1. Finish the process.

It’s like planting a tree: it’s better to plant a coconut tree first and take care of it until it grows fully, rather than to plant a coconut seed first, then change your mind and replace it with a mango seed, then with an avocado seed, then with an orange seed – if you do it this way, you’ll never see your tree grow because you didn’t stick with it long enough.

Focus on a single marketing strategy first and stick with it until you reach the point of learning where you’ll learn one of the following:

How valuable something is to your business’ growth. For example, this strategy is effective since it added $500/month into your revenue. Great! How can you work on this so it’ll grow to $1,000/month or even more? Or;
How not valuable something is to your business’ growth: If it’s not moving the needle, and you don’t see any significant results happening, then great! At least you learned from it so you can now move onto testing other strategies that may work for you.
You can only reach this point of learning when you “exhaust” a specific tactic – when you start it, stick with it, and eventually get to the bottom of it.

2. Focus on the ones with positive results.

Once you’ve done this, the next part is focusing on the strategies that work for you and doubling down on them.

Take your customer support, for example. If your customer support is top-notch and you can convert 50 customers a month through referrals alone, you know it works, so how can you double down on this?

3. Figure out how you can improve it.

You want to get the best results that can help grow your ecommerce store over time, right?

In our example earlier, perhaps you can automate the administrative tasks associated with this so you can deliver a more personal touch to every customer interaction and increase your conversion to 100 customers a month?

There isn’t a marketing strategy that’s one-size-fits-all, so dedicate some of your resources to find out what works for you and then making the best out of it.

Two caveats on this advice, though:

In my earlier video about “The Last 5% May Not Be Worth It”, I talk about the idea that even if you’re doubling down on something, you’ll reach a point where the marginal gain won’t be the same anymore since you’ve already reached the point of learning.

You don’t need to double down on a specific strategy forever. Once you’ve reached this point where there’s no obvious viable improvement anymore, it’s time to move on to the implementation of the next strategy.

Also, remember the Pareto principle which says that 80% of your sales comes from 20% of your top marketing strategies? It applies to this concept, too. You can spend 80% of your time working on the strategies I’ve mentioned on this blog post today, and then spend the remaining 20% into experimentation. Go ahead and try out something completely new, something you’ve never heard of before, or maybe even something that’s trending in your industry today, and find out if it works for you. If it does, then, double down on it until you reach the point of learning again.

I hope this concept can help you grow your business by focusing on a tried-and-tested system that works and optimizing it for the best results for you. This way, there’s a certain reliability factor that can help you move forward efficiently and effectively so you can reach that much desired sustainability of your business.

See you again next week, then! Cheers.

1. Consolidate your customer communications in a central inbox.

Simply put, use a help desk software so you have a central platform that focuses solely on customer service needs.

I know what you’re thinking -- you need to spend money! But before you close this tab on your browser, hear me out first: a) there are lots of help desk solutions out there so you’re guaranteed to find one that fits your budget; and b) it’s worth investing in this platform because you don’t want any customer communication to fall through the cracks, do you?

If you don’t have any central inbox to consolidate your customer communications, there’s a higher chance that a customer’s message will be forgotten, overlooked, or even accidentally ignored.

The #1 reason why customers switch to a new brand is because they feel underappreciated. Not replying to your customer’s message sends them the message that you don’t care about them. And you don’t want this to happen, do you?

It’s also more convenient to onboard other team members to help you with customer service if you have a central customer service platform to train them on. This way, the process is more streamlined, structured and easier to get the hang of.

1. Be owner-involved in customer service.

Your customers are the life of your business. If you don’t have any happy customers, you won’t have any business in the first place!

That’s why it’s important for you to be involved in customer service and interact with your customers as well. This way, you can learn from them, find out what areas of your business you need to improve on, and generally keep your pulse on your business.

Sure, you also need to delegate customer service to your trusted team members, and you also need the time to work on other areas of your business, but whenever you have extra time, you can also do customer service-related tasks accordingly.

1. Build a knowledge base of documentation and canned replies.

Customers prefer knowledge bases over other self-service channels.

You can build your own brand’s knowledge base by taking note of frequently asked questions and the most common customer concerns whenever you respond to your customers’ messages.

