#36 – How to Align Business Objectives With CRO Goals

Now, lots of times people tell me, well, yeah, because maybe they have strong brand and people know them and that's the reason that they're buying. And that is not the case. We work with some stores that you probably wouldn't recognize their name, but yet they're converting at 8 and 8.6%. I'm weary of the word average. My name is Khalil Slade, and I love to talk about conversion rate optimization.

I'm Simba and I love asking questions about conversion optimization.

This is CRO Live hour, a show all about a B testing, experimentation and conversion rate optimization.

Each episode, it amazes me answering some of the difficult CRO questions, dropping insights like, it's no big deal, while pretty.

Much every episode will take on a new set of conversion rate optimization questions that are not easy. We will talk strategies, we will talk process, and we will talk tactics. Simba will be bringing all the questions.

Oh, man. I bring tough questions like, do a B testing results fade over time? How do you go from low to high testing velocity? How do you measure the success of a conversion funnel? And how do you align your CRO program with a growth strategy? Yeah, Khalid, these are very, very tough question.

Yes, they are, but we always answer them here. And if you love conversion optimization like we do, and certainly like Simba does. Subscribe to the CRO Live hour podcast today. Wherever you listen to your podcasts. Words that we are going to be talking about today, in no particular order, although I am thinking of something that we want to start with. We're going to be talking Shopify, conversion rate optimization, failed experiments, and business objectives. But let's get started. Simba, how were the last two weeks?

Yeah, the last two weeks we've been good. I'm thinking that, like, all the time you ask me this question, I always say, like, it was good, right?

Well, you know, we hope it's good.

Yeah, yeah. Because, like, there's nothing to worry about. Exactly. Especially like when you work for an experimentation company, you're always experimenting, trying new things. Even if, like, some of the stuff that you do fails, you get to learn something. So it was good.

Something failed at invesp. Come on. Everything we do is successful.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There are some of the things, some of the goals that you try to reach. Right. That obviously, like, we set ambitious goals. We win most of the time. Especially, like on the projects that I'm working on right now, I can say that we're doing better. We're not failing. We're not exactly where we want to be, but we're making good progress, so that's good.

I like that. I like that. Yeah. It's been interesting because we finished Q1 a lot stronger than I anticipated, by the way. Q2 started soft and I was getting a little worried. Like, I'm looking at the numbers correct. So April was a little softer. And I'm like, oh, gosh, this is signs of what to come. Then I think we just got busy in May. We got busy to the point that I'm like, oh, gosh, can we keep up? So we're seeing a lot more demand for conversion rate optimization. So it's just kind of interesting. At some point, after running INVESP for so long, I just have to trust the process. Although this is a lot easier said than done when you run a business and you have salaries to make at the end of the month and things to pay. And I'm like, trust the process, but process, can you speed up a little bit? So here we are. Here we are. Soccer is about to finish. So I'm going to have, like a couple of months with no soccer. That's always hard. But anyways, that's a topic for another day, I think. Simba. For the next two weeks, at least in the soccer world, you are going to be watching things very carefully, my friend. We managed to make it interesting for you guys. Yeah, yeah.

But I'm confident that, like, my team will finish strong. So I was looking at the fixtures. The last two games that we have, they're not that difficult. So I'm sure if we win one, then we're going to finish above you. So that's all we need, just one win.

