Your Website Is Costing You Thousands in Sales [Here's How to Fix It] | Matthew Stafford

Your Website Is Costing You Thousands in Sales [Here's How to Fix It] | Matthew Stafford Speaker 1: 9 times out of 10, the reason why the person came to your site and didn't buy is one, they don't trust you or they have unanswered questions. And so if you're not putting in the time and effort in order for them to find what they're looking for, easy navigation, being able to trust you and see that things are working, you're going to lose sales. Speaker 3: How can you on the website create a personalized user experience? Speaker 1: Your most valuable traffic is search and then filters. If you can get them to use the search bar, our eCommerce sites, we've had as high as 7% of people use it. It'll account for 30% of the revenue on the store. Speaker 3: Wow. Speaker 1: The reviews that actually get the highest conversion is two stars and less. Speaker 3: Your website might look great, but is it actually making you money? Every missed sale, every abandoned cart, every unoptimized page, it all adds up. Today, we'll uncover the hidden leaks draining your profits and reveal the data-driven strategies that you need to boost conversions and turn your site into a sales machine. So let's get started. Over the past three decades, our guest has demonstrated entrepreneurial experience by successfully building multiple businesses across various industries. As the CEO and managing partner of Build, Grow, Sale, Scale, and an equity owner of several in-house e-commerce brands, he's accumulated extensive knowledge and expertise. This experience has enabled him to mentor thousands of store owners through paid eCommerce groups and live events. Today, this is our first time guest on the show, Matthew Stafford. But before we get to Matthew, we're going to have a quick word from a sponsor. Hey, Amazon sellers, are you leaving money on the table with Amazon? Well, TrueOps is here to help you reclaim every last cent you're owed. Over 1,400 brands have already recouped millions with TrueOps cutting edge technology. Finding reimbursements others may have missed. And guess what? You only pay 10% commission, no more overpaying the industry standard of 25%. Plus the first $1,000 in reimbursements is free to you. Here's the best part. TrueOps doesn't get paid unless you do. If Amazon ever reverses a claim, TrueOps automatically credits your fees back to you. Now that's peace of mind. Remember, $1,000 free reimbursements to start than just 10% of successfully recovered funds. You have nothing to lose but the three minutes it takes to sign up for a free audit and so much more to gain. Sign up with the link in the description and start reclaiming what's rightfully yours. Welcome, Matthew. Speaker 1: Hello. Thanks for having me. Speaker 3: You know, it's great to have you on. This is the first time we get to talk on the podcast, so thanks for coming on. I know you got a busy schedule. Speaker 1: Yeah, looking forward to it. We adjusted from Wednesday to Friday, and it's a good way to cap off getting ready for the weekend. Speaker 3: You rolled your eyes on Wednesday, right, going, oh, God. No. Speaker 1: No, it happens. Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, we were in the middle of that summit and I wasn't even sure I was going, you know on the Friday before so had to put together a brand new, you know what it's like. A brand new presentation, which you're doing, you're not giving to somebody else, takes forever. Speaker 1: Business is always changing environment. I do some coaching with some men and, you know, it's basically trauma all the time. Like it's a It's a game of learning how to figure out where things are changing and how you can show up in a powerful way over and over. Speaker 3: It's very similar to becoming an eCommerce seller. You have to be resilient. A lot of the time, like you said, but also crisis management because things happen. You know, all of a sudden something gets deleted or you don't get the information or the graphics or the text that you're trying to put in or I try to use, like we have graphic artists, but I also try to use some of these new tools that are out there, like Gamma for presentations. And, you know, sometimes it doesn't work very well. It's just like, come on. AI is not quite there yet. Speaker 1: Yeah. And if you think about it, realistically, we all have the same 24 hours and you see people that get a lot done and then people that don't get a lot done. And I think that that's just a measure of your capacity to handle change and adjust and not have it derail. And, you know, you just set a new schedule and get after it. Speaker 3: Yeah, I had a business coach once and I think what he was talking about was, you know, you can hear two people, one guy, both in business say, man, I am stressed or I don't have enough time or I'm maxed out. And then you have a guy that's very efficient that gets triple and he's saying, I'm stressed. And that's at a point where he's never been at. Until he gets over the stress and then he can pass that stress the next time. I don't know. I've