Turn the Traffic You Already Have into Serious, Scalable Revenue with Matthew Stafford

Most first-time owners of an eCommerce store think that scaling starts with getting more traffic. The thought pattern usually goes: buy more ads, we'll get more visitors, they will click more, so we will sell more. But traffic without conversions is essentially a money pit. If your store is slow, it's confusing, it feels generic, that traffic goes nowhere. Today's guest doesn't just help stores to get more traffic, he helps them to turn what they already have into a serious scalable revenue. Hey, what's going on everyone? I'm Mike Sirius and this is Mastering Tech Growth. Every week we chat with industry leaders to bring you no-fluff tips on how to grow. If you enjoy the show, please do me a favor, hit that subscribe button and do send me your biggest growth questions at masteringtechgrowth.com. I'd love to know what you're working on and what's getting in your way. Joining me today is Matthew Stafford. He's the managing partner of Build Grow Scale, a powerhouse that helped hundreds of e-commerce stores hit 7 and then 8 figures. Matthew worked with brands like Organifi, Piperloo, and Pink Lily. His optimization strategies have driven massive results and all without relying on more ad spend. Today he's breaking down the $10 million growth playbook most store owners tend to overlook. Matthew, welcome.

Thanks for having me. I'm excited for the conversation.

So we love to kick with this question, Matthew. When I say mastering tech growth, What comes to mind?

For me, it's understanding the metrics behind what's required to grow. And a lot of times the tech stack, if it's not organized in a way that is usable, I pretty much feel like garbage in, garbage out. Okay, you don't have things organized, then the data that you're using to make decisions is going to be poor. And so your decisions is basically like throwing something against the wall and hoping something sticks and then reviewing it afterwards.

All right. So we basically saying if you want to master, you have to be data-driven. So you have to be making decisions on data. Otherwise you're effectively just guessing.

Yeah, for us, we do split testing and optimizing every single day. And I would say that without the data, when we have to guess, we're probably going to be wrong 70 to 80% of the time.

Okay.

With the data, the odds are in our favor to create that predictable growth and optimization. So the data is essential, is essential.

Why do so many startups then just ignore that step? There's so many people just launching things and not really thinking about any data gathering whatsoever. They just excited that you get something out. They buy some ads to get traffic. And are we saying you should not do that at all? Like, just think about the data capture step before you actually start putting money into buying traffic?

Yeah, I think a lot of the reason why people don't do it is it's boring, and it's also difficult to do it long enough and enough times to actually get good at analyzing it. So most people, they don't understand how to get their data in a usable format. And so to try to go find it in Google Analytics, if you're not an expert, yeah, is a full-time job. So really, what we do right away is when we have a site, we get the data cleaned up, and then we create a Data Studio report that gives an average person the ability to look at their data in a usable format. And without that, even myself after 8, 9 years, because I have team members that are really good at Google Analytics, I'm not great at it. I'm really good at using that dashboard that they give me or that, that form, because I can look at things from a layperson's or from a business perspective. Rather than the intricacies of the different filters that Google Analytics gives.

I get exactly what you're saying. I have lots of tools being set up, and sometimes you look at them and you go through the data, you see some points, but you have to know what you're looking for. Effectively, these numbers have to be crunched down to give you some type of conclusion at the, at the 10,000-foot view, right? That's what we're saying. It's like if you just have numbers, it's just gonna be numbers to you.

Yeah. And that's really all Google Analytics is. It's a hub that stores a whole bunch of data, and then the Tag Manager filters it so that you can go in and search it. But without having a usable format, it's just a lot of numbers. And, and it's very difficult. It's very difficult to understand. So I would say that probably the number one thing that we encourage people to do is get their data accurate and then get it in a usable format. It's not important for the site owner to know how many bot visits they had. If those are filtered out of the data, who cares? What they want to know is when they buy an ad or they spend money or they have SEO and someone comes to their site for the first time, or if they're a repeat user, what are the actions those people are doing? If they can see that, then they can reverse engineer what needs to happen in order to get those people to carry out the actions that they need. In order to make a conversion.

I love that. So here's the question, Matthew. So when you get a new project or a client or a new store to analyze, and you have done that so, so many times, what's the number one issue you see with e-commerce sites? Like, what statistically speaking is at the top as an issue which you see all the time?

Yeah, it's the site is very confusing and bloated. So, uh, a lot of times they do their own customer service when they're small.

Mm-hmm.

And so every time someone has a question, they think that they need to go add that to the website. And what happens is over time, the 30 or 40 people that don't understand how to browse a website have asked 100 questions and now they have 100 more things on their website thinking that that's gonna make it easier for everybody. And really what they did is now they're forcing everybody to go through the journey of the person that didn't understand the website.

Yeah.

And it makes it confusing and bloated. So I would say too much— excuse me— too much stuff on their website. The majority of ways that we get wins early on is after we clean up the data, as we start removing everything that's not being used. And that doesn't make the site clear. So we always say it needs to be Homer Simpson simple. If you're calling something by a unique name that only you understand, people don't know what that means. That's not simple. If you have to explain what you mean, that's not simple. So all of those things, we, we want you to look at the site not from the owner's perspective, how much can I sell, but look at it from the consumer's perspective of when I get here, how do I find the answer to my problem? How do I solve my problem?

I love that. Just dumb down effectively. Just, just make it so the 5-year-old or 7-year-old can, can, can shop on your store. Basically, that's what we're saying. It has to be simple, pass all the mom tests and all the grandmother tests effectively.

100%. Uh, anybody that will go through their site with that perspective will increase their conversions significantly.

Okay. So number 1 problem, confusing and bloated. What about number 2 and number 3? If you like have that at the top of your head, just very interested, like what's the second biggest?