Should never say that. That's kind of the rule in life. You know, it's like, how bad can things get? Oh, you think, like, you know, they've gotten bad. Okay, we shall show you. But Bloodstock Conversion Optimization lost stock experimentation. I want to start our show with this news that just came out today. So today, May 18, 2023. So there's this report that came out, and I think the guys at Shopify are kind of like meshing it all over the place. Let me just kind of read over here. Today we are sharing results from a big three global management consulting firm. And the data speaks for itself. Okay, what's the data? Shopify converts up to 36% better than the competition and 15% more on average. Shopify loves this data. Correct. And it's comparing Shopify specifically, I think checkout, it was comparing it to BigCommerce. It was comparing it to Salesforce Cloud and it was comparing it to Magento and was saying that on average Shopify converts up to 36% than the competition on average. By the way, I love Shopify. I would say 90% of our clients are on Shopify plus 10% are all over the place between Magento, Salesforce as well and BigCommerce. It's fascinating to me because I just gave a talk a couple weeks ago to about 150 executives, e Commerce executives. And my whole point was forget and be weary and forget the word average because it is scary. So I've pulled lots of data points. We worked with so many different companies from Dynamic Yield to Content Square to data that we get from IRCE plus our own data. And I was comparing this average and how misleading it can be. The average E Commerce websites converts at 2.2%. The average luxury apparel converts at 1.7%. And I showed data where average is almost meaningless and it almost doesn't even matter. And that's kind of one of the questions that I always get. Hey, what's the average E Commerce conversion rate? Hey, what's the average conversion rate for my industry? And sometimes, and this is very funny because in a particular industry, specifically for example apparel, furniture, we have lots of clients so we get to see data from so many different stores. And what we find out is, I'll talk specifically about luxury apparel. Average conversion rate that you see in the different published industries is around 1.7 to 2%, 2.2%. Invesp owned data shows that the average luxury apparel E commerce store converts at 4.6%. The top converting luxury apparel converts at around 8.5%. So if you're doing 2%. Yeah, if you look at the average that's getting published by general studies that are looking at 1,000 or 2,000 stores, okay, yeah, maybe you are there. But if you're looking at the kind of the stores that are doing well, you're doing a lot worse. Correct. Because the average There is about 4.6% and that's based on our data. And if you compare your 2% conversion rate to our top performing sites, you're doing horrible. You're converting at 25% compared to those stores. Now lots of times people tell me, well yeah, because maybe they have strong brand and people know them and that's the reason that they're buying. And that is not the case. We work with some stores that you probably wouldn't recognize their name, but yet they're converting at 8 and 8.6%. I'm weary of the word average. Now, that doesn't take away, by the way, from Shopify. I think it's a killer platform. I think it will help you definitely improve your conversion rates. But if you ever think that a single platform, you just install things on it and you're done, you're probably wrong. And I think most people understand that technology is there as a tool to help you convert more people to customers, but there is a limit. And what is fascinating is two sister companies, both are on the same platform and they're sister companies, they compete with each other. One of them converts at 2%, the other one converts at 6%. And if you look at them, the philosophy has been, oh, we're going to have the same features on those two different platforms. Oh, we're going after the same markets. Probably not. You're not going. I mean, in theory, you are going after the same markets. And what's funny is that the brand that converts a much lower rate is kind of the stronger brand, the more well known brand. It is the brand that is killing it offline versus online is actually trailing behind its sister brand. So it's just fascinating to me. The one caveat there that I say is be careful when technology hinders your ability to improve conversions. Oh, I want to make a change to the checkout. Oh, I want to change the collection pages or the PDP or the homepage. Well, yes, you can do that, but it will take us 100 hours to do that. Well, it's a simple change. Well, yeah, but our platform is so big and complicated, that takes forever. That's where you have to run away from this. Back in 2009, 2010, Magento was kind of the big player. I mean, 90% of our customers were either on Magento or switching to Magento. Nowadays, everybody's on Shopify. And it's fascinating. Most people are running away from Magento because Magento became a behemoth. Just extremely difficult to modify, very slow. Shopify is kind of the new kid on the block, although they've been around for a long time. But that's what everybody's switching to. I would say between Shopify and BigCommerce, Shopify is easier and I love that. But those are kind of my two preferred platforms. And if you're on B2B, maybe they're not the best option out there. But if you're on B2C, if you're a B2C site, I would be on one of those two platforms. And which platform is better? Probably it will depend on the type of product you sell and the type of configuration, because one of them has an advantage over the other based on your specific products. That's my rant about Shopify. Average conversion rates. Yeah, yeah.

