Is Customer Value Optimisation the Real Silver Bullet of eCommerce? | Will Laurenson

Matt Edmundson

Well good aye or good evening as it is here in the UK Welcome to the live recording of the eCommerce podcast with me Your host Matt Edmundson. This is just me doing a quick intro to let those of you know who are watching the live stream or maybe watching the video on catch up, we do the podcast we have the eCommerce podcast kind of is what it says on the tin we talk about eCommerce, always have a guest on the guest is always amazing. Tonight's going to be no exception. That's for sure. But one of the things that we do, because we can because the technology is there now is we live stream the recording of our podcast so we do it on video, you get to see us record the actual podcast with tonight's guests. Will, we're going to get into all kinds of good stuff. So feel at home feel welcome. Say hi in the comments. Let us know where you're watching from always great to connect with new people. Do that and enjoy the show. ask any questions you've got as you go along. We'll try and get to them if we can. All the usual stuff. That's it from me. We were I'm gonna be back in just a second. But we're now going to start the actual recording of the eCommerce podcast. So welcome to the live recording of the show. Hope you enjoyed this one.

Sadaf Beynon

Welcome to the eCommerce podcast with Matt Edmundson, a show that brings you regular interviews, tips and tools for building your business online.

Matt Edmundson

Well, hello, and welcome to the eCommerce podcast with me Your host Matt Edmundson. It's great to hear great, you're part of the show, and whether you are just starting out in eCommerce you know, because everybody's in the mad rush now to be online. Or if you'd like me a bit of a dinosaur been around eCommerce for a while. Me personally since 2002, which is a very long time. Let me tell you, regardless of where you are on the journey, the goal is very simple to help you grow your eCommerce and digital businesses. And to do that I talk to amazing people from the world of eCommerce. I Get to ask them all kinds of amazing and wonderful questions, the kinds of questions that I hope you would ask if you got to sit down and have a cup of coffee with them, you know, you want to know the stuff that's going to help you, the practical stuff, the real stuff. You want to suck out their expertise and go, that is brilliant. But how does that help me? Well, that's what we want to do. We want to dig into the story. We want to learn the principles that can help us start and adapt and grow online. Yes, we do. Like you, I still run my eCommerce businesses. So I get my notebook ready, I've got my pen ready. And we are good to go. Let me tell you. Now, before we jump into it, if you are regular to the show, and you would like what we're doing and you haven't done so already, why not like it? why not subscribe to it on Apple podcast? Give us a review, give us a rating just helps us reach more people subscribe on YouTube or Facebook, if you watch the video version. And if you're reading regular to the podcast, you will know that we live stream, the recording. That's right, we do a live sort of live recording of the podcast. And we livestream that out on Facebook and YouTube as we record it. So if you want to connect with us on YouTube or Facebook, so you can get the podcast a week early, you can interact with a guest all kinds of good stuff like that. So come and check out the live streams. Now. All of that said, this show wouldn't be anything without the guests right? And today is definitely no exception. On this week's podcast, we are asking, is customer value optimization the real silver bullet of eCommerce? Oh, yes, that's a cool title, isn't it? customer rate optimization is typically seen as the magic pill that can make any business profitable, right? It but it doesn't create conversions there are that are really beneficial to the business. So how do we turn our customers into repeat customers? That's the question, we're going to dig into right with Will Laurenson today about the whole thing about customer value optimization and whether it trump's conversion rate optimization, which is a phrase I'm sure you will have heard many, many times or CRO is as it's known in the trade, but we're gonna be talking about CVO is customer conversion value optimization, you're going to you're going to get involved in this discussion with us. As we're going to get into the whole idea about creating value, and post purchase experiences and retention strategies. I kind of get the feeling we're gonna get into it all. Now. Let me give you a bit of background about today's guest Will Will Lorenson is a customer value optimization consultant. With 10 years experience, optimising customer journeys to convert more traffic into customers and retain those customers for longer. He is also the host of his own podcast. Oh, yes. And the podcast is called Customers Who Click so make sure you check that out because it is a great show. Okay. He also interviews guests from across the marketing spectrum, and is able to give you actionable insights that turn into growth. Sounds fantastic, right? So we are gonna do that. Make sure you grab your notebooks, cuz I've got mine, I've got my pen ready. I'm still a bit analogue on some of these things not gonna lie. Maybe you're like me, maybe you're like writing it into your web browser, whatever it is, but get ready to take your notes. Of course, if you are not able to make notes from today's show, don't panic, don't worry, because you know, you might be driving so it's best to be safe. Anyway, if that's you, you will be you'll be pleased to know that all of the notes and the transcripts and the links and everything from today's episode will be on our website for free for you to get access to and download. All you've got to do is go to the eCommerce podcast website, which is eCommercepodcast.net/66. That will take you to this episode, and you'll get straight into those notes. Okay, so eCommercepodcast.net/66. Now, without further ado, as I do like to say, without further ado, let's bring on today's guests will welcome to the show. Great to have you. Thanks for joining us How you doing?

Will Laurenson

Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, really good. Thanks.

Matt Edmundson

Yeah, good. It's, I'd say what well, it's there's two. There's two things going on here, which I quite like, number one, you are a fellow Brit. And number two, you are a British guy who has a podcast. So I feel like very niche if I'm honest with you, and it's great to have you on the show.

Will Laurenson

Yeah, I know. Thanks for having me. I get far more many, far more many? far more Americans, I think on my podcast. Yeah. Yeah, I've I've had a few Brits, but definitely get more Americans coming to me for the podcast, either themselves or through through agencies and things. But But yeah, it's good to chat to a Brit. Yes,

Matt Edmundson

always good, isn't it? I think like you, we have a lot of guys and gals from the States on our podcast as guests, which is great. And I loved speaking to our cousins across the pond. And earlier on now we got a guest coming up on the show. She's from Canada. And we get them from all over the globe. There's just something quite nice about speaking to him to a dude from your own nation, right? It's just Yes. Nice. So welcome. Welcome to the show. So Will, we are going to be talking about this whole thing CVO and not CRO. So why don't you start off by explaining what we mean by this phrase?

