What’s In It for Me? Understanding the Present-Day Consumer With Guest Jon MacDonald

Erik: 00:00:50

Welcome to the conversion show. Today we have our longstanding guest, Jon MacDonald from the good. Welcome, Jon.

Jon: 00:00:58

Thanks for having me once again.

Erik: 00:01:01

So Jon's just come in fresh off his his recent book tour. What is a digital book tour?

Jon: 00:01:07

Yeah, right, have something printed in analog and then do all the promotions digitally. That's pretty much what I've done. Although I had I did get one speaking engagement out of it, that I did in person. that specifically approached because of the book. So, yeah, that was in person. That was analog. And yeah, really excited about how how the launch has gone.

Erik: 00:01:30

It's really the podcast tour these days.

Jon: 00:01:33

More than anything. and it's so easy, right, to to just hop on for a half hour, an hour, have a great conversation and reach hundreds of people. it's it's hard to do that from the convenience of of your office on a daily basis.

Erik: 00:01:48

So anyone that doesn't know, Jon, look em up on LinkedIn. Jon McDonald. We'll drop a link here. Jon is one of our closest conversion allies here in the in the industry. Jon is is out there, building programs, working with working with clients to ensure they optimize their digital experiences to convert. I was catching up on the good.

Erik: 00:02:14

I notice you have the digital experience optimization program, which as I run through it, it's, you know, if I was running, a retail business, any sort of business with a website, you would be the first person I call.

Jon: 00:02:31

I hear that sounds a lot coming from you.

Erik: 00:02:33

Yeah. Well, so, we'll drop the link to this, too, and we'll actually going to touch on some of this stuff today for the audience. What we're talking about today. What is it? July 17th, 2024 is really, you know, Jon and I catch up every quarter. And today we're going to be talking about what's top of mind inside the walls at Justuno,

Erik: 00:02:54

and also what Jon’s seen with his clients at the Good. You know, today my focus with my team is on sales conversion. At Justuno we we have two main core areas lead capture, sales conversion and as we look at the sales conversion side Jon I want to bring up three segments that we as a company have drilled in on and are really focusing on what digital experience that visitor has when they come into Justuno, or a client of Justuno, so they are three the first one and these are low hanging fruit quick wins with high conversion rates.

Erik: 00:03:40

It is the visitor who has an item to their cart. Well on the site and then exit. So the cart abatement. The second is that visitor who has abandoned a cart and left the site returns to the site. And what what experience do they have that return visitor that abandoned a cart. We are achieving up to 30% sales conversion rate with that visitor segment.

Jon: 00:04:12

That's great.

Erik: 00:04:13

And then you have the third bucket, which is a general exiting visitor. This can be, someone that has looked at a product page or just has not looked at anything. You can separate those two if you want. If you want to ab test and go deeper. Obviously some of these look at a product page has more intent than someone that is just gone to the home page and abandoned.

Erik: 00:04:35

But if we look at those three buckets and what we've really drilled into is talking about our visitors as segments. So these three segments are the are I targeting them and separating them and speaking to them, creating an experience for when they're either exiting or arriving on the site through either a modal, banner or an embedded widget.

Erik: 00:05:04

We are able to show immediate, value to leveraging our own platform, right? How does that resonate with you?

Jon: 00:05:14

well, I think you've hit on the three points, that people would potentially exit the, you know, the, the challenging thing is a lot of people attack all of this through one way, and that's an exit intent banner. And that's like, the only way they attack this is they're just waiting for people's mouse to move off the browser, and then they throw a pop up.

Jon: 00:05:34

And honestly, it doesn't work extremely well. it can work. But, you know, it's a it's feels like a last ditch effort and it really kind of is. Right. I think the being able to send an email to somebody who has abandoned cart and bring them back into that purchase flow, it's going to be a pretty high opportunity area, especially if you can start a conversation with those people.

Jon: 00:06:01

Right. Was there something holding you up from buying? Get started chat right now with our customer service team, right? Push people into having a conversation to explain why they didn't buy so that you can help them through that challenge. I think that's that's where the money is hidden in a lot of these cases.