It's funny that, like, I see like a lot of people, they get interested in looking at averages, right? A lot of people, they want to know, like, what's the average conversion rate of an E commerce site? Or stuff like that. But at the end of the day, I've heard you say this before, that it doesn't really matter the average. You just have to try to improve month over month. That's what like matters. Because averages, they tend to lie most of the time or they mislead.

Definitely. And I always tell every E commerce store. And that was one of the messages I've had to those executives that I've presented in front of a couple of weeks ago. Forget about your site. Average conversion rate at a minimum. You want to look at your mobile conversion rate and your desktop conversion rate. Even better, you want to look at your product page conversion rate, collection page conversion rates, cart page conversion rates, and checkout conversion rates. Combine that with mobile and desktop. So now we're looking at mobile collection conversion rate for mobile visitors, the PDP conversion rate for mobile visitors, the cart conversion rate for mobile visitors, checkout conversion rate for mobile visitors, and the same thing for desktop. Start tracking those metrics and then as you start tracking those metrics, and you can sum them up by looking at the mobile conversion rate, desktop conversion rate. Look at the reporting month over month, quarter over quarter. We just finished Q1 2023. How has Q1 compared to Q1 2022? Most of the companies that we're working with, maybe a couple of them, are an exception. We saw that revenue grew by anywhere between 8% to 12%. We saw that conversion rates also grew. Sometimes they match the growth in revenue, sometimes they slowed down. But it's sort of like conversion rates are interesting. Metric conversion rates are interesting, symmetric for a simple reason. You drive more visitors to your site. Guess what happens? Conversions are going to drop just automatically because most likely you're bringing less targeted traffic. So overall, I like to track revenue. I like to track revenue per visitor, although this is also not an ideal metric. So we're not playing checkers. Correct. When we're doing E Commerce, we're playing chess. So we're trying to look at the same metric from different angles to get a really good picture of our business and how well it's doing.

That makes a lot of sense. So Today we're talking about business objectives and CRO goals. I remember, like, at some point, I think it was around 2021, I wrote an article exactly about this topic. So it's kind of like an interesting topic to talk about.

Definitely. It's a fascinating topic because lots of times when people are doing experimentation and doing conversion rate optimization, they're not touching a detailed matter. They're not thinking about the business objectives. Because every company we talk to says, well, yeah, I want to improve conversion rates. Why? Well, because our goal is to grow the business. Yeah, okay. I mean, everybody's goal is to grow the business, but you want to drill it down deeper to understand, okay, what are the objectives? What are you trying to do this quarter? And how does experimentation, how does conversion rate optimization play into helping you achieve that goal?

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. But how then do you align, Assuming from what you have said, business objectives always come first before conversion rate, before CRO goes. Right. So how then do you align the business objectives and the conversion goals? Just give us also, like an example, if you can.