Will Laurenson

Yeah, so for me, customer, customer value optimization is all about that long term approach you need to take, you know, obviously, everyone's heard the stat that it's anything between 5 and 25 times more expensive to acquire a customer, a new customer than it is to retain an existing one. Yeah. And yet, despite those that stat having been around for years, it's still feels

Matt Edmundson

Oh, we all know it don't we, we can tell you that step, not the stat. But if you go to anybody, is it more expensive to get a new customer keep and keep an existing one? They're gonna tell you, it's way more expensive to get a new customer. We all know it. Right.

Will Laurenson

Yeah. Regardless, even if you haven't kind of worked out for yourself, you've heard that somewhere. Yeah, right, you hear people say, and yet, we still see a massive focus on acquisition. And, and very little focus on on the retention side. In a lot of businesses, there still seems to be this attitude that if you can get someone through the door, you're kind of 90% job done. They either like the products that they don't, and if they don't, they're going to go away. If they like it, they should come back. But it doesn't work like that, you know, we all know it doesn't work like that, you still, you're still going to put a lot more effort in policy retention efforts, you have to put more effort into that post purchase experience as well. So yeah, for me get, you know, customer value optimization starts or where I start getting involved is that conversion piece, because we want to make sure people are converting for the right reasons in the first place. Yeah. But then we want to look at right, how do we how do we get people to buy again? And again? Or how do we how do we get people to stay as a subscriber? Yeah. And then for me, there's, there's a few other areas that are not exactly monitored, like financially focused. And, you know, we, we want people to leave reviews, we want people to leave feedback, we want people to refer friends. And those aren't necessarily financial related. So you know, if you, if you export to your customers, and just looked at total order values and things like that, you're not going to see that in there. But you'll find there's a segment of customers who are a bit more valuable to you, because they've taken those extra actions and and potentially driven indirectly, in other custom what directly other customers but indirectly, more revenue for the business. Because they've left reviews, they've referred friends. Yeah, even if they've only made a couple of purchases themselves.

Matt Edmundson

Yeah, we we just to sort of interject a little bit here listening to you talk. We looked at this way, a few years ago in Jersey, and I never remember there was this one instance, where I looked at where our traffic was coming from, and you follow the traffic to sales, right? How much sales came through the various channels. And so we looked on this, and there was one customer who liked what we did, and wrote a blog post about it, right, and just wrote a blog post about her experience, and how you know, the product had really helped her, and so on and so forth. And it was a beautiful blog post. And I did not know about it, no one in the company knew about it. And it wasn't until we looked at the data, we're like, hang on a minute, there's an awful lot of traffic coming from this one link. And when I analysed the value of that traffic, it was and I'm not joking when I say this, it was in the hundreds of 1000s of pounds. Because she had cords in her in her country. She's from a European country in her country she had she was she got ranked somehow on this blog post, which then led everybody to our website. It was the most extraordinary thing and I I wish I could say that was every day but it isn't it. Yeah, I did. It does highlight the point.

Will Laurenson

I had a similar experience with my own startup a few years back. Still very early stages. We had someone who is wrote a post in a forum. I think people will comment that he wrote the original post or if it was a comment in response, but he basically said, this new company sport draft has popped up, which is my company. Still early like you can tell it's still early. But there I think he's a UI is incredible, the best in the market. And this was just coming coming from someone who I think we kind of I think we managed to work out who was because I've a feeling his username was the same one sport drafters it was in the forum. Okay. So we're able to work out who that was. But it was just great to see that. In this situation, we hadn't even done anything special to that person. He just really liked the experience on the website. And he'd gone off and talked about it. And I mean, I can't I can't remember now. But I'm sure that resulted in in us generating a bunch of signups and potentially some revenue. Obviously, the business didn't last very long. Unfortunately, it was a far more difficult space than I anticipated.

Matt Edmundson

Yeah.

Will Laurenson

But it's just, it's great. Like, it's great for you as a founder, when you see that that sort of unsolicited feedback. And yeah, like you said, if you can actually work out where that traffic is coming from, what it's doing, and the value of that, you can then you know, that will guide you towards other opportunities as well as I think,

Matt Edmundson

yeah, totally, totally. So how do we, how do we get or what are some of the things that we need to start thinking about, then if we're sort of from where we are to, to wanting somebody to, you know, to feel that good about us as a company that they write a positive blog post, and they share it on social media, and it might not generate 100 grand, they might end up only telling 50 followers on Instagram or whatever it is. But how do we what's the process? Or what's the steps that are the principles that we need to think about here?

Will Laurenson

I think I guess to put it quite simply, it's about making sure the person is kind of fully informed and buying for the right reason in the first place. And they have a fantastic experience during that person during that purchase. Now actually completing it, you know, it's all the websites easy to use and everything, I'll come back to things I just summarised quickly, yeah, they have a good fulfilment experience. It whatever that means, you know, I guess, when we're talking eCommerce that's receiving a package normally. And even though it's not as simple as having delivery that's on time, you know, there's such a good opportunity to get that person excited before they've even opened the actual box that your product is in. And, you know, I know quite most most businesses will ship in a fairly plain cardboard box. And I think that's all right. You can go a step further and brand up your own boxes and make them make the actual delivery box. Fantastic. But I think you can do enough by, you know, even if it's delivered by Amazon, for example, people open that Amazon box, but then they see your package. And that is enough to make them go. Okay, this is interesting, like expedite extra information, whatever think things on the package that give extra value and make people excited about purchasing. You know, I bought some whiskey a couple of months ago from from this brand that's doing a really limited supply. I think it was only 205 bottles. And I pretty sure it came in a standard kind of rectangular cardboard box. I open that up. And from there, the experience was really good. No, I never received the bottle like that. Most of most of the time I receive it with you know, packaging peanuts. Or once one point they came in this this quite solid, plastic inflatable things not just really protective. But this one just there was something about it, you know, it was clearly the packaging was clearly designed for a bottle, not just something that was that would fit into a rectangle. And then it was there was that kind of papery like thin paper is stuff like like papery stuff which is like quite feels quite delicate. Makes you feel like there's something Yeah, even though it's really really actually like quite soft and delicate itself it makes you feel like there's something fragile and valuable in there. And then alongside it they had some little leaflets on tasting notes and story of the brand and stuff and it was all that stuff that made me go wow, this is incredible. Before I had even looked at the bottle really

Matt Edmundson

yeah.