I think probably the way that people label stuff. So like I was saying, one of the things that I think is the most important for your website is search and navigation, right? And most people do not have search prominent. And they're not tracking what people are searching. And then their navigation is sending people off their website to social media icons, or to a blog, or to all these other things. When if you want someone to buy a product and become a client of yours or a customer, then why would you ever put your blog in your main navigation where they would leave the website and go to your blog rather than buying your product? So all of those things can be on the website, but why not put them in the footer and have your main navigation handling the 80/20 of your site, which is the 20% of products that make 80% of the sales, right? You make those very easy in the main menu navigation and then give them the ability to search. So now you know what problem people are searching. You also, uh, Give them— we know that search traffic on average converts twice as high as the site average, and they spend twice as much as an average consumer. So if people can find what they're looking for, your website will automatically convert higher and people will spend more.

I, yeah, 100% agree around the search. We had a guest, um, um, a founder, a CEO of Mailysearch, which is the biggest right now open source search engine which you can sort of install, and they serve a lot of e-commerce sites, and they said exactly the same thing. People underestimate how much golden nuggets you can actually find in what people are searching and how they go through that funnel of when they look for something. That's a very strong shout.

All right, so yeah, let me give you an example just to drive that home. On a site that we worked on, We, we track what people type into the search bar. Well, in that search bar, the number 2 most searched things were unicorn and unicorn spelled wrong. And what they were was they had little stuffed animals that you could unzip them and they would unfold into a hoodie for a kid. So the kid could essentially have this stuffed animal. And if it got cold, Yeah, they could put on a hoodie, or if they got warm, they could fold it up and it became their stuffed animals. Super great product. Well, the number 2 searched items were unicorn— unicorn spelled wrong. They didn't have a unicorn for a stuffed animal, and so they built one. And when we launched it on Amazon Prime Day, they did $498,000. They were a couple thousand dollars short of a half a million dollar day. Selling that unicorn. And so they had, over the first 2 years of their business, they had had thousands of searches for unicorns and never realized that until we started tracking their data and showed them that. And it became a runaway hit from day one once we, once we discovered what people were looking for.

That's, that's— so did they just sort of started selling the product, or did you actually create the product?

They created it once they knew that so many people were searching for it, and they launched it on Amazon Prime Day and emailed all their people like, hey, we have a new product release. And yeah, it created $500,000 in a 24-hour period.

That's a great success story. Do you have any more? Like, you know, I'm just very interested in these, like, Small tweak, big results type of examples, if you know, if we have more.

Yeah, I have another one that I'll give. Anybody that has a website can use this, and I will tell you that over the last 4 or 5 years, it's probably accounted for $20-30 million worth of revenue. I would say 4 out of 4 or 5 of our biggest wins came from this little, uh, what I would call a optimization on the thank you page right after somebody buys. We put a pop-up on the sites that we manage. And what it says is, what was the one thing that almost made you not buy? And so, okay, person who just gave you money and bought the product will tell you what things were confusing what friction they had, what they didn't understand, what they wish you would have done better. They will give you the advice that a first-time consumer would love to have. Yeah. So that you can optimize your site. We go back and fix those things that they've brought up. And in that process, we create a lot more wins for the store. And an example of how valuable that is, we have a company that sells their e-com product off of a VSL. Well, at the end of the VSL, we asked— or when they bought, we asked that question, what was the one thing that almost made you not buy? And we got about 500 responses. 426 of them were the video is too long. Well, the owner said, we can't shorten the video because every time we do, conversions go down. And so I said, well, it's obviously a problem. And it's for the overwhelming majority, you know, over 90% of the people said the video was too long. How do we fix that? I asked them, do you watch your videos on 1x speed or do you speed them up? And they said, no, of course we speed them up, 1.25x or 1.50x. I said, let's give them the ability to do that. And they did, and we got a 10% lift. So they went from— they're a $60 million a year company, and we got a 10% lift on the sales right at the checkout by giving people the ability to do that. It's a $6 million win for them.

That's excellent. I want to read this quote, especially about the checkout, which comes from the The Baymard Institute, the average large-sized e-commerce site can gain as much as 35% increase in conversion rate just by making design changes to their checkout process. So I'm very fascinated and I was, you know, asking these sort of questions like some examples or biggest problems and I was sort of, to some extent, we're expecting the checkout will be in that list. So from your perspective, Maciej, like Where is the clunky or not really good checkout flow or checkout page itself in your list as a problem to fix?

Yeah, so I love that, and I do— we always start at the checkout first because that's where the transaction takes place. So if I can improve your checkout, you instantly make more money. Yeah, if I improve your homepage, that just means more people get to your category page or your filters. If I increase your product page, that just means more people get to your cart. It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to make more sales yet. Yeah. And so by fixing the checkout first, you make more money. And then every change on the website, as we work backwards, that improves, you have more people going through that checkout giving you more money. And so That gives you the ability to go ahead and spend the time doing the proper conversion rate optimization that you need from the extra money, hopefully, that you're getting through the checkout.

Yeah, so any real examples of recent checkout optimizations? It's like, what's like when you look at the checkout and you probably have already like muscle memory just purely from how much work you did there, you go like, bad, bad, bad, or do you actually go in and you go, Good checkout. Do you guys capture some data around the checkout? I want to see some numbers before I make decisions. It's like how your thought patterns goes from, I just got this project, I just got this checkout, to this is my suggestion of what we need to change and improve.

Yeah, so we certainly have some best practices that we know will improve any checkout, and those we would implement immediately. And as we're setting up the data collection, because our goal is always to get them more money as fast as possible. Uh, one way that we know that works, and it works very effectively, is the form fields. So the more form fields you have, the lower your conversions are. But what we noticed is, uh, because we track the errors on the checkout, that the email and the phone number produce the most errors of any other than any other form field on, on the checkout. And we need those to be accurate. So, or we want those to be accurate because one, our abandoned cart recovery emails go to that email, and same with SMS, which is a huge revenue driver for e-commerce. So what we did is we started testing the language that we put in those form fields. And so I read a book from Robert Cialdini called Persuasion. And in there, he gives a story of them running a test of allowing people to cut in line. And so what they do is they have 10 people ask, do you mind if I cut in line? And 8 people get rejected, and they only allow 2 people to cut. But then they have another 10 people ask if they can cut in line, but they give a reason. And the reason is just random, like, my kids are going to be late for school, right? Or my kids are this, or I'm running behind. And what happened was the mentality of the people that allowed them to cut switched. They now allowed 8 people to cut in line and only rejected 2. And the reason didn't matter what reason they gave. It was just the fact that they gave a reason. And so I used that same philosophy in the checkout. You know, we're asking for private information, we're asking for their personal email.

