← Limited Supply
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Nick Sharma
It blows my mind that people still don't put social proof above the fold in the hero. You know, on the product page, on the collections page, in their product cards, in their TikTok shop cards, in their ads. I mean, come on, this is, this is the, you know, you're asking somebody to come to your website, they've never heard of you before, and put their credit card info in. You've got to make it so obvious that you're not a scam and that you've got something that, that they're going to end up getting that, that when they place the order the product is going to arrive. And it doesn't matter if you're a $200 million a year brand or if you're a $2 million a year brand or you just started yesterday. If you don't have social proof, you are killing your conversion rate as a result. Welcome to Limited Supply, the place for refreshingly real takes on what D2C is really like. I'm your host Nick Sharma. Let's start talking about money. I'm so excited to take a second and talk about this season's sponsor Motion. If you don't already use it. Motion is a SaaS tool that launched three years ago. I even invested in the company pre launch just based on how they were thinking about creative analytics. Today. Motion's a no brainer tool to use in your marketing stack. Yes, it's creative analytics. Yes, it lets you track your competitors ads. Yes, it has the most beautiful UX and UI to report your ad performance. But let me tell you how people at Sharma Brands describe Motion. So I asked my team in Slack why do you like Motion? And here were the answers. The first reply says it's really moldable. You can use it for high level, more creative driven analytics or get really granular into the media buying analytics and data. It's a super accessible platform for all use cases and I think it brings our creative and paid teams together. The second reply says it unites everyone, agency and client, creative and paid founder and marketer. It's so dang easy to understand that everyone really can grip performance and speak the same growth language. The third reply says I love being able to reference prior campaigns using their filters and I love that we can use data from the past to make educated decisions on future content. As you can tell, we can't live without Motion at Sharma Brands and once you see a demo I bet you won't be able to either visit motionapp.com to get 50% off your first month when you mention limited supply to their sales team. Again, that's motionapp.com to get 50% off your first month when you mention limited supply to their sales team. Welcome back to Limited Supply. I'm. I'm a little disappointed in myself. I got to say. I spent a whole hour earlier today recording such a sick episode. I talked all about breaking down some of the election stuff, the tariffs, where I think interest rates are going to lead us to in our world of e commerce and investing. Talked a little bit about Black Friday and then talked a little bit about what I call, you know, actually my newsletter. You might remember if you subscribe to it. If you don't go subscribe Nik Co Email Nick Co Email goes out every Sunday to about 100,000 people. It's free. 7:15pm Eastern is when it hits your inbox. And one of the things I wrote about last year was this broke man's content playbook and specifically around if you've got something that you just launched and you're unclear about how to go about creating a bunch of content and getting eyeballs because really, if we think about this, this whole game of customer acquisition, which is again, one of my, that's my bread and butter, is customer acquisition. This whole game is really predicated on eyeballs, right? It's all about eyeballs. And then from the eyeballs you start take FR around conversion rate and what that turns into revenue and whatnot. But at the beginning, it's all about how many impressions and eyeballs you're getting, right. CPMs. And I did talk about a couple of brands that I've seen lately that have gone from launching, you know, 12 to 24 months prior, leveraging this broke man's content playbook that I wrote. And you know, this year they're doing anywhere from 100 to 200 million in revenue. And so anyways, I'm gonna I'm disappointed that I recorded a whole episode and my mic didn't. That's entirely my fault. So I'm going to rerecord that when I have more energy because it required a lot of energy to go deep into it and also want to rerecord my thoughts on the advertising and marketing side of the election because I think it was really interesting how, for example, even celebrities versus alternative media played a huge role in this year's election. So all that said, keep, keep that on deck for what's to come later this season for today. Today's Wednesday. It's November 13th. We've got, well, I think a lot of Black Friday sales are just starting this week. So if yours isn't already launched, it's hopefully launching today or later this week. For context, most brands haven't started their Black Friday sales. So a lot of people haven't necessarily seen the bump yet of Black Friday. But that said, if that's you also, you haven't seen that bump, you know, don't panic. I think a lot of the Black Friday momentum is gonna kick in at the end of this week or most likely early next week. All right, today's podcast though. Here's what I wanna talk about. I wrote a newsletter a few weeks ago that got in an overwhelming response, positive response. And a lot of times when that happens, like when I write something that gets a ton of positive response, I like to take it one step further and just break it down and talk through it in a podcast. Because I think a lot of the times, you know, when I write these newsletters, this one specifically, I remember writing just sitting at my desk and thinking, okay, what are, what are some easy, easy, easy, low lift, low, low resources required. However, high impact site improvements that that brands can make going into Black Friday. And so that's what, that's what today's episode is all about. But