Speak the language of Profit with Ilan Hurwitz

AI-Generated Summary

Black Friday is coming, and the pressure is on. But don’t worry, Ilan Hurwitz has some expert advice to help you navigate the chaos. Here are five key takeaways from his chat with Tracy Laranjo: 1) Start now! Don’t wait until the last minute to get buy-in and start testing. 2) Speak the language of profit. Showcase the ROI of CRO to your stakeholders, focusing on increasing conversions and profits. 3) Don’t be afraid to experiment. Test offers, product placements, and even email campaigns outside of standard website A/B testing. 4) Focus on the customer journey. Don’t just look at your website. Analyze customer service tickets, reviews, and LTV to identify areas for improvement. 5) Think beyond discounting. Explore creative offers like gift with purchase, cross-sells, and subscription incentives to boost sales. Get ready to conquer Black Friday!

AI-Generated Transcript

(00:00) hugely powerful look at last year’s numbers look at last year’s conversion rate and present a forecast of what the uplift will be if you can start doing the audits now get some winning tests before Black Friday because there is still some time maybe doing some landing page tests and when they see those

(00:17) dollars of what’s possible that um that should tick the box and get the Buy in the support for you to be able to go off and have the time and commitment and have your yourself in that conversation so when that when the business is looking at their Black Friday plan there’s like what’s happening with

(00:34) product what’s happening with marketing what’s happening with with C oh that’s right hey experiment Nation it’s Tracy lorano I am having a horrible hair day but you know who isn’t my guest today which is Elon Hertz Elon hello hey try good to be with you we’ve done the sound check I’ve had the coffee and we’ve done

(01:00) the most important thing we’ve done the hair check so yes we did the hair check now um fun fact you are my favorite Australian Optimizer of all time wow wow that’s awesome that is great to hear we are what a great I know that’s like an official I know that’s like an official award we just had the Olympics and now I think I

(01:23) just W the gold W the gold yes yeah trac’s favorite Optimizer so so two things there first is uh you’re the only Australian Optimizer I know you don’t me to say that pot you don’t me to say that okay we’ll just that didn’t happen uh it’s still it’s fact it’s factual you are my favorite but um I hear

(01:42) Australians are also excellent break dancers we we’re pretty good it’s what’s Australia known for in the Olympics swimming’s pretty good yeah hockey few other break dancing is now Legend we are we are on the global stage absolutely legendary um on that note thank you so much for sharing your your Brilliance with us today do you want me

(02:11) to break dance do you want me to sh that oh my God that would be amazing uh we’ll we’ll save it for like the YouTube shorts yes yeah let’s do that yeah yeah that that would need to be heavily edited as well yes of course well I I believe in your ities but seriously thank you so much for joining and putting up with uh you know all that is

(02:33) uh experiment Nation so far how how are you doing these days I hear you are a cro consultant slash you own an agency tell me about that you’re living the dream I am I am I um am the leag consultant and founder of clever conversions so we’re a boutique cro Agency for Ecommerce Brands they’re doing all the standard stuff focusing

(03:01) really on audits always is where we start but then uh depending on what clients looking for looking at um landing pages or running AB test programs so my background mainly in marketing actually for for many years and worked with teams in cro and towards the end of my time at a large company did some C programs uh and loved it and

(03:20) so a few years ago jumped out to start Consulting for for Brands and yeah it’s really really exciting space yes you kind of we we both kind of did the same thing around the same time uh I’m just way less ambitious so good on you for actually having a website and all of that good stuff and I have noticed you

(03:40) have one of the most like packageable audits cro audits ever I love how it’s packaged on your website and I just yeah I’m really interested in kind of what you talk about and I would love to ask you some burning questions about every Optimizer favorite time of year Q4 yep holy it’s coming up it’s coming it’s coming the Olympics of

(04:07) the year for anyone working in eCommerce truly I I love the the connection um what quarter are we in right now this is question what country are we in what country actually in Australia weirdly it’s Q2 our our year starts in the middle of the Year fun fact uh starts July 1st but uh yeah for for you guys it