Yep.

We're also asking for their phone number. So I thought, well, if we give them a reason, maybe that will stop some of those errors, we'll get more people to say yes, rather than giving us bad information. And so what we put in the email form field is email required for order confirmation. And we've tested all different language, but we've never been able to beat that one. And my hypothesis is the email order confirmation is opened 85% of the time. It's the most opened email ever sent. And so people want to know that they ordered the right thing or that you have the information correct.

Yep.

And so they give you their good email. And so we reduced our form field errors by 279%. So almost 3 times less errors by giving people a reason why we were asking for the email. The other thing that we noticed was our abandoned recovery went up. And the reason why I think that happened was because now people had a reason to give us their email. They gave us their good email. And so now it was more effective than their old spam email.

So the story you just gave, Matthew, is basically it went from 20% allowing, so 2 out of 10, to 8 out of 10, which is 80%. So, so 4 times better. And you basically reach very similar results by just giving the why. Or the reason behind why you're asking for email and phone number when it comes to people effectively making the error with the phone and email, which is you—

yeah, under the phone, uh, the language we use there is required for shipping notification, right? So one is required for email for order confirmation, the next one is for shipping notification, because who doesn't want to know when their product ships? Yeah. And so by putting those two in there, we've got as much as a 17% lift in the checkout just by giving people the reason why we're asking for the information that's required for us to, you know, move forward to make the sale.

So what was before then? Was it just like your phone number is wrong or something like that?

Just— it just says email and phone. And, you know, we were— we tracked that and we got errors all the time. Yeah, most forms just It literally just asks you for the email. Well, we just say email required for order confirmation.

Okay, I get you. Right. So how would store owners go about identifying these, I want to say, reasons of lower conversions? Is that a pure skill on your end or it goes back to what we said about capturing the information first?

Yeah, well, obviously, I would be naive to say that an average person is going to understand conversion at the level that we do by looking at the page, because that's all we do, you know, every day. Yeah. And have for the last 10 years. Our goal isn't in learning how to drive traffic. Our goal, and what we work on, is once the traffic gets to the website, how do we turn that into a buyer? Or how do we turn that into a lead that we can nurture that will eventually become a buyer? And that's our entire focus. So, yes, in order for someone who doesn't do it all day, every day, their proficiency is for sure going to be less. But the way that they can learn is by getting their data accurate and then understanding which metrics they can look at and then pull on those metrics in order to increase, you know, their profitability.

Okay.

We try not to call it CRO. We call it revenue optimization instead of conversion rate optimization, because I can raise your conversion rate by offering a sale on all your products. Your conversion rate is going to go up. Yeah, but that's not necessarily what you're trying to do. Exactly. You're trying to generate more net revenue. And so the way to do that is to have a website that is really good at communicating with your customer, because it's having a conversation when you're not around. And if your website's having a poor conversation, then you're going to have poor results. So that— making sure that that website performs at a high level and is super clear is what's required in order to have high conversions and create more sales.

I love how you made the difference between conversion optimization and revenue optimization. That's a deep experience type of, you know, difference. So I know you like average order value and lifetime value as two metrics. So let's talk about the metrics people should care at the end of the day. What metrics people And when I say people, I mean e-commerce store owners should actually care.

Yeah, I do believe average order value is required to pay attention to and to always be trying to increase because ad spend is what you use to increase your volume of sales.

Yeah.

And in order to be able to spend ads, you need to know what your metrics are. If your average order value is $100 and it costs you $100 in ads to get a sale, you've lost the money because now you've spent the entire average order, uh, in an ad. And if that— if your product is a one-time sale, then you've lost the, the cost of goods and the pick-pack-ship, all that. So you need to know your metrics and you also need to know how often people come back and buy again because then you can break that down into what you can spend to acquire a customer. Once you know that, if your average customer comes back, you know, for 3 or 4 or 5 purchases, some of the brands we work with a lot more than that, then you can go ahead and spend more than your competitors, because you know over time that you're going to get your money back plus a lot more. And so you could break even on those customers and just acquire as many as possible knowing that on average 60 to 70% of them are going to come back and, and buy again and again. That's where it requires you to not just be good at marketing, but to have a very good product, something that when the person receives it, they like it and then they are willing to spend money with you again.

Okay, so are the average order value and the lifetime value your favorite two metrics to track and look at the apex of all the numbers you look at?

I would say a couple other ones that really matter to me is your add to cart percentage and then the amount that complete the purchase. So, uh, you want to know those metrics because those are telling you how well your website is doing at converting the traffic into a sale. And you can kind of reverse engineer what needs to happen in order to do that. If you have a, uh, $100 average order value and a 10% add to cart and, uh, you know, less than 20% or 30% bounce rate, then now you know, okay, the people that are coming here are actually interested in what we're selling. The website's doing a good job of communicating that. But if your conversion rate to a sale is 2.5%, well, then we can go, oh, I need to figure out how to— or if it's 2%, I need to figure out how to increase that. We know that you're going to automatically have some drop-off from the people that add to cart to the people that proceed to checkout. And you're going to have some drop-off from the people that get into checkout compared to how many complete the purchase. And so seeing where that drop-off is kind of tells us where we want to focus our attention to improve, to get those numbers, you know, as high as possible.

Okay, so are we just sort of adding a key performance indicator to a funnel step. I felt like the first step which we discussing is add to cart, which is, you know, just someone added something into cart. Our next step in the funnel is did they actually complete? So that just feels for me like we just adding a key indicators to an actual funnel. Is that the right?

Yeah, that way you can see where the drop-off is and know that that's, where your time would be well invested in spending. You want to, you want to shore up the areas where the people are struggling to complete the conversion, whatever it is. We consider if they're on the product page, the conversion is to get them to add to cart. If they're on the filters, the conversion is to get them to pick the filters that get them to a product.