evolved from, and I've seen this over the years, and I remember one of my business partners, this was back in the 90s, just looking at me, seeing how stressed I was over what I would look at really nowadays say is nothing. I wouldn't even bat an eyelash, but I was losing sleep. I had a bloody ulcer at the time, real like a bloody ulcer. I was so stressed out and he just came up to me and he says, it's always going to be worse. Like you're always going to think about things worse than what they'll end up being. And it's so true in every walk of your life. But let's talk about, all right, let's talk about optimizing your website and why people are losing thousands of dollars and profit. So why don't we start there? Loving this episode? Sharing is caring. Don't forget to share this episode and give us a review. Speaker 1: Yeah, so the way that I got started, I was actually really good at Facebook ads and this is about 10 years ago. We did millions of dollars in spend, got invited to Facebook. And we used that to sell off marketplaces and then then Shopify came out and we started using. I work for Shopify and what I realized was the ads were just like all over the map like it was good some days, bad some days and I actually stumbled across a guy that was teaching a course on Google Analytics and it seems comical now. It was like six calls for $1,000 and we were doing We were doing probably 200 sales a day, 150, 200 sales a day on our store. I was feeling like it was decent, but I was just frustrated with the ads. And then when we started going through the data, it was showing me a whole bunch of stuff on the website that wasn't working. And I thought, wow, if I can fix these things, the sales will go way up or the ads will perform much better. And that was the case. And so then I, I wanted to make sure that I didn't get struck by lightning and it just worked on my site and it wouldn't work on others. And so I had some friends who we had done a lot of Facebook traffic together that had Shopify sites and I said to them, Hey, I think I can optimize your site a little bit and make a big difference in the amount of sales that you're getting because it's working really well for us. And so the worst case scenario, if it doesn't work, you don't have to give me anything. But if it works, let's do something together. And that was kind of the dive in and see if it was going to work. Two of the first ones that we did, one was Organifi, which is a supplement company. They had done 2.75 million the year before. And when we went in there in 90 days, we had them at a 9.8 million run rate. And they ended up finishing around $16 million that year. And the second one was another buddy of mine. He was doing about $300,000 to $400,000, kind of going back and forth per month in sales. And within six months, we had him at $2.7 million. And so I'm like, okay, this stuff works. It makes a difference. Let's get really good at this and actually understand what we're doing because at that point, you know, we were still learning a lot of stuff. We certainly weren't seasoned like we are now after 10 years. Speaker 3: What were you doing? Speaker 1: I approached the website like a funnel where, you know, developers, they basically look at the store as an online store catalog and a lot of store owners look at it as that. That's not great for shopping. And so if you look at the store as a funnel, like your landing page has a specific purpose, builds trust and easy navigation to what I'm looking for. That's it. If you're trying to sell on your homepage, which we see all the time, that's a huge no-no. Because if you sell a product that's worth 100, 200, we have some products that their average order value is three grand. And you have quick add or buy now on the homepage on these products. I always ask the owner, does your customer or your client have enough information on that homepage to make a two, $300 decision? And they're like, no. I'm like, so then do you understand why when you have this stuff on your homepage, it doesn't work as well. And then we use the principle that Dean Jackson talked about forever, answer the question that they have going on in their head. And so at different stages in your website, there's always a different conversation happening. Like when they're getting ready to add to cart, the conversation might be around shipping or how quickly they're going to get their product or if shipping is included. But that's not what the conversation is on the homepage or on the category page. And so a lot of times when the customer does some customer or the store owner does some customer service, they get these inquiries and instead of really thinking through where the person was, they just start plastering the answers all over their site. And what happens is it forces the 80% of people that would do business with you to go through a path that's way more complicated because 20% of the people wrote in and asked questions. And so for us, we find that a lot of times the best wins early on is actually removing stuff, making the site simpler and easier and simple navigation. Speaker 3: That is hilarious because