Check your customer support inbox. What are your customers’ top ten most common concerns? What do they usually complain about? What needs do your customers want to be taken cared of?

Create a list of articles about these and direct your customers’ attention to these articles as necessary. You can also craft high fidelity, detailed replies that answer their most common concerns. Use these as templates that you can personalize and tweak before sending to specific customers.

Doing this helps you kill three birds with one stone:

You save valuable resources in responding to your customer’s concern;
Your customers receive personalized messages that help resolve their concern; and,
You can quickly onboard your customer service team because there’s already a knowledge base they can refer to and a collection of detailed templates they can use

1. Beware of live chat.

Yes, in today’s world of instant gratification, offering a live chat function makes sense. After all, 42% of customers want to communicate with companies via live chat. If you can respond within 5 minutes of your customer’s message, and you can do this consistently, then offer live chat.

But if you’re not available to respond within 5 minutes, it’s better for you not to offer live chat in the first place. Imagine sending someone a live chat message and not getting any reply after 5-10 minutes -- you’d feel underappreciated, too, wouldn’t you?

Here’s a better solution: direct them to email instead. More customers (62%) prefer email over live chat (42%) anyway. Include a reminder that your customer service team will get back to them in an hour or two. This way, your customer’s expectations are managed better.

Additionally, customers believe that emails should be responded to within 24 hours, so if you respond within 1-2 hours, then your customers will be pleasantly surprised. Another win for the both of you, don’t you think?

Hopefully these tips can help you have better structures and subsequently, better conversations with your customers! That’s it for me today - now, over to you. What tip do you think is the easiest to start working on? Let me know in the comments below. See you next week! Cheers.

1. Figure out your skills and focus on the business-related activities you enjoy.

The idea of “do what you love and you never have to work another day in your life” seemed to be a lie - when you were starting out in business, you didn’t have the luxury to do only the things you love because you had to do a lot of things, even things you don’t necessarily enjoy doing.

Now that you’re scaling your business, though, you’ll have the joy of sitting down, figuring out what your greatest strengths & enjoyable tasks are, and delegating them to someone else in your team.

Do you want to focus more on sales and spend less time on bookkeeping? Or spend 80% of your time on product development to build a sustainable business, so you want to delegate your inventory-related tasks to someone else?

Find out what your weaknesses or your least enjoyable tasks are. Then, delegate them to someone who’s more qualified than you are. Your investment on doing proper delegation will be worth it. After all, you’re in it for the long run, right?

1. Hire a part-time assistant to help you with customer service and support.

As an entrepreneur, your mental space is one of your greatest assets. That’s why it’s important that you hire a virtual assistant or a freelancer (even on a part-time basis!) to clear up some of your mental overhead.

This way, you don’t exhaust your mental energy by focusing on these tasks only: you’re still involved with customer support and service, but you’ll have an assistant helping you along the way. Like the captain of a ship, you’ll still be in charge as you supervise your crew as sail through the rough seas.

You get to prevent burnout and improve your customer service at the same time. Talk about hitting two birds with one stone, right?

1. Batch similar tasks as much as possible.

Batching is a productivity hack that encourages you to do similar tasks all at once.

Think of batching as grocery-shopping: you don’t want go to the store every single day to pick up food, right? You’d waste your precious time and energy! Instead, you sit down, take note of your stock, plan your meals, and go to the grocery every week.

Personally, since I release weekly videos for Conversio, I batch my video recordings accordingly. This allows me to maximize my productivity and optimize my mental space to focus on a specific task for a scheduled period of time.

You can batch customer support and product shipping by doing them everyday - but only on specific schedules like doing them for an hour during morning and afternoon, instead of getting stuck on doing them several times in a day.

Additionally, you can also dedicate a specific time to batch a whole week’s social media content once a week. Or even batch your email newsletters by drafting them one month in advance.

There you have it. I hope these tips will help you scale your business successfully, without losing your sanity! As entrepreneurs, we should not be burning out - even the longest candle will burn out if you light it forever. That’s why I’ve made these tips that I hope you find helpful. Let me know what your valuable insights are, and see you again next week!