Erik: 00:06:21

So you mentioned the the cart abandonment email. That is something I've really come to recognize in the email marketing and SMS space is they've been able to attribute revenue, so clearly to their customers because they say, look, we sent this cart abandonment email and they checked out, what I've recognized with the on site experience is let's, let's leverage that same experience, that segment of cart abandonment that you're sending an email to.

Erik: 00:06:59

Well, let's talk about them before they even leave the website. Let's also talk about them when they return to the website. Right. Let's identify them and take them from I mentioned up to 30%. You know, I have one one chart from a client here that has a 23.64, conversion rate with, exiting visitors. yeah. They have an item in the cart, but when we, we, we do send them the last ditch effort, effort, card abandonment, promotion.

Erik: 00:07:34

They have a 29.41.

Jon: 00:07:36

So what are you doing that's a little different there. Explain that for everybody because I think, you know, honestly the the typical as I mentioned is just to send them an email. But it sounds like you're customizing the site, personalizing the site when they return in some manner.

Erik: 00:07:51

Yes. So we build a segment, a visitor segment, just like you build the cart abandonment email segment, but you have that same same segment on the for the website visitor so that in the instance you're bringing up, when a visitor returns, the website we have, we know who they are. They're in that segment. And we we, we show them a promotion right away saying, welcome back.

Erik: 00:08:15

You left this item in your cart. Are you ready to checkout?

Jon: 00:08:20

Right? Right. That's amazing because most people well, I think there's there's two thoughts that I have a lot of things I'm thinking about right now. The, the you're sparking a lot of great ideas here. But I think the first thing is that too many consumers have been trained to abandon cart to get a better deal. So before they abandoned cart, being able to tell them, hey, if you wait, you're not going to get a better deal.

Jon: 00:08:47

This is our best deal. And making that very clear before they abandon. You have a you have a point on that?

Erik: 00:08:57

No, no. I'm saying thumbs up yes.

Jon: 00:08:59

So I have seen that perform extremely well because, I mean, it was hilarious last week on, LinkedIn. I'm active on LinkedIn to the point where it might be annoying for people, but I will say that the reality is there's a couple of posts that really blew up last week, not of my own, but of peers that I saw.

Jon: 00:09:18

And one of them was the, it said, you know, consumers in 2020 would abandon cart and then get an email with the discount would be like, okay. Yes. And then it's marketers in 2024. I know they go add to cart immediately close, and then wait 24 hours for that email because they all know it's coming. Consumers.

Jon: 00:09:42

It was like new to them during Covid. Everybody started deploying this. And now what we're seeing and it happened before Covid people were doing it. But people really caught on. The more that they ordered. And, people were deploying during Covid. As sales ramped up online very quickly, they were all deploying the same tactics and doing it honestly kind of in a messy manner, right to the point where they were all sending the same emails because it was klaviyo flows that were diverse, set up easily.

Jon: 00:10:11

Right.

Erik: 00:10:13

And that gets into the how do you what's the best practices you set up the foundational best practices for, a retailer when it comes to the email marketing and SMS world? but I was touching on is that they figured that game out. They said, look, let's just make sure make sure we set up this cart abandonment email and all the other workflows and automations.

Erik: 00:10:39

They're great. you know, but if we really want to show that we're we have revenue attribution, let's make sure we're sending a cart abandonment email. Yeah. So let's look at how do we translate that to the on site experience. And what I'm saying is it's if you want to show that you can increase sales for a client or yourself, you need to set up a cart abandonment, promotion, and most importantly, a return visitor, promotion, you know, messaging however you want to do it.

Erik: 00:11:17

Banner slide out, embedded that says welcome back, making it easy.

Jon: 00:11:23

At that point it's a convenience boost more than anything else, right? So you don't have to offer discount at that point. The person came back to your site. So don't degrade your brand. Don't chew away your margin. Instead, at that point, hey, we've made it easy for you to checkout right now.

Erik: 00:11:43

That's right. And that is that second segment. You do that you can take someone, you can increase their sales conversion rate by, you know, five, 10% like that.