Will Laurenson

So yeah, I really really focused on that on the fulfilment stage. Following up with people as well. You know so many brands, the first time you hear from them after you've purchased except Your order confirmation is can you please like, how was your order? Can you please leave us a review? Yeah, right. I can't. I can't think of many times at all, where I've received an email saying, you know, a day or two after I've received the order. How is everything? Is everything? All right? Did it arrive on time? Is your order there? Is it complete? you have any questions about it? Do you need any help? And that can be automated. Right? It doesn't have to be, you don't have to reach out with these things. You can just automate it in klaviyo or something? Yeah. And if I haven't got a problem, but I see that email, I go cooll you're checking in on me. Yeah, that's good. That makes me feel good. If I have got a problem, it gives you that opportunity to fix it before I leave a review.

Matt Edmundson

Yeah. And that's really important. That is, I just said, I mean, let me just emphasise that point really quick. I just because this is quite fresh in my mind, this, this whole thing with reviews and customer service emails, getting that email out to them before you ask them for a review is such a good thing to do. Because, again, just to emphasise a point, if there is a customer service issue, they're going to tell you in that email, not in the review that they then leave. And that's, that's important, right, because so many of your negative reviews are really in effect, they're their customer service issues that don't actually make sense to put in your reviews. And if you dealt with the customer service aspect to that they wouldn't have left such a bad review.

Will Laurenson

Yeah, you do still get a lot of product, like product feedback. Yeah, no, it wasn't. Just trying to think about Amazon, Amazon's a good place to look, you know, stuff. A lot of reviews will say, Yeah, I suppose it come, it'll be things like I broke after a certain amount of time. Or sometimes you get this, this certain piece wasn't included with it. Right? You know, something was missing from the from the package. So you've got a great opportunity to follow up immediately after opened it, find out that something is missing and fix it. So actually a great example. I'm in the process of trying to move I ordered some...

Matt Edmundson

Sorry, we were talking about this before. Yeah.

Will Laurenson

I don't want to go into this too much. Because I'll bring it up again in a bit when I talk more about customer service and stuff. And I ordered some boxes and and, and bubble wrap and stuff. So I can start packing. And in the first order, because I think there was some confusion because I bought a bundle thing, like a one to two bedroom flat moving bundle. Right. But I also ordered extra bubble wrap. And I think as part of that, because the package, because the bundle came with bubble wrap. I think there was they got confused about having two pieces of bundle bubble wrap in there. And then somehow a couple of other pieces got missed. Maybe they just mixed up my order with someone else's, I'm not sure. But I got in touch with them. They immediately dispatched. What I'm hoping is the rest of the stuff. I've got to be honest, I haven't actually opened the box yet that they they've sent it in. But I've got a new box and they set it they sent it through via I think next day delivery with a courier. Right. So the first the first one came, like, you know, standard delivery, three to five days or something. And I received it probably on day three, I think it was quite good. But they sent the follow up package to fix the issue as quickly as they could. Yeah. Which I mean, yeah, I wasn't overly fussed that they fixed it, which was great. It taken a couple of days to arrive. I wouldn't have been too bothered as long as I've got everything I needed. Yeah. But the fact that they sent it courier, like tracked courier next day, has pretty much guaranteed a five star review probably Yeah. Unless these boxes fall apart while I'm while I'm packing. But have actually used these guys before. So I know the stuffs quite good. But you know, they've, they've turned it from maybe a four star review, which is still good, obviously. Because just because they fixed the problem to a five star review, because they went that extra step for me with that with fixing that problem. So now, even if I was still a bit annoyed that it didn't all arrive in the first place. The fact that they went above and beyond to fix it. That's the bit which has made me say yep, cool. And there's another brand Actually, I want to mention Games Workshop. I don't know if you know that. Yeah. Warhammer, right. I remember back in the days when I used to collect if you were missing a piece could be basically any piece you would just email them or phone them up and say I'm missing this piece for this model. What How can you help me What can we do? They would just send you that piece. Right? And if that piece was attached to 20 other pieces on a on a black a plastic screw, you would get the whole sprue. Oh, right. They didn't bother picking it off to send it to you because then they can't do anything with the sprue. They just send me the whole thing. And most of the time, you'd get it sent to your local store, because you get it dispatched for free. Obviously, I was a kid when I was doing this. So I was I was very, very conscious of those delivery costs as well. But that was obviously fantastic. The customer experience they're saying, Yeah, to be honest, I think I even broke some pieces, and said that to them. And they went Don't worry, we'll just sent you the send you a new piece. Yeah. And actually recently, I think I noticed this on in a Games Workshop, Facebook group, like a Fan Fan group for the top, that topic came up about what happens if you if you're missing a piece or if you've broken a piece. And I think there are well over 100 responses saying, Yeah, they're really good. They'll just, they'll send you whenever you need, they'll just sort that for you. So I'm really glad because even though a lot of things have changed with that business, some things that people aren't so happy with, including a big upcoming change with their own streaming platform, which Yeah, not sure on that. They've been doing that Not gonna lie. Yeah,

Matt Edmundson

I know, the shop. I don't know about the streaming platform. But

Will Laurenson

they're basically sounds like they're trying to do their own Disney plus bet for their own content. But it's, it doesn't seem to be going down so well. But it's pre launch. So we don't know. But anyway, it's great to see that they've kept up that standard of customer service. And they're still just willing to say, Yep, don't worry, we'll just send you the piece.

Matt Edmundson

Yeah, that's, that's really good. So, so what I've got here in my notes, Will, the stuff that you talked about is make sure customers are buying for the right reason. Make sure they're fully informed. Give them a fantastic experience. Make sure the fulfilment experiences, as we say, the mutts nuts, and, you know, follow up with them in a way that actually makes sense other than just, can you give ME a review? Is there anything else there that we need to add to that list?