Learn with our FREE Ecommerce Academy: conversio.com/academy

Music featured in this episode was "Celery Man" by Birocratic and can be found at @birocratic.

1. Monitor your bad reviews so you can respond on a timely manner.

Have a system that notifies you each time you receive a bad review. For example, with Conversio, you can choose to be notified of reviews which achieve a certain rating (or less) and you customize the rating level. So you might pick 3 stars or less, or 1 star ratings only.

Strike while the iron is hot so you can increase the possibility of your customer engaging with you. This can also diffuse the tension and communicate how much you care about your customers. On average, 53% of customers expect businesses to reply to their online reviews within seven days so can you imagine the positive impact to your customer when you reply to their online review in less than an hour?

1. Empathize with your customer and never ever be defensive.

Be sincere when apologizing but be objective when assessing the bad review you’ve received.

Start with a sincere “Hey, John, I’m really sorry about [reason why they’re upset].” This statement shows that you’re listening to them – you’re open to start a meaningful conversation with them and you’re accepting that the situation may be something that you’re partly responsible for.

Once you’ve apologized, address the customer’s concern or issue and fix it accordingly.

If they’ve received a defective product, apologize and tell them that you’ve sent a replacement immediately.

If they’ve received an item on a later date than expected, you can’t really fix slow delivery since it already happened. So if you can’t fix something that already happened, offer a simple compensation to make up for your mistake. Giving them store credit, a discount code, a freebie or even a refund (in extreme cases) works.

Just remember to always apologize first. After all, 37% of customers are satisfied with service recovery when they are offered something of monetary value (e.g., a refund or credit) but their satisfaction doubles to 74% when there’s an apology on top of the compensation.

The goal here is to improve your customer’s impression of you: from a one-star review, perhaps you can shift it to a 4-star or even a 5-star review instead. Sounds corny, but handling a bad review is like turning your customer’s frown upside down. Not everyone will be 100% pleased with your product & service, but it’s worth a try, right?

1. If you were successful in improving your customer’s impression of your business, ask for an updated review.

Once you’ve established that your customer is now satisfied with the resolution of their concern, and you’ve managed to turn that frown upside down, it’s now time to ask for an updated review from them. With Conversio, they can simply submit a new review via the email request or review form and it will overwrite the old one.

It’s better if they mention that they had concerns before, and that you were helpful in rectifying this. This way, you’re not only selling your high-quality product – you’re also guaranteeing great customer service to go with the product you’re offering. Not to mention the added bonus that if you resolve a complaint in your customer’s favor, they’ll do business with you again 70% of the time.

And who would say no to repeated customers, right?

Hopefully, this three-step process helps you to better address bad reviews in the future.

As an entrepreneur for nearly 13 years, I’ve had two life-changing realizations:

One, wow, has it been more than a decade already?

And two, there’s no such thing as a perfect entrepreneur or a 100% successful venture. Spending all your time, energy and resources to achieve perfection might not be viable anymore, considering that your to-do list as an entrepreneur is seemingly never-ending.

Sometimes, the last 5% is probably not worth it.

Talking about this reminds me of the blog post that Derek Sivers, CD Baby founder, wrote entitled “Relax for the same result”. Derek used to bike 15 miles every day. He used to do full-on biking, as in pedal to the metal, red-faced, rockstar biking that left him exhausted. Doing this -- giving his full, maximum effort -- gave him 43 minutes.

Over time, though, he started to link exhaustion and tiredness with the act of biking, so he felt tedious and less enthusiastic about it. That’s why he decided to give 50% of his usual effort instead. Doing so made him notice things, live in the present more, and actually enjoy his bike ride. The best part? His time was 45 minutes -- only two minutes more than his usual!

So for him, giving 100% of his effort resulted in 43 minutes; whereas giving only 50% and taking it easy resulted in 45 minutes, plus, he even got to enjoy it more as he wasn’t stressed and wasn’t exhausted about the ride.

Considering that the time difference between 100% effort and 50% effort was only 2 minutes, that last percent of effort didn’t give a significant result so it wasn’t probably worth it.

It doesn’t matter how much the actual percentage is. What matters is that aiming for perfection -- for 100%, for the maximum effort -- in your business isn’t realistic.
When you come to the point where the result you get isn’t really greater than the effort you make to get that result, it’s not viable anymore.