(04:28) is Q yeah Q3 February March April May June July August we are in three yep yes the beginning of Q3 Q2 Q3 Q3 um it’s also it’s winter for you right now isn’t it it is that’s right okay that blows my mind because it is the hottest part of Summer right now so it’s also a different day for you right now which

(04:54) just really trips me up like every time I know right it’s like we were saying the other day it’s like people experimenters we do all these statistical analysis we do all these like super comple complex things and it’s like so what time is it how do we this meeting which time which date let’s how we make it work yeah time zones not

(05:15) our thing but that’s okay we have other talents and speaking of talents uh you seem to have a talent for surviving Black Friday Cyber Monday and the holidays I need to learn more about how to get this holiday started without losing my because it happens every year I freak out and I never make the most of the holiday period especially

(05:42) when it comes to testing now tell me you’ve noticed something different but in my life I’ve always kind of run into the issue of nobody wants to test uh because of the holidays there’s just so much going on there are code freezes and it’s almost like experimentation just halts completely yep is that a good

(06:07) thing is that a bad thing where do you stand on this it is a good thing as we get closer to Black Friday okay it is it and that is I think when we spoke about what to talk about it’s it’s August now people might be listening to this in September and the key point is to do experimentation and help your business

(06:30) with C for Black Friday things need to start now it feels far away but actually the urgency to go through a proper C process from audit to testing and then implementation it has to start now because as we get closer to the date that window to try anything new it it’s just going to close there’s if you’ve

(06:54) ever LED an e-commerce business or being on the marketing side or the warehouse side it’s not a time to try new things your business has to do two three four five times as much with the same resources and so it just has to be about execution high quality website high quality experience high quality delivery

(07:17) all these emails going out there is so much going on and business just can’t afford to be trying anything new so I think that’s the challenge that we have in C and that’s why now is such an important time to be planting the seeds and getting the Buy in to to do the work in the next few months and so you can

(07:38) really contribute to the success of Black Friday which is it is for most e-commerce businesses a good Black Friday means you have a a good year couple of numbers on how big this is last year in the states $38 billion done over the Black Friday weekend which during the peak hours was $16 million spent every minute hi this is

(08:02) ROM Santiago from experiment Nation if you’d like to connect with hundreds of experimenters from around the world consider joining our slack Channel you can find the link in the description now back to the episode which is just that just blows my mind Canada was 7 a half billion Australia Chang the currency

(08:19) changing time zones changing currencies in US Dollars was 5.7 billion so just crazy numbers but probably the key point is last year all these numbers grew year on year and it’s going to happen again I think people talk about the economy and woring about are people still spending and they are still spending especially

(08:39) during the holidays in fact they’re spending more people are a bit more conscious about their money I guarantee you start having conversations with customers and they’ll talk about I’m waiting for Black Friday so it’s it’s going to be massive again and experimenters and people working in s can play such a big role in helping

(08:59) their businesses be successful yeah so much I want to touch upon there but yes uh people buy crap all the time all all year buying crap but I don’t know did you notice this too where last year right after Black Friday Cyber Monday it’s like there was just this massive hangover like nobody was buying stuff

(09:20) until right before the holidays and and through the holidays and then again huge over no one buying anything right after the holidays like is this a new thing was it just me who saw that like do you get that too just from the the agency okay so it’s not just me I’m not crazy I mean maybe I am but not for this reason

(09:42) it’s like around this time right after those Peak periods especially in the agency and Consulting world it was just bombardment of messages from clients being like help my website conversion rate has absolutely tanked can you look into this what’s going on and then you just see it across the board so you’re

(10:08) like okay it’s not them it’s something’s going on here so it sounds like you saw that as well yeah and continue to see it this year as well after every big sales period for example our financial year end the end of June which was quite big here and yeah big big hangover and I think it just comes back to with talking

