Human-obsessed CRO: Unlocking Shopify Revenue With Customer Insights — Anthony Morgan | Why Conversion Rates Deceive, Why Research Beats Guessing, How To Use Review Data, What Losing Tests Actually Teach, Why Human Obsession Wins Over AI (#470)

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00;00;00;07 - 00;00;20;10
Unknown
You're looking at global conversion rate, you're looking at a metric that on its own doesn't tell you anything. If you're looking at a single metric on its own, you're not going to get the full story. When we talk about customer research and you mentioned data, is the key there. Where do you get this data from? The truth is.

00;00;20;13 - 00;00;42;06
Unknown
Hello and welcome to another episode of the E-commerce Coffee Break podcast. A lot of brands on Shopify have the same problem. They're getting traffic. People are visiting the store, clicking around, but most of them never buy. In fact, more than 95% of visitors leave without placing an order. So today we're tackling a big question how to unlock more revenue from the traffic you already have by truly understand your customers.

00;00;42;13 - 00;01;02;26
Unknown
To break this down. I'm joined by Anthony Morgan. He's the CEO and founder of Enavi, a Conversion rate optimization agency focused on helping e-com brands understand why customers buy and why most businesses don't. Anthony, great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me cos I'm excited to dive into all things e-commerce zero. I'm a big fan of SEO, so let's jump right into it.

00;01;03;02 - 00;01;25;09
Unknown
So many brands get traffic, but few sales. What's usually going wrong there? Yeah, I mean, most of the time when we talk about, you know, a disconnect between the buyer, the visitor not ultimately becoming a customer, there's there's really two levers that play into it, and it's motivation and friction. There's either not enough motivation or there's too much friction.

00;01;25;12 - 00;01;58;26
Unknown
And, you know, it's all depends on on that, that specific user where they're coming from, their intent. But the biggest problem we see for most e-comm brands is they're driving a significant amount of traffic from paid social. That traffic is colder. And their their site, their store is speaking to a much warmer audience. It lacks the education, it lacks the necessary motivators and the necessary friction busters or friction reducers in the funnel for that specific segment.

00;01;59;01 - 00;02;17;16
Unknown
It can do a fine job getting somebody who's high intent to purchase or a repeat customer to purchase. But those colder audiences are way harder to convert their lower intent, and they're just typically doesn't do a good job of speaking to them and where they're at. Mm hmm. I think that's one thing that I hear from a lot of store owners.

00;02;17;16 - 00;02;36;20
Unknown
I just need more traffic than I will sell more. Now, obviously, I think this is the wrong approach because you should make the most of the traffic you already have. Now, that's different stages in SEO. It's not only the product landing page. Maybe we start there and talk me through where you look at when you see a store that's not converting well.

00;02;36;22 - 00;03;03;23
Unknown
Yeah, I mean, so we start with what we call the intercept funnel. And so this is core to understanding on site performance really how your store is performing. We use this to monitor store performance, and it's rooted in this idea that conversion rate is deceiving. If you're looking at global conversion rate, you're looking at a metric that on its own doesn't tell you anything like we believe it, period.

00;03;03;24 - 00;03;24;03
Unknown
If you're looking at a single metric on its own, you're not going to get the full story. You need multiple data points to give you the context and tell you a full story. And so that's why we take conversion rate and break it down in the four key metrics that lead to a conversion, and then take those four metrics and segment them down to get context on how they're performing.

00;03;24;03 - 00;03;45;08
Unknown
So we're not just looking at them globally, but we're looking at them segmented down. And so those four metrics are similar to what you see in like a purchase journey report. You know, Shopify would lack this first step. It doesn't have product views or a few items. G4 would have this first step. And so the first step is landing the product view.

00;03;45;10 - 00;04;06;16
Unknown
What percentage of users land on your site actually view a product? And we like to view that isolated. So just look at that metric on its own, not a continuous funnel. So like, well not the global conversion rate like when we get to the end of checkout to purchase. We're just looking at the percentage of the users that get to check out how many of those purchase and then the upside for you to add to CART.