just growing up and going through school back in the 80s and then learning about e-commerce in the 90s to early 2000s that what you said is completely opposite of what I learned and that is above the fold, by now, you know, It has to be above the fold. Before, just, you know, pretty graphics. What's your pain point? Buy now. And then, you know, you scroll down, there's a whole formula to this and what you're doing, and this is, hold it, a different question. Just because what you just dropped is very different than what I thought. So you're talking about not only you're having a second click or even a third click, Again, what I learned was you're trying to minimize the clicks to get to the product because every time somebody clicks, there's about a 50 plus drop off in traffic. So by removing some of this, you're finding out that that's not the case. You can have that extra click and still get the conversion. Want to learn more about optimizing your website for the best chance of success? Check out another great episode on Website SEO right here with Steve Wiedemann. Speaker 1: Yeah, so what we found is Your most valuable traffic is search and then filters. So those two forms, if you can get them to use the search bar, we've on our eCommerce sites, we've had as high as 7% of people use it and it'll account for 30% of the revenue on the store. So very, very valuable. Those people convert much higher. And so when you think through that, why would that be the case? Well, one, they found what they were looking for, so they're going to convert much higher. So we're like, okay, how do we make, when they don't use the search bar, finding what they're looking for much easier? Well, that would be a much simpler navigation. You see these mega menus that have 100 items or 30 items. When really it should be men or women's, go to men's and then give them a set of filters or go to women and then give them a set of filters. But you're asking them to look at this huge mega menu of all these different things and a lot of times it's on a phone and you're asking them to do that and click the right spot with their thumb and then people wonder why it doesn't work. Well, when they get it wrong two, three times, they're already frustrated at the site and they leave. Speaker 3: They skip, yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah. The other thing that you said though is correct. Above the fold is very important. And the reason why I say that is because when you look at the stats, about 50% of people never scroll. So that means that if your site has like a false bottom across the bottom, which is items, it looks like there's a bottom to the page. That encourages even less people to scroll. So we always try to make sure that in that homepage banner or whatever, the next section kind of comes up underneath it. So you can see that there's more and you can encourage them to scroll. But we also use a principle called the hierarchy of focus. And what that means is every single page should have the next most important action standing out. And what I mean by that is everybody thinks like, oh, I want to test my button color. Well, If you use the hierarchy of focus principle, what you realize is the button color doesn't matter near as much as like whether it's green or blue or red or any of those things. What matters the most is that it doesn't match anything else on the page. So like literally it stands out and in their mind they know that's the next action to take if the page gives them what they need. And so by doing that, you encourage people to take those micro actions and get further into the site. And when you do that, they convert at a much higher level than a typical user who gets, you know, fumbling around the navigation. Speaker 3: So it's a simple pattern interrupt. Speaker 1: Yep, 100%. So if you have a black and yellow theme, you don't want your buttons to be black and yellow. You want them to be blue or green or any color. Speaker 3: You know, just going back to what we're talking about on the homepage, I do a lot of searching and just looking for things. I can't believe the number of websites that don't have a contact at the top and there's no search. And then if you have a search bar, a lot of the, I always find, and this is the way I was told to do it. You always kind of just put in a gray background, What's it used for? Like type in a keyword, type in this, type in your product. Speaker 1: We've actually tested the words in there and we can, we could literally physically show the data what it would change the site dynamics, the site metrics. And so their hero products are the things that they're known for. We'll usually put those in there, like you said, in the light gray, because then that suggests go ahead and put in here. Another thing that we learned, and I'm sure throughout the show I'll give you plenty of damaging admission, because I think that there's a lot more lessons in what we've done wrong than just what we've done right, and we've certainly made those mistakes. We used to think, well, if you don't have that many products, you don't need a search bar. Well, what we