Over the past three decades, Matthew Stafford has been entrepreneurial and successfully built several businesses across various industries, including Concrete, Brick and Mortar Locations, POD, and Software-based ventures.
Matthew, the Managing Partner of Build Grow Scale and an equity owner of some in-house eCommerce brands, has mentored thousands of store owners through paid eCommerce groups and live events.
His experience has also allowed him to help hundreds of ecommerce brands scale past the million-dollar mark – with many hitting the $10 million mark. To top it off, he’s been speaking on stages about eCommerce optimization for the past seven years!
Before COVID-19, BGS hosted the largest yearly eCommerce-focused event in North America – BGS LIVE.
What you will learn
- How optimizing your eCommerce site can double your revenue without increasing traffic.
- Why asking customers what almost stopped them from buying can unlock major sales growth.
- How simple changes to checkout forms can reduce abandoned carts and boost conversions.
- Why AI is reshaping traffic strategies and what it means for your eCommerce business.
- How top eCommerce brands use customer experience to drive repeat sales and long-term success.
Transcript
Jeff Bullas
00:00:04 – 00:00:54
Hi everyone, and welcome to the Jeff Bullas Show. Today, I have with me Matthew Stafford. Now, Matthew has been entrepreneurial and successfully built several businesses across various industries, including Concrete, Brick and Mortar Locations, POD, and Software-based ventures.
Matthew Stafford, the Managing Partner of Build Grow Scale and an equity owner of some in-house Ecommerce brands, has knowledge and expertise, enabling him to mentor thousands of store owners through paid Ecommerce groups and live events.
His experience has also allowed him to help hundreds of ecommerce brands scale past the million-dollar mark – with many hitting the $10 million mark. To top it off, he’s been speaking on stages about ecommerce optimization for the past seven years!
Before COVID-19, BGS hosted the largest yearly Ecommerce-focused event in North America – BGS LIVE.
Jeff Bullas
00:00:55 – 00:01:22
Uh, Bill Greyscale hosted the largest yearly e-commerce focused event in North America, BGS Live. Matthew, welcome to the show. It’s great to have you here and look forward to, um, finding out how to, um, grow an e-commerce site, and, um, very intrigued by what you’ve learned over the years. But on the other topic at the end there, as I mentioned was, uh, COVID did, um, I suppose kill a lot of event companies, I think, during the pandemic.
Matthew Stafford
00:01:22 – 00:01:59
Yeah, for us, that was our lead gen, um, up until that point for our business. And uh it it it definitely, I, I would say that it was a wake up call to me, um, and. I didn’t actually learn it until about 2 years ago. I have a mentor that, uh, literally said to me, he goes, I used to always think I was smart, and I used to say that all the time. I would say I’m really smart and I’m a good worker. I’m a hard worker. And he asked me the question, he goes, well, what if you weren’t smart?
Matthew Stafford
00:01:59 – 00:02:40
If you, if you quit saying that, um, would that, what would that do? And I’m like, oh, yeah, I guess if I looked at things from that frame, it would open my mind up and let me, um, actually, uh, probably see better ideas than what I think I have. And I would say that COVID, um, really taught me that I probably was smart and a hard worker then, uh, because when that went away. Uh, it changed the metrics of our business and I had to learn how to create systems and processes, uh, so that everything in a business wasn’t reliant on the owners.
Jeff Bullas
00:02:41 – 00:03:00
Yeah. Exactly. So, uh, in other words, essentially providing, you know, good processes, and I’m, I’m the same as like, OK, um, I’m good at selling, but then I was really crap at processes, and that means a bunch of things from losing control of the business, not knowing what you’re doing, not being able to delegate, and the list goes on, doesn’t it?
Matthew Stafford
00:03:01 – 00:03:11
Yes, absolutely. It’s very humbling, but uh uh through those more difficult times is actually where I think the greatest lessons of the business come.
Jeff Bullas
00:03:12 – 00:03:34
Yeah. Exactly. So tell us about how you got into e-commerce. Is there, uh, you know, were you intrigued by it? Uh, was it something you think you were sort of like designed to do and called to do in terms of that? What, what led you to, um, go, I want to be a specialist in e-commerce and online stores?
Matthew Stafford
00:03:34 – 00:04:33
Yeah, so, um, like, like you alluded to, um, I had spent about 20, little over 20 years in the concrete and physical labor, um, area, and I, we would literally, I was on the road about 200 days a year, we were traveling, pouring big commercial pours for Menards, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Walmart, etc. doing parking lots and things like that and. In that time frame, I went to a Tony Robbins event, and he was selling a DVD series called Money Masters. And up until that point, you know, I’d built that company to about 25 people and we were probably doing 4 or $5 million a year and um. If you included the concrete, probably doing closer to 10 million, um, but just as far as like minus the materials and uh.
Matthew Stafford
00:04:33 – 00:05:00
I started listening to those monthly DVDs and they were people that were selling stuff online. And the very first one that I heard was a guy named Frank Kern, um, he was making like $50,000 a month selling an ebook on how to teach your parents to talk. And up until that point, I had never used my computer for anything other than email and blueprints and because they would, they would email us blueprints, we would do estimates and
Matthew Stafford
00:05:01 – 00:05:53
Ship them back and stuff, but never ever to make a sale. And I thought, wow, that’s really intriguing. And by the 3rd month of those programs, I’m like, I’m gonna try to sell something online. And there was a site, uh, called Teespring, which is where you could basically create a design on a T-shirt, put it up, and then sell, um, or run ads to it and sell it. And, um, for some reason, the first one that I tried, um, it was kind of humorous and um. Uh, I’m trying to think of the exact one, Oh yeah, Schmidt happens. And so what I did is I took everybody with the last name of Schmidt and I put on the shirt, Schmidt happens and um.