Okay, so if I ask this, how should store owners think about KPIs? Are we saying that First, build a funnel, like a happy path type of funnel, have a metric which, which is an indicator of is that funnel healthy or not, and then basically create some KPIs around that.

Yes.

Yeah. Okay.

And I would say that obviously when you set it up from the very beginning, simplicity scales. And chaos fails. So trying to give them more information instead of important information always creates confusion and less sales. It's much, much better to have a very simple funnel than trying to handle everything. I call it the paradox of choice. When you give them too many options, Uh, your conversions always go down. So if you have the ability— say you're selling, uh, print-on-demand t-shirts.

Yep.

And you have the ability to give them 15 colors, you will hurt conversions if you give them all 15 choices. If you give them the choice to buy black, navy, heather gray, and red, you will have 3 times more conversions than you'll have if you give them 15 choices. And people always go, oh yeah, but I sold some pink ones and I sold some purple ones and I sold some— yeah, but those people would have bought one of the other 4 main colors that make 80% of your sales if that was all that was offered. What you're not seeing is all the people that said, oh, I like purple, oh, I like red too, oh, that, that shade of green is cool, you know what, I don't know which one I like best, I'll just come back later. And they leave. And so that's happening all the time. When you give them too many options, you create that paradox of choice.

I love that. I mean, I don't know why, but people's brains don't think in simplistic ways. And we tend to overcomplicate things. And the moment you were talking about this use case, I was like, if I put myself in his shoes, I would want to add more colors because that feels like I'm offering more. What we're saying on paper and in practice, it actually hurts conversions. So that's not a good choice, right?

And I am very bullish about it because I have never ever had our split test prove us wrong ever in 9 years of removing options. Every single time it has increased conversions.

And if you're actually storing your stock, that's so much better because now you have less stock to handle. Yeah, so it's just overall easier. Oh, I just blew my mind a little bit there. That's a good one. So, um, um, I have this quote from PPC Geeks which, which I wanted to, uh, drive this, uh, you know, average and lifetime value quote. So what they're saying is that average order value and lifetime value are vital metrics to assessing the financial health and growth potential of e-commerce business, and they did a little bit of math and study around that. So effectively, these numbers need to be healthy if you're considering scaling through buying traffic. And I think that's exactly where you were explaining, Matthew, as well, is that if these are not healthy, you're just going to be burning money on ads.

Yeah. Or you're just not profitable.

Yeah, exactly. Or you're just not profitable. Yep. Okay, so, so build the funnel, get some KPIs into the funnel, make sure you're capturing data, then potentially start, you know, getting or buying more traffic. Hopefully everything sort of, you know, works out. We talked about a little bit about cart abandonment and the adding to cart metric. So if people are tracking this right now, can you give a little bit of indication what's a good number? You know, like, you are doing very, very well number, you are doing okay sort of market average number, and then you probably could be doing, uh, you know, better number around these KPIs.

Uh, yeah, you'd be surprised how many people don't even send cart abandon emails, or if they do, it's just the template that Shopify gave them, so they don't have any thought or effort put into that. What I will tell you is, if you interview your customers Or you look at customer service. Hmm. What are the most consistent questions that people ask? Use, like, say you have 3 questions that are pretty standard that a lot of people ask. Well, use those in your cart abandonment. Send out an abandoned cart email that explains or handles that one question. With some information and then include their cart, the items they had in their cart. And then, you know, later that day, send another email that handles another issue that is a question that people ask. Because most of the reason that people put stuff in their cart and then don't buy is they, one, they either don't trust you, or two, they have an unanswered question. So why not handle some of those questions in those emails where you're getting them to come back and buy, rather than just say, hey, I'm gonna give you 10% off, hey, I'm gonna do this. Well, now what you did is you just devalued your product. The first email, which is going to be the one that's going to capture the most, is— I think should handle one of the most asked questions and then just include a link to their cart, not even a discount. Later in the day, you can give them a discount and handle another objection. And then the final one that you'll send should be within 24 hours of when, when they abandon, because we've seen that that's when all of the recoveries come. And literally less than 1% come after 24 hours. So you sitting there hammering them again and again and again, to come get this cart and offering all these discounts, after 24 hours, less than, less than 1% of people are coming back to buy those items. You would be much better to shift them into a nurture campaign than to just hammer them to buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, because the, the odds are 99 out of 100 of those people are going to unsubscribe and stop following you. If you don't stop trying to sell them and actually help them.

Hmm, I love that. So you mentioned two things, Matt. You said, uh, one was they probably have unanswered questions, and what was the another reason?

Uh, they don't trust you.

They don't trust you or have unanswered questions. So I wanted to add my reason, which is an experience-based reason. I sometimes just don't finish 'cause I need to do some other stuff. So I often—

Right, that's why we don't offer a discount right away. Yeah, exactly. Many times people just are distracted or they were shopping while they were at their desk and their boss walked up.

Yep.

Or like lots of other reasons. So yeah, offering the discount, trying to get them to come back a lot of times isn't necessary and you're literally giving away your average order value.

Yeah, I do agree 100%. I do shopping during lunch very, very often. And my shopping is, I do a lot of like software shopping. I love just buying tools, trying them out, seeing what's going on in software world. And I sometimes just browse around really, you know, and then I put something in the cart. I was like, that's good, that's good. And it almost acts like a bookmark for me. And then my lunch sort of ends. I'm like, okay, I need to go back to work. And then I get an email next day and they go like, hey, you have a great taste. You know, you put all of these in a cart, you know, like, do you want to sort of continue? And now I'm thinking, I don't remember asking any questions, but it definitely pulls me back, especially if I really wanted to buy.

Yeah.

And if they would give me a discount, I mean, I would be happy, but you're absolutely right. They don't have to. If I had intention to buy, I would just come back and continue with that cart.

Yeah. And I'm not saying don't offer a discount. I'm saying don't make that the reason why you're offering for them to come back. Cause so many of those people don't need that discount to go ahead and finish the purchase.