So usually towards the end of every quarter, and even if somebody had just started working with us, one of the first conversations we're having with top management and with their teams is to understand, hey, what are you trying to do? What are the goals for this quarter? What are your business objectives for this quarter? And this really could vary from one company to the next. Sometimes revenue growth. Most of the time it's revenue growth. But like, you know, let's break it down even further. Well, we need to capture larger market segments. We need to maybe sometimes introduce subscription. Sometimes we need different positioning. Revenue growth could be translated to any of those kind of, like, finer details. You have to start there. How are you going to measure those objectives that you have? So that's also kind of part of the conversation that we're having. And then as we understand those business objectives, as we understand how we are going to be measuring them, we take that into the experimentation and the CRO team to say, okay, some of your experiments, if not all of your experiments, need to help us achieve those objectives. One of the companies that we're working with says, you know what? Yeah, we're seeing that the cost of advertising is increasing. We're seeing kind of consistent conversion rates. So we're doing well there, but we want to increase the average order value. Okay, so if I know that's one of your goals, is to increase the average order value. Some of my experiments are going to be very focused on the upsells cross sells. If I'm going to be running 16 to 24 experiments for you this quarter, that some of those, maybe 50, maybe 70, maybe 80% of my experiments are going to be very focused on helping you achieve that objective. Knowing that I have this now new lens that I'm going to look at the site with. Because instead of an average order value of $150, I am trying to increase that average order value maybe to $180. One of the companies I work with, and they've been a client for a long time, average order value, again, I just mentioned it's $157 and conversion rate is doing well. It's around 6%, 6.5%. And the conversation with them around Black Friday Cyber Monday is like, hey, we have the promotions coming up. What can we do? Because we don't want to offer discounts. What can we do to actually increase the average order value? So some of the experiments that we did were very focused on that and we moved away from discounting, which is kind of the typical strategy that people have when it comes to Cyber Monday. Correct. Black Friday Cyber Monday. And we said, you know what, why don't we experiment with product bundling? Instead of somebody buying one product, let's buy multiple products, let's bundle them as a package. And this was very powerful because we saw the average order value climb from 150, 157, 156, I don't remember the exact number, but upwards of $220. That was extremely powerful because that on its own, in addition, you see typically an increase in conversion rates in Black Friday Cyber Monday. But usually that increase in conversion rates is offset by the fact that you've discounted some items, you've captured larger markets, so now you're trying to do more marketing, retargeting to those people. But the fact that we focus on product bundling, some of our experiments were focused on that, that helped us really see explosive growth in Black Friday Cyber Monday. And again, that was driven by the market strategy, the objective that the company had. Now, fundamentally, you need to start with a good objective. One time we signed up, it's a $2 billion company and I'm having conversations with the CMO. And it was just fascinating to me because her objective and what she wanted to report to the CEO on was the number of product page views. Now when she first told me that, I'm like, it just threw me off. In all honesty, she's a super smart lady and I'm like, really product page views, I mean, that's kind of the objective. Maybe like, you know, there's a bigger. And her theory was we need to drive more people to the product page views and we let the funnel handle itself, which means that we have higher revenue. Really? Her goal was higher revenue? Well, I can probably achieve that in different ways. Yes, we can spread and bring more people to the product pages, but I'd like objectives to be a little bit higher than that. I want more PDP views and give the team the ability to help you achieve that goal. Different philosophies, different companies, different ways of measuring things. So that's kind of the only caveat that I have to mention there, that we need to be fully aware of what kind of objectives that we are trying to achieve and make sure that they make sense.

Yeah, yeah, I like those examples because they also kind of show like, the difference between CRO programs, because the way I see it, like, each and every CRO program has to be driven by business objective. Those were good examples. So moving on to the next question that we have around this topic is, are there any potential challenges or pitfalls businesses should be aware of when aligning their objectives with conversion optimization goals?