After all, investing 50% of your resources and achieving 23% is much better than putting in 80% and receiving 25%, right?

How does this translate to your business?

Take email design, for example. In my video “How Anyone Can Design and Send Beautiful Emails”, I talked about not custom-designing your emails and sticking to tried-and-tested templates instead.

Why? The trade-off isn’t viable.

Your time, money, and effort to custom-design your email may be greater than the direct and indirect profit you receive from doing it. The marginal gains may be off and you may be better off developing other core components of your business that can achieve a significant impact in your company’s growth.

Having two businesses worth multi-million dollars under my belt, I can say with absolute certainty that you don’t really need to achieve super-duper expert level in all aspects of your business. You don’t need to be perfect because perfection doesn’t exist.

You can approach this with a bootstrapper’s mindset: when inputs are scarce, maximize the output. Because when your time, money and energy are limited, the best thing you need to do is to make the most out of it. Know the phrase, “get the best bang for your buck”? It’s similar, but you want to find the best bang for your time, money and energy.

Another concept that applies to this idea is the Pareto principle: for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

This means that for your business, 80% of the profit may come from 20% of your clients.

Or 80% of your company’s growth may come from only 20% of your activities, such as setting up a better marketing funnel, or a more improved internal system for efficiency.

The key here is to find the best input to output ratio so you can focus more of your resources into doing things that actually improve the growth of your business.

I want to hear from you: have you ever had an experience where doing something in your business led you to the point of wondering if giving your absolute 100% resources is absolutely worthwhile? Let me know in the comments below. See you next week. Cheers.

Note: Before we go to the main course, here’s a tasty treat for your appetizer: I’m giving away ONE ticket to the “Running Remote Conference” where I’ll be speaking in this June in Bali, Indonesia. If you’re interested in remote working, this is one conference you can’t miss. Make sure to join here as this giveaway ends in a couple of days!

Everyone wants to have a slice of the remote working pie. After all, being a “digital nomad” who can “work from anywhere” so they can live the “laptop lifestyle” gives them the freedom to earn money and still enjoy their time with their loved ones, right?

You don’t even need to log on to Instagram to check out the remote working trend. Stripe, the payment processor, recently announced that they would have an office exclusively for remote workers, even though they have offices worldwide.

Additionally, a Citrix study shows that 50% of the workforce will be office-free by 2020. Can you imagine a world where half of the working population will be working from the comforts of their own home? It’s also possible, considering that the remote workforce has increased by 140% since 2005.

While the idea of remote working sounds great to the remote workers, the entrepreneurs involved in the hiring and team-building process find it a bit daunting.

After all, how can you trust someone to actually hire them and work with them, even though you haven’t met them before? How do you build a remote team if you don’t have any experience with the process? Before you paralyse yourself with all these questions, take a deep breath and get your favorite drink as I help you start building your own remote team by discussing the 3-step process in today’s podcast.

You can start building a remote team by hiring:

1. Freelancer or Consultant

Hiring a freelancer or a consultant is a great start since you’ll be exposed to the wonders of remote working without feeling overwhelmed. To start the hiring process, you can work with them by assigning a project to them first and consider future collaborations if you’re satisfied with their work and the results they bring in. There’s no full-time commitment yet and you can test your work compatibility with them by communicating with them via email or video/voice check-ins.

Your freelancer or consultant needs to be professional and reliable enough since they’ll be managing themselves. There’s no need to micro-manage them since you’ll be working with them on a per-project basis and they’ll invoice you accordingly.

1. Virtual Assistant

Now that you have a little bit of hiring experience for a remote team, the next step is to hire a virtual assistant who can help you with customer support or administrative tasks.

Normally, you’d be advised to hire someone working at the same time zone as you -- but isn’t it actually better to hire an assistant who won’t be working at the same hours as you do? This will give you the necessary experience to deal with your remote team in the future. After all, your team will be all over the world, right?

In hiring a virtual assistant, you’ll ultimately be responsible for them, so the best way you can handle this is by working on a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) you can use to train them effectively and efficiently. You can also apply here the communication channels and processes that you’ve learned by working with a freelancer/consultant first.