realized is people don't only use it to look for the specific products that you have. They also look for it as to solve a problem. And so what we were realizing by tracking what people were typing in there is that they were using language that we could use in our product descriptions that was much, much better because it's how they identified the problem different than the person who was selling it did. The other thing by tracking that, we had a company that we worked for called Club Coats, which was a little, basically it was a sweatshirt that was like an animal for little kids. And then when they would take it off, it would fold into itself and become a stuffed animal. So they could carry their stuffed animal. And when it got cold, they could open it up and put it on. Well, the two most searched items on that store were unicorn and unicorn misspelled. And so we're like, oh, okay, cool. They didn't have a unicorn. So we told them how many thousands of searches people had put in. We're Unicorn and they launched it and they did $478,000, $480,000 in 24 hours on Amazon Prime Day when they introduced the Unicorn. It was a half a million dollars worth of sales that we literally discovered through tracking what people were typing in the search bar and if we hadn't done that we would have never even known it. Speaker 3: That's incredible. One other thing and I just went through this a couple of times over the last week. Uh, companies that make their support site. Uh, impossible to find. So I'd have a question. I'd go to their chat bot. The chat bot wouldn't answer it. So I'm looking all over scouring. I'm getting more frustrated. And all I want to know is if it has this or if it can do this. And it, it got me so ticked off. I didn't even buy the product. I skipped off and just went to another product that gave me that information. So, Being able to, and I'm looking at, I know I'm skipping over here. Kelsey probably told you at the beginning that I go down a few different rabbit holes, but adding a proper support system that you test out. There's so many people that put in these AI chatbots now that never test that out that are more frustrating than anything. And I think that's a huge conversion factor as well. Speaker 1: It is, especially when you consider about 80% of your traffic's on mobile. And so when those, those things like autopop, when you land on the site and it covers up a third of your screen and you have to try to click the X to close it, that's a wasted click. And it's an annoyance to the person. So what we teach and what we've found works much, much better is that those stay closed automatically. The only time that they auto pop is on a contact us or a FAQ page, because at that point, someone's saying, I have a question or I need help. And so that would make sense that it would open there and then they could interact with it. But again, like you said, that wouldn't help if it wasn't tested. I'm surprised how many people do that and then they expect their customer to figure it out. What we always say is nine times out of ten, the reason why the person came to your site and didn't buy is one, they don't trust you or they have unanswered questions. And so if you're not giving them, if you're not putting in the time and effort in order for them to find what they're looking for, easy navigation, Being able to trust you and see that things are working, you're going to lose sales. And, you know, obviously they're going to, it doesn't mean those people aren't going to buy that product. It just means they're going to buy it from someone else who did a better job. Speaker 3: So can we just put out a list of three to five items, just one, two, three, four, five, just bullets about what people can do. You've already mentioned a bunch. But what they can do to simply get better conversion on their website. Don't forget to subscribe right now and join us every Wednesday at noon Eastern Standard Time for our live recording of the Lunch With Norm podcast. And don't forget that you have a chance to win big with our weekly giveaways. Speaker 1: Yeah, so what I'll do, I'll try to make it simple so that they can go back and listen to this. Speaker 3: Right. Speaker 1: Easy navigation, which means if you have three or four money, what we say by easy navigation is they should be your money making links. If you have 20 products, but three of them make 80% of your sales, that should be the three links that are in your main navigation. So they trust you and they find what they're looking for. Doesn't mean that they can't use search and find all the other products that you have. You just don't try to show them everything and make it look like a flea market. That all by itself will make your homepage work much better. And the other principle is don't sell on your homepage. What your homepage is for is what is your unique value proposition and then how do I find what I'm looking for. If you answer those two things really well, you will see your conversions go up astronomically. The second page should always be a filter page or categories. If you have three different types of products and each one has