(10:28) about conversion rate on website but conversion rate is also a factor of of demand in the market yeah and coming back that people uh much more conscious with their money they’re not spending as much and so they’re waiting they’re spending on the big sales and then it’s dropping off and I think that’s a really

(10:45) great Point as part of this as well is um as part of that planning and setting expectations at showing your so when people your business your clients ask about conver rate cuz we get into this situation what’s happening with the conversion rate and they just look at the they just look at the total website

(11:03) conversion rate and we all know that’s not very helpful at all that single number which in the comments a lot of people are just looking at that Shopify dashboard they’re not even looking at G4 and they just want this answer from someone working in C like this magic bullet it’s not just not that simple and

(11:21) so it is part of this and I know we’re going to talk about this is looking at last year and looking at sales setting those expectations so you’re ready for those questions and saying let’s look at sales this year let’s look at sales last year like this is natural natural abs and flows when sales run and so you’re

(11:37) kind of ready for that that answer and it’s not perhaps not something to look at on the website of course yeah yeah you’re already giving us gems it’s like in part part of preparing for this is being able to set that expectation with your team your client whomever and saying do not be scared if you’re

(11:57) noticing your your conversion weight will your conversion blah blah blah do not be worried if your conversion rate absolutely tanks at after this period I think that’s really helpful to take away and get everyone in the mindset and one before we get into kind of how we can prepare I was always of the mindset kind

(12:24) of to what you said you know you don’t want to do too much in the way of testing during this period of Black Friday Cyber Monday or holidays when there are a lot of promotions going on and it’s very Peak but there’s been a different perspective that I’ve been hearing more and more this year which is

(12:45) no we should still be testing we should still be doing what we’re doing just maybe shifting a bit testing more promotion based tests things that are kind of they make the most sense during discount heavy periods and usually the driving reason behind it is this is when clients churn so this is more of a concern with agencies and

(13:11) Consultants you know your client is like well we’re not doing testing so like what are we going to pay you for is it fair to say that even if you take the stance of not testing during Black Friday Cy Monday and the holidays Q4 can you still prevent a client from churning by giving value in other ways I love

(13:35) that question yes you absolutely can I think there’s two ways you can do that and as a cro or working in cro you got quite a unique skill set that can help other areas of the business so one is analytics and so we do a lot of analysis which we’re focused on the website but we can provide some pretty interesting

(14:00) insights across the whole funnel across marketing as well particularly since the mov to G4 a lot of businesses uh a lot of inhouse e-commerce or marketing managers were comfortable getting insights from Universal analytics and most Ecom managers I speak to have given up uh and they just it’s become too hard

(14:23) there’s too much friction there’s not a lot of trust there so that’s one to start with absolutely I think the other is getting moving into more experimentation than traditional cro so we’re saying don’t do big AB tests on your website during the busiest time of year because there’s a lot of risk there but yes absolutely let’s

(14:45) experiment with with offers with product placements and I’ve got a few ideas towards the end of the Pod we can talk about but I think that’s the value there where you come up with these ideas to test for the website and part of e-commerce because it’s product driven the experiments can go into offers and

(15:05) offers for those products and so I think you can help brands with thinking about for example an email offer and experimenting within email you can help them think about sure we’re not doing tests or we can just maybe test just how we do a headline differently around presenting an offer so I think AB that

(15:23) they’re the sorts of things that we can help businesses with which aren’t strictly uh full website ad tsts yes love that you called out other channels that can benefit from the experimental mindset Y and this specific period of time is one that really drives home the point that cro is not just a testing

(15:50) there’s so much more that you can do and have to do Beyond just 5050 AB split and also on top of that you can still experiment without AB testing so I find that yeah this time of year the Q4 time of year is just by the way Q2 for Australians but that whole time of year that is especially true yeah I agree and also businesses are