Nurture your relationship with your virtual assistant: it’s a win-win situation that gives you more experience to work on building your remote team and allows you to win back some of your resources, too.

1. Full-Time Hire

You can get your full-time employee by evolving their relationship from a freelancer/consultant to an official member of your remote team. This way, you already know that you have professional compatibility and you’re guaranteed that their work output will be satisfactory.

Another pathway you can get full-time employees is by posting on job boards that are focused on remote working opportunities. In a world where freelancers and remote workers are forecasted to be the majority of the US workforce by 2027, hiring someone full-time means you’ll treat team exactly the way you would treat someone who’s an official part of your team, regardless of the physical boundaries.

After all, you’re all working towards the same goal -- to boost your company’s growth, aren’t you?

If I had to do it over again, I’d still build a remote team for Conversio. And you’ll get to hear more about my personal experience in building a remote team by listening to my talk over at the Running Remote Conference in Bali. Join our giveaway and win your free ticket here! See you next week.

Learn with our FREE Ecommerce Academy: conversio.com/academy

Music featured in this episode was "Celery Man" by Birocratic and can be found at @birocratic.

Should content be king, and strategy be the king’s advisors, then visual identity is definitely the queen.

Sure, the most important element in your email is your content since it has to resonate well with your target customers. Compelling content helps motivate your customers to do whatever action you need them to do, right? Whether it’s buying, referring or subscribing.

Now, for the great content to be engaging, it also needs to be sent strategically by optimizing it via personalization, timing and segmentation. These elements, as discussed in my podcast, “4-Step Checklist To Effectively Boost Your Engagement in Email Marketing”, help drive email engagement up and boost your sales over the long run.

But these aren’t enough. Visual impression of the email matters, too. This is why 51% of B2B marketers prioritize visual assets creation as part of their content marketing strategy.

In this week’s podcast, I’m going to help you design beautiful, engaging and great-looking emails. Spoiler alert: I’m definitely not a designer, so you can guarantee that these tips are for everyone who needs them.

1. Use a tried-and-tested email template that just works

I agree that custom-designed emails are amazing. They’re great tools to solidify your branding identity and keep your business at top of mind.

However, designing custom emails take up a lot of time and investment -- resources that are better spent on growing your business and taking it to the next level.

Just think of the 80-20 principle: custom-designed emails don’t necessarily outperform templates by much, so why would you “improve” it when you can improve other elements of your business that are directly related to boosting your revenue instead?

You’re not sending a Christmas card to your family, so you don’t need to customize and overthink every single thing. You’re better off using a good email template, once that’s been stress-tested in multiple browsers and has a good design language, as your foundation for your email’s visual identity. If you’re still within the early stages of your brand’s growth, if it works (and it doesn’t have a significant impact yet), don’t stress too much about it.

2. Use better imagery in your emails

Now that your template is done, focus on the image you’re going to be using. As I’ve mentioned in my previous video, “One Action Rule”, the simple formula to create super-performing emails is a striking and related image + brief but consistent and relevant copy + one compelling call-to-action.

Since you’ll be using one image in your email, it needs to convey exactly what your content is talking about. This single image has the power to make or break your email so it has to be impressive to catch your reader’s attention and relevant to keep the momentum going.

HardGraft practices this simple recipe into their emails. You can check out several examples of their appealing emails here -- and when I say appealing, I mean it: after all, I am one of their customers! Observe how the images they use are striking enough to make an impression and appealing enough to encourage you to scroll down.

I’m leaving you with these two tips for today. Is there any other tip for creating beautiful images you’d like to add? Let me know in the comments below. Cheers.

Learn with our FREE Ecommerce Academy: conversio.com/academy

Music featured in this episode was "Celery Man" by Birocratic and can be found at @birocratic.

Revenue -- such music to an entrepreneur’s ears!

After all, it feels extremely great to know that implementing a strategy results in revenue to your company, right?

But did you know that revenue can be achieved directly and indirectly?

You ran an ad campaign and your target customers purchased from you so you got $13,000 in sales? That’s direct revenue.