several variants, when they click on the t-shirts or blouses or whatever and they go to that, if you have 30 varieties of t-shirts or 30 designs, from that category page they can filter. color, size, style, any of those things. Now what happens is within two clicks they've landed on what they're looking for. Instead of having to scroll through tons and tons of things, a lot of times most people are looking on their desktop And not looking on their phone. And so when they think it's really easy to navigate and do everything on their desktop, because that's what they're looking at at home when they're building the site, they don't look on the phone and it's a totally different experience. So having the filters on a category page works much better. The third thing would be your product page. At this point, that's where you have one button, which is your main Your main call to action, which is add to cart. And then from there, the next button in the cart would be proceed to checkout, etc. But on the product page, that's where you answer the question, why is this product cost how much it is? What's the materials? How soon are you going to ship it? How long have you been in business? All of these things are, this is the conversation that they're having in their head. Am I going to pull out my credit card and give these people money? Well, I want to know how soon I'm going to get it. What's the quality? Reviews on the product page. Reviews are very, very important. And I think that Amazon is pretty much made that true for the websites as well. As we've used their review principles, we've realized that, yes, that makes a huge difference. And a little thing that's counterintuitive that people don't realize is the reviews that actually get the highest conversion is two stars and less. And everybody thinks like, oh, that's really, really weird. And so what we realized, and we've done, you know, thousands of tests, is that people don't expect you to be perfect. They want to see when you've made a mistake and they want to see that you've corrected it. So when you push the negative reviews and you have an answer and you've handled it, those actually convert really high. When all you do is just push all your great reviews, people actually don't trust it. And so for us, we found, you know, it could be on shipping times. It could be we ran out of product, all the different ones. Clearly you get to still push them, but the ones that have answers and you've taken care of it and all that, those actually become conversion tools, not a reason for people to not buy from you. Speaker 3: So regardless if it's a negative or positive review, you should always comment. Speaker 1: 100%. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: Yes. Yep, interaction on it. And your reviews will actually make a lot of sales if you do that. Speaker 3: And I know this from the Amazon world, but your tone can kill your conversions. Like if you go back and you're screaming at somebody because they didn't like something, you're done. If you go back and even if somebody's, okay, Matthew, I sell beauty products and one of the products is soap, natural soap. This lady bought my green soap. Okay. It's, it's, um, it's a green pea soap and she didn't like the hue. So she gave me a one star because she didn't think that the hue of the color green matched what it was on the website. So I could have just said, you're an idiot, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you know, you bite your tongue. And I still wanted to, like, usually if I have confrontation in most things, I bite my tongue for 24 hours, but I want to show that I'm quick. I'm efficient. And I had to bite my tongue and then just let her know that whatever it was, uh, would be fixed. And I sent her out a different scent. I asked her, Oh, maybe you didn't like that color. You know, could you, do you want us to send you out a different, um, a different scent? And I gave her a couple of options. She did. And she did bump it up, I think to a three star, but, I 100% agree with what you were talking about is if somebody is looking at your product and you only have five star, something's funny. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. So that would have been a great one to push. Ones like that where the customer really is actually wrong. Like you can't, there's no way you can quality control the hue of the green. And people, most 99% of customers understand that. And when they see, wow, you had a very unreasonable customer and you handled it in a reasonable manner, the amount of trust that you get from that, believe it or not, I would have that review pinned to the top and it would be a one or two star review. And I'll guarantee you when you track the conversions off of people that clicked on it, it would be double what the site conversion average is just because People literally don't expect you to be perfect. They expect you to take care of the problem. Speaker 3: That's a great idea. Okay. Hey, we're at the bottom of the hour. This is a little bit different today. This is a pre-recorded podcast. So what we're going to be doing, if you're listening