Episode 2 of The Growth Ecommerce Show aired yesterday and we had a special guest in the “building”: Jon MacDonald.
Who is Jon MacDonald?
Jon MacDonald is the founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization firm that has achieved results for some of the largest online brands including Adobe, Nike, Xerox, The Economist, and more. He regularly contributes content on conversion optimization to publications like Entrepreneur and Inc. He knows how to get visitors to take action.
Jon started his career as the sole web designer/developer for a start-up advertising agency during the dot-com boom. Throughout his career he has engaged with dozens of brands including Autodesk, Apple, Columbia Sportswear, Comcast, Cisco, General Electric, Harley-Davidson, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Nationwide Insurance, Nike, Nokia, Red Bull, UPS, Vodafone and Xerox.
Here are some key takeaways from this episode!
Mistakes companies do that are harming their conversions.
Jon speaks about data-driven decisions:
There are a lot of brands still aren’t making data backed decisions.
So they’re not utilizing the clicks and movements of their site visitors to truly make decisions that
are going to impact what consumers are doing on their Website.
Secondly I think a lot of brands think that conversion optimization is a one time thing.
A/B testing for example and that type of optimization needs to have a compounding effect, so it needs to be growth month over month or test over test. Test your learning from a test and then you’re compounding those learnings into the next hypothesis, the next test into the next improvement on the site. And it’s that compounding growth over time that is really going to show massive and sustainable which I think is the key sustainable growth.
Don’t turn your brand into a discount brand.
Jon mentions that applying a discount strategy right now might do you worse than good on the long term:
I’m seeing a lot of e-commerce brands who are discounting right now and I think that’s the wrong approach.
I think discounting is not optimization. I call it margin drain because that’s really what it is… it’s just hurting your margins and revenues and it’s not truly helping your conversions in a sustainable way. So I think brands should be maintaining price integrity right now.
Do you really need that discount for your product in order to get it to sell?
Selling with discounts might make you feel like a lot of problems would go away. But then those problems come back as soon as you get rid of the discount.
And so, I’m an advocate of solving those challenges that your consumers are having.
And I think that discounting is going to devalue brands in the long term. I often say, you know once you bring a consumer on discount they are forever a discount customer and they’re gonna see your brand as a discount brand moving forward because they will never want to pay retail again.
What eCommerce managers should do right now?
Providing consumers with an optimal experience now more than ever is really really relevant.
Instead of cutting marketing spend I think reallocating some of that spend to focus on how to better convert your traffic is really going to be key because what you want to do is make sure you’re getting even a higher return on that ad spend.
In addition to that, focusing on conversion right now or on user experience metrics of conversion, is going to be sustainable over time, while ad spend and ad cost are going to go back up again.
Make sure to check the whole episode to learn more about how to convert your website visitors into buyers.
Next week we are going to be live again at 3 PM GMT with a special guest – Thomas Bartke – Known as the “Pixel Whisperer”, Thomas Bartke is the creator of Trackify, a Shopify app that supports and enhances the leverage features of Facebook Pixels for your Shopify store. This group is for Thomas to speak to his potential customers and current customers, and teach them how to leverage Facebook ads for better results.
Stay tuned and have an amazing weekend!