You implemented an abandoned cart recovery campaign so you made an extra $5,000 in profit? That’s direct revenue. Direct revenue is the obvious result of your marketing strategies: an increase in profit.

Beyond direct revenue, though, there’s another magical realm where fairies, unicorns, Doctor Strange and indirect revenue exist.

And it’s good if you implement a marketing strategy that results in direct revenue. But isn’t it better if you can run a strategy that achieves both direct and indirect revenue at the same time because it’s optimized for both?

Your time, investment and efforts will be the same but you get to hit two birds with one stone. In this week’s podcast, I’m going to help you achieve exactly this.

In the spirit of having your cake and eating it, too, the inspiration to share the concept of indirect revenue came when I was doing a case study for one of Conversio’s customers, Pastreez, an online shop selling beautiful and yummy macarons (French cookies).

As a Conversio client, Pastreez’ lead magnet is simple and enticing enough: sign up at their website pop-up for free so you can receive 7 pieces of macarons for free. Once they’ve received the voucher for the free macarons, they’ll also be included in a nurturing email campaign to encourage sales over time.

In this scenario, the direct revenue is simple. For example, if you’ve sent 100 emails and made $500 from them, then $500 is the direct revenue.

Now, checking at the case study of Pastreez, I’ve noticed that the direct revenue seemed promising -- an additional $10,000 in direct revenue for them, spread over ~2500 email recipients in a 3-part email campaign is great, right?

But that wasn’t the end of it. There were also extra benefits in the name of indirect benefit that I’ve monitored:

1. Higher Average Order Value

Customers who went through this specific email campaign by Conversio had 23.57% higher Average Order Value (AOV) compared to customers who didn’t experience this campaign.

This is massively beneficial in terms of boosting Customer Lifetime Value and direct revenue. Just imagine: if your AOV is $300, and it’s increased by 23.57%, you get to have an additional $70 in sales -- for every customer!

2. Higher Repeat Purchase Rate

Another hidden benefit of indirect revenue is the increase of repeat purchase rate: customers who experienced this specific email campaign made 2.56% more purchases compared to the rest of the brand’s customers.

This is amazing news because a) it’s easier to sell to engaged customers who purchase repeatedly; and, b) repeat customers tend to spend 3%-15% more. So in a way, this indirect revenue affects your direct revenue, too.

3. Improved Cart Recovery Rate

Sure, 10.7% of customers who receive recovery emails return to make a purchase. But Pastreez’ number was off-the-charts: they had a 50% increase of the overall cart recovery rate!

This means that the overall email campaign was effective over the long run since it had a momentum going that encouraged the prospects to buy from them, even though it took two to three emails to make this happen.

Figuring out the hidden benefits also allows you to decide on whether or not a strategy is worth investing on: since you’ll be considering at least two metrics that’ll help you determine your ROI, you can make better investment decisions so your company can move forward.

Also, indirect revenue encourages you to look beyond the obvious metric -- sales in terms of numbers -- so you can also look into optimizing your email campaigns for both direct and indirect revenue.

So there you have it. I hope this video helps you with your company’s growth as a brand and as a business! Any other insights you’d like to add? Let me know in the comments below. Chat to you next week! Cheers.

Learn with our FREE Ecommerce Academy: conversio.com/academy

Music featured in this episode was "Celery Man" by Birocratic and can be found at @birocratic. This podcast was produced by comealivecreative.com.

Sure, knowing that customers rated discounts in email as the biggest influence on their purchase decisions counts. But this doesn’t mean you should just hand out discount coupons to everyone in your mailing list, of course.

Consider your prospects who recently gave you their email addresses to sign up to your mailing list. At this stage, they’re still warm leads, right?

They gave their email addresses as a way to engage with your brand, so you’re not necessarily required to give them a discount code at your first contact with them. You already got their attention.

Now, the story changes if after a week or two, they still haven’t bought from you. At this stage, they’re becoming less warm: there may be less interest or less engagement with your brand. This is when sending a small discount -- $10 off their purchase or 5% off -- makes sense.

This is what the Heat Map Method of Better Discounting is all about. Take every customer category (prospect, first-time customer, repeated customer, inactive customer) and place them on the “heat map”.