there's, there's probably 15 things that I want to go through, so I'm going to go through them. If you have questions, promise me one thing, DM me on Twitter or shoot me an email with your question. My email is just the letter narma.com My full email is, you know, nickarmabrands.com, but this just forwards to that. So email me or DM me if you have any questions or need any clarification. Otherwise as I talk through this, I'm going to speak to some of the examples and where you can find those examples. So. All right, so let's get started. So first one is comparison charts. Now comparison charts are the easiest way in my opinion to show how something looks or how something compares from, from one way or you know, what are, what, what you're selling to something else. And I also believe that comparison charts are a huge part of empathy first design. I always think that, you know, when I think about sites that convert, I don't necessarily think that they've got the gimmicks or the timers or you know, the got within the site. I just think they're designed with a lot more empathy in mind. And I'll share a couple examples later on that I think do that really well. But you know, let's Talk about comparison charts. So there's, there's really like four main ones that I like to go off of. The first one is you compare your product to your competitive category. So let's say you're a matcha brand. You're selling ceremonial grade Matcha. Comparing it to your competitive category doesn't mean you're comparing it to other Matcha products within your category. It more so means you're comparing ceremonial grade Matcha to coffee, to energy drinks, to caffeine pills, to, you know, maybe to Adderall, whatever it may be. Right. Wherever you think that your brand or your, your products category plays against in terms of competition, that's a great way to use it. Another, another example is when I worked at Hint Water, we used to always say, okay, who's our competition? Right. It's really not. We're not competing against other flavored waters. No, no, no. We're competing against the diet soda drinker. And so for us, okay, how do we get people to understand the comparison between diet soda or vitamin water or, you know, the vitamin water is zero, whatever it may be, to flavored water. So you're really comparing, comparing what you've got against what other people are likely doing instead of what they should, you know, what, what, what they would be doing if they were consuming your product. Okay. Second one is comparing your brand's price or density to other brands and other products. So for example, if you go to davidprotein. This is a site that the Sharma Brands team designed and developed and launched recently. You'll actually see this really amazing comparison chart which is about. It's on the homepage, but it's also on the pdps and you can actually see the calories from protein. And then you can also see the macros. It's just a very, It's a fun way to com to. To look at a comparison chart compared to, you know, just a regular, like, generic style comparison chart. And you're basically just competing against, you know, density or price or ingredients or whatever it may be versus just the standard things you would compare to. The third one is compare the convenience that your product offers against them doing it the hard way. So my favorite example of this is we just launched a site called Mirror Mate, or I should say we redesigned, developed and launched a site for this brand called Mirror Mate. And if you scroll about probably 65% of the way down, you'll see this comparison chart. It's called the Mirror Mate difference. Basically, they title it us versus the Rest. And what we did is we said, okay, there's three options, right? When you come to Mirror Mate, either you use Mirror Mate and you use this beautiful website builder application that we built custom, or you go with one of our competitors or you do it yourself. So let's just get ahead of it and explain to people why they should choose mirrormate over using somebody else, right? So we put mirrormate competitors, do it yourself. And what this does is it just makes it very clear how has the experience changed from a convenience, a resources, a cost, a time, even a scary standpoint, right? Like intimidation of doing this. How does it compare to what you're doing doing? And the idea is that you can actually demonstrate that, hey, if you do it with us, the idea would be to do it this way. Hey, if you do it with us, not only are we going to make it so easy for you, but we're going to walk you through the process. You know, it's cheaper, it's faster, it's more cost effective, it's more efficient. All those things, that's what you're really trying to show is you're trying to show the convenience so that when somebody thinks about, oh, you know, now I got to install this, this mirror product or this mirror frame, you know, you don't want somebody to think, oh, this is too complex. But that's where this convenience style compares and chart comes in. And then there's of course the standard one, which is the fourth one. And my favorite example of this is on this brand Salud, their homepage. If you go to tastesalud s A-L-U-D.com if you scroll down, you'll very quickly see right near the top, probably the fourth section of the page, they have a comparison chart between them and three other brands in their space that are really well known. Gatorade, Liquid IV and Pedialyte. And they call out the three things that they are just better at, which is added sugars, calories and the two in one benefits. Now you can sort of change that however you'd like, but it still stands that, you know, comparing yourself against other brands is always kind of the default. And if you can do it in a fun way, like in this example, if you go to the site, you'll see it's an animated comparison chart. It not only adds to the brand experience of, you know, wow, this is a brand brand. It's not just a standard Shopify site or it's not just a, a static boring to look at comparison chart. So not only does it enhance