00;04;06;16 - 00;04;28;03
Unknown
That's your second step. And then add to cart to checkout is your third step. And we have benchmarks across each of those. And so we create this kind of target baselines of where you should should be. And if you're underneath those target baselines and that kind of tells us where you should be focusing efforts. If you're over it, it's not really a way to like pat yourself on the back.

00;04;28;04 - 00;04;43;26
Unknown
It's not the intent. The intent is to give you focus is it's too easy to be like gather. You know, there's a million things that you could do to your onsite experience. There's a million things you could do to your funnel. There's a whole lot of different levers. We want to make it super clear this is your metric on fire.

00;04;43;26 - 00;05;02;21
Unknown
This is where you should be focusing efforts. And for most brands, it's really two areas they struggle and product discovery, or they struggle when users land on the product page, typically coming from paid social. And so those are like the most common issues that we see and metric on fire that we that we focus in on. Mm hmm.

00;05;02;23 - 00;05;31;23
Unknown
What's your take on customer research? I think SEO all starts before people come to your website. How does it work? Where do you look at? We're talking about customer research. 80% of our zero efforts is research. And so research is is a huge component. Most of the time, unfortunately, what we see in the Shopify space is research is not a component of zero efforts and it just typically becomes AB testing, just throwing up testing ideas.

00;05;31;25 - 00;05;56;17
Unknown
And if there is a level of research, it's this best practice list, or here's what my competitor is doing or a site that I know converts really well. So this is our this is where we're pulling our research from. But we believe that through the zero process, you're solving data backed problems and in most cases it's a customer problem and that has to be discovered through research.

00;05;56;23 - 00;06;19;01
Unknown
And so that first step we just talked about with the interest funnel, understanding, performance, understanding where you should be focusing efforts. That's the first step. Now we know where the fire is that we don't know what's causing it. We don't know why it's happening. And that's where the customer research really comes in. And so qualitative customer research where you're getting voice of customer data is a huge part of that.

00;06;19;01 - 00;06;53;24
Unknown
You have to understand why does the customer buy the product, What's the job that is looking for that product to ultimately solve or do? And so that's a massive component of what we do. And without it, we'd just be left guessing. We'd be left kind of throwing up ideas. And in many times we can have decent assumptions, but sometimes our assumptions get totally wrecked by by real customer data, and it can shape our hypothesis, it can shape our test ideas in a way that is incredibly impactful for not only the onsite experience but also the marketing funnel as a whole.

00;06;53;24 - 00;07;14;15
Unknown
And sometimes it can be disruptive to even how the business is thinking about who their customer is. Mm hmm. Now, a lot of a lot our listeners might be surprised to see your show is not only on page optimization, as is a lot of research in there. And you gave a good example do not copy what your competitors are doing because they're also only throwing spaghetti against the wall and want to see what sticks.

00;07;14;17 - 00;07;37;15
Unknown
So it's a very bad idea to just copy your competitors. Now, when we talk about customer research and you mentioned data is the key there. Where do you get this data from? Yeah. So if we're looking at qualitative customer research and voice of customer data, the main sources like a great starting point, is reviews. Many brands have a lot of review data.

00;07;37;17 - 00;08;00;04
Unknown
Those your first party reviews, the reviews that you've collected. There can be a lot of value in extracting learnings from those. What are the different themes that you're seeing there? What is that motivation? What's the outcomes that they're speaking to? What what is it ultimately solving for them? And then there's also surveys so you can do onsite polling.

00;08;00;10 - 00;08;26;28
Unknown
This can be used to understand somebody in the midst of the buying process. They're in the midst of thinking about you can really try to understand what is the friction that they're feeling. You can also do post-purchase surveys. These can be immediately after they purchase. This can be after they've held the product, use the product. You can extract all different kinds of learnings throughout the customer journey with surveys and then like a a way to invest even more in that is like customer interviews.