Warm customers are those who are highly engaged, meaning, those who recently subscribed to your list, or those who recently bought from you.

Less warm customers are those who have been inactive for a specified time frame: those who’ve never bought from you, those who bought from you one year ago, or those who repeatedly bought from you in the past but abruptly stopped doing business with you.

Your customer is “warm”? Don’t send an email just yet. They’re “less warm”? Better get started on sending those discount coupons.

Now, this idea isn’t limited to your customer categories only. You can apply the Heat Map Method of Better Discounting to your abandoned cart emails as well. For your first recovery email, don’t send a discount code yet. Remind them of their abandoned cart. Find out what stopped them from finalizing their purchase. Listen to what they have to say first.

Then, if by the second and third emails, they still haven’t made their purchase yet, then by all means, include a discount code in your email so you can motivate them to finalize the transaction.

Pro tip: most customers want percentage off discounts (35%) and free shipping (20%) so keep these in mind when considering what kind of discount scheme you’ll offer in your email.

The “colder” a customer is, the better it is for you to do discounting. Simple, sweet, and straight-to-the-point, right?

I hope you find this video helpful! Any insights you’d like to add? Let me know in the comments section below. See you next week! Ciao.

How do you eat an elephant?

Do you open your mouth as wide as possible and hope you can eat it all at once?

No, of course not. That’s crazy! You eat it one bite at a time.

The same principle applies to improving customer experience on your website so you can increase your conversion rate. You don’t do a major makeover and hope your conversion rate jumps from an average of 2% to a whopping 20% overnight. That’s impossible.

Instead, you tweak your website’s elements bit by bit and aim for a realistic improvement from 2% to 2.2% conversion rate. Sure, the figures may seem small when you look at it superficially. But have you considered the extra revenue you can earn just by doing small changes in your website?

You can start improving your website – and your customer’s experience – by doing these small tricks I talk about in today’s podcast.

Imagine walking into a brick-and-mortar store and just being bombarded by 20 different employees asking you what you want to buy, how they can help you, why you should sign up to their exclusive list, or what your target budget is.

It’s irritating. It’s overwhelming. It’s confusing. Right?

So if your prospect visits your website and sees a lot of things happening: a pop-up appearing, multiple widgets loading, and several things flashing on the screen at the same time, it’s the same thing. They feel targeted. They feel attacked. They feel overwhelmed.

And you bet they’re going to want to leave your website as quickly as possible.

Unless you do these three things to improve your customer experience, of course:

1. Log out of your admin dashboard and browse through your website in the eyes of a prospect.
   Here’s where a change in perspective comes in handy. Instead of checking your website as an administrator, think of yourself as a guest.

Another advantage of doing this tip is it gives you the opportunity to view your website with all its features.

Sometimes, the website development team tends to add a lot of widgets and pop-ups because they’re logged in as admin so they can’t view everything, so logging out and viewing in a private browser window helps you fix this by seeing all the website elements first-hand.

Think of pop-ups, for example. If you’ve set your pop-up to appear every 3 days only, and you’ve already seen it, whenever you test it while you’re logged in, you may not see it any more so you tend to add another pop-up to really capture your market.

Before you know it, you already have 3 pop-ups and 2 widgets. The only way you can know about this is if you view the site in a private browsing window and see for yourself – kind of like putting yourself in your prospects’ shoes, isn’t it?

1. Create contextual and relevant pop-ups with trigger, instead of showing it all the time.
   You and I both know that pop-up works.

Sure, Sumo even discovered that top performing 10% of pop-up forms convert at a whopping 9.3%.

But you also need to consider the fact that intrusive pop-ups are overwhelming and sometimes, irritating enough to negatively affect your customer experience.

After all, 70% of Americans say they get annoyed by irrelevant pop-up ads.

So how do you go about it?

You make your pop-ups relevant by providing:

Context
Instead of randomly showing your pop-up on every page of your website, consider displaying it in a highly relevant blog post.

For example, you can write an in-depth guide on investing and then display your pop-up offering a free ebook about personal finance.

This way, you’re sure that people who want to download your book are interested in finance as they’ve seen it appear on your post about investing – exclusively.