Okay. So Matthew, do you have numbers like in your head? Like let's say I care about KPI of people adding product to my cart. Like what's like, you know, like market average, what's a healthy conversion?

I think that if you're not capturing at least 25% of your revenue from email, that you're— you have something's broken. Okay, so we want it to be at least 25. We have site owners that are extremely good and dedicated to their email process, and they make as much as 40 to 50% of their revenue comes from their email campaigns.

That's a lot. That's half of the business just coming purely from—

that's the most profitable money because they've already spent the money to acquire the customer.

Exactly.

So now they're not It's, it's not all money's the same. The money that comes from the email is by far the most, most profitable. And so we want that, that email and SMS, we want those to be healthy, because that means the business has a healthy profit margin because of that. And when they have that, then they can grow and scale.

Okay. So and as well, that allows to personalize, and I really love personalization, and I want to get a little bit of your, you know, take on that. So the site I mentioned which sends me the cart abandonment, I mean, it's a very known— it's called appsumo.com. It's a very known sort of entrepreneurship software discount type of, you know, service e-commerce store, right? So when I go to their website, I'm always logged in, so then they never log me out. And what I love when I go there in their sort of like main, uh, homepage is that they show what I like. Like they show the software and the apps I'm, I'm historically probably purchased or navigated to. They personalize that page and that experience for me. So I don't get noise, right? And then if you look at others, you get a generic landing page. You basically, I get the same, you would get the same, and it's just everybody get the same. And very often that doesn't get my second click, let's say like this. So from your perspective, how much you think that personalization have a play when it comes to conversions and how do you guys go about all that personalization theme for commerce sites?

Yeah, I believe that that's becoming more and more important. E-commerce is evolving and maturing just like any other industry. And so the better job that your website does of making it appropriate to the person that's browsing it is going to matter. And most, I think, with AI and the other things that are happening, most of the platforms are going to do a good job of that. You just need to probably set it up properly and understand your main customers' problems and their browsing habits, which you can do if you are looking at your data. You'll figure that out and can optimize it in an effective manner. I don't think that a cookie-cutter approach works very well. I see a lot of people just like think they can flip a button and it's going to work, and it requires more than that. Okay, because your competitors are putting in more time and effort than that. And so if you're not willing to do that, then you have to be okay with just getting the scraps from the leftovers, because the people who actually care and run the business from the customer's perspective are going to win.

Okay, so, so we're saying there's no easy Shopify app or plugin where I can just go like switch on, boom, from this point on we're capturing data, everything is personalized.

There's like, it's probably going to be better than doing nothing, but it's not going to give, you're not going to compete with the people who are actually going in and setting it up properly.

So from your perspective, Matthew, the service you guys doing, did you have like, like, do you put attention to personalization or you believe that's You know, that, that comes later in the journey. And there's a lot more other things to fix first.

Well, yeah, I think that everything that we do is personalization based off of the data, right? So we see what people are doing, and then we alter the website to make it easier for people to perform the action. So yeah, I actually see what we do from start to finish is personalization based off of the data of what we see people doing on the website.

Okay, and when it comes to average order value, and I'm coming from this like recommendation perspective, you know, like where you're sitting, either you're going through the funnel or you're sitting in a checkout, and they go like, like, you're coming to us a second or on the third time, you know, we know what you clicked around, we think with what you have right now in the cart, the cart would be much better if you would add couple of these things. So effectively like a recommendation with personalization. Do you have any insights on like how much it increases the average order value percentage-wise?

Yeah. So, uh, we do and we've tested it a lot and there's a lot of misconceptions. Okay. A lot of people add a whole bunch of upsells in the cart and that actually hurts conversions. Your average order value will go up because you actually will have less sales, but the, the number of— or the order value will go up because people are adding extra items. The problem that we see with that is now you have less customers to market to, to come back again and again because you've tried to oversell them in the cart. Where we believe in what we've proven with data is that the upsell can be offered on the product page, not in the cart. The only, only item that we would ever offer in a cart is if I'll use an example of one of our clients, and it was the Choose Muse head device for meditation. Well, it's a $230 or $250 product. And it's, it's kind of, you know, it's expensive, and it's delicate. Well, in the cart, they have a case that you can buy for like $26. Well, the case in the cart for this item that they sell had a 70% take rate. And that's the highest that I've ever seen. But it was a no-brainer. Like, if I'm going to spend $230, $240 on this device, I want something that will protect it. And if it's only $26 and it's made for this device, it's perfect. And so it works really, really well. Ones that I see all the time that are done very poor is like somebody that's selling clothing and then they offer shoes and this and that and they have like 3 or 4 things that you can select to, um, add to your cart. And I always ask the owner, is there enough information on that upsell right there for them to make an educated decision, or do they have to stop their buying process and now go look at other stuff? The people that are doing that, you're literally giving them another reason to get distracted and leave instead of complete the purchase. And now you have them on your customer roll, and you can market to them again and again and again and sell them effectively instead of, hey, I'm trying to maximize every little ounce of this. And so I'm going to put a whole bunch of things in the cart for you that, uh, make it confusing and actually hurt conversions. So people think like, oh, well, my average order value is $4 and order more now that I have those upsells in there. Yeah, but you have 20 less customers out of 100. So would you rather have the 20 customers that will buy again and again and again, or would you rather have the $4 average order value and most people don't understand that and make a very poor decision that hurts their business long term by trying to oversell in the cart instead of doing it on the product page.

That's brilliant. So it's very similar then, uh, thought pattern when we talked about the colors. It's like adding 15 fields good to you because you think you're offering more choice, but actually offering more choice hurts your conversions. So it's a very simple situation over here. You think you, you know, you're offering more. If they're buying a shirt, maybe they want my shoes, maybe they want my pants, and it feels like good to do that. It feels like something, you know, I'm just showing that I have more, but actually that's distracting to the buying process and And again, hers conversion.

Yeah, 100% correct.