Will Laurenson

I realised I didn't really touch on the first bits, I started, I started off by summarising and then I just

Matt Edmundson

yeah, once we got to go, which is why I make notes because we're gonna if the listeners, you know, they're listening to this, you know, hang on a minute, we are going to come to those things, we will go through them point by point. But is there anything else I need to add to this list from your point of view,

Will Laurenson

and then there's just the, the retention piece really how you follow up with people, right, you need to you need to start segmenting your customers is understanding your good customers, your bad customers are, you need to look at things like NPS scores, reviews, customer, customer service, contacts, use of discounts things, when I was in gambling, we, in gambling, they're really, really good at this. We have so have so many algorithms and machine learning in place to really identify who the good customers are, who the bad ones are. And you would see things like someone would come in, they would sign up for an account, not take up the welcome offer. And so they've received an email Two weeks later, or something with a an additional bonus on top, then they would take up that welcome offer. But then once they've used that offer, they would just disappear. Yeah. Right. And then, you know, you've got people who fall into our kind of anti lapse campaigns, which I guess, like win back campaigns, but trying to preempt it. And again, if someone was in regular anti lapse campaigns, or if they just had multiple, over a certain period of time, they would kind of get marked down in their score, and we would treat them as a lower valued customer, which meant they got lower value bonuses, you know, we did want to try and win them back. we'd give them you know, a five or 10 pound bonus to come back compared to VIPs. Where it's, it can be, I think, a lot of money that we're willing to give them in bonus cash. So you know that that was really good. And that's really important. Because, you know, if you look into this sort of data, you'll identify those customers who only purchase when there's a discount, and they will wait for it and they have no, there's no pattern outside of that to their purchase behaviour. It will be when they receive a discount or they see a discount online. That's when they come and buy from you. And, you know, it's not necessarily to say, ignore those not necessarily saying ignore those customers. But you might want to consider potentially not building advertising audiences often. For example, I don't want to get too much into that because I don't deal with advertising. I don't deal with that side and those customers.

Matt Edmundson

How do you I can just, I'm just picturing, you know, I'm picturing a friend of mine actually in my head who's starting their ecommerce business. They go well hang on a minute. How do you what do you mean? score them. How does that even work? So when you talk about that, and you're talking about, you know, segmenting good customers and bad customers, what is? How would you do that to sort of two or three top tips on how to segment them?

Will Laurenson

So simple way, I say simple way, it's quite complex. But the simple way is using an app, which will do like an RFM model for you. So RFM is recency, frequency monetary. So your most valuable customers are the ones who score highly on recency that bought frequency for recent start getting valuable customers are the ones who've bought most recently from you. Yeah, they buy frequently from you, and they spend a lot of money with you. Right, and, and then you've got customers who will who have just bought from you. So you know, brand new customers, so their recency will be high. But if it's their first purchase, their frequency is low. Yeah. And then you'll see, but you might still see variations between high value customers and low value customers there. Yeah. So that's where you still need to be breaking things down. Because, you know, previously, I've even looked at it as your your people who haven't purchased from you. So people who you know, they've given you an email address, then people have made one purchase from you recently, then people have made frequent purchases from you. And then people have made a purchase from you, but not come back for a while. But at a basic level that can work for you. But once you really start to grow, you do, do you need to start segmenting more. And that's where you need to use, you need to be using a tool for it to help you build out those segments, and work out where your customer is actually falling into place as well. You know, where they're kind of just naturally falling into groups, and then what the flow between those segments look like. absolute best is use a tool for it. Because it just plugs in your data, spits it all out, and then you can start analysing it trying to understand it.

Matt Edmundson

Well, okay, so the RFM model is something worth looking at that and I like that. I do like that. Because you recency, frequency, and the money side of things are really someone asked ME this the other day, what are some of what are the three key metrics I need to make? Do you know what I mean some of the key metrics I need to measure or you need to measure? You know, average order frequency, the frequency, what's the, you know, the gap between the orders, the average order value, how much are they buying, that's your monetary aspect of it. And, and obviously, how you put all that together, you've got your RFM model. And so I think it's a really a really smart way of doing it. And just to just to clarify you, there are apps there are bits of software out there that people can use once they start to build a bit of a customer database that will mine that data for them and give them the information.

Will Laurenson

Yeah. There are definitely if you've Shopify, I believe reveal by omniconvert as a free plan, which will give you I think it will lay out those segments. And I think there's a bit of a bit of other analysis or do for you such as how long between, you know, was it average time between purchase? Yeah, things like that. There's another tool that I was actually looking at the other day, but I can't remember the name of. But yeah, there are a few few tools.

Matt Edmundson

But I just don't really find some Yeah, definitely find some and see what works for you. I'm sure if you really needed to, you could use Google sheets for it. If you're halfway decent at programming spreadsheets, but

Will Laurenson

you know, I mean, when I was working in startups, you know, we didn't have access to stuff like that. So it very much was pulling data from, you know, we did have intercom, which, which was really useful for us at the time. So we had our mix panel, you could build out those segments yourselves, you had to be you had to kind of be looking at the data, interpreting a bit and then working on what those segments should be. Yeah, whereas RFM model, you know, the tools you've got these days, you plug in the data, and it'll do it for you. But spreadsheets, you know, they're still good. Obviously, at scale, they start to slow down and become really difficult. So actually, you know, sheets. Yeah, yeah, I do still like analysing certain, you know, certain bits of segments of data in a Google Excel Doc, just because I know that I can play around with it. I can use a pivot table or whatever, just to say, right, what if I look at this metric and this metric? Yeah. And I remember doing that at one company. You must know, Europcar. Yeah. Yep. So I worked for one of their startups in the Car Club space. So my competitors to Zipcar Years ago and yeah, we did that analysis in Excel documents because we didn't have anything else. And it we were finding out you know, What are what are the best bookings? What are our best bookings that are most valuable for us most frequent for customers. And so we use that to determine what messaging should be. And even though we positioned ourselves as you know, you can book a car from an hour to a day, actually, we kind of started moving towards a weekend, or, you know, one to two days, because we just found that so many bookings were more than 24 hours, or they were kind of 24 to 72 hours of analysing data we saw, our messaging was a bit wrong. People, you know, there weren't a massive number of people using it on an hourly basis. It tended to be or if they did, I think on an hourly basis, it tended to be about four hours. But then the next step up was, you know, 24 to 72 hours, where people were doing long, long bookings, either to have it for a few days of the week, or over the weekend. Yeah. So that analysis really worked helped us work that out, that's a little different from the RFM. segmentation.

Matt Edmundson

It's still useful. And like you say, just playing around on Google Sheets and pivot tables, it's amazing what you can find out, once you start to build a little bit of data, and just looking at the numbers, it doesn't have to be scary. Just Google, you know, go into YouTube, and look how to use pivot tables, and you just to choose some parameters, and it'll tell you what's going on.