to this live, yes, we're going to be putting this on Wednesday. Usually we have the Wheel of Kelsey and that's where our guest gives away something. Well, we can't do that if this is a pre-record. So what we're going to do is we're going to put the information into our WhatsApp group. And if you're listening to it on live, you can just go over the WhatsApp group and put in your name and we will be drawing the will of Kelsey in the group. So what do we have today as a giveaway, Matthew? Speaker 1: We're going to do a site audit. So if you have a website, You can submit that and I will go through and do a loom video and walk through the entire site and show you what I see and we call it a heuristic analysis. You'll get a lot of benefit and you'll look at your site different than you probably ever have in the past. Speaker 3: Very good. Even the information you provided so far, it's so different than a lot of other people from what I've heard from a lot of other people. So that's hashtag WheelOfKelsey. Just go to the WhatsApp group, put that in and yes, we'll honor the, if you mentioned two other people, we'll give you a second entry. All right, so Kelsey, let's queue up a sponsor and let's go over to them. Hey, Amazon, Walmart and TikTok sellers, we're in queue four and I know the pressure's on. So how do you rank higher and sell more during the busiest time of year? Well, as a certified Amazon partner agency, AzRank has the expertise and proven strategies to take your projects to the top, driving visibility and sales across all platforms. With a proven expertise in optimizing search rankings, AzRank guarantees your products stand out during this critical shopping season. You can email AZRank today at hello at AZRank.com. That's A-Z-R-A-N-K.com. And don't forget to mention the beard guy sent you, and that's gonna unlock an exclusive discount. I wanna mention something about AZRank. And Kelsey, I think we have to do a new sponsor, a sponsorship recording, because we talked about fourth quarter. But there is, like when you're an Amazon seller, There's gift cards. People give each other gift cards and they usually, I would say it's to about the 15th where you get these crazy sales that are still filtering through and you're wondering why. It is January 10th. You'll probably see it's going to continue to be a pretty good selling season for you. Then you probably have, you'll, you'll see a drop. So don't worry if you see a drop. And also if you're looking to rank, yeah, check it out. AZ rank. I've used AZ rank a bunch of times to work on a lot of my products. So I just wanted to check to let you know, That if you're wondering, especially if you're new, why am I still seeing all these sales? It's gift cards and that'll probably start to drop off January around the 15th. Okay, so let's get back. Oh, by the way, If you see, if you offer gift cards on a website, do you normally see that to the drop off around January 15th? Speaker 1: I love gift cards. So the stats on the gift cards is only about 30% of them are redeemed. So they're very highly profitable. The other thing that we realized is we prefer to give people gift cards over discounts. Because if you think about the mentality, If I give you cash, then you get to come spend that cash and put a little bit of money with it in order to get what you want. If I give you a discount, it just feels like you're spending your own cash. And so you'd be shocked at how effective gift cards are at getting people to come back to the site compared to just the discount. Speaker 3: Very good. All right, let's talk a bit about the key performance metrics. What should eCommerce sellers look at? Speaker 1: Well, obviously, Revenue per user, I think that that's a more important metric than conversion rate because conversion rate can go up and down and fluctuate based off of the quality of your traffic, whether you have a sale going on or not. I think that revenue per user is a more accurate site metric to understand if your site is actually performing well. Another, let's see, what's another site metric? For us, we like to see them moving through the site. So certainly in our analytics, we look at the people that went to the landing page to the percentage that added to cart and move forward. And those metrics give us an idea of whether the site is done well or not. And one of those would be, you know, we'd like to see at least a 10% or more add to cart percentage. Otherwise, your site's not really doing a good job answering the questions and getting them to the point of where they make a decision. Because if you think about it, out of a hundred people that came to your site, they clicked on something or Google search something in order to find your product and you were what was served up. Why would 90% of them leave and only 10% add to cart? We think that at least that many should add to cart otherwise you have some issues on your site and then from there You should have less than a 50% drop to proceed to checkout and less than a 50% drop to completed purchase. And so doing that, that will tell you where your site's performing well or underperforming. The