Here’s what I learned this week

If you’re reading this email this week, I want to work with you.

If you’ve been on the fence this email should change your mind entirely.

If it’s a cost thing, just email me, we can work out a profit share arrangement where you only pay for incremental gains.

3 month minimum though, can’t have people trying to weasel out of the deal.

I honestly think this will be our mark on ecommerce

If I had a legacy contribution to ecommerce, what I’m about to share in this email would be it.

This week I’m going to talk about a product feature we’ve been testing that fully embraces the absolute best in customer journey.

It’s something I wish we considered 4 years ago and it’s something that we needed to create because it solves for a very real problem for all brands whether or not they are ready to start collecting data.

We’re talking there’s absolutely zero reason every store shouldn’t immediately switch to these kind of popup forms.

Before we get to where we are today, we need to look at a little bit of history.

Patience young grasshopper.

Popup history

I wrote a really long guide on this years ago so I’ll just cut and paste the important bits here:

What types of popups are currently widely used?

There are four widely used examples of the popups:

1. The single opt-in without extra questions

2. The single opt-in with a radio question

3. The single opt-in with micro commit first

4. The double opt-in with email and phone number

The single opt-in without extra questions

Step 1: Provide an email address

Step 2: Get a coupon code.

The single opt-in with radio selection.

Step 1: Provide an email address + style preference

Step 2: Get a coupon code.

The micro opt-in starts with a question, “Would you like a discount?” then goes to the next step to provide contact details in exchange for the discount.

Step 1: Micro Opt-in

Step 2: Email Collection

The double opt-in asks for an email address on the first step and a phone number on the second step.

This one has become the most popular one in light of iOS 15 changes.

Step 1: Email Collection

Step 2: Phone number collection

Then in 2019 we introduced multi-step popups with live data collection:

In the pre-purchase customer journey, the signup for a discount is the main driver of intent.

It provides the most relevant information about the customer when they have decided to exchange their contact information for a discount. The customer is CHOOSING to exchange their data for a reward. They are showing INTENT of taking a forward action towards a purchase.

This is an amazing time to collect more data from your customer as long as it relates to their customer journey.

When done correctly, we see a 95% completion rate of the entire form. With a staggering 99.96% of people providing at least one data point beyond an email address. (Data taken across Formtoro Clients).

This still holds true, but we’ll we’re perfectionists.

Step 1: The email

Step 2: The Preference

Step 3: The interest(s)

Step 4: The timeline

Step 5: The code

But we noticed an issue…

The more personal questions people asked, the higher the drop off rate.

I’ve always been against SMS as something that shouldn’t be collected during signup but I couldn’t put my finger on why, because there were too many reasons.

So we looked at the numbers.

SMS alone turned into a big drop off rate of nearly 26% with a skip button and upwards of 60% without one.

Fuck this is bad. And I’m pretty sure that 99.9% of stores don’t even realize how bad this is because the forms they are using are stuffed down their face by people that bill by the SMS or the contact.

This here is what I like to refer to as a conflict of interest.

There’s another problem that started to show up also, the experience for the customer when they dropped out of a flow.

They would go from entering information to nothing where the dropped off.

Here’s an example:

“Of course Jon, they didn’t give us what we wanted.”

And this is the crux of it, we get so consumed by numbers and KPIs that don’t really matter to the end customer.

We then started to see people just make the form sticky but hey people still didn’t want to share their phone number so stores, stop being assholes, no one likes you for doing this.

What this does is make me leave the website and not in a good way.

My first stop an affiliate website where you’re giving away an additional 3-5% of revenue.

This might not seem like a lot but it definitely adds up.

Now to the exciting part…

We started to think, what would be the ideal customer journey?

How could we create a journey that would improve the company’s understanding of potential customers while also providing the end visitor with an experience that felt like magic?

Well it seems like we’re a little lopsided here with priorities.

As a visitor I started to think of what experience would be the absolute best for me if I decided that I wanted to take advantage of an offer via a popup.

Here’s my bucket list of an ideal situation:

• Go to website

• Browse to product page

• Get popup of offer of discount either before adding or after adding items to my cart

• Opt-in to providing email

• Discount auto applied to my cart

• Checkout via Apple Pay

This is how I want to experience online shopping.