Will Laurenson

I do think I do you think you still have to be good at interpreting data. You know, if you've never looked at a spreadsheet before, never looked at any of this sort of data, and it's not your thing. You can have a go. But I do think you can't always just look at the data and say, okay, that's, that's what it's telling me. You still have to look into, you know, like causation data, suppose I think it's the term what are the factors which are influencing this data? Was it really made, and you and you can come to different conclusions? It's the same with customer feedback. You know, once you if you really, if you take the feedback at face value, it's very easy to I think to misinterpret it. Yeah. But if you really think about the wording and how they've said things, you really understand what they really mean by it, and what their actual problem might be. And it can be the same with data. So not saying you have to go out and hire an analyst. I just, I'm just saying, you know, just be careful with data.

Matt Edmundson

Yeah, yeah. Keep it if you don't, I like to keep it simple, right? And just focus on a few key things, especially like you say, if you don't know what you're doing, I think that's right. I think there's a big and tell me what you think here? Will, there's a big move or a lot of questions at the moment about how AI and big data is affecting eCommerce. So you take someone like Amazon who has a gazillion transactions in their system, and some very clever AI to monitor that data, and to create all kinds of hypothesis and test you know, on that data and figure stuff out which maybe the mere mortals don't have. And I was reading a you know, I was having on one hand, I'm having these conversations about AI, and how that's going to be impacting eCommerce. But on the other hand, I don't know if you've ever read a book called alchemy by Rory Sutherland. It's one of those it's a really fascinating book, highly recommend everybody to read the book is a good book. And in there, Rory talks about, in effect, alchemy or magic? And how and how the interpretation of big data is good. But it doesn't have that human genius, a quiet the ability to, to create magic. And you kind of need both, was the basic premise. And I thought it was fascinating. I don't know where you stand on on this whole debate.

Will Laurenson

Yeah, I mean, I I like data Is that a lot? But yeah, there's still gonna be that human element, you still don't understand people. And, you know, when I when I mentioned, right, the starts. Now you want people converting for the right reason. that reason, I think comes from, from people and understanding people. And it's probably never going to come up with data. Because, yeah, I'm not sure data will ever, ever tell you that, you know, you've got to speak to people, you've got to understand what their, what their real problems are, what their pain points are. And make sure that your messaging reflects that. And at the levels at the levels of traffic and conversions that most people deal with. I don't think you can just rely on a on a tool. to iterate on that and test and learn, because it will just take, it will take forever, you know, Amazon can probably do it, Google can probably do it with, you know, some of their optimizations and things. But I think for most ecommerce stores, you know, the data can help point you in the right direction with a lot of things. And but you've still got to, you've still got to work out what to then do with it, and what the approach is. So, you know, when you use data to work out those segments, for example, you know, an RFM model can build you out quite quite a few different user groups. But he won't tell you what to do with them. It will just tell you, what sort of stage that they're at, and what sorts of people they might be, you still have to work out how you actually approach each of those groups and what you do with it.

Matt Edmundson

Yeah. And that's the human side of it, isn't it? I mean, I was talking to a startup company who's written some incredible AI. And I was going through this, you know, what they were demoing what their product does, and I thought, you know what, this is bloody clever. But for it to have any meaningful output, they were saying you're looking at about, you've got to be doing probably around half a million in sales every month. And so what that what that told me was, it was really clever AI software. But for that to work, the rows of data it's got to have is beyond what most of us will be doing on eCommerce, if that makes sense. Yeah, it's beyond most of those kinds of numbers. And so you, you're gonna have to do a lot of this analysis yourself, because there's not enough data to create any meaningful AI out of it. And I quite like that, I quite like the fact that it is still a bit human. A still a bit intuition, you know, but

Will Laurenson

I've used some really good tools. I've worked with a company called Phrasing in the past, who do AI copywriting. And, again, when I was back in gambling, we use them. And we use them for email subject lines, okay. And the great thing about it is our copywriters, or, or one of my team was write a subject line, or you give them you give them various criteria, you say, this is I think this is the type of email it's going to be, since it's a promotion, for example, I think you plug in the offer, that you want to give out one or two, maybe one or two other points. But you've also already given them all your brand, your brand guidelines, your tone of voice and stuffs they've already built that in. And then it will generate you about 20 subject lines for that campaign. And they can really vary. So some of them were mentioned the discount, some won't. They'll mention it in different ways. They'll include emojis, you know, they'll give you 20, I think they can do more. But generally, we generated about 20. But in order to really improve their model and get results from it, you have to be sending, I think, I think it was something like 100,000 emails in just one at a time in one campaign. Well, that was the minimum requirement to then learn because also, the idea is that you actually use multiple subject lines in Split tests, run those, and then you tell the, the tool which like the results of each one, and then it would learn from that and improve. Yeah, but it means you have to have quite a lot of data, then each of those that you pick, so even if you're picking five subject lines, I think they said the minimum split you want is about 10,000 per subject line.

Matt Edmundson

Okay. Right. So any meaningful data out of it? Yeah,

Will Laurenson

you can, you know, if you had 50,000 on your list, I suppose you could use it, because you just do a five way split. And just use it to optimise but then it always means that the actual winner the bet the best subject line is still only getting a fifth of the of the traffic. Whereas the idea is really, you run that five way split. And then whatever tool you're using says that one's the winner send everyone else the rest of your of your campaign for the winner. So you do need quite a lot of data. But I actually interviewed the founder on my podcast and one of the he went on about how people marketers get too focused on the data. And not enough on the kind of human aspect and then the behaviour aspects be. So one of the really good things about this tool is and this I guess the same for other similar AI tools, it removes like personal bias from it. So what will happen most with most companies, I imagine as you're putting together an email campaign, the person putting that campaign together, writes a subject line or they write two or three subject lines for for a B testing and thats it. Right. And it's it's still three subject lines that come from that person. So it's still their preference for how they do subject lines. Right? It's still, if you think about it, that the variation between those subject lines is going to be probably quite small. Because it's all come from the same person. But that same mindset, that same approach. Yeah, yeah. And what happens is, is that if you even if you have a team do it, what still tends to happen is the person who talks the loudest person was the most stubborn. And, you know, most, I guess, influential is the one whose subject line ends up in the campaign. Yeah. Right. And the one who persuades him and says, Oh, you know, we have to do it this way. I've I've done it before in campaigns, this sort of style really works. Like those sort of subject lines go through. So the cool thing about Phrasing was, you know, it takes away that bias. Yeah, you can't, you know, shouldn't be looking at these subject lines and saying, Oh, I don't like that one, we won't use it. You should be saying, We've trusted this tool, we're paying a lot of money for it. plugged in, or we've plugged in our brand requirements and everything. So what it's spitting out should be what we use. Yeah. And I think I think we tested out the first few times with brand. And we said, Here's 20 subject lines, it's it's it's spread out, what do you think? And Brand would say, we can't use this one can't use that one for whatever reason. And we'd use that to refine the model. But once it kind of got approval, it was whatever phrase he tells us to use goes in the campaign? Well, no, no arguing with that. Because that removes the whole point of that.