Jon: 00:11:53

Which is huge, right? I mean, you think about that, that you've gotten a massive return on investment from a tool like yours that can do that.

Erik: 00:12:02

So that's that's really what's top of mind that I've been focusing on. You mentioned the you know, the games. Right. That's totally a game. You know, add it to the cart, leave, wait for an email. Be sure you give them your email so you can get that card of an email. The. And when we talk about how do you provide value.

Erik: 00:12:20

And you know we've talked about in the past consumer psychology and understanding their needs. And that's where Amazon has nailed it. and understanding is customer centric. Understand their needs. How do we replicate that experience as one aspect. The my main point is retailers, do they accept and understand present day that people will shop their website, but will very much the same as they used to search for coupon codes or add their email to get that coupon.

Erik: 00:12:55

They will go to Amazon to see if it's available on Amazon and if they can get Prime free shipping and get it the next day. And if returns are a pain in the butt, not a concern because they know Amazon's returns.

Jon: 00:13:08

Well, look, I, I literally went to Apple's website and I was going to buy these because my wife has been working from home and I could literally she's not in the room today right now, thank God. But I could literally like high five her right here. And we both can't be on a call at the same time. And she's a very loud zoom talker.

Jon: 00:13:27

so it's one of those things where I needed noise canceling headphones and the AirPods weren't getting it done, so I was going to order these, but then did a yesterday and today is Prime Day, and I went on Amazon just because I was like, oh, whatever. And I saw they had them for like $150 off. I could get them delivered overnight.

Jon: 00:13:48

They literally showed up like three in the morning. my doorbell went off. I was like, what's going on? and yeah, I was just shocked. I was like, okay, so I can save 150 bucks and have it tomorrow. Why would I buy it from Apple? It didn't make sense. Right? So it's happening even at that massive brand scale.

Jon: 00:14:06

It's definitely happening at a smaller scale brand too.

Erik: 00:14:09

And I think people trust larger brands less than smaller brands or, you know, DTC brands, because the bigger brands just they don't they're too big. They don't get, they're not going to get it to you the next day. Yeah. and you know, we talk about what message do you communicate on that cart abandoned or that is exiting your website?

Erik: 00:14:31

That's where you come in. That's where we want experts like you testing the message, you know. So let's have five different variations of this exiting message saying, hey, get it. You're leaving. If you check out in the next five minutes, you will get this, you know, at this date. You know, speak the Amazon language to these consumers that are leaving your website and test which message... Like we have an exit one we're testing right now systemwide which has four general messages at the bottom like shipping returns.

Erik: 00:15:09

You know that can direct them to answer the top. You know, five core consumer need needs. but why not A/B test. Like, I love how you’re A/B testing all of the, you know, the experiences on site, the buttons, the language, the location, the spacing. What I'm excited about is testing this experience of messaging in these visitor segments.

Jon: 00:15:36

Yeah. And I think message tests are a they're fairly easy to run, right? And B, they can be really impactful. So, you know, if you look at that quadrant and you want impactful and easy like that, there's messaging almost always fits in there. The hard part of messaging is coming up with variants that actually move the needle. Right.

Jon: 00:16:01

Because you really need to put some effort into that. And I think a lot of folks just test whatever they think of first and that always, you know, normally is not the best way to handle it. But, you know, I mean, I think really it this phase. Right? This is what I would call the decision making and conversion phase of a buyer's journey.

Jon: 00:16:21

They're really asking themselves a handful of questions, and you need to be able to answer those. And if you haven't already, and they left, you still could answer those in a cart abandonment email, right? You could try to answer them when they come back to the site. but really, at this point, if people are deserting, it's because they don't have the information they need or they've just decided that it's not a good fit.

Jon: 00:16:45

And if it's not a good fit, you're not going be able to convince them otherwise. that's why I would just let those go. Quite honestly. I would focus my effort and tailor the messaging here to answering the questions for people who are missing those pieces of information. So those might be questions like, what's in it for me?