the brand, but it Also just drives more viewership time. So if you look at, hopefully you use something like heatmap.com, you can actually see how much time is being spent there. Or you can see that somebody's mouse is stopping, their scroll is stopping, they're watching that before they end up continuing and going through. So those are the comparison charts. And I don't think that there's a better section to add on every page than a comparison chart. You should have it on your homepage, you should have it on your collections page, either breaking up collections or at the bottom. You should have it on your landing pages, you should have it on your product pages, you should have it on your Our Science page, you should have it on your About Us page. You know, comparison charts, they don't necessarily have to sell something, but it should give somebody a comparison to a point of reference that they already know. So for example in the salute example, you know, people already know Pedialyte. That's why it's a great place to compare. Back to right on the mirror mate, people know what it might be like to do it yourself. On the David example, people know what Quest Nutrition or if they don't know any of the brands that we've listed there, they know what boiled cod is. And so the idea is to create the point of reference to something that people already understand. And once you do that, you make it so much easier in somebody's head to let them visualize why your product is superior and why the other alternatives that they may have been thinking about or pursuing are inferior. It's also a good thing to remember, to make easy for people to remember because if, if somebody leaves, they're gonna stick, it's gonna stick in their head why this is better than some other, you know, form of that. Okay, next I wanna talk about the second thing which I call the sales associate style shop section. So you know, ever since I was a kid, I was always fascinated by the retail experience you get at Apple from their in store associates because they don't make any commissions on products they sell. And unlike like a Verizon or AT&T, you know, they're so pushy about. You should buy this case and get this charger and bundle three cases and you get the fourth one free, right? But at Apple it's entirely focused on their convenience that it drives to the customer, which in my experience is the best way to sell online. You should only focus on, on the convenience part or what makes it, you know, what makes it beneficial for that person to go Ahead and choose. And a lot of times, you know, if you're at Apple and you're looking at a laptop, they're going to come up to you and say, okay, you know, what do you need it for? How do you use it? Well, this is what most people buy. Oh, well, you're doing movie editing. Well, this is what most people buy for that and essentially take that similar style or that sort of like social proof, right? And bring it to the shop section of your pdp. Adding badges like new customer favorite, most popular, you know, new customers or sorry, I already said new customer favorite, you know, subscribers favorite, you know, most most ordered in the last 24 hours. There's so many different ways to do it, but sort of just adding this, this like extra badge or social proof or you know, the old version of this is like that FOMO app that says, you know, it's got the pop ups at the bottom. Kelly just purchased this four minutes ago in Orlando, Florida. I don't think that that is as sophisticated. I think the better way to do it is calling out, you know, most popular stocking stuffer, favorite, gifting favorite, you know, whatever it may be, so that you're sort of, what you're really doing is telling somebody that, hey, this, this is not, you're not the first person to come buy this product. Multiple people have bought this and multiple people have said it's their favorite. And you know, when you hear that sort of satisfaction or you see that sort of, you see that sort of messaging, you are a lot more inclined to make that purchase. Right? So that sales associate style shop section is something that I think is huge and more brands should do it. It's very easy to implement. Okay, the next one is custom and branded, same thing, iconography. So whether you're breaking down super complex topics, you're explaining the features of your product or service, or you're just using visuals to show how the product works. Always, in my opinion, always leverage icons. If you don't have the ability to have custom icons, then you should go to flaticon.com for example, download the icons as SVGs, open it in Illustrator or Figma, Figma's free and change the weight and the colors so that it feels a little bit more custom. You know, we. I'm gonna talk about bullet points in a second. There's, there's like three, three evolutions of, of making copy really easy or to understand the. The first is what you don't want to do, which is chunky paragraph text. The second one is bullet points which we'll talk about in a second. And the third one is taking those bullet points and going one step further and just turning it into iconography, where it's super easy to just glance and understand exactly what is being said or what the goal is here. If you can take it one step further from so sorry, regular icons is one thing, then downloading them and updating the colors and the weighting is the next level of that. The third level of that is designing your own custom iconography. And then the fourth level of that, which you can actually see on Mirrormate's website, mirrormate.com is animated custom iconography. So not only is the iconography custom to the brand, which of course, as soon as you get to the site and you see like, hey, this brand has their own iconography that doesn't look like stock images or stock icons or things of that nature, it adds to the brand experience, which adds to the trust, right? And then the step further is you now animate the iconography because, you know, similar to like wrapping a bus or a billboard or a TV ad, it's perceived as something