00;08;27;00 - 00;08;54;06
Unknown
That's incredibly valuable. You can take a cohort of your customers and then you can even go in for customers from competitors. There's third party tools, SAS products that you can use to ultimately gather that and then run customer interviews across, you know, ten of your own, ten of competitors. And there's so much that you can gather in that process about who your customer is.

00;08;54;08 - 00;09;20;03
Unknown
And in some cases, you'll learn that your customer is actually very different than who you think your customer, your competitors customers are, because oftentimes brands think they're the same. But the truth is, even if you sell a very similar product, in many cases, the customer is slightly different. Their motivation, the reason why they purchase yours, is going to be different than another brand that sells even a very similar product.

00;09;20;06 - 00;09;40;08
Unknown
Mm hmm. Quite right. I had cases where I was talking to sellers and they were just too scared to call their own customers. And they had, like, superfans and they were not. No, I'm not calling them. I don't want to talk to them, which is obviously a big mistake. Now, there might be a lot of brands out there who have the same problem, and you're running a SEO agency.

00;09;40;09 - 00;10;06;29
Unknown
You're working with a lot of clients. What's your approach there? Do you take this over? Do you take this away from the client or how do you work? Yeah, I mean, so we come in and we bring a zero process in, an experimentation process in, and part of that is the research. And so this cadence of research that's taking place and to really understand what are the underlying problems and opportunities that exist.

00;10;07;02 - 00;10;42;02
Unknown
And so we come in and bring that in. And and there's many cases where some of the brands we work with, they're already doing some of this. They're already doing surveying, they're already doing interviews, they're already talking to customers. And so we you know, we come in and in to help shape that, help kind of improve that help that, you know, oftentimes what we'll find is these efforts aren't very focused on solving particular problems or understanding particular problems.

00;10;42;05 - 00;11;07;13
Unknown
It's mostly just kind of like, here's a list of questions that we feel would be good to get answers to, but we try to come in and be super strategic with, okay, hey, we've got a brand that we know that their customers are really struggling with X, you know, let's say it's makeup and it's shade selection. We need to understand what are all of those underlying decisions that they're having to make inside of choosing a shade.

00;11;07;17 - 00;11;31;09
Unknown
And then then it's going to vary by product, it's going to vary by customer, it's going to vary by skin tone. And so there's so many different questions that you can ask to cover that and understand the friction and motivation behind that decision. And those surveys can be very powerful that for that. And so that's where we like, if you can come in and be strategic with this is the problem that we're going to try to solve.

00;11;31;11 - 00;11;49;05
Unknown
And so it depends. There are some brands that are doing it and we're coming in and help shaping what they're doing. There's many brands that are doing it and we're instilling that process and owning it in many cases, you know, makes perfect sense how you don't know, what you don't know. And if you don't know how to ask the right questions, your questions probably won't help you at all.

00;11;49;08 - 00;12;15;25
Unknown
Now, I want to go a little bit back to the store, to the Shopify site and talk about AB testing, which for a lot of people is also a bit of a a dark hole and they don't really know where to start there. What's your approach for AB testing? We view AB testing as a means of research. It's a method of research and and that's its primary kind of use in our process.

00;12;15;27 - 00;12;35;06
Unknown
Oftentimes AB testing just gets seen as a means to validate, just to see how to have a positive impact. Do we not? Can I be confident with what I'm doing that's mitigate risks in the bets and the decisions that we're making and be a little bit more confident That's valuable and that is a part of what a B testing is.

00;12;35;06 - 00;12;55;23
Unknown
But first and foremost, AB testing is a method of research. It helps you understand your customer. And so like I, we love using test just as much as a winning test. It's not all about winning as a losing test can tell you so much. It can tell you you're way off track that you're there. There's so much that you can actually extract from a test results.

00;12;55;25 - 00;13;16;23
Unknown
Winning and losing in particular, flat tests are a little bit harder because it's like, wait, what actually mattered? And that was winning a losing test can tell you about what you did. Did it actually make a difference? Who did it make a difference for? Why did it make a difference? And you want to uncover those learnings. It's a method of research and and that's why it's a loop, right?