other thing is we want to see with our email that we're making nothing less than 25% of our revenue is coming through email. And it can be as high as 40%, but less than 25, we know that you probably got some revenue leaking out there too that you could work on and capture some more sales. Speaker 3: Yeah, these email sequences, just making sure that you're sending them out. Even after a sale goes out, now you're doing other promotions or a newsletter with value, value, value. Promo, promo, promo. And Abandoned Cart. So that's another one where you can find out why. You could just ask a question about why did you abandon the cart? Or it could be a reminder. But these are also just lost sales. Speaker 1: Yeah, we had one of our clients. It was one of the smartest things I've ever seen him do. He has a $2,000 average order value. And so what he did is he took the three or four. Biggest or most asked questions. And what he did is he sent a four email sequence, card abandon. And instead of addressing them as a general problem, each email was specific around one issue. And what we found, typically your first email that goes out has the highest recovery. And then the second one's much less than the third one is almost non-existent. Well, his four email sequence because they were literally providing value, not just selling. In fact, he didn't even ask for the sale. He basically had a link to their cart, but he used the entire email. To address a question that was a very, the most asked question by their consumers. And that four email series performed ridiculously well. Like I've literally never seen another store that pulls in as much from abandoned carts as he does. And the way that he did it was just really brilliant. Speaker 3: That's great. That really is. Another thing is you were talking about revenue per user. How do you bring up that it's the average order value, correct? I mean, it's what we're talking about. Speaker 1: Well, not necessarily. So that would be your average order value would be people that bought. So that would be the average sale for everybody that actually made a purchase. Your revenue per user is the revenue for everybody that's visited your site. That's going to give you a cleaner metric to know how well your site is performing and telling you like, okay, as we're making these tests, your average order value isn't necessarily going to go up, but you're going to make more sales from the same number of users. That's going to raise your revenue per user and you know your site's functioning better. Speaker 3: Okay, got it. Now on that average order value, how can somebody bring up that? Speaker 1: Yeah, great question. And we think that that's a key metric that a lot of people get wrong. So a lot of times people try to add things in the cart, a bunch of other stuff. And what happens is their average order value goes up because they're making less sales, but people are adding extra items. And so their average order value is technically higher. The problem is instead of making 100 sales, they might have made 88 or 87. And so what we would rather have is the customers that you can market to again and again and again, especially if you have high quality products. That's more important than just the average order value. But the way to do the average order value that's worked really well for us is we make it an add-on on the product page. So they don't have to leave the cart once they're in the cart. We want them to check out and become a customer. If they're still on the product page, we consider them a browser and so they can go ahead and browse, look, okay, this thing that I'm looking at is very congruent with the product I'm looking at. Yes, I want to add that too. That works really, really well for getting your average order value up without losing the number of sales that you have. Speaker 3: Okay. Now, personalization. I know For me, I just talked about packaging and personalization. How can you, on the website, create a personalized experience, user experience? Speaker 1: Honestly, at the moment, I don't think it's done well. I do believe that AI is going to make that a lot better. I think the more personal experience is that the site is very clean. It's not cluttered. It's very well thought out. So it's very trustworthy. You know, the buttons work. The things that a lot of people take for granted, they look at their site And it's cached on their computer. They don't go look at it through, you know, private browsing and look at what the customers seeing or look at it without Wi-Fi or the different things that actually matter a lot as far as like trying to troubleshoot why your conversions aren't as high as you want. I don't see personalization creating that many more sales unless it's like a print-on-demand and that's just done through, you know, where they can When they type in the personalization, having the image actually display the personalization, that works really, really well. In fact, we sell them some metal signs, and when they type in something, the metal sign with their typing will actually show up, and that works very well. Speaker 3: So let's go