(16:19) busy they’re so busy so I think that’s also your value as a consultant or an agency is where going to go off and do that insights and Analysis piece or just take the time because you’re so busy focusing on getting your Black Friday right so I think as well but yeah absolutely there’s so much you can

(16:37) experimen uh and test across channels and help other areas of the business yes now let’s let’s do this what should you be doing instead so I think the number one thing before you jump into the um audit and testing process is getting buying from the business you started this pod with number one challenge I think that we

(17:02) have whether we’re in-house C or an agency is just getting that buy in because often with Senior Management or clients top of mind is is product that brand and product for an e-commerce business and what does that look like for Black Friday of course marketing they’re the things that uh email website

(17:22) design but not necessarily C they’re the sorts of things is at a top of mind and how do you get into that conversation and get the resources that has to be the first thing before you even get into the work knowing that you’ve got the time and the resources to help the business and so the first thing I recommend is

(17:42) need to speaking the language of key stakeholders and showing how powerful cro can be during Black Friday and it can be hugely powerful look at last year’s numbers look at last year’s conversion rate and present a forecast of what the uplift will be if you can start doing the audits now get some winning tests before Black Friday

(18:05) because there is still some time maybe doing some landing page tests and when they see those dollars of what’s possible that um that should tick the box and get the Buy in the support for you to be able to go off and have the time and commitment and have yourself in that conversation so when that when the

(18:22) business is looking at their Black Friday plan there like what’s happening with product what’s happening with marketing what’s happening with with C oh that’s right Trac and Alan are working on these tests how are we going with that how’s the audit going um I think that has to be that has to be number one um and talking about it not

(18:40) just in terms of the conversion uplift but the things that matter to the business during that time so one of the biggest challenges the businesses is moving away from discounting and remaining profitable and so explaining how of course if we can increase the conversion rate and find some winning tests now we’re moving the

(19:04) business away from discounting to motivate the sale um because we’re presenting better headline better user experience whatever that whatever that looks like we’re able to increase profit which is probably a conversation which wasn’t there a couple of years ago because Facebook ads were so cheap during lockdown like businesses were

(19:27) just making money and they didn’t have to they did not have you could have a pretty good A good enough website if you had a good product you were going to make money that’s just not the case anymore costs are going up and so profit is part of the conversation now so showing not just conversion rate but

(19:44) profit per session or profit per customer talking in that language um and how you can help the business achieve that so I think that has to be uh that has to be the the first step yeah I love that I love that you called that out and it’s like you have to go into it already with a degree of trust because it’s

(20:05) going to be an uphill battle to try and get that trust for the first time yep then and I’m really curious to know from you what does it actually look like when you have that buy in because it’s not always obvious yeah it’s um I think it comes it’s it’s the resources so explaining good sorry I threw a curve ball there no

(20:32) no that that’s a great question I think it is getting this support across the whole business it does come down to resources because you can sit there with all the analysis and all the ideas in the world but you need to bridge the gap for the business to implementation and you can’t do that on your own they have

(20:53) resources design resources so I think ultimately it just it depends on the size of the business but you want a senior stakeholder to say this is important to look around at the head of devb the head of design the head of product and saying cro needs to be in that conversation I think that’s the main thing in Practical terms it is um

(21:14) there might be funding there there might be things that you need to say in order for me for me to achieve this you have just get them excited you have to show the vision and the dream and then say for me to be able to do this this is what I need and this is how I want things to run and really get that

(21:30) agreement from decision makers up front and and you might need to do a little bit of work if it’s a bigger business here so you might need to have a separate meeting with the design team because they care about ux and brand they they’re not really going to respond to commercial you might have to speak to

(21:46) the dev team because they do not want they have going to be very risk averse and they need to make sure that the website is a well Ed machine so you need to maybe need to speak to each of those stakeholders individually to show how this helps them because it absolutely helps them in their areas and so then

(22:03) when you are looking for that bind maybe from the CEO or whoever makes the decisions they’re looking around at all their reports and everyone’s like y we’re we’re bought in on this and then ideally you also have I guess a champion from each of those teams so you might have got the buying from head of Dev and