Yeah, that's, that's definitely goes against, I think, the natural tendency of to think about things for human brain. So we see that error all the time. Okay. So, all right. So, so, so there's some gotchas around personalization then, right? So, um, I mean, these recommendations, which, which are based on personalization. So even if I'm buying a t-shirt and I bought shoes before, it doesn't mean that you should be offering me this in my current flow of trying to buy this shirt. Okay, I get that. Um, I want to read this quote from McKinsey about personalization just to sort of land the importance of this. Companies that excel at personalization generate 40% more revenue from the activities than average players. So this is still important research numbers which are showing that personalized, personalized experience when it comes to e-commerce have a much bigger abilities or projections to do revenue. 4% is, you know, it's, uh, it's like a lot in my book. Yep.

Yeah.

All right, so let's talk a little bit about, uh, recording and heat maps and things like that. So that feels a little bit advanced. And then if you think about first-time store owners, like at least majority I talk with, they don't tend to sort of go like, yes, from the get-go we're gonna install some tooling and some services to capture all the sessions. So we start looking at everything, and they all start with, you know, a simple tool such as Google Analytics. But it's healthy to capture that information. Or what's your point of view, Matthew? Does the heatmaps and session recordings help, and where are they best help?

Yeah, of course they do. Data is, data is gold. And so we want that data. We use that in order to optimize the experience. The more ways that we're tracking what people are doing on the website, the less questions that we have to guess at. So I definitely agree with it. I think it's very important. When we see a drop-off in conversions or something's happening, those recordings are great to go look at and you can see what the consumer sees. So maybe all of a sudden your Android devices aren't converting. Well, we can go look at all the Android recordings and heatmaps and see how the page is displaying on an Android phone and go, oh, no wonder they're not buying. The page is like shifted, you know, half of it's on and half's off. We have to go in and, you know, clean up how it's displaying on that browser. And then all of a sudden conversions come back. But we wouldn't know that if we couldn't go look at what they're seeing.

Okay, so how do you, like, when you look at the recordings and you try to judge what exactly going on, it's a little bit of like science and gut feel and experience, I presume, because if a casual mortal looks at the recording, you know, they just like, yeah, okay, it's a recording, unless it's very obvious, like site is broken and, you know, some— something is not visible. Otherwise, it's like, okay, well, I can see what you're doing, but how do I go from this to an actual formulated A/B test action plan?

Yeah, practice, practice. Um, the truth of the matter is you're, you're never going to become the expert if you're not willing to put in the work. So, uh, if, if you don't want to do that stuff, pay someone to do it for you. It pays for itself. If you do want to do that, or you do want to become proficient, you should probably still pay someone to shorten your learning curve. Because if they can help you over a month or two and prevent you from having to spend hundreds of hours to learn what they've already learned, now all of a sudden you have a much bigger lever to pull in your business based off of someone else's expertise.

Yeah.

And so for me, I don't ever try to think, how do I figure this out on my own? I have always— once I realized, you know, how valuable it is to pay for the expert, you can shortcut months and months and months, sometimes years worth of effort in a matter of a couple of months, and then become good enough that you actually know who to hire. Or who to have on, who on your team would be good at it.

Do you, when it comes to these A/B tests, Matthew, do you guys always do A/B tests or sometimes you just go like, there's no need to run a test, I know that this will perform better?

Yeah, we have some best practices that we know win every time. For sure, we do that. We do that early on. But then once those best practices are in place and the data stabilized, it's A/B testing. You know, every site is contextual. You know, one site might have 35 to 55-year-old women who are married and have a couple kids, and another site might have, you know, 18 to 30-year-old males that are single. And so they're going to browse a website totally different than the women are. And you need to understand your demographic and understand the problem that they're trying to solve. And that's how you're going to make your website convert higher.

Okay. What, uh, when you do A/B testing and then when you have winning scenarios, and I think people underestimate how, how these compounding results have huge impacts. Let's say, you know, you run A/B testing. Let's take a look at the situation. You now stabilized everything, right? So, so you're sort of running A/B testing and and you got a lift of like 1%, right? With one test. Now you're using this lift of 1%, you're doing another test, another test gives you half a percent. Now you have a percent and then suddenly in 6 months you just lift it up by like 8%. That on a big scale, and we're talking millions plus, 8-figure type of scale, that's a lot of money, right? So these small A/B tests and these small wins, they compound very quickly to much more revenue. So the question I have is when you do these A/B tests, it's like what's the biggest wins you actually had in the sense of lifting conversions in percentage-wise and what's an average expectancy people should have when they do A/B testing?

Yeah, you can't really do it that way because one customer has an average order value of $100, another one has an average order value of $2,000, another one has an average order value of $240. So all of those metrics are going to change the numbers that you're looking for. The goal is that you're always increasing. So rather than say, oh, well, I have to have 2% more, or if you figure out that's what you need in order to be profitable, then you try to find the biggest levers that you can to work on those first to get that 2%, because that gives you runway to go ahead. And I believe that A/B testing is iterative, and you should always be doing it. Because you can't go, oh, my site is converting at 4% now, I don't need to do anything else. Because otherwise, 6 months later, you're going to come back and look at your numbers and be like, oh, we're only converting at 3% now.

Mm-hmm.

Like, you need to constantly be iterating and evolving and working on those numbers because e-commerce and your website is a living, breathing thing, and it's always evolving and changing, and it requires that. Okay, if you don't want to do that, then don't be in e-commerce. Go get a job.

Go get a job. I love that. Go get a job. Don't be in e-commerce. So I want to share this success story, which I really love the simplicity and impact of it. So there's a business called Clarks in UK, which is a British footwear manufacturer and retailer. It's actually quite big. I don't know how big, but in UK terms, it's quite big. Lots of stores everywhere. So they did the A/B testing and they shared that story online. They effectively took their product page, right? And in the product page, they had a free shipping sentence, right? It was part of the product page. It's a white product page, and it was, you know, black letters written free shipping, part of everything else, the product definitions and everything like that. So they took and did A/B testing. So they took the free shipping and they put it very close to the buy button or add to the cart button, and and they made it very visible. Like they put the background as gray and the text as white. So it was like impossible to miss. Like if you open that page on a mobile, like your eyes would instantly see the free shipping. And the results were that they lifted the conversions by 2.6% just by doing that, which basically resulted around like $3 million to revenue, which for me, that's, Uh, it's just a simple A/B test, right? It's like you almost like, uh, to your point, Matthew, it's like, it's like gut feel experience situations. Like a simple mortal would, would never probably assume that this could have such a big impact. Like you need to be either reading somewhere these information or have someone who actually have these skills to go like, you know what, I know that worked for someone else. How about you do this A/B testing for yourself?