back. This is probably one of the last questions, but what are some other data-driven optimization strategies? Speaker 1: All right, this is the one. This is my favorite and it's never ever not got us a significant increase and it's the text that you put in your form fields on your checkout. So 99% of all sites say email and they want you to give them their email. I was reading Robert Chiodini's book that people don't mind giving you the information when you give them a reason why. And we track how many errors we get in those form fields because we want to optimize it. And we're looking at all the data on the website. Well, the email is it was always full of errors. And what we realized is Well, I'll tell you what we put in there first. We put email required for order confirmation. And the reason why we do that, the order confirmation emails opened 85% of the time. So we know that people want to see that order confirmation and they're probably going to give you their best email. So by doing that, we reduced our form field errors on several tests, like over 200%. And so what happens is we get one, we get their very best email. So our abandoned cart series collection goes up because it's in their primary email to we're giving them the information that why we need it. So they don't mind. It's actually creates more trust. And then under the phone, we put phone required for shipping notification because everybody wants to know when their item ships. And so by putting that, we've got the best data and SMS recovery is actually higher than email abandoned recovery. And so getting their phone number in there and not making it optional and giving them a reason why, you'll be shocked at what Your email and your SMS will recover from abandon just by adding that form field in there giving them a reason why. Speaker 3: That's so simple, but brilliant. Oh, very good. All right, let's get some of your contact information and tell us a little bit about Build Grow and Scale. Speaker 1: Yeah, so we love, I literally love what I do. We look at data all day long and figure out how to make more sales from the same amount of traffic and hence the Build Grow and Scale. When you're ready to build it, we have plenty of free resources on our site. That will give you a lot of tips and tricks and how to build it so that they will, they'll buy from you. And then as you grow and scale it, we have other services that we would love to offer if you're in the market to do that. And we can talk to you about that too. Speaker 3: All right. So check out Build Grow and Scale and now the website for it. Speaker 1: Yep, BuildGrowScale.com. If you want to get a hold of me, it's just Matt at BuildGrowScale.com and I check all the emails. Speaker 3: Fantastic. All right, Matthew, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I'm just going to put you back in the waiting room and we'll be right back with you. Speaker 1: Sounds good. Thanks for having me. Speaker 3: You're welcome. All right, everybody. So don't forget for this podcast, go over to our WhatsApp group, just Lunch With Norm and put in your entry there to get that website audit from Build Grow Scale. Kelsey, let's have the last sponsorship and then we'll come back. Speaker 2: Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat. I'm Colin C. Campbell and I've started over a dozen multi-million dollar companies in the last 30 years. I spent the last 10 years writing the book Start, Scale, Exit, Repeat to figure out what it is that these serial entrepreneurs do over and over again. We interviewed over 200 people. We created fifty eight chapters over thirty illustrations a hundred and eighty call outs and we quite frankly made this book. For the ADHD entrepreneur it's been number one on amazon in fifteen categories and has won twelve awards globally get your book today either on ebook. Paperback, hardcover, or audible on Amazon or your favorite bookstore. Speaker 3: And that's up to about 25 awards now. It's gone crazy this year. But all right. Kels, where are you? Unknown Speaker: All right. So we're all wrapped up. Thanks everyone for watching. And a reminder, make sure you subscribe to our newsletter. That is lwn.news. And don't forget to subscribe to this YouTube channel. Leave a comment and look forward to the next episode. Speaker 3: All right, and we should put in the Think Tank, Kevin's Think Tank that's coming up in, I think it's February, in Austin. If you missed the first one, just positive, positive, positive things. It was like no other event I've been to. Unknown Speaker: We'll make sure we include that link as well. So check that out and I think that's it. Speaker 3: All right. So that's it, everybody. The next time you'll see us is on a live podcast and that, if you want to catch it live, is Wednesdays, every Wednesday when I'm in town, which is most of the time. And I just wanted to thank everybody for being part of this community. If you want to join our community, we do have four options. We have the podcast, we have the newsletter, the WhatsApp group and the Facebook group. All right, everybody, we will see you next Wednesday. Thanks a lot.