Yeah, I mean, you have to understand. So business objectives will help you define what your CRO program is going to look like in the next, maybe three months, six months, 12 months. Now, when you're doing experimentation, you're coming up with new designs, new flows, new copy, and you're letting your visitors judge those designs correctly. You'll tell them, hey, what do you think about this? Here's a new concept that we're introducing. For example, we're working with a company. They sell specific kind of cereals and they want to introduce subscription. Now, the risk there, and part of our experimentation program has been to push the subscription model because they see that as more sustainable model. Well, guess what? For the last seven years, people were able to come to your site, buy one off product, and move on. Now we're introducing subscriptions. So guess what? Your visitors are not going to like that. They're not looking to subscribe. I just want to buy one cereal and we're done. So as we are experimenting, we knew that you were not going to like that. But at the same time, our eye is on the big goal. I'm going to help you push subscriptions. We are going to take a hit in conversion rates. People are not going to like that. But as we're evaluating our experiments, we're keeping the business objective in mind. Because that's really help us design, you know, kind of like we know it's kind of the roadmap is very clear to us knowing that visitors are not going to like some of the design options and the layout that we have. So as we're evaluating experiments, sometimes we said, you know what? Yeah, this was an experiment that actually lost. It failed. People don't like it. However, it pushes us closer to the final goal that we want. Now, at some point, you have to balance this out. How much pain are you willing to suffer through and how many experiments where people tell you, I absolutely hate this, I'm not going to buy from you. How much can you handle to help you achieve that big objective? Every time I talk to a VP of marketing or a CMO and they're doing a site redesign, I tell them, listen, the goal from the site redesign, probably several goals. You want to increase your conversions and it might be taking you on a path of where you want your site to be. You have this final picture. Unfortunately, whenever you roll out a new site design, there is a chance that people don't like the new site design. So you have to have that discussion, have that conversation internal of saying how much of a drop in conversion rates we are willing to take before we say, you know what, we're going to pull the plug and we are going to skip the old site redesign. Now, mind you, you can't imagine how many times I've had that conversation. And most of the time they're like, yeah, it's fine. No, I don't think our conversion rate is going to drop. I tell them, have that conversation. Put the line in the sand of maybe 15%, maybe it's 20%. We are willing to forego 20% of our monthly sales, quarterly sales with this new site redesign, knowing that we're going to recover them eventually, knowing that the new platform is going to give us XYZ advantages. The problem is, most of the time, companies don't put that line in the sand or they put it and it keeps on moving and you end up with very difficult conversations that happen post fact. Oh, we've launched the site. Oh, gosh. Our sales dropped by 17%. Yeah, we've told you that. Oh, we're not ready to do that. Oh, how can we switch? Oh, maybe your technical team comes back and says the switchback is not exactly easy. We've worked with a brand that went bankrupt because of lack of clarity on the business objectives and what experimentation wants to do. And then they refused. Like, you know, they were Actually launching a new site that was costing them an arm and a leg, pushed the new site, discovered that the sales dropped by a lot, switched back, there was loss of confusion, morale dropped. Because that was a project that was running for about two and a half years and you can see the writing on the wall. Things did not go well. It's better to have those conversations early on and those conversations will actually help you understand kind of measure where you are and where you're heading to. Correct. And it's like, oh, yeah, we know that this experiment is going to fail because people are not going to like it. People are used to us doing business a certain way. That's fine. We can handle that pain because our eye is on the wall.

So, yeah, I know that usually, like when you do like a site redesign, right, and conversion drops, how long will it take to see? Maybe just like a conversion starting to pick up? Because I feel like that's something that many people might worry about.