There’s a few parts to digest here, I don’t want to get a popup right away, I’ll start navigating a website pretty quickly when I get there.

I’m looking at a specific category or product most often than not, but I will spend time on the product that I’m thinking of purchasing or will add it to the cart.

So the timing of the popup should be related to time on page of a product or the action of adding something to my cart as an indicator of intent.

Ideally, you want to get me before I add something to the cart.

I’ll provide my email, no problem, phone number, not going to do it.

(I’m not alone here either 60% of people drop off at this step, and of those that subscribed upwards of 50% unsubscribe after getting a code)

So more often than not I fall into the limbo zone of the above gif. Exiting out and hating your website and have no intention of purchasing.

Then I go through my questions:

• What just happened?

• Did they email me a code?

• Did I need to provide both for a code?

• Do I go to google and search for a code?

• Do I just leave, this is a shitty experience?

So instead if I really want to purchase I have to leave your website and go google a coupon code which can pull up any number of distractions.

And if I pull one off a coupon site you’re losing additional percentages to affiliates. Usually 3-5%.

This is an unforced error in your customer journey where you leak percentages to a third party for your own business stupidity.

Ok so another issue that comes up is having to “guess” that a coupon code was sent via email and go check my inbox in hopes of one being there, again pulling me off the website.

Are you starting to see the pattern here?

We’ve created all these friction points in the customer journey that don’t make any sense at the highest intent part of the customer journey.

If this would be my one and only thing I’m remembered for in ecommerce it would be to fix this terrible, stupid, no good, rotten problem for good.

Which takes me to my last requirements, a coupon code unique or generic I don’t care, that is auto applied to the cart so I can see savings as I shop which makes me feel confident about checking out rather than having to go to checkout before cutting and pasting a coupon code.

Bonus if I leave and get distracted, close the window but then go back to your website for any reason including a marketing email that my code stays live in the session so I can use it.

As a customer, this is what I want.

I want you to give me a code, I want to see how that code saves me money while I shop, and I want to have it auto applied so it feels like magic.

I’ve never had the joy of this experience until now…

Wait, are you telling me…

Yeah we did a thing.

Some of you on this list have already seen the demo video as we’ve been teasing it out and sharing it with a few people.

For those of you that haven’t here’s a demo:

There’s a lot of behind the scenes logic that went into this.

I’ll try to explain some of it.

Coupon code creation is still based on someone putting in an email. (We are working on something that makes this optional then combines the data later, but not sure if it’s the right path overall.)

So essentially what we did was add secondary logic to the coupon code field that allows it to be hidden/auto applied.

Example Video:

The other bit of logic that goes into this is allowing certain steps to use the close icon to close the form v. other steps where the close icon is used to jump whatever step someone wants it to go to (HINT: should be the coupon code step to notify people the code has been added)

What does this mean?

So above we talked about how 90% of people that did zero party data multi step forms completed them, but we also mentioned how 25% of people drop off on the sms step.

Well we looked at a lot of data around drop off rates and started to see some patterns, then we ran some tests with the old forms v. these new ones and found that the new routing with auto adding increased subscription to conversion rate by upwards of double.

The net result is the experience really is magic for those people looking to purchase.

It’s a win win for both the customer and the company.

The company can now ask as many questions as they like and the customer gets a code auto added to their cart and notified when it happens even if they drop off.

Why do I love this so much?

This is the first time we’ve released a feature that is 100% customer journey and what’s right for the customer.

I posted a few weeks ago about being wrong about how to bring Formtoro and data collection to market, I’ve been talking with a lot of brands and a lot of agencies and they’ve all run into the same problem, it’s too much of a leap for those that don’t understand data.

Sidenote, here’s a link to a video of me talking about data for 40 minutes with real life examples and data:

Well I think the above demostration solves for the go to market issue we were facing.

1. No data no problem, we'll solve that 60% drop off at the SMS step

2. No more cut and paste coupons

3. Live discounts in cart as people shop to increase AOV

4. Coupon stays in session to increase performance of welcome flow, abandon cart flow, and abandon browse flow

5. 30% increase in subscription to conversion rate

6. Not sure why people aren't converting? Let's collect some data

This is the natural progression of what it takes to solve a problem and lead people from point A to point B.