that only a successful company is able to do because of, you know, it doesn't feel cheap, it doesn't feel like it's lazy. And so that's my hypothesis as to why it works. I know for a fact that if you have custom animated iconography, people slow down and they, they read, they consume those sections with a lot more time, they spend more time there and it for sure leads to more revenue. Next one is reposition copywriting. So most copywriting on websites focuses on features, right? It's things that, the same way that you talk about what you know, the same way you speak about your product in internal meetings, right. Is the same way that a lot of times copy is reflected on the site. It feels like, you know, you're, you're speaking in a way where people should already know what you're talking about or why, why they, how the product fits into their life. And you know, one of my favorite examples, I've said it many times before, is I always think of those rice cakes that you get at Trader Joe's, right? Those sugar. If they marketed that as a sugar free low calorie rice cake, it doesn't sound nearly as enticing as after school snack that moms are proud to serve their kids, right? The first one is just a fact. It's a, it's a feature. It's a sugar free low calorie rice cake. It sounds like something that you know it just, in fact, it just sounds plain. It doesn't, doesn't do anything, doesn't inspire anything. But as soon as you hear after school snack that moms are proud to serve, you know, you can immediately find, okay, I can, I can picture where, where in my day or where in my routine do I use this product? How do I use it? You know, the fact that it says moms are proud to make that means that I'm not the first mom, I'm not the only mom that is going to be serving this to their kids. So it adds that social proo. And you're sort of taking these different elements and putting it into one sentence that is very much focused on benefits and not the feature of the product itself. So that said, I had another thought, which is that, you know, a lot of brands love to do rebrands and we do tons of rebrands at my company, Sharma Brands. And a big part of a good rebrand is not necessarily just to rebrand the actual like design and typography and colors and button styles and things of that nature. It's also in the positioning and the ux, right? It's really like the positioning in the UX is, is what makes a rebrand. The UI, you know, the fancy design, the colors, etc. It's all layered on top. But you know, if you look at a site with terrible UI but amazing ux, it's going to convert, it's going to work. So that said, reposition copywriting from features to benefits is, I would call it 40% of a rebrand. If you, if you feel like you need a rebrand, I would start with that and then take a look at your site UX and I bet you would get, you know, 70% of the way through in terms of what you're trying to do with that rebrand. Okay, next one. Going along with the copy. This is, I think the last piece of copy related stuff is to use bullet points versus fancy copy. So fancy paragraph, you know, on brand, brand jargon, all that kind of stuff, that's great. And if you plan to grow your brand really slow and steady and you know, you want to take that more luxury brand approach where everything has to be super on brand and whatnot, then you do you. But as a performance marketer, I'm a fan of bullet points. I don't think that fancy copy is, you know, fancy copy is great post purchase. In my opinion. Once somebody's already become a part of the brand, you have no brand. If you don't have Customers. So I'm always a fan of let's use bullet points. Let's get customers in the door. They're easy to read, they don't look intimidating. You get to the point, and people can skim bullet points and still get the gist, right? Even those four things I just said, easy to read, they don't look intimidating. You get to the point, you can skim and still get the gist. Those were just bullet points I just wrote in my notes. So you see how easy it is. Bullet points, way better than a chunky paragraph. It's also, it plays off this other thought that I wrote down, which is sort of this sound bite strategy. With the sound bite strategy, you actually see it a lot in news and reporting where what they'll try to do is, is take a headline or a sentence, something that you'll remember, and it's easy for you to remember, and then regurgitate elsewhere. So, you know, somebody says, well, you know, actually this happens all the time with headlines, right? Headlines are the. The biggest culprit of the sound bite strategy. You. You have some crazy headline which is, you know, some form of clickbait, probably, and the goal is to make it easy to replicate for somebody to consume that and then go, go share it after, right? So, like, how many times have you read a headline on Wall Street Journal or New York Times or wherever you get your news, and then you go to a group chat and you say, whoa, did you see? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's the sound bite strategy at play, right? It's basically taking something that's very easy to digest and internalize and remember, remember being the key, and then making it easy for making it something that you then regurgitate later. And this is something that you definitely want to do on your website because, again, it makes it very easy to remember. I also call this, like the girlfriend test. So if, you know, if you've ever ordered something and your girlfriend's like, hey, what? What the fuck did you just order? Why did you order that? Right? The sound bite strategy is really useful because if there's five bullet points as to why somebody ordered Black Wolf Nation men's body wash, then, you know, somebody can regurgitate that back to their girlfriend. The David Protein site actually does a really good job of this. They have a section that reads, 75% of David's calories come from protein. This is 50% higher than any other bar. That right there, that's the sound bite. When somebody says, why did you order David Protein? It's