Yeah, this really varies tremendously. We've worked with some companies, actually just one name, Sallard University, that's a university based in Chicago. And it's funny because they had the site redesign, pushed the new site and conversions drop. But the drop in conversion, and this was fascinating, was offset by the increase of number of visitors that were able to drive to their site. So they had a problem, but they didn't really understand that they had a problem because they were running too many campaigns. They opened the floodgates on more Facebook ads. They were doing a million things. But eventually, about three or six months into the new sites and after launching it, somebody had to sit and look at the metrics and say, oh, gosh, our revenue per visitor had actually dropped horrendously. And it took them almost another nine months to recover to the original conversion rate. Now, it was, I think, a whole bunch of things mixed together that caused them to be where they're at. I think you take specific metrics about your current sites and where it stands. What is again, my collection page conversion rate on mobile and desktop, my pdp, my cart, my checkout. If you're an E commerce website, if you're a SaaS, you know, you're looking at the navigation from maybe the homepage to your pricing page, your demo request pages, the funnel. You take a look at those numbers, you launch the new site, and you can launch the new site in an AB test fashion and see, okay, did the new site design really cause our conversions to drop? Let's say it did. But you are sticking with the new design. Then you want to look at the funnel numbers and identify where the problem is and then get to work. It's like, oh, if you're an E commerce website, our PDPs, let's say micro conversion that clicks on the add to cart were at 12%. 12% of people who got to our product pages were clicking on the add to cart. With the new site we are seeing an 8% click on the add to cart. So there's almost a 40% drop. What can we do? Where did we go wrong? If it's the same product offering, something that we did in the design that caused people to say, you know what, I'm not clicking on the add to cart. Same thing with the checkout. That careful evaluation of the funnel will help you understand, okay, here are the problem areas. Here's what I'm going to focus on. And hopefully by deciding to move to a new platform, that platform is not going to be a hindrance towards you making changes, really being able to fix those conversion leaks. I was talking to a company recently, that conference that I went to, somehow the VP of brand and brand design jumped. We end up sharing a taxi to the airport and they are in the process of switching to a new platform. And it's funny because the platform that they're switching to I am very familiar with, beyond familiar with, because some of those platforms that I actually helped put the initial architecture for back 17, 18 years ago, literally sitting in an office saying, oh, here, this will be cool to do this, cool to do that now. Because I am so familiar with that platform. I know exactly who we were targeting when we built that platform. And I know that this lady, when I was talking to her, I'm like, this platform is not built for you guys. This platform is built specifically for B2B brands. You're a B2C. I don't think you're making the right decision. Love the fact that you want to switch to it, but is this the right decision? And add on top of that, because it's a platform that's built for B2B, making changes to it is expensive, is very expensive. So, you know, making a tiny change on the product pages will probably take maybe a week, two weeks, and it will cost you an arm and a leg. So be careful of what you wish for and what you are switching it to. And that's by the way, the reason I think marketing teams and technical teams all need to be sitting on the table when they're evaluating different platforms sometimes. And it's an unfortunate the decisions of what platform people are going to be on are left up to the technical teams. Although the marketing teams are the ones who are going to be making some major decisions after the fact is done. And that could be horrendous. That is a recipe for disaster.

Those were good points. Right now, like we're talking about aligning business objectives and CRO goals, but I think another important factor to look at is also like making sure that the team is aligned or the team is on the same page with what you're working on. Because you might tell yourself that the business objective is to try and increase the average order value. So we're going to focus on maybe upselling experiments and stuff. But I believe that along the way maybe you might find some distractions or some test ideas that really don't contribute to the main business objectives. So how do you make sure that the team is just focused on or the team is just aligned?

Yeah, I mean, remember, business objectives are not a top down process. It's a top down, bottom up process. Here are kind of big goals. How are you going to be able to help me achieve those? What are some of the goals that you think we should be focused on? I can tell you with Fig Buy and this is fascinating to me because I have some goals that want to achieve correct quarter after quarter. And for me, by the way, the biggest thing that I look at right now is the MRR monthly recurring revenue. That's kind of like one. The other one is our expenses. Trying to cut down on the expenses, trying to increase our monthly mrr. That's a high level goal. This translates into what features we're going to build, what features are we going to delay? How do you prioritize those features? And those are really constant conversations that's happening. I would love to say it's on quarterly basis, sometimes on weekly basis between me, our product manager and our dev team and our marketing team. Correct. I mean, we just had the meeting yesterday. We're evaluating different channels and you're sitting there and we're talking about, okay, this is working. This is not working. We gave this a try for the last three months. We've spent a few thousand dollars on it and we're not seeing enough signals to tell us that this approach is working. Let's switch gear. Those conversations need to be happening all the time. Decisions cannot be made in silos. And there are times where in all honesty, I had to say, you know what? Yeah, okay. The team, especially our product manager because he is on daily calls doing demos for the product for FigPi. So he's having conversations with companies, potential companies or prospective customers for FigPi. So his ears are closer to the ground than I am. I do some of those calls. I'll probably take five or six of them a month. He is doing five or six a day. That's a different conversation. So, like, you know, we're always sharing notes and we're saying, okay, yeah, this makes sense. And what's funny, I can tell you, about a month and a half ago, I was talking to him and I'm like, okay, here's what we should be focused on. Because I think if we do this, that will be a huge advantage for us. It's going to set us apart. And it makes right now Google Optimize is basically going away, sunsetting in September, and there's a couple of missing features in FigPi. We're like, hey, we probably shouldn't be working on this. And I told them companies are asking us about this. So initially we said, yeah, let's work on it. But then two weeks into it, and we sat and we evaluated about 70 calls that we've had, 70 demos. And we're like, you know what? Of the 70 demos that we did, only four demos asked us about this feature that I said, we really should be pushing it. All the other six, six devos were asking about like, you know, like a concentrated set of features. That's what we should be focused on. So we switched gears. We're small enough, lean enough to be able to say, you know what? Yeah, okay. And we haven't even started on that initial feature that I had suggested. So we said, you know what, let's keep it on the roadmap. Let's change. So that's conversation between marketing team, the experimentation, team management needs to be constant feedback. There should be a feedback loop. Here's the experiments that we're running, here's how those help us achieve objectives, and here are the results that we're seeing. You need to be nimble and you need to be able to move really fast based on results. Kind of keeping your eye on the prize.