(22:22) then they kind of say yeah you know Tracy in my team Alan in my team they’re going to be your person to speak to as you want to roll out this road map and I think it’s helpful to get maybe a working group um of people who almost make it feel exciting in a project it’s like this is the you know yeah have to

(22:39) come up with a name but this is like the Black Friday you know Black Friday um and then of course having a a seat at the table for the actual Black Friday meetings which are definitely going to be happening as well yeah and everything that you’re saying right now resonates so hard I was just in one of these

(22:55) meetings uh these like Q4 planning prep type meetings where we brought in kind of all the department heads and we didn’t just look forward to this Q4 but we did a retrospective of the last Q4 yes we everybody on the team had a different idea of what went well and what went wrong and that’s where you

(23:23) really start to see whole okay so we can’t make this same mistake over again uh fulfillment and stock issues especially for Ecom huge thing that came up this week when I was having that chat so it almost kind of forces you to just learn from the previous year and that’s part of that’s part of the the

(23:47) experimental mindset it’s like you are every single year going on this new experiment of this is how we’re doing Black Friday this year what are we learning from last year and it’s an iteration every single time yep so so important to have those conversations and that’s not even talking about the numbers really I I

(24:06) feel like you need to also look at how the website performed last year but also knowing that every year it’s different I feel like every year there’s a new end of the world coming up and it’s like what can we take away from the performance of last year that’s that’s such a good point and I did speak about numbers because that’s

(24:35) where more senior stakeholders interested but not all of them um you know as C we need to understand our audience our customers we need to understand our internal audience as well and what they’re interested in and a lot of more interested in customer experience and I think that retrospective like that business my

(24:51) favorite stakeholder yeah it’s um exactly right at some meetings at some businesses I’ve been in we get someone to pretend to be a customer in the meeting and they have to they have to kind of agitate and go okay I don’t like that like does this pass the customer test it’s like there’s a customer sitting in the room just to bring it to

(25:11) life and it’s so true that followup customer experience and and so often it is logistics is where things do fall over because it’s just so busy and so going back now again now is a time when you kind of have a bit of time and space to do that Discovery before the pressure starts to build decisions have to be

(25:32) made about release dates code freezes placing stock and it’s just going to be a no like we don’t have time to sit and look at last year we now now need to just make decisions and move in and um I think there’s a few ways to do that I think absolutely looking at the results um looking at going into your analytics

(25:50) and looking what happened on the website I’m a big fan of navi’s int funnel report I think going looking at that last year because you can’t you can look at this year’s analytics great but to your point Black Friday is like um completely different it’s completely different it’s like its own special period so you need to go back and look

(26:12) at the analytics last year because you’re going to see all sorts of different things all sorts of different things people are browsing faster they’re getting through checkout faster like that might come up like did that happen how did they move between the site was there specific black Friday landing pages like all those things are

(26:28) quite unique so that’s from the website perspective and then you need to look yeah I think um at the um experience overall and just looking at things like customer tickets like customer service tickets and the number of chats um looking at the reviews that came through and one of the big big things depending

(26:47) on the type of product uh you sold is what was the lifetime value of those customers you got in Black Friday it it really depend depends on your unit economics and huge differences if you’re maybe a subscription product um at a repeat purchase repeat use product but have people just come in and purchase

(27:06) once or have they continued and what did that look like in terms of the experience presented during during Black Friday yeah I anytime we get into LTV it’s like I forget LTV is a thing which is so silly it’s but it’s true it’s I would like to know out of your customers who became customers for the first time last

(27:30) year during the holidays during Black Friday Cyber Monday are they still customers and if not the vast majority haven’t spent a dime on your product since then or they just immediately churned then what can you learn from that and what can you also learn from the ones who did become repeat customers

