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

The Conversion Show

In this episode of "The Conversion Show" podcast, Erik Christiansen welcomes back Jon MacDonald, President & Founder of The Good, and author of "Behind the Click". Erik and Jon discuss digital experience optimization and e-commerce sales conversion strategies. They also highlight ethical marketing practices, understanding consumer psychology and behavior, and how staying attuned to consumer needs and preferences is essential for success. Jon also shares a discount code for his book "Behind the Click," plus a chance to get a signed hard copy.

Erik and Jon discuss:

• “What’s In It for Me?” consumers seek relevance and authenticity in return for their loyalty.
• Experience optimization vs. digital experience optimization.
• The magic of free shipping.
• Investing in customer experience beyond just conversion.
• Why do some shoppers abandon their carts? And what can you do about it?
• Test, test, test, learn, repeat.

Host: Erik Christiansen, CEO of Justuno

Guest: Jon MacDonald, President & Founder of the good

Get a copy of Jon’s book, Behind the Click, and use code “btcpodcast50” for 50% off. Plus, get your hard copy of Behind the Click signed by Jon Macdonald send an email to ([e-mail]) or message Jon or Erik on LinkedIn.

Transcript:

Erik 00:00:50

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

Jon 00:00:58

Thanks for having me once again.

Erik 00:01:01

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

Jon 00:01:07

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

Erik 00:01:30

It's really the podcast tour these days.

Jon 00:01:33

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

Erik 00:01:48

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

Erik 00:02:14

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

Jon 00:02:31

I hear that sounds a lot coming from you.

Erik 00:02:33

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

Erik 00:02:54

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

Erik 00:03:40

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

Jon 00:04:12

That's great.

Erik 00:04:13

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

Erik 00:04:35

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

Erik 00:05:04

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

Jon 00:05:14

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

Jon 00:05:34

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

Jon 00:06:01

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

Erik 00:06:21

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

Erik 00:06:59

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

Erik 00:07:34

They have a 29.41.

Jon 00:07:36

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

Erik 00:07:51

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

Erik 00:08:15

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

Jon 00:08:20

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

Jon 00:08:47

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

Erik 00:08:57

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

Jon 00:08:59

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

Jon 00:09:18

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

Jon 00:09:42

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

Jon 00:10:11

Right.

Erik 00:10:13

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

Erik 00:10:39

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

Erik 00:11:17

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

Jon 00:11:23

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

Erik 00:11:43

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

Jon 00:11:53

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

Erik 00:12:02

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

Erik 00:12:20

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

Erik 00:12:55

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

Jon 00:13:08

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

Jon 00:13:27

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

Jon 00:13:48

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

Jon 00:14:06

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

Erik 00:14:09

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

Erik 00:14:31

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

Erik 00:15:09

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

Jon 00:15:36

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

Jon 00:16:01

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

Jon 00:16:21

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

Jon 00:16:45

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

Jon 00:17:08

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

Jon 00:17:33

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

Jon 00:17:55

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

Jon 00:18:22

And if you can...