so expensive. Why did this box just show up? You know what makes David Protein better, right? You have this sound bite from the headline that you can now take and leverage elsewhere. So the sound bite strategy is real. And you know, next time you like watch news or consume any news, try to see if you can spot it because it's a very like, it's a very real thing that publications do so that you remember it and then you, you know, regurgitate it later. Whether you're spending 50,000 per month, 50,000 per week, or 50,000 per day on ads, there's one thing that you need in all those scenarios. It's creative analytics that help you understand what's working and drive more revenue. With Motion, their software makes it so stupid simple to see what is performing, what is missing the mark, and what you should continue to double down on. With Motion, their software makes it so stupid simple to see what's performing, what's missing the mark, and what you should continue to double down on. Motion reports are also the only reports I've ever been able to send to a brand, CEO or cmo, but also to the professional performance marketing team and to the creative team. Their UI makes it so easy to interface, so whatever you're looking for, you can find it or you can create custom reports for it. It's literally an idiot proof software. And I say that as someone who gets easily confused with complex ui. I want you to try Motion because like myself, I bet you won't be able to live without it once you try it. Go to motionapp.com and when you talk to their sales team, mention limited supply to get 50% off your first month. Month again, that's MotionApp.com to get 50% off your first Month when you mention limited supply to their sales team. Try it out and let me know how you like it. Next one is cart gamification. It's 2024. Like, why are you not optimizing the cart that you have on your site? If you've got a standard Shopify cart, I don't know what you're doing. You're clearly not trying hard enough. You need to work with a cart that focuses on gamification, on building aov, on building upt, which stands for units per transaction, AKA the number of items in your cart and is focused on getting more products in there and converting people and also in a way that feels rewarding to them. It shouldn't just be that you're just trying to go get more products in the cart with nothing for them. Because why would they do that? So here's how I think about it. If you have an empty cart, you should be showing your social proof. That might be a customer quote, it might be a publication testimonial, it might be that you have 9,000 five star reviews. It might be whatever it may be, it might be even a video or an unboxing. I don't know. I would definitely recommend the first two or three options. I just said. You can also have category block buttons that drive people to collections pages. You could feature a new customer offer or a box bundle. A lot of times too. What I like to do is figure out what is, what is the product or the bundle that has the highest sell through rate for net new customers coming to the site. And let's put that in there because if we know that you know somebody's on the site and they don't know what they're looking for because they open an empty cart, that means they don't know what they're looking for yet. We should put something for them there. AKA what is the bundle or the product that has the highest possible sell through for a net new customer. If you have a consumable in the cart, then I think you should make it very easy to show somebody that they can subscribe and save by enabling a subscription. I believe the Native and the Magic Spoon website both do a really good job of this. And it should just be one click, right? It shouldn't require somebody to delete the item in the cart. Go back to the pdp, check subscription and then do it. If you don't have a consumable item in the cart, but you have more than one product to sell, then you should be using the cart to upsell complementary products based on what is already in cart. Sometimes that's adjacent collections and sometimes it's just other popular, popular flavors or variants of what is already in the cart. So for example, if I buy a suitcase from a luggage brand and they also sell backpacks that may be in the cart, that's where they're selling backpacks. Or maybe they're selling an add on for the suitcase or maybe they're selling an extended battery pack that goes with the suitcase, right? Or if I'm, if I'm buying sheets, maybe I've bought this, you know, bedding set from Parachute, let's call it. And in the cart they're going to upsell me a different color of pillowcases knowing that you know I'm about to spend a few hundred bucks on a sheet set. So what's an extra 40 bucks on some more variety of pillowcase colors? Now once you figure that out, the next piece is to set a free shipping threshold in your cart. This always, always, always drives up AOV as long as you're within reasonable range of the basket size that you can build with your product lineup. So you know, if your AOV is now like, call it 30 bucks, you're not going to get to 90 by putting the free shipping threshold at 80, right? But if your AOV is 30 bucks and you put the free shipping threshold at 40, you could probably get to like a 35 AOV. And, and the next level of that is also free gift options at different cart thresholds. So for example, once you get past free shipping, you know, maybe that's the first unlock. Then you have, you know, if we're, if we're. Salud. Maybe you unlock free stick 5 stick pack sample of a new flavor, and then the next tier of that might be, you know, you unlock another full 30 stick pack packet, whatever it may be. You want to basically show people that, hey, if you're going to buy more products here, if you need more products, we're going to reward you for that. So we want you to do that now versus, you know, buy one order today, come back two weeks later and buy something else. One of my favorite examples of this is the true classic website. If you go to their site and you