Yeah, 100%. That's why we do what we do, and that's what our entire business revolves around. So we definitely believe in it. Right.

So can you give us a little bit of understanding when an e-commerce business should be looking, you know, to partner with companies like yours? It's like, if I'm just starting and maybe I'm doing like dropshipping, I assume you would be, you know, like too big of a partner or too expensive of a partner. So it's probably like some type of maturity where you look at maybe at revenue totals or something like that where you go like, look.

Yeah, for us, we want them to be doing around $100 grand a month or more.

$100 grand a month. So that's just above the million a year.

Yeah. Yeah. Before that, there's a lot of free resources. Or different things that we provide in order to help them optimize their journey and understand conversions. We need volume in order to do a good job. The more eyeballs that are viewing your website, the more data we have in order to optimize. And so we put— we provide developers, we provide the, the data and analytics and the split testing and everything to go ahead and help grow and scale it. And so we have a significant investment each month. And so we need them to do enough volume that we know that we can get the lift that makes us a profit center for them, not an expense. Yeah, if we're an expense, they're only going to spend that for a little while. Yeah. And, and clean things up and then we're done. Our goal is that we're constantly bringing more and more revenue and justifying the expense that we charge.

Okay, I love that positioning. So, um, so if I'm just, uh, you know, I'm listening right now, I'm an entrepreneur, I'm just starting with e-commerce, from, from your perspective and your experience as well, Matthew, it's like, what's this, uh, like 1, 2, 3 of how you can start with e-commerce?

You know, it's like, listen to podcasts just like yours.

Okay.

Because you have a bunch of experts that come on and give a lot of really good information for free. And, uh, that free information will give you enough knowledge to know where to look or different ideas that you can leverage to grow. And once you get to the point of— I, I really think I don't want to work for the customers that need us. I want to work for the customers that want us. Everybody else can have the customers that need them, because those are the ones that are a problem. They're looking for you to be a magic bullet and solve all of their issues. Yeah, because they're too lazy to understand what to do. I want the people that say, hey, I want to grow, I'm going to pay the guy that has a proven track record of growing people, and I'm going to do what he says, not argue with everything he brings to the table.

These are good clients to have. Yep.

Yeah, I want the clients that want to work with us because they believe that what we will do is going to be an investment in their long-term success, not the clients that need us because they're failing.

Okay, so If you would start a new e-commerce shop right now, what would that be?

What would it be? I would probably go into the pet industry. I think that people spend an inordinate amount of money on their pets and it's very emotionally driven rather than logic. And you can also— it's very— it's a very consumable You can sell a lot of different types of consumables, so you can sell the client multiple times. And so yeah, if I was starting a brand, it would probably be, you know, somewhere around people's pets.

I love that. He just took my answer from my head and put it, and put it in the podcast. I've seen a lot of successful, uh, very speedy type of, uh, you know, e-commerce brands where you just like they don't exist and suddenly they're quite big and they have been driven by toys for dogs or cats and things like that. So yeah, that's a very good shout. Right. So I have 10+ rapid questions, Matthew. So these are sort of to maybe take us a little bit deeper in the topics which we discussed. So it's like 30-60 seconds type of answers. Ready to go?

Sure.

All right, let's go. What's a simple test that surprised you with how much it improved sales?

Probably putting the, the text in the form fields. That, that, uh, still to this day is one of our biggest wins that we know works every single time we do it.

Uh, that's what we just discussed in the checkout. Give an explanation of why you're asking for this information.

Yeah, exactly.

How do you quickly figure out if load time is hurting your conversions?

Well, we know that load time hurts your conversions. So if you have a site that loads in longer than 2 or 3 seconds, automatically you can increase your conversions by speeding up your website.

So that's not even something you need to figure out. Like the whole market just knows that slow—

100%. Every single time a slow website will cost you conversions.

Yeah. What, what is the golden number you're aiming for when it comes to a viewpoint?

Under 2 seconds.

How much?

Under 2 seconds.

1, 2 seconds?

Under 2 seconds.

Under 2 seconds. All right. What's a low-effort way to test different pricing strategies?

Uh, ask your clients that have already spent money with you. So many people ignore the people who have already spent money and they're trying to talk to people who haven't spent money yet, and those are the wrong people to ask.

Okay, so basically go to your client base who already trusted you to give their money to you. You gave them a service, you gave them a product, hopefully went well. So there's a good—

you have a relationship with them.

Exactly.

Use that relationship to get more information to provide a better service.

Okay, excellent. How do you measure the impact of trust signals like reviews, security badges, and others?

By the lift that it provides on the page. So we know that when we add the correct symbols underneath your add to cart button, like American made or ships in 24 hours, we know how much of a lift that that brings. So we measure all of that.

Is that A/B testing again, Matthew? Is that best practice? You know it works, so just—

No, we add it and we track the data.

Okay.

Yeah, we know that those are going to work, but we don't A/B test that stuff.

You just know that they will work. So effectively, we're saying it's just same as the speed load time, just do it.

Yeah, absolutely.

What's a small checkout change that most stores overlooked but can fix now? I know the answer to this, but go.

Include your phone number.

There you go.

Or an email. Most checkouts just have the store's logo. If you add the phone number or an email, you'll actually increase conversions and you won't see more phone calls or more emails. But it's right at the point because it's a trust symbol. So if someone's not ready to give you the money and there's no way to contact you, they're going to have this internal like resistance to trust.

Oh, I'm a big fan.

Hey, here's my phone number and here's my email. You're like, oh, well, if I have a problem with this order, I can get ahold of them.

Is it as simple as just having it visibly somewhere, or do you want to put a sentence, something like, if you have any problems, don't hesitate to call us 24/7?