00;13;16;23 - 00;13;44;21
Unknown
So you've got your research that's giving you those insights and then you're implementing that into a test and then you're interpreting the results of a test and then going back through and extracting the insights from that to then iterate on that many cases, you can have a winning test and have two or three more tests off of that similar idea or solving that same problem in maybe the same area or different areas of the site, or even beyond the site.

00;13;44;23 - 00;14;03;05
Unknown
But it's not just a line, you know, just like testing and then, oh, we won. Great. Let's move on to something else. It's a loop that shows to tell that CEO Oh, it's not only having a list and working through a list and changing a colored button from one color to another, it's far more complicated and then it's a lot of brainpower to do it right.

00;14;03;05 - 00;14;23;16
Unknown
And that's why agencies like yours are there. Now, just for our listeners, give an example of how can you drive growth or how can you drive more growth with zero? Do you have any examples, any case studies? Yeah, I mean, so the way that we typically come in to a relationship with a brand is through the entire site funnel.

00;14;23;19 - 00;14;50;19
Unknown
The vast majority of brands that we work with have some type of foundational issue that's wrong with their on site experience. And the interest funnel can point us in the right direction and tell us where to focus. And it starts there. We improve the foundation of their website, make sure that it's functionally working well, it's usable, it's accessible, it's intuitive, it's persuasive, and there's a lot of elements that go into to all of that.

00;14;50;21 - 00;15;13;00
Unknown
And so like an example of a brand that we've worked with for a long time now is a brand that sells chicken feed. So they sell like, I would say like healthy chicken feed is the idea that people that are health conscious, they want to make sure that their chickens are eating good feed and therefore producing healthy eggs.

00;15;13;03 - 00;15;37;13
Unknown
And so when we came in with them, they were really trying to push forward their subscription side of the business, getting that to be the vast majority of their revenue. And so in that kind of process, we started with a product discovery issue. They had users landing on their site. They had a lot of users landing on blogs on the help page that weren't getting into product pages.

00;15;37;13 - 00;15;59;02
Unknown
And so we focused there, really improved their navigation. They didn't have a massive catalog, but they had a big enough catalog that it was creating some friction. And so that was the starting point. And there was some some serious improvement there. And then as we continue to progress through their funnel, we got to the point where foundationally their interest funnel was in a really good spot.

00;15;59;04 - 00;16;29;09
Unknown
They were near the targets across the board. There was definitely some segments when we segment it down where there is opportunities, especially with like paid social, where it's a little bit called their traffic. But the big next area was in subscription and improving the subscription journey. And so we started off with take rate. We need to get more options and there is a series of tests that we ran throughout the site, but accessing the product page by box, that led to a lot of wins on that side of things.

00;16;29;11 - 00;16;48;27
Unknown
I think their take rate improved. It was like 40% over the course of the testing that we did. They were at like a 15% take rate when we started and now their take rate is consistently between 40 and 45% for their subscriptions. And this wasn't just default to subscriptions that was hot. That was not the route that we went.

00;16;49;04 - 00;17;22;04
Unknown
We tested that initially and that actually had a negative impact to performance. It had a negative impact to conversion rate that actually drove less revenue, though it did drive a little bit more subscriptions. The net value of it was actually a loss. In the end, we ended up going that route, but it actually wasn't the right decision to default to subscriptions until we had improved the buy box in what we were communicating about the value behind the subscriptions of choosing a subscription versus one time.

00;17;22;06 - 00;17;47;22
Unknown
When we did that, it improved the value there. Once we defaulted to subscriptions, then it had a positive impact. And so that was just like an interesting kind of series. Oftentimes we hear and see brands default to subscriptions. That's the best we know. It's not actually the best ways to get your value props correct around the subscription, and it's not all the same.

00;17;47;22 - 00;18;19;22
Unknown
It's not always like, you know, it's not always just logistical stuff that you get free shipping or it's easy to cancel. There's other value props that can tie to why somebody is choosing subscription, why they want maybe that convenience of subscription. And so being crystal clear with those where it was really impactful and we've seen their their takeaway go from 15% all the way up to 45% across a series of other changes too.