start adding things to cart, you'll see how they gamify the cart in order to get you to add more products in. And it's just a beautiful way of rewarding customers. But also it's a win, win, win. Right? It's a win for the customer, it's a win for the brand, it's a win for the performance marketer. So why not do it? Okay, next piece is, is just this concept of empathetic customer journey. So again, I spoke about this with the comparison chart, but you know, there, there are so many products that exist where people are just intimidated and all you have to do is just figure out what intimidating about that and then build an experience around that. So if you go back to the Mirror Mate website, you know, one thing that we identified when we started working together was this concept of putting together mirror frames for somebody who's not a builder or a, you know, like, I mean, look at me. I, I don't, I don't do handyman work in my apartment, unfortunately. Sorry to disappoint all of you that maybe thought I did, but the thought of somebody Telling me, you know, me seeing that I could get a mirror frame looks great, the thought of then me going ahead and putting that together, not so great. So there's a lot of stuff where there are people on the fence and you need to get them over the fence with their purchase decision. And that's the biggest unlock. Sometimes that is the unlock that you need. Right? It's almost the equivalent of like product market fit. Obviously you have a good product, it's going to do well, but you need to make sure that people feel comfortable about the product arriving and how they, how they make use of it. So go to the, go to the mirrormate pdp, like choose a frame, go to their PDP and go through that app onboarding experience that we made. It's, I should say it's an app that we made for the onboarding experience. The whole idea is to create a very empathy driven customer journey. Everything that somebody has a question about along the way, we've answered it. If you have a question at one of the steps, we have little icons there for you to make sure that you fully understand what's going on. And, and then, you know, let's say somebody is going through the process and they're like, you know what, this is still too much. We even created this buy now, measure later option where you can actually just purchase the frame and then the customer service team will reach out to you personally and make sure they work with you to understand what is your framing and your dimensions and all of that. It is empathy. First design should be the gold standard of site design. It always is whenever we work on sites. And I think that's why conversion rates are always so great as a result. But it goes hand in hand with conversion rate. And you know, the more that you can sort of put yourself in somebody else's shoes versus just trying to get that, you know, that, that sale or selling too hard again, it goes back to like the Apple store versus the AT&T or Verizon store, right? The more that you're like, hey, let me, let me, let me make sure I give you all the right information and as much as you possibly need in order for you to make an informed decision, the better the outcome is. Okay, next one is social proof. So obviously we talk about social proof all the time. It blows my mind that people still don't put social proof above the fold in the hero, you know, on the product page, on the collections page, in their product cards, in their TikTok shop cards, in their ads. I mean, come on, this Is this is the. You know, you're asking somebody to come to your website, they've never heard of you before, and put their credit card info in. You've got to make it so obvious that you're not a scam and that you've got something that they're going to end up getting that. That when they place the order, the product is going to arrive. And it doesn't matter if you're a $200 million a year brand or if you're a $2 million a year brand or you just started yesterday, if you don't have social proof, you are killing your conversion rate as a result. So the three main ones that I am a fan of, One is customer reviews. I think this is the holy grail of customer experience. Customer social proof. Sorry. And the reason is because everything else you can for sure buy to some degree, right? Influencers, celebrity press, you can. I mean, there's literally sites. You can literally go to a website and say, I want to buy this article in Vogue Australia for 1300 bucks. You make the purchase, you put the quote you need, and then, boom, you got the quote with the. With the Vogue logo. So I think consumers have obviously caught on to that fact, and that's why customer reviews do a good job. Customer reviews, now, if you take it to the next level, they should always be the ones that you highlight, should be focused on benefits, right? They should speak to what did the product do for somebody? Not just that, you know, it shouldn't just be, I love my Jolie showerhead. The color is beautiful, right? No, it should say, I've tried for months, I've tried for years to get rid of my eczema, and nothing worked until I brought my Jolie. Thank you so much for making this process so easy. That's a fire review to put on a landing page or a product page because it speaks to the benefits. It speaks to how easy it was to implement. And if you. If you're a brand that's doing well, you've obviously got reviews like this. Those are the ones that you want to highlight. Take it a step further. If you check out Jolie's PDP under the choose your ailment section, they basically taken this concept of highlighted reviews and called it, hey, tell us what your problem is. We'll show you what people are saying about it, which I thought was a beautiful way to lay that out. The next type of social proof you could put in is influencers or celebrities or, you know, my. My favorite version of this is actually more What I would call like subject matter experts. So who are people that have the validity or the influence or the credentials in order to be taken seriously about this review? So, for