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Ep 474: CRO Is Dead! Kyle Hitchcox on the Future of Shopify Optimization with Warpdrive | AKNF
00:22:24
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- [00:00]
Kyle Hitchcox
A lot of Shopify brands, they don't think about the funnel or the customer journey. They're thinking about a high converting store or a great checkout for the most part. What we're doing essentially is democratizing conversion rate optimization. The way we do it is a little different.
- [00:15]
Eric Dick
Talk about PageSpeed.
- [00:17]
Kyle Hitchcox
Basically, the more people that bounce, the less money you have. I love Shopify, but the majority of stores are on the traditional code base because they don't have the resources or haven't invested into their own headless environments. We know for certain that if your store is low loading two two and a half seconds above, you're losing a ton of traffic and it compounds up the longer that it loads. I'm going to be running around this year saying conversion rate optimization as you know it is dead. What that means is that.
- [00:51]
Eric Dick
If you.
- [00:52]
Unknown
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- [02:23]
Eric Dick
I'm Eric. This is the DTC podcast. I'm here with Kyle Hitchcox, the actual progenitor of the All Killer no Filler moniker. I think you suggested it in one of our first podcasts that we should call our pod, our pilot house podcast, All Killer no Filler, which has been a lot of fun. So thanks for that. What's new with you man?
- [02:42]
Kyle Hitchcox
That's a big question. New year, new you, new business?
- [02:45]
Eric Dick
Talk me through that.
- [02:46]
Kyle Hitchcox
Yeah, just before Eric, obviously longtime business partner, but I haven't been on here in a while and thanks for reaching out. What do you want to hear about?
- [02:54]
Eric Dick
Well, I know that you are working on a long gestating project that we have been using internally at Pilothouse for a very long time and much to our clients benefit. Essentially a headless CRO tool. So talk a little bit about what you're working working on.
- [03:12]
Kyle Hitchcox
First of all, it's not a headless product for the headless haters out there. What it is is an all in one conversion rate optimization tool and team that helps Shopify brands make more money from the traffic that they already have. So it's built in three parts. The first is our Shopify Page Builder which is modularized components that are pre configured to drive better results. So we've basically taken all best practices integrated into all the best apps. Shopify, Yotpo, Judge Me, Klaviyo, Rebuy, et cetera. And then we can basically create branded shopping experiences that are delivered of high quality and higher conversion rates. That's one piece. The other piece is the old platform which we've used for years within Pilothouse, which is our optimization and routing tool which allows us to build and split test literally an infinite amount of customer experiences. So we don't really believe in A B testing. We kind of go A through Z1 through 11 million, which is a visual tool which allows us to build these, these incredibly complicated octopus arm looking funnels. And then of course the Attribution Suite which gives us step tracking within the funnel all the way down through to starting point and into conversion, measuring things like average order value, conversion rates, earnings per click and so on, which allows our media buyers to monetize every part of the beast. So from pre click through to post click, we use this tool to essentially just drive better results. And so we're bringing these tools together into a product called Warp Drive, name Explanatory. But yeah, we're launching with, well the Shopify Builder. We're lucky enough to work with Four Sigmatic right now as well as O2 hydration. And we'll be bringing it to market February 1st for our, for our fans and followers alike.
- [05:07]
Eric Dick
Oh, nice. And this hearkens back to some of the first things we talked about on this podcast, which is, and it's funny, I just did a podcast with Kurt Elster, who runs Ethercycle, which is a big Shopify dev agency. And I brought up the term about, about landing pages and like, you know, custom sales pages for your, your paid traffic. And he was just like, oh, yeah, we don't really do any of that. We, you know, we were more of just custom Shopify. He's like, I think. But he's like, I think brands should be doing way, way more of it. And that's something we've been talking about since the first week of these podcasts was this sort of like, mindset and really meeting every. If you're paying this much for your traffic, paying so much for your traffic, you might as well meet people where they're at and really have a reflective funnel that ideally converts better. Talk to me a little bit about just like landing pages and your, your history with them.