(27:51) what are what are those traits What promotions encourage them to keep coming back and like discounting I know there’s like so many thoughts out there about discounting like should we should we discourage it should we not and that is that is very important to think about especially when you’re looking at your

(28:15) customers who converted for the first time last year yep exactly exactly it could look so exciting seeing that big Revenue in all those sales over Black Friday but depending on the type of business you might not be profitable on first purchase which depend that might be okay but then you need to see people

(28:34) coming back yes but looking back you need to understand did the way we do the sale uh did it just result in people come just it just got the deal the deal Hunters you just got people who were looking for something cheap and one off um and that having too many of those um types of customers is is does not make

(28:53) for a healthy healthy PML I think um the other big part is doing surveys now as well is is huge um yeah trying to go what do you ask like what do you try to learn yeah I think I was thinking about the type of questions I think it is trying to understand people’s perhaps purchasing plan just trying to ask about

(29:14) um how they buying sales are they waiting for sales this could be more external research rather than than a post-purchase survey but it’s also just doing your your standard surveys which are not always in in place again getting to that buy in and saying to we need to we need to find out now to be able to come up with good ideas to to

(29:39) plan and test so just making sure um the standard survey after post purchase just asking about the experience is there anything that we could that prevented you from buying all those sorts of of questions I know for a lot of people listening this is bread and butter staff but you’d be surprised if with so much

(29:58) going on in your business if someone’s actually thinking about or trying to find this sort of um information from from customers yeah voice of customer is a thing that I always notice uh gets thrown to the side and you know you’ll have one person who says oh we uh ran a survey six months ago so that’s that’s

(30:22) enough and it was like exactly the survey with 80 questions yep and you learned absolutely nothing from I one survey question that I would love to explore this year in Q4 since we’re having show and tell now I would love to find out what promotions have you gone for in this past year what promotions made you act

(30:53) and kept you as a customer what was it about those promotions was it like a gift with purchase where you know you got like a trial size or a mini version of the product that you just loved and you couldn’t stop buying or was it hard discounts like what what did work over the year and asking just really directly

(31:16) tell me about an experience don’t tell me what you would go for what you would want like what have you acted on yeah this is kind of the art of the survey is just just reframing that question to get rather than prescribe the answer get the ideas and actually I think that’s a that’s a great idea actually to throw

(31:36) into into the survey is uh present testing offers now and asking customers so either getting them to give you ideas or um asking questions like what else if we had given you x what else would have encouraged you to buy more if if you purchased you know for subscription businesses is what um discount or offer

(31:57) would encourage you to buy more and kind of getting those ideas on the table now so you have time to actually test and Implement them I think that’s yeah that’s awesome um yeah I wonder if there’s also a gifting angle here too because so much of what’s purchased throughout this period of time is you’re

(32:15) either gifting for someone else or you’re putting together the list that you toss to your spouse and say hey Santa uh I want this there ‘s got to be something there about asking about your gifting behaviors so Black Friday is the 29th so this year so it is absolutely leading into Prime Christmas gift purchasing and

(32:41) it’s always a challenge I chat with clients like how do we weave this messaging together because the challenge with Black Friday is the Market’s saturated there’s ads and messages is everywhere and so the instinct is to go for Discount storewide it just works I I I read I read on know LinkedIn and things people

(33:06) say you’re discounting too much I’m like have you worked inside working inside an e-commerce business like of course people know they don’t want a discount but it works and it’s very simple to execute and we don’t have unlimited resources and there’s a lot going on in the business and so but you’ve got to

(33:22) try new things we have to try and move away from that in some in some form so it’s you got your Black Friday messaging and then how do you lead that in or make that feel part of the Christmas gift messaging so you’re saying get your gifts now at a better price something like that and to your earlier Point

(33:43) avoid that hangover and so you’re really getting people are buying for themselves but then they’re spending and getting all these gifts for um for Christmas as well totally totally is there anything else that you think kind of gets neglected in preparation for Q4 yeah I think um I think is a couple of other

