah, yeah. What problems do you have that you need solved that you couldn’t find an extension for it, an app for it? Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s brilliant.
Ezra: But just get in the game. Get off the bench. Start [inaudible 00:32:33].
Kurt: Yeah, absolutely. There’s so much value that’s out there. It’s just a matter…The one thing that I would say is an actionable bite is once you jump into that pool, don’t try to collect all of it at once and do it allat once. Pick one. Pick two. No more than two.
Brett: Do those things really well.
Kurt: And do them really, really well. As you’re going to hear that reverberating drum on our show, is just pick a couple things, one thing, and do it really well. I think that’s great. Ezra, thank you so much for being on the show. As always, it’s been awesome. I will say…
Ezra: Llama Commerce.
Kurt: …that my vote is that OTT goes to Brett because of that amazing, your website is like a bad salesman. That’s going to stick with me. I’m going to talk about that all the time. Not that…
Ezra: Let’s face it. Brett has the fanciest shirt of all of us here.
Brett: I think that’s really what’s going on.
Ezra: I think that based on that shirt alone, I would like to award him a prize.
Kurt: It’s like pink and then almost purple. You have to have such exceptional confidence to wear that shirt.
Brett: You’ve got to use what you have. You’ve got to use what you have. Ezra’s got the knowledge and I’ve got cool shirts. You have to [inaudible 00:33:31] what you’ve got.
Ezra: Brett kind of has, he’s kind of got the whole Clark Kent sort of, you know…
Kurt: It’s so true. That’s so true.
Ezra: …little farm boy all American square jaw.
Kurt: Yes, it’s annoying. It’s annoying. We did a photo shoot and everyone’s like, “Oh, yeah. Brett should be a model or something.” I’m like, “You kidding me? I don’t even want to be on the show with this guy, because then they’ve got to see me right next to him.” It’s just super annoying.
Ezra: Well, you’ve got a whole different kind of charm, bro. You’ve got that whole kind of like Ryan Gosling sort of bad boy thing going. You know?
Kurt: Oh, me? Oh, yeah.
Ezra: You do, yeah. You’re very Ryan Gosling.
Kurt: I’m the bad boy. You hear that?
Brett: You are.
Kurt: You’re the pretty boy. I’m the bad boy.
Ezra: First of all, bro.
Brett: Most girls want that.
Kurt: Look that up. That’s right.
Ezra: Ryan Gosling. You want to talk about dudes. Ryan Gosling was in The Notebook. I think you win. I think you should get the statue just for looking like Ryan Gosling, bro.
Kurt: It’s not the first time someone’s mentioned Ryan Gosling in connection with my name.
Ezra: There you go.
Kurt: But of course we have Ezra Firestone talking here and he has, like, long stallion hair. I’m not even going to talk about it. Don’t note show everybody, Ezra. You’re just showing off.
Ezra: Well, I think it’s kind of funny, because what we’re doing right now…
Kurt: It’s ridiculous.
Kurt: Okay, so all those on the podcast, if you haven’t seen any picture of Ezra Firestone…
Brett: You should get the hair.
Kurt: …just Google Ezra Firestone. Feast your eyes on the hair. It’s all I’m going to say.
Ezra: I think that it’s kind of funny, because really what we’re doing right now is we’re all just being like, “Oh, we’re so awesome. We look so good. We’re so cool.”
Kurt: Yeah, that’s true.
Brett: more ego.
Ezra: I think we should quit while we’re ahead here, guys.
Kurt: True that.
Ezra: We were doing well here and we were providing value. Then we started talking about how awesome we are.
Kurt: Ourselves.
Ezra: We should end the show before we get ourselves in trouble.
Kurt: True that. Okay, actionable bites. Find your extensions, your apps, wherever that marketplace is for your platform. Take some risk. Try some things. One or two things at once. Let us know if you have some problems and you can’t find an extension for it. Let us know. Thank you all for joining the show. Catch us live at the Imagine conference next week. It’s going to be epic.
Brett: Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.
Kurt: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.
Brett: Live from Las Vegas at the Imagine show. It’s going to be awesome. As always, let us know if you like this topic, what other topics you want us to discuss. We want your feedback. We want you to drive this show.
Kurt: Ezra, thanks for joining us. To the rest of you, stay classy.
Brett: Stay classy.
Ezra: Stay classy, you…