Jon: 00:17:08

Right. So they could be like, okay, well it's Prime Day. What's in it for me? I'm saving $150. It could be I get it overnight. It could be, hey, there's a free gift with purchase right now. It could be, well, I'm going to be joining, this group of like minded individuals, and, it's going to say something about me.

Jon: 00:17:33

there's a lot of tangible and intangible things that that a consumer is thinking about here. and, you know, they're also saying, hey, maybe it's super easy for me to purchase, maybe it's not right. Maybe they got to your page and they couldn't search for what they wanted. They just couldn't find the product. So they didn't even get to a cart to abandon.

Jon: 00:17:55

Right? They just abandoned because they were on your PDP, and it was just too difficult to figure out what they needed or, you know, the last thing consumers want to do is reach out to customer support, okay? If they have taken that step, they likely are going to buy. If you can answer that question in advanced. So one thing to do is talk to your customer service teams and say what are the questions people are asking you.

Jon: 00:18:22

And if you can look at those questions and start seeing some trends and patterns, then you can preemptively answer those. you can add on to your email flows, etc..

Erik: 00:18:33

That's a huge tip right there. We do the exact same thing at Justuno, we, you know, as you can't be product led growth if you don't know what problems need solving. Yeah. I'm going to I'm going to add that little hack. I hadn't thought about that for our clients in terms of, looking at the tickets.

Erik: 00:18:51

That's a good one because, you know, it's hard to understand what questions people are asking internally. Having, you know, and I love the “what's in it for me?” one, why do people go to Amazon? We know what's in it for them. You know, the shipping. And obviously there's the basics that we know consumers need, what needs they have.

Erik: 00:19:17

Shipping is still the number one main reason, ease of payment. You know, well that can be solved with, hey, we, you know, communicating that throughout shop. Hey, if you're on Shopify, the shipping widget is a tricky one. We're working through that one.

Jon: 00:19:39

Yeah, well, even doing, like, an estimated delivery date, right? And saying, hey, looking at their zip code, ideally there are Shopify plugins that do this, but looking at their zip code and saying, okay, it's going to be three days to get it to you, right? And you could even you could even guarantee a delivery date, which is basically what Amazon does.

Jon: 00:20:03

You could say you will have it by Wednesday and if you don't have it by Wednesday, you just refund them the shipping fee. Right? Yeah, you're out a little bit, but it's better than giving them a discount and you're going to convert way higher.

Erik: 00:20:16

Well things we the thing about Amazon is you trust when they tell you it's going to be there.

Jon: 00:20:22

Logistics is what Amazon does.

Erik: 00:20:24

That's it. You know I bring up Shopify again because they you know the largest you know e-commerce platform competing right now. They added shop pay to try to answer that one question there. Have you seen what they're doing with their shipping. validation. which I think is rare really smart. and I think I'm really surprised other shipping apps haven't jumped on that quicker because they have all the data.

Erik: 00:20:56

Why don't they have the wedge. More widgets communicating that.

Jon: 00:21:00

Yeah. You know it's interesting because there are apps that will pull the different providers. And that's really all it takes is to say, okay, I'm shipping from zip code A to zip code B with this level of service, how long will that take? It's not a difficult proposition to do the data. Is there? Okay. you know, you could even do something like two-day shipping.

Jon: 00:21:27

You know, you just call it two day shipping. You know, they all have two day shipping, and then you just add three days, right? A day for us to get it out the door. And then two days in transit. there's, there's ways to hack that. I've seen that worked decently well. But there are providers out there now that will that can do this for you without a whole lot of, fuss is an app on Shopify.

Erik: 00:21:51

What do you talk about What's in it for me? This is where, you know, working with retailers. You say, hey, look, if you have a cart value of X, are you willing to provide expedited shipping for free? that's where you really get into the more nuanced.

Jon: 00:22:10

Yeah. I'm a you know, I'm a huge fan of not doing discounts, not doing a dollar or percentage off. Okay, I've been beating that drum for a decade. I think it devalues your brand. It sets you up to be a discount brand moving forward. It eats into your margins. Consumers will actually we've tested that. They think less of the product when you discount it.