00;18;19;24 - 00;18;43;20
Unknown
And I was just one area that we worked further down the subscription journey in to busting churn and cancellations. And now we're working on expanding the average order value, getting users into multiple subscription products, into bundles. And so that's an example of a relationship that has worked through more than just conversion rate. We like barely touch conversion rate.

00;18;43;20 - 00;19;10;00
Unknown
That's honestly something that we rarely look at unless it's a very narrow lens and we're looking at like mobile paid social users and their conversion rate. It's a great example. Obviously subscription is the golden grail of e-commerce and the results are absolutely stunning, but it also shows that there is many moving elements in the customer journey and into how you communicate your content to make this work.

00;19;10;00 - 00;19;35;04
Unknown
So it's not just the one single thing you're looking for. You need to have a bigger picture and getting there. Now, who's your perfect customer? What brands are you working with most? Yeah, so we typically work with Shopify stores and we do have brands that are on Shopify. But if you look at like all of our all of our marketing, our website is very narrowly pointed toward Shopify stores and we work with both eight and nine figure Shopify stores.

00;19;35;04 - 00;19;52;19
Unknown
We do have some brands that are sub eight figures. Typically we say if you're less than like ten or 15 a month in revenue, if our process just doesn't quite work for you, you don't have enough traffic, you don't have enough conversions for it to usually make sense. And so that that's kind of that typically the starting point.

00;19;52;19 - 00;20;19;24
Unknown
But the vast majority of the brands we work with are doing eight and nine figures. Mm hmm. Walk me through typical onboarding process. What's involved? How long does it take to get up and running? Yeah, So time to value is something that we've really, really leaned into and focused on adding. Avi So a lot of CRM agencies, the typical approach is you do the ones that are doing research, so there's some that don't do any research and they just do a B testing.

00;20;19;24 - 00;21;03;20
Unknown
I don't really consider those zero agencies, but there's a lot of SEO agencies that do incredible work, but their initial focus is like anywhere from 1 to 3 months of research and then they start testing and they build out this roadmap of all of these tests. We lean more into this idea of continuous research where you're not doing like research sprints, but research is done throughout the process and then getting a AB test launched by week two so that we're driving forward testing, we're getting that testing velocity up and we're learning from testing and, and in many cases the results from our tests is what keeps the buy in to the relationship.

00;21;03;20 - 00;21;34;13
Unknown
And so it's really important that we're kind of cutting down that time to value and and getting a test slide by week two. And that's just like one of the many things that we're doing by week two and week one, we're presenting a slew of just do it's that come out of our QE tests, our smoke tests, our heuristic analysis, where our CE protein is walking through the experience and pulling out things that are like, Hey, this is it, we're testing, this is a broken experience or this is that as responsive as it could be?

00;21;34;13 - 00;22;00;17
Unknown
Or here's a technical issue that we found in our audit on, you know, Samsung Galaxy, whatever model, the experience is less than ideal on Chrome. Let's tweak this and improve this. There's just a list of those that ultimately can get handed over to your dev team or we can go in and fix. And that's all part of decreasing the time to value and making sure that we're making an impact immediately.

00;22;00;17 - 00;22;23;02
Unknown
And you're not having to wait for two months for a big old research doc to come. And then, okay, here's the next year of testing, which is it can work and there's value in that research, but we like to do the research throughout and just hit the ground running with the testing instead of instead of waiting. I like this approach more than waiting for 2 to 3 months before I see the first results.

00;22;23;02 - 00;22;44;08
Unknown
Me as an entrepreneur and as a long time Shopify seller, I would be a little bit of strain to to to wait for so long before I see anything. Now for emergent, is there any kind of homework they need to do before they can get started now? I mean, when it comes to our service, we try to make it as done for you as you want.

00;22;44;11 - 00;23;05;16
Unknown
This is what I like to say. And so there are some brands that are far more collaborative and and they're bringing multiple departments and even roles into the conversation. There are some brands where it's a founder that's maybe leading it, you know, and they might be an eight figure brand. They've got a pretty slim team. And in those cases it's it's very much as done for you as you want.