(34:04) things that I would definitely be doing during this time uh getting close to the product road map and the dev road map just coming back to understand what’s else is going in the business but in e-commerce it’s all about the product and the brand and there’s people in your business that speaking to the product

(34:19) leads um and the merchandising leads like what are we what’s our plan for Black Friday are we bringing in new SKS understanding that is really important so you can present back a plan to help to help support that strategy speed optimization is a massive massive one how is the speed going how did we go

(34:37) last year it actually is a great way to get buying as well it’s very simple to explain to to people um our website’s low customer experience is not good our conversion rate drops and so you can kind of wrap it into your cro plan it’s like we need to do this and by the way we’re going to also try all these tests

(34:53) so it feels yeah just gets that gets that buying yeah uh but I think and the other one is just um looking for new ideas at this time and I just have to give a shout shout out to Ecom ideas.com that’s been a go-to resource of mine lately when I’m doing Audits and um you know no one has all the ideas in the

(35:14) world and you just want to throw clients something completely different really get them thinking out the box they want to see the latest best practice not sorry best practices I saw this best I know I know I know um um yeah so I think that that’s one as well I think it’s just such a great um resource just to get people thinking

(35:34) again we can do discounts how are we going to be differ different in Black Friday here’s some things that we can try and uh it all comes back to those offers so and how do we uh how do we come up with great offers which move away from discounting so I um you asked me for for three but I’ve got five so I

(35:53) think I’ve but I’m going to Rattle them off quickly just to get people thinking I think I think how do we not discount I think gift with purchase you mentioned is such a great one um instead of discounting the product you’re just adding more value and you’re still maintaining a higher price but that can

(36:09) be in many forms it could be a product but one of a great one is is giving a gift card yeah so $200 get a $50 gift card you can kind of talk about make it feel explain 25% off the customers very happy with their $50 and of course they’re going to come back they need to spend that $50 and and more often than

(36:28) not they’re going to they maybe spend more than the $50 because they want to purchase a higher item or they can gift it to someone so get something for yourself and here’s your Christmas gift sorted so gift with purchase is great uh a really um so that’s kind of gift with purchasing gift card uh cross cell

(36:44) testing super super powerful I’m seeing a lot of success with postp purchase cross sales so if the business is worried about just just don’t touch the funnel just keep it’s really clear we’re going to sell these products on discounts let the customer yeah don’t break it keep it simple and and seamless

(37:03) okay that’s fine and then after um after the checkout um yeah offer them something else which you secure the sale and like can we increase the the aov so that’s such a great such a great way to play around and test without um in a really lowrisk risk way uh trying to get people to sign up for subscription with

(37:25) a big a discount if you um are a subscription style so instead of yeah just making it super attractive to sign up for uh subscription up front and waiting your discounts that way and then the that by the way yeah a sick thre Monon subscription offer if I love it after this three months I I’m hooked forever this has happened with my

(37:50) my accounting software my toothbrush and toothpaste subscription it’s it’s it can be so effective if you get it right but you really got to believe in your product you got to really Bank on you know you you made that period great yep exactly and you got to make it feel uh like just really uh remove the risk for

(38:10) customers like put in that social proof put in that money back guarantee cuz we’re trying to get new customers so if you can get new customers who haven’t tried the product to sign up for a subscription on first product or first purchase that’s like that’s like pure gold so you need to make attractive

(38:26) price-wise but then you need to make it feel that if you have to back your product but um the customer doesn’t know yet they haven’t tried the product so you need to try and remove that risk to get them to to sign up to the subscription first the final one and this is more helping guide the businesses strategies product releases

(38:42) over as part of Black Friday so trying to work with your business to hold back some product um so it’s not all Black Friday because you’re trying to come up with these offers and keep things exciting so instead of sending an email every 2 days and 2 hours 25% off 25% off it’s like 25% off storewide and then on