Jon: 00:22:39

so what I really recommend you do is add benefits. And one of those benefits is free shipping. Because consumers, when they could have paid for something like shipping but don't. This also works for something like a free gift with purchase. They don't look at it as a discount. Right. And it's an opportunity for you as a brand to do something that has more perceived value to the consumer than the actual cost to you as the brand.

Jon: 00:23:12

most e-commerce brands I know are charging a little more for shipping than what it actually cost them, right? You got to pack and pick and pack, etc. storage fees, whatever, right? Especially if you're using one of those third party fulfillment centers. They are definitely. I mean, how how are they making their margin, right. That that's exactly. Yeah.

Erik: 00:23:30

Everyone takes a piece of the margin.

Jon: 00:23:32

Yeah. So if you think about that, you can easily say, okay, well I'll give you free shipping and that might cost you 3 or $4 on a, on a larger order. But it could also entice that customer to increase the average order value to add some stuff to the cart. because to them that it's more valuable to get it for free in two days by giving you extra $15 and losing that to the shipping provider in their mind.

Jon: 00:24:01

Right?

Erik: 00:24:02

I've always preached look at take up, take some of your marketing dollars and invest it into your customer experience. And shipping is the number one area. So you talk about eating away margins, well, offset those margins by literally taking from your marketing budget and add it in. That is your best experience.

Jon: 00:24:24

I mean this is where, you know, you mentioned The Good’s digital experience optimization. The reason that we call it that. And we have moved from what we've done for a decade, which is what's called our conversion growth program. That was what we were known for and probably still are, but you know, we have transitioned to what we're calling digital experience optimization specifically because of that word conversion.

Jon: 00:24:53

It is one point in that journey. And if we only optimize for conversions, I mean, you're leaving so much revenue on the table, you are forgetting about all the people that dropped off that funnel in steps one, two, three before they got to Z. Right? Which is the the actual checkout conversion point. And also even after the conversion, there's so much that could happen that you could create a lifetime customer, increase your lifetime value to reduce your customer service costs, reduce your return rate.

Jon: 00:25:32

There is so much that could be done to reassure customers, right? Because a post-purchase experience either triggers regret or reassures that they're in the right. They did the right decision. So, you know, you really need to be paying all attention to all of this and not just the conversion point. And unfortunately, as conversion optimization has become more commoditized, you're seeing a whole bunch of these providers come in that are focusing on exclusively.

Jon: 00:26:08

Here's ten things to get somebody to check out right now. You know, like, well that's great. But what about anybody who doesn't get to that point? Or what about the customers that you I don't want to say people always try to trick people. There are black hat techniques. And I you know, that that unfortunately are part of any of these, digital marketing, you know, ecosystems like SEO has always gotten a bad rap for having black hat techniques, right?

Jon: 00:26:37

Same thing with CRO. There's a lot of stuff you could do. you know, we've had, a lot of great conversations lately about how to do ethical subscriptions because there's so many brands out there that will say, hey, you know what? We'll we'll subscribe. You, you know, automatically renews and you get you save x percent by becoming a subscriber.

Jon: 00:26:59

Right. The problem is they don't send an email before it goes out. They don't let you know. They just start. They just charge you hoping their hope is that you don't see that charge. You don't pay attention to it. Or it's like, it was 20 bucks. 25 bucks. I'll get to it before next month. And you totally forget the next day, right?

Jon: 00:27:19

How many times does that happen to all of us? That does a TV commercials now from credit companies saying we'll help you reduce all the we'll cancel them for you. I mean, it's gotten that bad that they can run, spend millions of dollars on TV campaigns around this problem. So it's something where you can do it ethically and have a consumer for life if you but it that's not just the conversion point, right?

Jon: 00:27:46

You got to have the right messaging before you get there. You have to have the right messaging and onboarding after, and then you have to have the right messaging every recurring cycle. So there's a lot to think about that digital experience besides just that conversion point. And I think the industry has really been commoditized by, what's called ‘Twitter Bros’ who really go online and just say, do these five things and you'll convert higher.