Matt Edmundson

That's where it starts to get a little bit scary, though, doesn't it? It's like, it's, it's full on. But again, for that to work, you've got to have the big data. So you've got to have the 10s of 1000s. But in the meantime, obviously, you can still take the principle, but do yourself, create three or four headlines and split test is always a good thing to do. But alas.

Will Laurenson

So can I just make a one point on that? I completely agree. The important thing, though, is record the results, analyse the results, learn from it, and do better than next time. Right? I think loads of companies do a split test, and then don't really, and they, you know, they they rely on klaviyo saying, alright, this is this was the winner of the test. So send the rest of the audience this subject line, and then they don't really learn from it.

Matt Edmundson

They don't look at them that way.

Will Laurenson

Yeah, but understand why that subject line has one. Or they go to the extreme and say, write the subject line with a numerical percent discount work the best, therefore, that's what we have to use all the time.

Matt Edmundson

And then that gets tested again.

Will Laurenson

You've still got to Yeah, yeah. Oh, you know, it comes up a lot a lot in CRO actually. And not so much in other places. But you know, there was saying CRO, whether you have a winning or losing test, iterate on it. Yeah. Right. Learn from it, iterate on it, you know, you might have a test that gets you a 20% improvement in conversion rate. Have a think about it, can you can you change that and iterate on it to get an even better increase? You might not be able to work something out. And maybe you move on. Or if you know, maybe if you're relatively low traffic website. There are big better opportunities that come back to it, you know, don't just move on to the next area and say, right, that's done, that's now the best move on to something else. And that just applies to everything. It's not just CRO. Every aspect that you're looking at, you can always iterate on things, you know, like, like I mentioned, that started that fulfilment process, how can we get the box any better? And we make that experience better? How do we make the customer service experience better? should always be looking to

Matt Edmundson

Yeah, always mix it up and change it. In fact, we had, I'm feeling slightly slightly self righteous now. Well, because we had a I had a conversation this afternoon with one of our designers about changing out the box and the packing slip on on for one of our companies. And I think I described our packing slip as functional. It was just a list. And I'm like, what could we do? If we just took that requirement out? And just from a design point of view? What could How could we do this in a way that maybe is a bit more beautiful? And and it's your right, you know, your constant iteration is quite nice.

Will Laurenson

Yeah, it's interesting. You said like, how can we just make this more beautiful? I don't know what the product is. And it completely depends but the customer might want five bullet points. This is how to use this. product, or, you know, it doesn't have to be beautiful, it looks it. Everyone likes it. It's beautiful. But really what the customer needs is a clear, clear guidance. You know, that's why manuals for electronic goods and kitchen appliances and things. Those those never pretty. But they generally do a good job of a diagram. These are all the things are, you know, number one is here, number two is here. And then you look at it goes, number one, this is what this does. Number two, this is what this does. And you know, you just get through a manual, it tells you exactly what you need to do. It's great.

Right?

Matt Edmundson

Yeah, I think Jersey is totally you, I've tend to tell you what I've noticed. If I look over my purchasing history, right with ecommerce sites, of which I've purchased from a fair few, I'm not gonna lie, I try not to do that too much. I you know, as I always say to my wife is part of my job is just research never goes down well, but you know, when I look, you know, you can track the journeys of a lot of things you can go man alive, the delivery companies have got a lot better, you know, the service they offer now is just chalk and cheese to what it was 10 years ago, the packaging has gone a lot better. And you can see how Apple I think Apple was probably the first company I noticed to really drive quality packaging.

Will Laurenson

The first big one, definitely. I imagine there were small companies, you know, the ones

Matt Edmundson

I imagined every small company at Apple the way we know Apple, they probably ripped it off. Yeah, it's like, but it was the first one I noticed do you know what I mean and so you notice the packaging getting better. I've noticed the packaging materials getting better as well. I mean, Amazon is still doing what they do with the boring brown brought boring brown boxes, very hard to say. But I've noticed a lot of them, the sort of independents are doing some really quite like the whiskey you were talking about some really quality stuff around packaging. The one area that I have yet to see any any real major innovation is the packing slip. And I the invoice Yeah, as in in your box is, you know, four packets, a maltesers And a partridge in a pear tree or whatever. It's just like a simple list. And occasionally it's written on with pen where someone's ticked it, you know, as they've packed it and initialled it. And it's just a very, very functional document. And sometimes it's on the back. It's got our returns policy. But I it's not a it's not a prophecy. It's more like my observation will be everything gets iterated at some point and somebody will innovate somewhere and everybody else thing catches on.

Will Laurenson

It's not something I've I've looked at really, it wouldn't surprise me if it's just the system limitations for printing those sort of invoices. And

Matt Edmundson

I said to our web guys, I said, I said I want to change the packing slips, I want to do something a little bit different. They just went.

Will Laurenson

I see what you mean, you know? Personally, I almost never, I never touched them. I never even take them out of the box. But if I noticed something different about one, you would need caught my it caught my attention. I pick it up, I probably would double check the order. Make sure everything looks correct. But then you've got you've caught my attention with it. It's now in my hand. What other information can be on there? Yeah, I'd be. I think there's great opportunities to use QR codes. Now, given the explosion, use your codes over because of the pandemic. Yeah, yeah, QR code in there. Don't even say much about it. That's what I'd be tempted to do I just have a scan me or something, or even something more cryptic. Get rid of a script, get people to scan it, get people to and then lead that to a good experience, but effectively extended warranty data capture? Yeah, but in a in a nice way, you know, not just, oh, gotcha. Give us your details. But you know, you've caught my attention right now I'm going to scan this thing because I'm curious. Then you've given me some great landing page that welcomes me to the product or something. And then says, you know, it could be a video from the founder or something. I'm liking this idea.

