Here’s what I learned this week

If you reached out to Tare.ai since last week’s email, in true startup fashion they have pivoted out of ecommerce.

I just got a slack message end of last week.

The truth is an email design service on it’s own isn’t a large enough market to support a business.

There is a trend where ecommerce SaaS companies are eyeing the lucrative agency space and working on ways to automate their way to a 50% savings vs. an agency for 80% of the work.

I talked to another company trying to do the same thing, I told them the same things that I told the team at tare. A stand alone service like this has no moat.

I posted last week that Klaviyo could effectively put all agencies out of business inside of the next 6 months.

They changed their pricing back right around the same time.

I started to get messages about people looking for a cheaper option.

My response, just cold storage your list instead.

The future of email automation

Right now big flashy design is having a moment with younger DTC brands.

Older, more established brands, don’t mess around with it instead opting for just clean well laid out emails, more like a structured magazine layout.

I see most emails being one main thought, one main idea, one CTA.

My bet is that clean well crafted templates with dynamic content will end up winning out. Klaviyo and others have enough of the templates and they just need a quick generation script to move stuff where it belongs.

Most emails are either about products or collections, it’s basically just a url that’s needed to populate them in their entirety.

I know this because we’ve been doing this for more than a year with generative ai stuff for another project.

The difference is we can tell you which emails to make and who to send them to backed by data.

Not sure if we’ll go that direction in the immediate, but it’s definitely a possibility in the future.

Reddit’s thoughts on AI in marketing

This top comment is the most upvoted.

This was the same response when I told someone their job was automatable.

I’m talking as someone that automated customer support at 1200 tickets a week with only 4 people and a record of 0 new tickets for every business day for over a year, with most days having a zero queue by 10am everyday.

Trust when I say that what I’m seeing now puts even what I was able to accomplish to shame, in the right hands, people will be automated.

I’m honestly not even sure having a good understanding of the tools will be enough, because those building them are building them with the idea that you don’t need people to build strategies around them.

I’m speaking from what we’re doing.

A few things that all ecommerce stores should look to do

I have a few that anyone can do and a few that are what modern technology can unlock.

1. Video Descriptions of the products

It’s 2024 and we all have 4k capable video cameras in our pockets. Yet, the vast majority of all product pages don’t have good casual explainer videos about their products, I’m not even talking all their products here, I’m talking the best sellers don’t even have videos attached to them.

These don’t need to be high production value videos either, it can simply be someone explaining…

• Why they made the product

• What it’s made of

• The process for designing it

That’s all that’s needed. This is a huge gap.

2. Ditch the quiz or at least do it right with the right contextual data

Quizzes became a thing, but really they just replaced good navigation, a quiz is only beneficial if the product pages are well laid out and have contextual information relevant to the answers provided, in most cases, people are using quizzes incorrectly.

The results of a quiz look like this:

and maybe include a breakdown by percentage like this

Then they give you a revenue number based on all the people that have gone through the quiz.

That’s like me claiming revenue for everyone that went through a popup. That’s not actually the way these things work.

Of all the things I think should go, quizzes are poor place to collect and actually action data. Most brands don’t have contextual landing pages.

Imagine instead of a quiz the menu had just the results pages based on the two questions that really drove the answers anyway.

Instead of the crutch that is a quiz, I think marketers would be better served to take the same efforts in creating them and instead just building better navigation, that way you’d get data from every visitor rather than those that choose to go through a quiz.

Last bit on this, if the goal if the quiz is to actually help a customer, ditch the email signup. Just make it about their journey in finding something.

When we run quizzes we tell people the following:

1. Fix your navigation first if that’s your reason for a quiz

2. Build contextual landing pages based on the answers

3. Collect the email via a secondary offer on the landing pages that shows only when someone has completed the quiz

This is how you create these for the actual customer journey.

You can see an example at formtoro.myshopify.com/quiz

3. CTA for people to review a product on the product pages before purchase could double as a sign up spot

Ok so this is something I haven’t seen yet, but it’s something we could technically do at Formtoro.

I might mock it up later today.

I think the future of most ecommerce will be video reviews, honest ones.

The problem is up until now they are really tough to get.

I kind of like this approach, the styling isn’t there yet as this took me just a few minutes to create, but I could see this being something potentially cool in the future. From a technology standpoint the link would go to a pre-tagged product or page of products that someone could choose from that would allow this functionality.

It’s dynamic so people that don’t qualify still get an offer.

If someone is looking at a product and you’re a brand interested in getting more people to review the product, you could create a separate flow that pushes people into a reviewer only flow.

Might be a great way to shift marketing budget to conversion optimization with the waterfall effect of getting more video reviews collected from customers.

Because as was number one on the list they are lacking.

4. Subtle contextual data grabbing

The problem with the way that most data collection happens is that it’s anonymous, so with all the trackers that are going on the goal is to push events after you can establish an identity, you need to have that identity first through in order to do this correctly.

Similarly what’s been on my list for a while is to strategically link data from one input to another. To help people better understand what size they should be selecting while also collecting valuable data in the process.

The perk of modern tools is that you can provide value while also combining that data to a profile later without requiring someone to login or to even provide an email during a point of the journey where they are trying to figure out what’s going to be best for them.

I’ll save this data then combine it later with the other data collected and it will all be added to a profile to determine what’s leading to conversion or if there are any insights that can be leveraged at a later point in time while also helping the person discover what’s going to be right for them.

This is way better than normal size charts.

5. Moving the close area on mobile popups

So about 4 years ago browsers started to relocate the url bar to the bottom of their apps because screens had become so long and large that it made navigating them tough.

Now with a lot of brands doing full screen popups the mobile experience has been hit pretty hard.

Yesterday, rather unprompted, I realized that I hadn’t seen a popup relocated the dismiss space to the bottom of the forms on mobile.

You know I’m not about stats but instead about a better customer experience believing that if you nail one properly then stats improve automatically.

I don’t see a reason to move the close button back up to the top on mobile unless you’re trying to game the system and make things harder for people.

The Takeaway

So this email was a lot about UX/UI and how we can adopt a fusion of data collection with better user experiences.

We talked about quizzes and contextualizing them, we talked about adding offers directly on product pages to increase video reviews, we added in a size guide that collects data seamlessly in the background to help people get size right the first time, and we showed off moving the close button to the bottom of forms on mobile to better adapt to larger screens and one handed scrolling given mobile’s dominance as a traffic source.

Have a great week!

-Jon

Catch up on past posts: https://ecomwithjon.beehiiv.com/

You can learn from me: jonivanco.com