Trigger
Using the concept of “less is more”, show a pop-up only when it’s triggered by an action.

For example, the exit pop-up is triggered only once a prospect approaches the close button to exit your website.

Another example is taken from the Conversio website: whenever a visitor who’s reading our long-form content stays a certain time on the page or scrolls beyond a specific part of the page, a pop-up is also triggered to appear.

Of course, if you also want your offer to be available anytime but you don’t want it to appear as intrusive as a pop-up form, you can also use a bar that’s fixed on the top or bottom part and persistently appears on the page. It’s still a nice visual call-to-action that doesn’t detract from your customer experience.

1. Consider how your website elements interact with each other.
   Perhaps you have several pop-ups appearing: a persistent bar, a widget for chat, a widget for a loyalty program like Smile.io, and even Conversio’s Review Tab.

Sure, I understand the reason for wanting to include all these elements. They may all be helpful in helping you achieve your respective goals.

Again, think of choosing your website elements as you personally talking to your visitor. If you talk about different things all at the same time, your message will be lost, your customers will be confused, and your goal will be left unfulfilled altogether.

That’s why you really need to consider and prioritize which element you actually need and how this element will be displayed on your website.

Perhaps you don’t really need to have a persistent bar that’s available all the time?

Or maybe just showing a simple “contact us” link is better instead of showing a chat widget all the time?

Maybe instead of displaying everything on your homepage, you can consider displaying a certain element on certain pages only. Prioritize and consider alternatives to pop-ups. You owe this to your website readers and customers.

I hope this video inspired you to assess and modify your website as needed. After all, improving your customer experience can boost your conversion rate and increase your Customer Lifetime Value over time – killing two birds with one stone, right?

Interested in learning more about this? Let’s chat about it in the comments section below. Talk to you next week! Ciao.

Learn with our FREE Ecommerce Academy: conversio.com/academy

Music featured in this episode was "Celery Man" by Birocratic and can be found at @birocratic. This podcast was produced by comealivecreative.com.

If you’ve done everything (shipping coupons, social proof, product reviews, etc) and you still haven’t seen an increase in your abandoned cart recovery rate, it may be time for you to change your tactics so you can view different results.

As my imaginary friend Albert Einstein once said, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” and we don’t want this, do we?

Because here’s the truth: sometimes, your website may be great, and your email sequence may be top-notch, but if the customers coming into your website aren’t a good fit with your brand’s target market profile, then you’ll still see no change in your abandoned cart recovery rates.

If this is the truth, then, you shouldn’t change your website or your email marketing strategy. They’re already effective to your chosen target market.
Sometimes, it’s not HOW you talk – it’s about WHO you’re talking to.

Instead, you need to tweak your traffic acquisition channels so you can get customers who are more likely to finalize their purchase with you since they’re a better fit for you and your company.

You can do this both in your email marketing tool and Conversio. First, you need to look into customers who have recently abandoned their carts but haven’t purchased anything yet. In Conversio, it’s simply a matter of going to your All Carts page and filtering those into carts that are still recoverable.

Once you have your list, get in touch with them via direct one-on-one email. Start with customers who have the highest abandoned cart value and then slowly but steadily work your way through the list.

Perhaps they were just browsing. Or maybe they lost interest and bought from your competition instead. Or it could be that they don’t have the budget for it right now.

Because you see, you can always check out abandoned cart statistics and make an educated guess as to why your customers aren’t buying from you. Or you can do this trick and find out the exact cause — straight from the horse’s mouth.

You’ll never know the real reason why they abandoned their carts unless you personally contact them and find out for yourself.

Afterwards, feel free to tweak your website or your email marketing campaign accordingly. After all, you know the exact reason why your customers are abandoning their carts, so what’s stopping you from recovering them?

Now, I know a hands-on approach like this doesn’t scale. It’s not very “efficient” or “automated”, but if it’s going to be effective in increasing your abandoned cart recovery rate even just by 1%, then, by all means, try it out and see the difference for yourself.

It may take time and a lot of your resources. But this is one strategy that can give you a slow but steady ROI over time.

I hope this video will contribute to the growth of your business! Let me know in the comments below or email me at [email protected] if you’ve tried out this strategy before. See you next week!