Apologies. I’ve been busy.

Apologies on not sending this weekly, Q4 usually turns into head down building mode as most companies aren’t adding new technology before Black Friday.

So I’ve been building…

1. Full Funnel customer acquisition with video feedback and reviews funnel complete with all FTC disclosure language to automate user generated content for product feedback and marketing collateral

This was the post that started this one off:

Would you leave a video review of a product for a discount?

If it was less than 5 mins of my time and a large enough discount my answer would be yes nearly 100% of the time.

For me personally, the discount would have to be greater than 40% off.

If I really liked the product I would take a higher amount back in store credit to buy more things from the store.

So this is my running hypothesis, I don't think I'm alone in this reasoning.

Are the numbers fixed? No.

I think there's room for some solid testing in this model, but the idea that I would purchase for full price, then by providing a video review could unlock a large part of my purchase price back is really appealing to me.

We'd have to keep this under control though, so first time buyers only, limited product set, maybe some conditions for repeat purchasers for new product launches to juice up those reviews right away.

Select unit economics items that make sense.

But here's why I think it could work:

1. It would de-risk a purchase
2. It would require me to use the product and provide an opinion on it
3. It's a mutual exchange of time for value from an action already taken that can be banked on an existing purchase or one in the future
4. It would get product into hands

Rather than just a discount on a purchase it would be a further exchange of value that would provide the brand with something they could repurpose and leverage ongoing in the form of UGC to build trust.

So you'd get an opinion, a likelihood of someone purchasing again via the reward they choose, and a measurement of your top of funnel advertising if it's tied to and used for CAC relating to paid ads funnels.

There are some tricky bits, making sure if someone posts to social there are appropriate disclosures about being compensated with the discount, monitoring this would be tough to do, but using that footage in company ads and on the website etc, completely doable.

More on this one to come as it’s already been built out. Just need to finish the legals behind making it all above board.

Toying with the idea of starting an agency on the side to set this up and run it for companies. It’s complicated to get setup properly but expectations are hundreds of video feedback reviews for a fraction of the current costs, a real name-to-the-face community builder.

Expected Testing to Start: December 2023/January 2024

2. Gift Card Upsells to unlock free shipping for Shopify Stores

In case you missed it from LinkedIn:

Customer Journey v. Company Journey

Problem: I hate paying for shipping on a DTC website but the way people price things is so I come up just short of free shipping. It's annoying.

Sometimes it's a purchase of like $5 but they don't sell anything for less than $30 and I really don't want that thing.

Solution: Let me add a gift card to get to free shipping rather than purchase something I don't need, make it for just enough to get me free shipping.

Second Problem: Shopify doesn't take gift cards into consideration as value towards free shipping.

Solution: There is a solution for this if you're savvy.

Third Problem: This needs to be dynamic in relation to the amount in the cart and how close the person is to free shipping can't offer a $25 gift card for someone that is $5 dollars away.

Solution: Set parameters around offering a gift card based on how close someone is to unlocking free shipping, make it dynamic.

I don't always share what we're working on at Formtoro because most of the time it goes far beyond just forms purpose built form behavior in relation to strategy, but I think this one deserved a little bit of daylight.

I haven't seen anyone able to implement this properly. So we built it.

Because this is the kind of thing that online shoppers deserve.

The number 1 reason for abandon checkouts are taxes and shipping, most people try to get past this with upsells, don't rush the sale, prep it for the second sale instead and pocket the money upfront.

It's actually better for the customer and the company, this might be the one time where Customer Journey and Company Journey can be aligned.

There’s a full video demo on this post.

This is coming out of staging this week. For 4 years I’ve envisioned something that would automatically trigger access to an existing gift card product that gets me just over the free shipping threshold for my cart.

There’s been multiple times that I’ve just added random stuff to my cart and it costs a brand the larger part of the shipping balance without prepping me to come back and purchase more.

We built out a prototype last week and worked through the bugs this week to make sure it works as expected for end customers.

Expected Testing to Start: November 10, 2023

3. A collection of websites geared towards teaching people ecommerce in a very step-by-step format

Going to keep this one quiet for now, but if you’re on this list I’ll be partnering with industry experts across ecommerce to create resources to help people get 70% of the way there across all of the main parts of ecommerce.

I’ll be focusing on popups, email, paid ads, copywriting, and CRO.

These are all things I’ve spend quite some time a part of.

Expected Testing to Start: End of this year early next year

4. Ecom with Jon clean up

I haven’t touched the website in a few months, so I’m going to get back to it, in some of the calls I’ve taken over the past few weeks, it’s clear that most of the information that people need is already uploaded through the courses.

But people need some step-by-step action about things. So I’m going to look to make some of those guides. It’s something generational that I’ve noticed is that the younger generation really just needs a blueprint to get things done, learning on the fly and critical thinking doesn’t come naturally to everyone.

A real community so people can actually interact…

I only want to do this if people can 100% behave themselves, I’m only part of one or two slack groups where this is the case, I still don’t have a good handle on what would be the best format for this.

5. Consistency in a newsletter

This is a big goal for me to get under control in the next month or so, but it needs to be in a digestible and repeatable format that makes it easy for me to share some things consistently.

If you’ve ever been on a call with me, you know I can talk for days, my brain wanders which makes tight formatting a bit difficult especially with no character limit.

We’re going to give it the old college try. We’ll see how it goes.

Until next week, probably starting on Sunday nights Pacific time, I’ll see you around the Internet.

Best,

Jon