Matt Edmundson

evolving in your mind as we're talking?

Will Laurenson

Yeah, a video from the founder, welcome to the company. You know, extend your warranty or whatever by doing this, or fill out this survey so that we can give you more personalised promotions or something and then start doing data capture. Yeah. I think there's great opportunity there.

Matt Edmundson

I think you're right. I think there's something I remember, years ago Virgin on their website did this thing where it just had a button on their website, it might even still be there, I've not been on their website. And it just had this button on their website, which says do not touch do not push this button, right. And so of course, the first thing you're going to do is push the button. And it took you to a page where it was basically Richard Branson in a wedding dress, it was horrific. And they just had the title, we told you not to touch that button, right. And it was just a bit, it was a bit of a joke is a bit humorous. And I think you could almost tie that in with the QR code thing. It's almost like a secret type thing. It's like, you've scanned it, we've not promoted it, you've only seen this in one place, well done for doing something the rest of the world hasn't done. Here's what you you know, here's what you get as a prize, you know,

Will Laurenson

but also even better. You could change the content behind that QR code, you could write, so a lot of effort, but every week, you could just put a new video on. Or you could he could even have one per day that you the founder just going you've got to be careful with it, because you just haven't been a great location. But you'd have been saying that Oh, it's a it's a lovely, lovely Thursday in London. Just wanted to say hi to all our new customers. So yeah, you could do it from new customers first, you could do different ones for your loyal customers are there's so much opportunity there

Matt Edmundson

is because you can personalise the QR code, there's no reason why every QR code printed is is not tailored to that customer, gentlemen, so

Will Laurenson

that I mean, that might be going to a bit of an extreme. But I mean, you could have, you could have one page designed for new brand new customers who you've never seen before.

Matt Edmundson

You could have like different postcards with the QR codes on Couldn't you. So this is the first order of a customer, I'm just going to put the first order one in their box. And when they get that they go to that page. And if this is their second order, they go to this page, and then they kind of get used to it. And by the on the fifth one, they get, you know, celebrations and Champagne or whatever, you know, it's that kind of thing. And make it just make a note of this. Ladies and gentlemen, you have you were here first when when this idea was generated, and we'll see who develops your first meal? Well, we'll come back in six months. And we'll talk to you about the power of your code. Yeah, packages.

Will Laurenson

so much you can do that. And easily. And easily. That's the thing, right? Like you said, have two that you can have two different postcards, one for new customers, one for repeat customers to keep to keep it simple. Two QR codes go to different pages. One is welcome to the brand, blah, blah, blah, you could leave that one the same for quite a while. just refresh it every now and again. And then the loyal customer one, just change it up every week or month or something work out, work out what you're buying, what are your buying frequencies there, just refresh it. So that hopefully people don't see the same video each time.

Matt Edmundson

Yeah, yeah, you can totally do something like that. And that would be nice, easy, straightforward to do.

Will Laurenson

And once you've got once you've got the two sets of Postcards done, and the landing pages, you know, maybe you're changing the video once a month re recording a video. There's a company called Bonjour. Oh, yeah, Matt. Yeah, Matt.

Matt Edmundson

I've been on the show. Really great. Episode. Yeah.

Will Laurenson

Part of this is coming from the conversations I've had with them. Where he says like, don't worry about production value or anything. Take it on your phone. Like take that video on your phone on the way to work on the walk or something. You could do the same with these. Take a quick video on the

Matt Edmundson

day. Yeah, it says here's the top tip. If you're going to do the QR codes, those landing pages 99% of them are going to be viewed on a mobile. You want to make sure that that page that landing page really thing is on a mobile phone and not on a desktop. Yeah, right. Exactly. I'd be surprised if it's not even 99.9% Yeah, yeah, be some horrendously high stat.

Will Laurenson

You'll get that one person you'll get someone like me. If someone like me who scans it copies the URL emailed it to myself and then I can see on desktop just

Matt Edmundson

Yeah, that'd be the point. 1% marketers who are analysing the pages. Yeah, you and me both both you and me both. I think I'd be doing the same thing to be fair I would definitely be definitely be be check because you can do that Apple have this thing now where if you've got a URL on your iPhone, it will automatically come You know, you can click a button and it'll come up on your Mac as well. So um, I have a Mac, but I do not know. I tell you what you have got because I saw in your mirror you've got a really cool PC with a flashing light led going around it. Is that right?

Will Laurenson

Oh, yeah. Yeah, I do actually. That was That wasn't even. That wasn't actually a selling point. But I do quite like it. It's quite.

Matt Edmundson

It's very cool. That's the one thing you don't get on the max is a flashing LEDs. Yeah, that's for sure. But that USB ports or something either do you don't be basically don't get anything. Really nice screen. Now I'm a bit I'm a bit of a Mac boy fan. I'm not gonna lie. But yeah. You know..

Will Laurenson

I'm iPhone, iPad. I had a Mac, for work. Once at startup. When I moved company and moved on to a Windows computer, Windows laptop moved again. And then after about a year, we had we had desktops there. But after about a year, I said that I really need a laptop because I need to move around the office quite a bit. And they said your Windows or Windows on Mac. I was like, do you know what actually, I remember the Mac being really good. So I ordered that from the IT team got it next day. And literally within a couple of hours. I was like, No, I can't use this. Can't use it anymore. It's so different. And I've got I've got windows at home. I've always had his own. So I was like this doesn't it doesn't make any sense. What am I doing? Why am I trying to teach myself a whole new way of using a computer? Yeah, just because I fancied a Mac. So now I got rid of it within a couple of hours.

Matt Edmundson

I believe I'm the other way. Now I I can't My son has a PC. He's got a laptop. And it used to be if they if they bought me the laptops, I could fix them because I use PCs for years. Now I'm just I, I just I get I get frozen. You know, I can't help you. I'm really sorry. Just like I give them back to people. It's like, yeah, I wouldn't know where to start. It's as sad as that sounds. I have a very good friend. He's a bit of a PC nerd and is always showing me the latest thing that he's done on his PC is awesome. I've no idea what you've just done, but it's really awesome. Yeah. Well, listen, Will. How do people reach you? How do they get ahold of you? How do they connect with you if they if they want to reach out? Um,

Will Laurenson

so I've got promote the podcast again, I think differences that listen to the customers who click podcast. That's a great way of hearing me quite frequently. But yeah, reach out and LinkedIn Will Lawrenson I think my profile. No, my profile picture hasn't got a blue background anymore. But yeah, you'll I mean, you'll see meets this face quite

Matt Edmundson

well obviously link to you and your LinkedIn profile and to the podcast in the show notes. But yeah, it's, it'll be easy enough to find. How often do you release episodes on your podcast, bud?