First is the easy win that makes sense, that solves for a very real problem that everyone is ignoring that directly creates revenue. It’s a quick swap.

Second takes the guess work out of coupon codes and allows everyone if they want to move to unique codes.

Third is actually really cool, being able to see the savings as you add things to your cart so that less people abandon their carts and checkout, no hidden fees, no needing to wait to enter a coupon code until the end.

Fourth is dope. I’ll leave a website multiple times but I don’t want to go back to my email to find a code, which is what we currently have to do, this way it’s just there waiting for me in my cart to be used.

Fifth, who doesn’t like increased revenue and making their customers super happy?

Sixth is a bit selfish on our part as the software, but if you have all these optimizations going and you’re still not seeing gains in your conversion rates, then something else is going on and my best piece of advice is to start collecting data relevant to the customer journey so you can spot the gaps and work on a plan to action a better plan of attack.

A list of questions I’ve received so far and answers

Q: Can the unique codes push into Klaviyo?

A: Yes, all codes and data are created in Shopify on the Fly for unique codes and pushed into Klaviyo as customer profile fields.

Q: Is it possible to create something where you can insert a line of text on the PDP form indicating that a discount has been applied?

A: This would require a ton of special javascript and wouldn’t be worth it, go hit up Shopify and tell them to change their code to allow this.

Q: Do you see this opening up the opportunity for more brands to start using email & SMS popups as they risk of dropoff has now been mitigated?

A: Although I wasn’t aware of people hesitant, this would eliminate any and all trepidation with doing any sort of data collection.

Q: Will you be able to have the cool auto-fill feature (2 Factor Auth) that postscript/klaviyo have?

A: Potentially, looks like some of their APIs allow, but is the goal to get someone to opt-into SMS or to get someone to purchase? There’s still a 60% drop off at that step, I like to focus on the large numbers.

Q: Have you compared that to a hold out?

A: We ran A/B tests, depending on location of the form and device we’ve seen gains of up to 50% over the baseline for subscription to conversion rate.

Q: this seems SO obvious that i'm shocked no one has this?? or do they??

A: Other forms have done auto add before in the past, but none that we’re aware of have gone far enough to do the logic mapping behind the scenes to create this seamless experience, usually they require a bit more work to setup as well.

Q: Have you ever experimented with a tiered system? Where it's like "Get 15% off - enter email" and then it says "Want to bump that up to 25% off? Enter your phone below."

A: Yes, we have more than a few companies that do this, it’s usually a 5% increase and performs the exact same.

Q: Does this work cross device?

A: We actually get this question a lot and I think people don’t actually fully understand how identification works in technology. It's impossible unless someone was logged in on both devices, which for shops is slim to none for people just signing up for the first time.

Q: Does this prevent someone from signing up twice?

A: No, that’s always going to be a thing, you can use generic codes that can only be used once if you’d like that will prevent the code from being used more than once per person but they could always use a different email address.

Q: Do you have data on variations of that SMS page to increase sign ups?

A: I don’t really track variations on the SMS page, I know that not having it tends to increase revenue by about 10% which makes sense given the terrible experience and forcing people to leave the website to find a code promised.

That 10% number was observed on a website that had the existing offer already in a banner on the website so is a confirmed low end of the spectrum.

Closing thoughts

This is the closest I’ve come to finding a silver bullet to reducing friction, creating a great customer journey and also providing the flexibility to collect more data to better get to know our customers.

We’ve removed any downside from implementation.

The return on investment of making this move is tremendous:

1. Happier customers

2. Keeps customers on website

3. Encourages customers to spend more

4. Allows seamless data collection as far as they want to go with no downside

5. No more coupon codes - really, they are completely hidden and auto added

6. And a clear path to understanding why people still aren’t converting by collecting zero party data

Then there’s the chart:

We might have to revisit our pricing model or just make a lot of companies super happy, not sure yet.

The Takeaway

Sometimes it’s the little things that no one things of that can have the largest impact. Remember to always put the customer first.

Have a great week!

-Jon

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

You can learn from me: jonivanco.com