Yep. So I think those are the questions that I had for you today. Unless maybe you want to share something else or you want us to talk about something else.

Yeah, I'm looking. I'm just going to mention something fascinating to me. So we're 2023 and the conference that I attended, a gentleman. Absolutely. I mean, it's always amazing to me when I attend a conference and I've been doing this for long, but sometimes you have speakers who are just absolutely amazing. You learn from them. But it's fascinating because he was at North Face and now he switched to a different brand and he was saying, well, you know, North Face. He's like, oh, you have about 20 different jackets. And it's like, you know, selling online is easy. Great. That's the marketer or the product owner view. Here's the customer view. Because I have been trying to buy a North Face jacket now for the last two months. You think buying a jacket is really easy? Buying a jacket online is hard. Is very hard. First off, summer already started. Correct. So no one is buying jackets right now. But guess what? Here's the other thing. If I buy a jacket right now, I wouldn't know how good that jacket is. Correct. Because it's no longer winter, I cannot judge how cold this jacket can handle. What kind of cold weather is going to help me handle. That's something that the team at North Face was not thinking about. That's something that most companies at saljackets are not thinking about. But here's the consumer perspective. Okay. I can look at the feel. And this is an apparel problem. Correct. If you're selling apparel, how well this fits? Okay, so that's another problem that you need to solve, which they haven't solved. Then I go and I'm like, okay, there's 20 different jackets. I need to be able to maybe filter out the jackets by how warm they will make me feel. Missing feature completely. Okay, I have to go to the product page and I can see different slides on. Is this the warm? The warmest. And something else fascinating. The jacket that I thought, oh, man, this looks very, very light on the side. It showed it as the warmest. The jacket that I thought will be like, oh, this looks like it's going to keep you very warm. They said it's, you know, moderate. And I'm like, really? The tiny jacket that looks like, you know, very thin, that's going to be the warmest. And the site absolutely left me in confusion. What's my point over here? Sometimes you think you have an easy problem because you keep on looking at the problem day in, day out. You really have to find people who are thinking about buying your product and understand the challenges that they're facing and then figure out how you solve that problem for them. You give me any space. I hate this example, but I'll give it nonetheless. Taxis. We've all struggled with taxis forever. Correct. I don't know when they're going to arrive. I don't Know if they're taking the correct route or are they overcharging me? Uber comes in and solves that problem. You think about so many different things that we do in life, and you can take them and you say, okay, where are people struggling and what's the opportunity for me over there? Wherever people struggle is an opportunity for you to stand out. And the more people struggle in a particular space, the more opportunity, the larger the opportunity is for somebody to come and disrupt that space. Every time there is an annoyance, there's a potential for somebody to come and say, you know what? I am going to solve that problem for you. Now, you need to pick a problem that is big enough. Correct. If only 5% of your consumers are struggling with this one problem, it might not be worth it, or it might be an interesting positioning, but you want to think through that and say, okay, what problems are people annoyed with? And is there enough consumers who are annoyed with this problem to solve? And by the way, people don't think of this as conversion optimization, but I think this is pure experimentation. This is pure conversion optimization. This is pure growth. I think that will help you solve the problems and really beat the competition. That's what I wanted to finish with because his thought just kind of stuck with me, especially the fact that I've been going to the site again and again. I could not until now. I am yet to buy a North Face jacket. So food for thought.