- [05:52]
Kyle Hitchcox
Sure. Before we go there, I mean, I think a lot of Shopify brands, they don't think about the funnel or the customer journey. They're thinking about a high converting store or a great checkout for the most part, obviously, pricing, testing and everything that comes with that. But what we're doing essentially is democratizing conversion rate optimization. So the way, the way we do it is a little different. So a landing page, to your question, is one part of an experience. And you might build a landing page for different reasons. One, you have different products and you want to showcase them all together, maybe create more interest from your, from your click off of Facebook, for example, to a splash page. Maybe it's a promo, maybe it's Black Friday. There's obviously a lot. Maybe it's a founder story, which we lean into big time. But a landing page on its own is, is just one part of the funnel. It allows you to bypass the need for doing CRO inside of your whole Shopify store. You can bypass a lot of the technical needs to speed your store up. A landing page on its own, that's literally just, hey, welcome to my store. Click to continue. You're going to get gains just from that if the tool that you're using delivers the page faster than your Shopify experience. So there's a bunch of different ways to look at landing pages. We've been doing them for years. I used to be a media buyer through Pilothouse and before that, now I'm an operator founder. But landing pages were my go to. I could get a conversion rate up 30% with 2, 3 days work measuring as opposed to measuring button colors and see which button color is going to give you more clicks. And so that's how we would use landing pages. We'd use them to bypass the technical needs to optimize your Shopify store, build them quickly, deliver the experience very fast to the end user, which ultimately was a funnel. And then we would built, then we built this tool so that we could build multiple funnels in the same experience without disrupting our traffic.
- [07:46]
Eric Dick
With a brand like four Sigmatic, I don't know if you can give away the farm here, but like how are you thinking about, like which parts of their product catalog and customer experience are, are getting landing pages? Are you doing one specific. Are getting full warp drive funnels basically built out for them?
- [08:02]
Kyle Hitchcox
Yeah. So we're, it's a new way to do CRO. So you know, I'm going to be running around this year saying conversion rate optimization, as you know it is dead. I'm going to be telling everyone that. And for those of you that are listening, what that means is that we're eliminating the need for putting a bunch of tracking pixels, apps and scripts onto your page that actually does more harm than good on average. It slows your speed down, therefore poor user experience, therefore less revenue because they bounce. So when we talk about building landing pages or experiences, we're not using landing page builders. We've built a store builder that has integrated shopping experiences. So the landing page, you click through that whatever content we create, whatever experience, whatever promotion you go through on the Shopify side, it's now the same experience. So there's no redirects. You're not going from an unbounce page into a Shopify collection where then you lose all your attribution from the first step and all the tracking is gone. So with four Sigmatic, we're reskinning the store. We're going to be delivering it hopefully twice as fast to the end user. And we're going to be doing tests, for example, in his brand, in his feel and what he wants. So we're not reinventing anything. We're one for one. We're going to test that along his side, along his store, so that we don't disrupt his workflows or his teams or his plans, and we're going to copy the same promotions. So in this instance, we're testing a bundle builder against only subscription against the standard shopping experience. And from that we're going to be able to gain data because they have a lot of traffic. We're going to be able to gain data in days instead of weeks or months, which traditionally is how CRO is approached.
- [09:48]
Eric Dick
So if CRO is dead, what's my new acronym?
- [09:52]
Kyle Hitchcox
I know it's almost a new category or approach. It's an integrated shopping experience with all the attribution and routing that you could possibly need. And you know, we've been working on this for seven years and I'm really excited to share it with more people.
- [10:05]
Eric Dick
Outside of Pilot House because yeah, CRO seems to imply that it's. You've got a static, you've got one static thing and you've got all this traffic coming through a static funnel and then you're optimizing the funnel for all of that traffic. But this is like some more meta approach.
- [10:19]
Kyle Hitchcox
Let's talk about the conversion rate optimization. Right. So what does that even mean? What are you optimizing? I think the term has been beaten up because conversion rate optimization could simply be split testing 10 different headlines on your PDP. It could also mean changing the format. It could also mean testing subscription versus like I said, bundling or just, you know, your standard card upsells or whatever. It could be button color changes. It could be adding attribution tools, adding modeling tools versus just using the standard meta pixel as an example. Obviously iOS that was a nightmare. In part why we built our attribution tool so that we could track the conversions as they happen because we couldn't depend on data back in the day, so on and so on. So like what is CRO ultimately? The way we're looking at it is anything post click that puts more money in our clients pockets.
- [11:13]
Eric Dick
Yeah, and CRO is just one dimension too. Right? Like you even mentioned, you know, you're testing subscriptions versus bundling versus their standalone page. You need to know AOV and LTV and all of these other things that having persistent tracking throughout your whole funnel should help you get a better handle on, I guess for sure.