Will Laurenson

Every week.

Matt Edmundson

So it's a weekly podcast? And is it you have guests on the show your regular chain to guests about all things to do with marketing? Right?

Will Laurenson

Yeah, tends to be kind of new ways of thinking about things. Even if it's something like PPC or SEO, it's someone's new approach, or sometimes they're at least new to me, cuz I'm not really in that space. But yeah, it's not. It's not five tips you can do right now, with your PPC account or anything like that. It's more, this is how you should be thinking about it. This is the approach you should be taking. And this is guidance towards how you can do that. Yeah. And it really gets you thinking and it's, it's amazing how much crossover there is between all these conversations in that a lot of the time it generally comes down to what does the customer want? And if you focus on that, yeah, you're you're gonna start doing better instead of just focusing on what the company wants.

Matt Edmundson

That you know what, it's funny, isn't it? I was I was on a podcast yesterday. And I was a guest on a podcast. It's always unusual when you're a guest. You'll find this right. You are a podcast host. But when you are a podcast guest it does feel different, right? Because you I don't if you're like me, well, I kind of feel like I'm in control at the moment. You know, it may be fleeting, it may be just totally illusory, but at least I feel like I'm in control. And so we did this podcast with with Rory Kramer yesterday is such a good guy is going to be on our show at some point. And we call it toilet seat thinking right? Because down by the side of my den by the side of my desk for those listening to the audio podcast, and not watching the video, I have now shown a toilet seat. I have a toilet seat in my office. And we did this thing called toilet seat thinking. And it all came from a story that a friend of mine told me I wish I could take credit for the story, but I can't. And a guy called Rich Rising. And he told me this story, which basically went like this. He worked in a hotel, he was one of a number of cleaners who cleaned the toilets in this really large hotel. And the hotel monitored customer feedback and the cleaner, we've got the best feedback won some kind of prize or bonus every month, right, so it paid to clean the toilets. Well, and Rich won this all the time. I mean, no one could ever even come close to him, no one ever even got close to the customer satisfaction scores he was getting. And so you know, exasperated, his fellow cleaners basically went to him and said, What is it that you do that we don't do, because we feel like we've tried everything, but we just can't get close to your scores. And he is, and he's like this one say says, show me how you clean the toilet. So they show him how they clean the toilets, how they scrub and how they get down, and all this sort of stuff. And he said, Now let me show you how I clean the toilet. And the one thing that he did was he went into the toilet, he turned around and he sat down. And he said I clean it from this point of view, because that's how the customers see it. And it was just this real simple. And I don't even know if the story is true. Well, I'm not I just I just thought this whole thing of toilet seat thinking I thought was very, very clear and come back to your point. This whole idea everything just boils down to Can we see this from the customer's point of view? Yes or no? It's the most simple, simple advice. And we look for all these silver bullets and all these amazing big things but fundamentally all boils down to your customers think. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's great in it.

Will Laurenson

I like that story, quite good. I'm imagine is not not true, I imagine is a very, it's a really good way of positioning it.

Matt Edmundson

It is. It is I did, I did a big consulting practice a consulting project with that company in New Zealand who I won't name but anyway, I was working with them. And I basically gave them all toilet seats to sit on. I had to do this thing virtually, you know, because we couldn't travel. And so I said to the host, I want you to have them all sitting on toilet seats as we're doing this video. Anyway, I digress. Listen, Will, just to emphasise again, you have a podcast called Customers Who Click. Check out wills weekly podcast, where he talks about all things marketing, you can connect with him on LinkedIn, we will of course leave links to the podcast, and to Will on the show notes which you can down download eCommercepodcast.net. Will, it has been an absolute pleasure. But thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us. I have no doubt. We will have you on again at some point soon. Probably to talk about QR codes on postcards.

Will Laurenson

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's an absolute pleasure. I really enjoyed it.

Matt Edmundson

Thanks, appreciate it. Wasn't Will, absolutely fantastic. Of course it was. I mean, it's just sharing all that insight. And I love it when you get into these conversations like we had with Will and just ideas start to permeate and and you start to just go down these little rabbit trails, and they're so super, super valuable and for Will, for me, it was a QR code thing and thinking about packing slips. So let me know what it was for you What was your little rabbit trail that you've got going on now in your head as a result of listening to all of this, and hopefully it happens every week. And you know, we put out this content like Will does every week. So make sure you subscribe wherever you get your podcast from, whether that's on Apple, whether that's on Stitcher, whether that's on Spotify, whether that's on Facebook, or YouTube, you can subscribe to the show and make sure you get access to all of the stuff that we put out there to help you grow your online business. Now for regular listeners of the show, you will know season six saw a slight change in our programming. Yes it did. What we are now doing at the end of each podcast is we are doing a giveaway. Oh yes, we are. And so this week's giveaway Will has been very, very kind and generous to basically give you his time. So for one listener, you will get a free call with Will and if you want to know more details about this if you want to talk to will and pick his brains about QR codes or about anything else that he's talked about tonight. Head on over to our website, eCommercepodcast.net/66 which is the episode number that we have here. And you can go and put in the details there and just check it all out on that page is totally free. Obviously. Go check it out. You will definitely want to have a conversation with Will such a top guy and we will of course let you know if you are going to have that call. So a big thanks to my guest again Will Lawrenson just a top top dude. That's that's how we say it here. Liverpool, his top bloke, actually how we say in Liverpool is like this. He's a top lad that fella he's great him. And so we would normally say, but he's great and I hope you enjoyed the show. If you did, make sure you like and review, wherever you're consuming the podcast, it just helps us grow and connect to more people. I will be back next week with some more amazing tips and insights and phenomenal guests to do with eCommerce. All this left me to say is have a fantastic week, and I wish you continued success with your online business. I'll be back again real soon. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.