00;23;05;16 - 00;23;37;29
Unknown
And they're just saying like, yep, this looks great. They're pushing back in certain situations if they don't like something. But for the most part they're just letting us come in as an extension of their team and kind of own onsite performance, improving that experience end to end. And so from a homework perspective now I'd say just get in and and figure out what the heck is wrong with your your site through our audit process and we'll dive into your data and it's a great starting point to just get a gauge on how you're performing white glove service and free.

00;23;37;29 - 00;24;08;24
Unknown
That's what people like. Let's talk about pricing. How does the pricing structure work? Yeah, so we have a conversion audit that's part of our sales process and that's 1500 dollars. That's where we go in and we do the interest side funnel. It's kind of foundational to how we start everything. It's what kickstarts our relationship. And so at the end of the audit, you get a 30 page document that tells you what's wrong with your site, what we believe you can do about it and what the impact would be.

00;24;08;26 - 00;24;39;29
Unknown
And then if you decide to work with us, then we jump into a program and there's really two different programs. We have our growth plan, which is focused on the traditional kind of onsite experience, mostly through the lens of the interest funnel. And then we have our acquisition plan, which is narrowly focused in on new customer acquisition. Typically through Page Social, we're building landing pages and funnels and experimenting across your new customer acquisition campaigns and funnels.

00;24;40;02 - 00;25;03;03
Unknown
And so with the acquisition plan that's priced at 6500 a month, that's the starting point for that. And then the growth plan starts at 8ka month. Okay. I think that's money very well invested because I mean, if you double your conversion rate to double your business and then it's basically a no brainer and any before our coffee breaks comes to an end today, is there anything you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet?

00;25;03;06 - 00;25;27;11
Unknown
No. I mean, I said the biggest thing is talk to your customers. I think this is that's kind of where we started. And I think that's that's why we call our approach to CRM human obsessed. And it's in the age of AI and wanting to find shortcuts and tools to help you, you know, do things faster or maybe not have the same failures as another person that went before you.

00;25;27;12 - 00;25;50;02
Unknown
The best thing, honestly, is to go back to the fundamentals and the reality is you have a business where you're selling a product and you have a customer that's buying it. That customer needs to buy the product. And so understanding them not only shapes how you market and sell the product, but also shapes your product, future iterations, future products.

00;25;50;09 - 00;26;14;00
Unknown
And so just take time to understand the customer. And just because you were the customer at one point doesn't mean that you are still the customer. You should still be talking to the customer and understanding that even if you built the product for yourself as the truth is, you're probably not the same as your typical customer. And those assumptions will quickly get washed away once you start having conversations with real customers.

00;26;14;02 - 00;26;32;11
Unknown
I couldn't agree more. I had somebody telling me today, if you should ask such a pity if a website is okay and and say I would rather basket person if your website is okay, so totally aligned with what you're doing there. Talk to people, talk to your client, talk to prospects. They will tell you what's wrong with your site and they actually want to.

00;26;32;14 - 00;26;49;12
Unknown
They will tell you what they want to buy from you. So that's the best learning curve that you can have in the business. Anthony, Where can people go and find out more about you? Yeah, I mean, so the best place would be LinkedIn, typically posting on there weekly. We also have a blog called Our Metric on Fire Blog.

00;26;49;17 - 00;27;13;07
Unknown
And then we, we send out a weekly newsletter every Thursday. And so both of those are great spots to stay in tune on what's happening on the CRO front and and then give you some really good tidbits to think about to go in an action and some reports for you to pull up. But both of those would be good to two good places the newsletter and my LinkedIn perfect.

00;27;13;07 - 00;27;26;04
Unknown
I will put all the links in the show notes as always. Then you're just one click away. Anthony I could talk for hours about SEO very close to my heart, but for today I think we have covered a lot and I know a lot of people will reach out to you. Thanks so much for your time today. Thanks, class.