example, if you've got a hydration stick, right, you could obviously have influencer or celebrity testimonial review quote. And those do great. Because what it does is it, again, it's like a comparison chart, creates that sort of frame of reference back to somebody that people might recognize. But when you have a subject matter expert or somebody who has the credentials to be talking about hydration, you know, call it Soul Cycle instructor, a fitness instructor, swim coach, whatever it may be, right now you're actually getting the person who's, who's reading this and consuming it, is now reading it from a different point of view. That has a lot more authority as to why they're saying it. So I remember a few years ago, I used to do this with Soul Cycle and Rumble instructors, Rumble boxing. And we would, we would do photo shoots with them. We would get, we would do a bunch of Instagram posts with them. And it did so well because people thought, well, you know, yeah, you could obviously get influencers to post and get quotes from them. But look, if you've got Soul Cycle instructors talking about your hydration product, it's obviously working because they, you know, they're, they're exercising for hours, hours per day. The last one is press quotes. So just like it sounds, featuring quotes from press outlets and publications on your site that talk about the product. Ideally, you're taking the part that, that talks about the benefit. So again, if you look at Jolie's homepage, the first press quote says, my hair and skin never looked better from apartment therapy. It speaks directly to the benefit. And that's what they already know people are looking for with a Jolie, So they put that front and center on the homepage. Next one. I've talked about this many times, so it should be nothing new, but it's the five main landing page questions. If you can. If you can answer these five questions over and over again on a landing page, in an email flow, in a TV ad, in an ad creative on your pdp, literally anywhere, you will win. The five questions are, explain what you're selling. Why should I care? How fast can I get it if I order today? How, how will it make my life better? And how does this compare to other products in the market? If you can answer those five, you're, you're golden. That's basically ux, in my opinion, is answering these five obviously In a way that is compelling and, and makes a good case. But these are the five questions that consumers are always caring about. And if you can get ahead of this, you're going to probably lessen the chances that somebody leaves your website to go elsewhere to get the answers to this question. Next one. Adding a promise or a satisfaction guarantee. This is something that I actually didn't think was going to move the needle that much, but it moves the needle a lot. And, and essentially what it is is it's just some sort of a message that says something like, you know, try risk free. Actually this is, I pulled this from Magic Spoon there says try risk free, 100% happiness guaranteed. Right. And their on site refund policy is basically that if you're unhappy within six months of purchase, you can make a return, no questions asked. You are probably doing some form of this, right? If some customer emails you and says, yo, I'm super unhappy, it's probably not likely you're going to tell them to go kick rocks. You're going to, there's some sort of a policy you already have. So just make that more obvious. Anytime somebody is making a high intent or a purchase decision. So if they are, you know, the first place I'd put this Homepage Hero, why not second place collections page maybe right near the top. Third place, the PDP is right below the CTA for adding to cart. Fourth place would be landing pages all over and fifth place would be in the actual checkout itself, making sure that that's reiterated, reiterated there, that there is some sort of a refund or, or a happiness guarantee or satisfaction guarantee. Because again, to my earlier point, you are asking somebody to come to your site. They've maybe never heard of you before. They don't even know where you know who's taking, who you are, who's taking their credit card info. But if you have some sort of a guarantee that, hey, if you try this, if you don't like this, we got you, then it just helps increase that conversion rate. Okay, next one. I don't think I'm going to have time to go through all of these. So I'm going to go through, I'm going to go through two more. This is one that I'm shocked more people don't do. But updating your Homepage Hero banner, what do I mean by Homepage Hero? Well, when you go to a website, a lot of times the first call it half, maybe 40% of the screen on the homepage is what you call the hero. I think Apple may have Actually coined that term in the way that they develop their sites, at least that's where I first saw it probably like 10 years ago. And, you know, most brands actually don't change this really ever. Like, a lot of brands leave this pretty static. And. And they do that because they think it's a better way to, you know, represent the brand as if somebody's coming for the first time. Reality is that is like your. That those are your windows on your. On your store, right, Facing the street. That's, in my opinion, where you've got to focus on merchandising. If you've got promotions, they've got to be active. If you've got offers, they need to be there. If you've got new flavors, new, new variants, they should be listed there. You should have social proof in there. You should have a combination of visuals, in my opinion. You should have video and static, maybe a product card. You should have social proof, like a customer quote, a review count, maybe a small press quote like the example we just talked about on Jolie. And then you need to sell the promise right in your homepage Hero. You need to sell the promise. If you're not. Okay, take a step back. How many people do you think are going past your homepage hero? Maybe 50%. How many people do you think are getting past the second or third section