(39:00) Sunday it’s like new release or um we just found some stock like make it feel fun like we just found like Tracy from the warehouse forgot about these 200 items they are now on sale like just keeping it really exciting um and planning out that calendar again leading into to kind of Christmas messaging as

(39:17) well and maybe holding a bit of product back there to get them to give them a reason to come back and come back to the site yes I’m gonna add one more thing here and it’s kind of relevant to your last Point there’s every year I see retailers do this thing where they’ll increase the value of their promotion like every day over like a one

(39:41) week period And I feel like Shoppers are getting wise to this like they know okay you’re giving me 10% off on day one but I know that the discounts will get better and better and better every day maybe it’s beneficial to take advantage before the stock clears but I think it’s important to realize a lot of brands are

(40:05) doing the same thing as everyone else and we’re just we’re too smart as Shoppers to fall for these I think so yeah and I don’t love that I think there’s always this fine line with tactics that we use to encourage sales and I feel a good customer experience if you’re willing to purchase for me on Black Friday I think you should probably

(40:25) get the best discount I understand we extend I understand we can extend sales and I think there’s a lot of great things you can do during Black Friday with countdown timers I was going to mention as well like tweaking your abandoned carts and talking Black Friday and all those sorts of things but I think coming back to it like why should

(40:42) a customer who committed to buying from you on Friday get less of a discount to someone that committed buying on a Monday so I think you’re right people are switched on to it um but I think as well it’s being a little bit more creative um with how you do your office so everyone everyone wins totally now

(40:58) for any of our listeners who are like okay uh great advice I’m still shedding my pants I’m really scared for Q4 what would you tell them to kind of put them at ease take a big breath uh planning is is key um starting the conversation now starting the conversation today um when you going to work uh and and getting an

(41:25) understanding of the plan I think um that’s that’s got to be uh number one um I think that’s the um I’ll try that one again um is this more like an exit question or more like just yeah unless is unless is there anything else that we haven’t covered yet that you want to speak to no I think that’s no I think that’s pretty good

(41:50) um yeah I think the number one thing is just to get started I think get started um trust your trust your process um get that buy in is is number one so you have the resource and the time to go through your process and and start now because that window starts to close now it’s it doesn’t feel urgent I think that’s the

(42:12) key Point make it feel urgent that we need to we need to do XYZ first to to be successful for Black Friday and then going through that typical conversion audit going through your analytics going through website and then just making yourself part of that that team in the leadup in the leadup to to Black Friday

(42:30) yes great advice usually I just say uh I don’t know deal with it at the last minute with everything else but that is not the takeaway of this episode so nobody take that as the the point from this episode start now ASAP and you won’t regret it’s you have done it before we’ve done it before Black Friday

(42:54) is not new anymore to be honest most of what you’re going to deal with is is a known quantity you can look at last year you can speak to people there’s experiment Nation slack channel is amazing like there’s so many people who’ve been through this so it’s not like this new thing but there’s different things for

(43:15) your business so like how do you connect those dots knowing that it’s going to be crazy yeah and try to try to walk through the scenarios and then go what do we need to do what do we need to do now has the time to to go through that absolutely well Elon thank you so much for all of this wisdom I’m so glad that

(43:33) you joined where can our listeners find you LinkedIn um a regular a regular on uh regular on LinkedIn so U love love to chat all things zero and and geek out so um yeah please feel free to DM me if you have any questions always always love to have a chat amazing yeah and also check out your website clever

(43:58) conversion.com auu yes that’s the one yes excellent I remember great I’m always on your website because I’m like this is a a study in what I would want my website to look like if I had any sort of uh ambition or drive at all thank thank you that’s great it’s um it’s been it’s a lot of work like going

(44:21) from uh yeah freelance to to building out and can see during the website so thank you for that love it for you well thanks again and best of luck to you in this upcoming Q2 for you Q4 for me hi this is romal Santiago from experiment Nation if you’d like to connect with hundreds of experimenters from around the world consider joining

(44:47) our slack Channel you can find the link in the description now back to the episode

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