That's interesting. In what you were saying, like, as you're explaining, I was kind of, like, thinking of how important, like, the jobs to be done framework is. And also, like, experimentation is not something that you do online, but it's also something that you can do offline just to.

Definitely. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Ultimately, online offline. I know we talk a lot about online, and the beauty of online is it helps you measure things in a way that we cannot measure offline. But ultimately, it's about, okay, my consumer, what's their experience? How can I provide them better experience? And how do I actually structure everything around that better experience so I can stand out and beat the competition.

I guess, like, this will be, like, an interesting topic to talk about, especially next week. How can you build a culture of experimentation or something like that? Because I've seen, like, a lot of people tweet about it, a lot of people post about it on LinkedIn, but I think it's something that might be interesting to talk about. We might just like, maybe choose a certain space and say, like, maybe just for E commerce. How can you start an Experimentation program or something like that.

Yeah, I love that. I love that. Let's talk about that. Because it's funny going back to that conference where experimentation, when you peel the onion, it's not that complicated. Correct. Figure out things that are broken on the website, come up with new designs, test them out. The problem is not everybody is committed to that. Everybody will tell. Yes, we are committed to that, but not everybody's really committed to that. And actions, I think, speak flobbers than words. We worked with this one company back in 2019. 2020. From 2019 to 2021. Ran a whole bunch of experiments for them. Then they had a change of management and they said, hey, let's take it internal. All power to you. And as far as I knew, they had a CRO team. So I'm like, oh, I mean, if you have a CRO team, you have devs who are dedicated to conversion rate optimization. Experimentation. Have at it. Beginning of this year, they contacted us again and said, hey, we want to come back. And I'm like, oh, this is fascinating, because I haven't looked at their sites since then. I started going through the site and I'm like, man, this looks oddly familiar. Nothing changed in two years. And then I had a conversation with their VP of marketing, and I'm like, I couldn't tell. I'm like, I had to pull the old designs. And this looks exactly in the same state that we left you guys in. He's like, yeah, we've run into issues, and dev team was really busy and basically they did not do anything in almost two years. Now, this has nothing to do with investment. Correct. And hiring conversion rate optimization agency. This has a lot to do with being committed to experimentation. And it's not like every marketer, you sit with them, they can suggest so many things that they want to change on the website. Yeah, I want to fix this, I want to fix that. Yes. Wanting to fix something and fixing it are two different things. If your list of things that you want to fix on the website or test on a website has been there now for three months, six months, 12 months, you need to do something about it. Now, that might mean that, okay, we need to hire resources dedicated to this, and those resources are just strictly going to be dedicated to experimentation, or you hire an agency, or you just have to do something about it. It's not enough to know of all the potential things on your website if you have not done something about them. There's a huge opportunity for you there.

I agree. I think, like, experimentation is one of the easiest for me things to explain on paper, but when it comes to actual implementation, it's really not easy. People might think that, okay, we'll go and talk to customers, we'll analyze this data that we have. But not anyone knows how to actually pull insights from the data.

It sounds to me like we have an and let's talk about the experimentation. E Commerce. I think that would be fun. Awesome. Well, everyone, we're finishing up the episode. We have quite a few weekly subscribers. We'd love for you to like it wherever you're listening to this podcast and leave us, leave us a review that would help us a lot. Until next time. Thank you, Simba.

Sure. Bye.