of your homepage? It's probably 20%. So 80% of the people have already left by the second or third section. If you haven't sold the promise in the hero, you're fucked. Right? You gotta make it really easy, ideally with bullet points or icons, to understand as a site visitor, what the product can do for me as a customer, if I go to your site and I can't figure that out without having to scroll, you've probably lost this person as a customer. That's why your bounce rate's high, your conversion rate's low. You have to also, you have to sell the promise because you have to earn that. Scroll past the hero section and you have to entice somebody with what you have to offer. Right? You can't just expect somebody to go to your homepage and then them be motivated to go and browse your website. Could you imagine walking into a store that you've never been to before and thinking, you know what? I feel like I'm not getting anything from the front of the store or from the windows outside, so I'm gonna go spend the rest of my day walking the entire store. It just doesn't happen. And the same thing Applies to E Commerce. So highly recommend use the hero on the homepage to 1. Merchandise 2 add better visuals. 3. Make sure you have a good compelling headline. But the main one or and also social proof. But the main one is to sell the promise. What is it at a high level? And maybe this is where you combine the sound bite strategy, right? What is it at a high level that somebody is getting as a result of becoming a consumer or a customer of your product? Okay, the last one that I'll talk about and maybe we'll save the rest of this for another episode or a part of an episode is to. Let's see, I'm gonna go with making the details easy to access. So if you've run a beauty brand, food supplement, personal care product product, you know, if you've run a site or, or run, run a brand in that category, you already know that one of the most clicked elements of your homepage or sorry, your product page is the ingredients panel or the nutrition label. You know, people want to know what's included, what isn't included, what allergens are present, how many servings are included, how many days will the product last? Is there an expiration date I gotta be aware of? How do I store the product, how much sugar is in it, Is it gluten free? These are all things that, that are top tier questions on a lot of people's mind. And the standard like Shopify templates that exist, what they do is they have these little drawers right below the, in the shop section. A lot of times and you have to like, you know, it'll say details and then you gotta click the plus to open it and then it goes down. And most people, because when you build a site, you're, you know, in the back end of Shopify, they sort of just put like three, four paragraphs of text. Nothing is really easy to understand. Nothing's in bullet points or icons, let alone as a result, a lot of people don't understand what the details are because maybe they missed that thing or maybe they open it and it's not easy to understand and they end up leaving the site and maybe finding a, finding a competitor. Or maybe they leave the site to go ask a question and Google hey, is this, is this product gluten free? And then of course, what's the first thing that pops up above that is an ad for your competitor. So figure out what those details are for your brand that people need to know in order to make a purchase. What are those buyer decision questions people have? And then make it Very easy for people to understand and see. It shouldn't require a click. Every time you have a click, you lose a chance that somebody is going to stick around. Right. That's why I love landing pages. And in this case, just, you know, you don't even have to. Well, one. Step one would be to make it easy to read when you do open the drawer. So bullet points. Step two would be take those bullet points, turn them into icons. Step three, which is really what you should do, is just build another section that's easy for people to visually see without having to open up a drawer and make sure that you answer those questions. Another. Another great example of this, actually, on the Jolie site, I believe, is if you scroll through the product carousel, they just answer a lot of these questions in the product carousel itself, either through social proof or some of the benefits that they list out. But you've got to make the details very easy to access because that is where. That's where people leave. All right, I'm gonna pause there. It's been close to 45 minutes, and so I'm gonna pause there. I've got more. More of these CRO tips. Again, this was something that a lot of people really liked, so I will definitely revisit it. I hope you guys have a great week. You know, Black Friday sales should be kicking off soon. I hope you're locked in. I hope you're getting good sleep. I hope you're staying hydrated, making sure you're taking care of yourself. Go for walks, whatever it may be that you need to make sure your mental sanity is in check. We're about to enter the Super Bowl. I hope you're ready. I hope you're strapped, excited, and I'm gonna see you next week. So make sure you meet me right back here Wednesday next week. And if I'm in your car and you're listening to me in the car or on a run or at your gym, I genuinely. I love you. I appreciate you. Thank you so much for doing that. If I can make this podcast better, which I know I can, I want. I want you to tell me, because that's how it gets better, right? It's not gonna get better if you don't tell me. So shoot me an email, shoot me a DM if you got my number, shoot me a text. I want to know how this thing gets better from you, in your opinion, as a listener, as a consumer. And I wish you nothing but the best of luck going into Black Friday. Peace. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next time to cut through the noise on CPG retail and e Commerce. If you enjoyed this episode, why not share it with a friend? And be sure to subscribe wherever you listen so you don't miss the next one.