- [11:29]
Kyle Hitchcox
And now imagine persistent tracking through your whole funnel when you're brand conscious or you don't know what your brand is or you want your brand to change or you have a new hire CMO brand manager and they're struggling against their agency or their media buyers internally for performance against what this brand feature or vision looks like. Right. We can reskin because it's modularized your store literally in 24 hours and we could provide five different branded experiences and then we can work with you to actually help you inform what brand decisions will actually drive more sales. Well, looking great while you still get the same feel.
- [12:04]
Eric Dick
Performance branding, and this is an upgrade over the performance versus brand is the false dichotomy that powers this industry. But, but I see. But in the past where we would have been running like landing pages from a sub domain, for instance, this, this really does merge performance and brand. So you're really getting an experience that is as good or ideally better than the homepage and then that, then that experience. But it's going to be inherently more customized as well.
- [12:33]
Kyle Hitchcox
Well, that's the thing. Our system is modularized, so we're able to add your brand elements, css, fonts, styling into the platform itself and save that as a brand, which will generate and populate your brand into whichever look, feel, shape we recommend to you based on proven historical results. So it's, it's, it's a brand safe way to explore your new ideas and get results much quicker than iterative testing. We believe in big contrast tests. We believe in big wins. And if we're not finding wins, you know, 48 hours within two a week, like we're not, we're not doing a good job.
- [13:13]
Eric Dick
Yeah, big swings, 100%. And this probably fits in. I know that this tool has evolved throughout Pilothouse's media, like hand in hand with Pilothouses, like media buying methodology. We talked about the pilot test, for instance, and the different kinds of avatar testing that we do all the time with clients. This is just hand in glove with that approach, I guess.
- [13:32]
Kyle Hitchcox
Hand in glove, I mean, post click. But you know, obviously if you have a good headline on your meta campaign as an example, you're going to want to put that into this tool. You're going to want to spin up a landing page or copy clone a PDP and quickly add 10 variants in that idea. I mean, we know for certain. I know for certain. I, I like. Absolutely. This is a takeaway. This is why we call it all killer. No filler. I try to make sure that there's takeaways for you, but if you find a way to test 10 different headlines and hooks in your PDP, wherever that traffic is going, you're going to find a 10% gain just purely on what they read above the fold. 10% on 100 grand in a month is a lot of money. It's a million. It's a lot of money. 10 million, it's a lot of money. So you know that that's the Other thing, people I think, think, oh, it's only 10%, oh, it's only a 5% gain. But that compounds with obviously the more revenue you have. And once you establish those winners, you can go find another 5% or you can find 30% just from the speed alone on the delivery side.
- [14:34]
Eric Dick
Talk about page speed.
- [14:36]
Kyle Hitchcox
Basically, the more people that bounce, the less money you have. Bounce is primarily driven from stores being overloaded. I love Shopify. I love Shopify, their original code base and they've, they've improved it. They have obviously advanced code bases now also. But the majority of stores are on the traditional code base because they don't have the resources or haven't invested into their own headless environments and, or custom custom code just because they don't have the resources or they just haven't got there yet. But we know for certain that if your store is loading two, two and a half seconds above, you're losing, you're losing a ton of traffic. And it compounds up the longer that it loads. Your first contentful print is, or paint rather is the stuff that loads above the fold. That's the most important piece. But you need to get your store loading, especially in today's like attention deficit economy. You know, if you're coming off a TikTok or you're coming off of Instagram these days, like, it's got to load, it's got to load like within a second. And that's, that's what we've done.
- [15:41]
Eric Dick
Nice. So you've gone from scaling an agency pilot house up to whatever we're at now, 160, 170 employees, through to starting a software company. What's been the, what's been the biggest challenge?
- [15:54]
Kyle Hitchcox
That's, that's a good point. I think going back before Pilot house, there was obviously our affiliate work and that really taught me to work all the tools and every bit of traffic, every bit of funnel, every piece of copy, everything. And so I think bringing that into Pilot House and training that into teams obviously has helped us and our clients be successful. Moving that into a software founder experience. It's been a learning curve certainly. I think going from a tool that's internal, where you can get away with, you know, a bug for years because it's like, oh yeah, just don't press that thing you remember, just don't press that thing and just do this thing instead. And cleaning all those up so that it's user friendly and accessible for the world, I think is the biggest challenge. But we're quite lucky in that we're doing this bootstrapped. It's a tool that we battle tested and built throughout years and I think almost 300 brands have been through the routing and reporting tool over the last three, four, five, six years. So we have a lot of infrastructure already set up and adding this new piece has been really exciting. I'm learning a lot of the things that I would tell my team. It's okay to make mistakes, I'm living them right now. It's okay to be delayed on timelines. It's okay to take chances and invest deeper when there's a burn rate. We've been building this for seven years and we've tripled down on our development team because we believe in it and learning to work with in sprints and all these things is something new for me. But I think we're doing a good job and we're excited for launch February 1st.