Jon: 00:28

And of course, brands want that, so they're hungry for that. but it's not very effective.

Erik: 00:28:19

The, as you talk about retention and lifecycle marketing, you have the visitor segment of return customers. you know, some of that has had a positive experience or some of that is has purchase and waiting for the delivery when they come to the website, you know, you want to treat them as if they're a valued customer. Yeah.

Erik: 00:28:46

And so you, you do that through having that visitor segment and creating messaging campaigns specifically to them.

Jon: 00:28:55

Right. Although I'm off obviously, segmenting your email lists and, and based on actions people take is it's a it's a must. It used to be what I would call a graduate level course. And now it's elementary school. If you're not doing that, you might as well find another job because it's just that's such an easy layup.

Jon: 00:29:18

And all of these tools make it so easy. Now, to do.

Erik: 00:29:22

So that is where we are today with the visitor experience. Is that and and that's what we've, we rolled out with our, our workflows and visitor segmentation. Is this, this concept of hey, you can't treat every visitor the same. Right. And just the success we've had the last ten, 15 years with email marketing automation. Let's now bring that to the website experience.

Erik: 00:29:46

and so, now that we're live, I'm really excited, Jon, to, to start testing these different segments and messaging and, and really excited to see what I most importantly, that exciting visitor, what can we message them to really engage them in a positive experience to to answer those questions like what is in it? What's in it for me?

Erik: 00:30:11

What do we not answer for you?

Jon: 00:30:14

You know, I think there's a lot of good potential IP in there for you, but I hope you start sharing that data as it comes in, because I could see so much good learnings out of that.

Erik: 00:30:27

I want to learn with you.

Jon: 00:30:29

Yeah. Do it.

Erik: 00:30:31

you know, we've we've focused on the technology building. This is the last three years and now we want we want experts really testing and providing this out to the market and educating the market the same way that the email marketing world, you know, the as you mentioned, you know, used to have to have a graduate degree.

Erik: 00:30:53

Now it's, you know, out of the box standard. So well that's a good that was a good catch up Jon. What do we have? three minutes.

Jon: 00:31:02

It’s been about half.

Erik: 00:31:03

All right. I've learned to like where the brain kind of starts training.

Jon: 00:31:09

unfortunately short attention spans, but. Yeah. this was great. I appreciate you having me today. I'm really excited for what you have coming down the line. And, can't wait to do some testing with it.

Erik: 00:31:23

okay. Next postings will be, will be some A/B tests for the crowd on these cart abandoning visitor segments. also, Jon, where can our listeners find your new book?

Jon: 00:31:42

yeah. Thank you. thegood.com/btc for Behind The Click. So the letters b-t-c. And then actually if you go and use that link and use the code btcpodcast50. So again btcpodcast50, you will get 50% off whatever, variant of the book you want. Print, hardcover, paperback, e-book. all of the above.

Jon: 00:32:15

You can also obviously get it on Amazon. It was the number one bestseller, for about a month in marketing and consumer behavior categories. So, I was stoked on that. It actually had a better launch at, the first week then. Gary, Fender Chuck's new book. So that was a huge win, considering how much effort and how big of a crowd he has behind him.

Jon: 00:32:38

yeah, it's done really well, and I'm really excited about getting into everyone's hands, so, know if you do get it let me know what you think.

Erik: 00:32:48

Can I add an extra bonus for our guest today on this? And I'm going to volunteer you for this.

Jon: 00:32:56

Love it.

Erik: 00:32:57

What's in it for them? Jon will personally autograph hard copies that come through.

Jon: 00:33:06

If you do that, I will happily do it. email Erick when you buy so I know it came through that channel, and I will easily do it or hit me up on LinkedIn. I'm so easy to find. I just look for The Good or Jon MacDonald, and, you'll find me on there. yeah. Really excited.

Erik: 00:33:24

Well, congratulations. And, thank you everyone for listening. Thank you, Jon, and have a great day.

Jon: 00:33:30

Thank you.