No, just have your phone number and email.

That's it.

Put it right next to your logo in your checkout, and you will see a lift in your checkout.

Keep it simple. What's one mobile-specific tweak that instantly improves the shopping experience and conversion?

Removing complexity. You have such a small screen space compared to a desktop. Your mobile experience should be much different than your desktop experience should be, and the way that you do that is get rid of complexity.

What's a simple and good— I want to say optimized for conversion page, but that probably means a lot. But like, let's say we're looking at the mobile, like what I'm actually seeing in my viewport the moment I land. On a page?

Less options.

What is it like, we still showing picture and we're saying title of a product and buy button, like that's it?

No, obviously they need to have enough information to make a buying decision. Yeah, it'd be really difficult to say this one thing.

Okay.

What I can say is your button shouldn't match anything else on the page. So if your theme is black and yellow, don't use black and yellow buttons. You want to use a color that stands out.

Mm-hmm. Okay. So do you have any insights in having a video for product or just having images for product? Is there any—

Yeah, video, video sells. So I wouldn't have an autoplay, but I would definitely have a video as one of my thumbnails.

And the video is effectively an ad video, or is it more like a showcase video, or is it better if it's video?

It could be a product unveiling. Could be an explainer video, can be all different things. That's going to be— it depends on the site.

Okay. Is it worth actually running some type of campaign with customers who bought the product and go like, hey, can you do a video of how you're actually using that? And then just bring that back into like a product video and give them—

User-generated content always helps sell. So I wouldn't say that that's a bad idea, but I don't think that that's That's a very complicated way to get a video to start with. And most site owners, yeah, the more complex you make the task, the less of them will do it. Again, I would say, again, I'm always looking for the simplest answer that's sustainable.

I love that. All right. What's the difference between personalization and hyper-personalization, and how do you apply it without overdoing it?

Well, I guess you could get creepy because there is a way to get enough data now that you know way more about the customer than what they think you know.

Yeah.

And if you're revealing that, you're probably going to freak them out. But you can also use the data to make sure that if they've purchased from you 3 or 4 times and every time it was shoes, maybe it's a good idea to show them shoes or your new offerings rather than trying to sell them on your t-shirts. So I think that there's always a way to use data to increase conversions, and then there's also a way to scare people away.

Yeah, I'm always Not scared. I'm looking for a word. The Twitter, or now X, if you ever run ads over there, the targeting they give you, like, like, it's just so difficult not to ask this question, like, how do you have this data? Like, it just blows my mind because, as an example, which was the latest, is that you can target people who own Teslas. So I'm like, how do you know who and Twitter actually owns Tesla. Like, there's nothing in the forms about that, right? And I'm like, how do you get that information? That's for me at the borderline of like, you know, this like edgy hyper-personalization.

I like—

I'm not even sure how you capture that information. All right, what's one signal in session recording that tells you the page needs fixing?

Uh, load time.

Load time. So you look at it, I mean, load time. Yeah, it's no-brainer.

Yeah, it's a highly visited page and the load time on that page is low.

Yeah.

Or slow. Fixing that's going to automatically increase your conversions.

And when it comes to load time fixing, Matthew, is that like, what's your go-to? Is it like smaller images, stronger servers?

A lot of time it could be an app. That's making a server call and the app has been discontinued or you're not even using it anymore. And so it's not connected and so it's sitting there making server calls and times out. There's a lot of different things.

Like a Shopify app, that's what I mean. Yeah, okay. What's a quick way to turn first-time buyers into repeat customers?

Treat them good. Stop trying to beat them over the head to make more sales and just treat them like a and like you would want to be treated.

Okay.

It's amazing how, uh, shitty people are at forcing people through their funnel instead of actually taking care of them.

I'm not surprised. I get that treatment quite often. Spend a lot of money online. I mean, I buy everything online, to be honest. And you, you can absolutely— to the point you're making, from experience, I can tell you I never go back to the shops where I'm not treated right. You know, I'm always like, I want to say like spoiled by a good customer service at this point where if I'm not getting that, you know, I'm a sort of like king type of treatment, I'm like—

The number one thing that I look for in a customer that we're going to help and work with is do they have really good customer service? Because if we increase their sales and they have bad customer service, yeah, they're not going to stay with us anyways because it just implodes.

Yeah. Good shout. How do you decide what part of customer journey to optimize first?

We look at the data and see where the drop-offs are.

And is it always that you have a drop-off? What if all the funnels are plus minus the same? Like, you know, you don't have like—

That would be in a perfect world and that doesn't exist.

I love that. So you're always going to have, you're always going to have a Stepping the foot on it.

Yeah, customers are really good at certain aspects of their business and they're not really good at the others.

Okay.

So it's— everybody has a weak spot.

Okay, excellent. Well, that was an excellent, excellent episode, Matthew. We went through many things there. I mean, we started with the fact that fundamentally speaking, you need to be getting and capturing the data. You need to make sure the data is accurate. Then you need to convert the data in a usable format. And that is a fundamental critical step all the store owners should have, because from that you're going to make decisions about what you want to optimize. You should think about your funnels. You should have some KPIs for each of these funnels. If something is misbehaving or not misbehaving, if one of the funnels is performing poorly, you can do some A/B testing, which probably will lead you to capturing some recordings for the sessions, some great tips about the checkout, about the forms, giving the reasons. It was an excellent episode, Matthew. Thank you very much. If people want to learn more about the services you're providing, how they can get in contact?

Yeah, our website is buildgrowscale.com, and my email is just matt@buildgrowscale.com. So they can email me, or they can go to our website, look at it, and, you know, sign up for a call, and we'll do an audit with them.

Excellent. So we'll have these in the show notes. People tuning in live, of course, go ahead, do this right now. Otherwise, check your show notes, uh, you'll see all the contact details of Matthew over there. If you find this episode useful, and if you have a friend who's right now optimizing their e-commerce sites, share that episode with them. We would love if you would send us your challenges, your questions around scaling your business at masteringthegrowth.com. Don't forget to subscribe as well, and as always guys, until the next time, stay safe and see you online.