- [17:32]
Eric Dick
And when you say launch, is this going to be like a hybrid managed launch or this be full self service people can jump in and use the platform themselves hybrid.
- [17:41]
Kyle Hitchcox
So what we're doing, we're positioning ourselves as a CRO agency that is tech enabled. So our price points are going to be less expensive than CRO development shops. It'll be faster time to market an alternative to headless and internally, whether there's a team already in place making these optimizations for future clients or not, that's okay because we can plug in with them or plug in agnostic of them and do that work in an affordable way where there's performance incentives much like how Pilothouse works when we win, when you win, we win rather so we're again it's a new way to do CRO so it's going to do some decent communication needed but we're priced affordably and we're sitting between tech and traditional CRO agencies. For now we will be doing self serve hopefully within six months but the primary goal right now is to is to get it live and get the DCC community making more money.
- [18:48]
Eric Dick
Super cool. How are you using AI in this process?
- [18:51]
Kyle Hitchcox
Yeah, our workflows we're building out extensively into modularized code generation that fits into our tech endpoints so that we can skin up new apps and you know, experiences faster. It is quite fast now but obviously workflows with AI are the primary focus and then we'll be expanding further into AI optimization so we have the optimization engine. So we will next step will be recommendations on how and where to optimize your funnels, your Shopify funnels which people don't think about people think click funnels when they hear funnels. Right. And expanding our auto optimizer so that we can just plug our tests in and the octopus arms will work towards the goal that we set.
- [19:39]
Eric Dick
Nice. So we're jumping on early. This is coming out on Friday and so what do you want? Brands who are hearing this and want to kind of get involved in what's next after CRO died with a tool like Warp Drive. Once again to this performance creative.
- [19:56]
Kyle Hitchcox
Yeah, well, there's, there's actually we're looking to meet and talk with agencies as well. We're separate to Pilot House. We're an independent business. Our team is independent and so we want to support the whole community. So it's not just brands, it's agencies and brands. Anyone who's touching Shopify, really, we want to share this with takeaways. You know, start of the year January. Unless you're a CPG brand or health and beauty, you're going to be struggling. You're going to need ways to, you know, hit your KPIs and targets. If you're a marketing manager, you're pulling your hair right now. Get in touch. You can go to pilothouse Co. Our Warp Drive content and site will be published shortly. But you can reach me through the normal form at Pilothouse Co or you can find me on LinkedIn. Quite accessible there. Anyone who wants to explore something new, a new way of doing conversion rate optimization, a new way to get a store built quickly, a new way to see if you want to get off headless. A new way to build funnels. Just. Yeah, we're excited, we're excited to meet with you.
- [21:00]
Eric Dick
Very cool. Are you a Trekkie?
- [21:02]
Kyle Hitchcox
A Trekkie, yeah.
- [21:03]
Eric Dick
Because Warp Drive, whenever here, Warp Drive. I just hear like N Gage.
- [21:07]
Kyle Hitchcox
You know, it's funny you said that. I'm trying to come up with some funny trade show here.
- [21:10]
Eric Dick
Oh, yeah.
- [21:11]
Kyle Hitchcox
You know, like there's a whole bunch of little tricorder. Yeah, no, I watched, I watched Star Trek growing up for sure. I think only had three channels, so.
- [21:18]
Eric Dick
T Earl Gray. Hot. Nice. Well, very cool. I think we're, we're here for a very exciting future and it' only fitting that CRO and that Pilot House be leading the vanguard on, on what's next with CRO. I'm super excited to see where this goes and I'm super excited for some people in our audience to get on, on this launch on February, this hybrid launch in February because I think there's a lot of value to be created here. Yeah, fna. Thanks, brother. Talk to you again soon. Talk to your. You'll be our resident. You can become our resident CRO or new CRO Guy.
- [21:52]
Kyle Hitchcox
I can't wait.
- [21:59]
Unknown
Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you're not getting the DTC newsletter, you can subscribe for free at directtoconsumer Co. And if you want to learn more about Pilothouse's all killer no filler services, take off to Pilothouse Co. I'm Eric Dick and this has been the DTC podcast.
- [22:14]
Eric Dick
We'll see you next time.