Matthew Stafford
00:05:54 – 00:06:21
Literally targeted everybody that had that last name and within probably within 3 hours, I’d sold about $10,000 worth of t-shirts and I was like, oh my word, this is crazy. And uh, that shirt, I ended up doing several other ones. I put them on like little kid shirts and said I’m a little Schmidt, um, and just a whole bunch of funny sayings around, um, that last name and so on.
Matthew Stafford
00:06:21 – 00:07:09
I ended up doing about 1000 with that. I thought this is actually really crazy. I did this part time goofing around. Um, I’m, I’m gonna, I think I could do this full time and I don’t have to travel and live on the road 200 days a year. And so I set a goal to be all done, uh, you know, running the concrete business within 5 years. And it was almost to the month, uh, 5 years that I had sold the concrete business. Two brick and mortar locations that we had that were like salons, um, in the Grand Rapids, Michigan area, and I was full time online. And so that first two years, uh, we sold about $15 million for the t-shirts and uh I, I thought, yeah, I’m gonna stick to online, um, work.
Jeff Bullas
00:07:10 – 00:07:17
Yeah, it’s So if you hadn’t gone to that conference and you hadn’t started, I suppose educating yourself,
Matthew Stafford
00:07:17 – 00:07:20
I would have never heard about it, never even known,
Jeff Bullas
00:07:20 – 00:07:35
yeah. Yeah, I suppose it’s being open to different ideas. Like you said, if you, if you think you’re too smart and too clever for your own boots, then the problem is that, uh, you’ll get a smack in the face eventually because, um, uh, chance and, uh, randomness will actually get in the way of life.
Matthew Stafford
00:07:36 – 00:08:13
Yeah, and I, I really could have said, I’m too busy. Like, cause I was too busy. Um, but it intrigued me enough that I actually, um, paid. One of the people that worked for me, I paid their little brother to help me do designs because I couldn’t, I had the ideas, but I couldn’t make the designs. And so I paid him to make them and I took that chance of like, OK, I’ve spent several $100 bought some ads and figured this stuff out. Um, but then once it started working, I was like, oh man, this is crazy. I can make a full-time income.
Matthew Stafford
00:08:13 – 00:08:29
Really fast, uh, with one person instead of 25 employees and having to worry about whether it’s sunny or rain or or concrete trucks getting stuck in traffic or any of these other things. I was like, this is, this is a different life.
Jeff Bullas
00:08:29 – 00:08:40
Yeah, well, you mentioned, uh, concrete, like you see some uh people building houses and concrete trucks don’t turn up, or the second one doesn’t turn up after you started the poor.
Matthew Stafford
00:08:41 – 00:09:23
So we did, we did, yeah, we did large commercial ports, so um the largest we ever did was 1700 yards. Um, so that’s, that’s a concrete truck. It took us 12 hours as a concrete truck every 4 minutes for 12 hours straight. And so, um, when you start doing the math, like, yeah, if they have a traffic jam or they don’t get there for 15 minutes. You have a 200 ft joint that’s getting hard and you have to chop it off and refresh it and do a bunch of other stuff. It’s a pain in the butt. And uh, so nothing that I’ve ever done online has been even close to the kind of work that we had to do uh when we were in physical labor.
Jeff Bullas
00:09:23 – 00:09:38
Yeah, well, my dad was a plumber, so, uh, I’ve, I’ve done some heavy, you know, I suppose, digging by hand and, uh, other stuff. So, um, but I discovered I didn’t like getting my hands dirty, so I obviously wasn’t designed to be a plumber. Yeah,
Matthew Stafford
00:09:38 – 00:10:16
So I, I’ll kind of give you the transition from that, um, that business we sold, like I said, about $15 million in t-shirts in about a two-year period. And I, I really thought, man, I’m amazing. I can do this. I’m gonna be so good at it. And so I started a Shopify site, um, selling kitchen products, and I was really good at driving traffic. That’s how I had sold so many t-shirts. And within 30, 40 days, we were selling a couple 100 units of these kitchen slicers and we added avocado tools and stuff like that and.
Matthew Stafford
00:10:17 – 00:10:46
I, I, I really thought like this is so easy, why doesn’t everybody do it? And then about 3 months in, the sales kept getting worse, getting worse, getting worse, and then finally we were, we were struggling, we were probably losing money every day for a little while, and I saw a guy, um, promoting, hey, learn how to do Google Analytics for $1000. I’ll give you 6 coaching calls. And I thought, oh, well, I want to look at the analytics of our site.
Matthew Stafford
00:10:46 – 00:11:06
Um, maybe I, I had no idea what it was going to turn into, but so I gave him the $1000 and did the 6 calls, and by the end of those 6 calls, I had our site instead of selling 300 to 400 units a day, um, and it had gone down to less than 50, um, back up to 400 or 500 units a day because.
Matthew Stafford
00:11:06 – 00:11:56
I could take the data that was happening on the site, go back and fix the site and make everything else work better. And um that was really uh how BGS got started. Um, I had a business partner. We parted ways about 3 years ago, but he was really good at teaching, and I was really good at figuring out the back end strategies of how to make it work. And so together, um, I was working on it. My site and then some friends of mine who I had sold T-shirts with, and we started really getting some um. Really good results consistently and we turned it into what PGS is today, which is where we um essentially partner with different brands and do all of their split testing data and analytics and help them scale their business.
Jeff Bullas
00:11:57 – 00:12:47
Yeah. So let’s talk about traffic, uh, because we are in the middle of, um, another transition where we’re leaning from, I suppose, a social web to an AI web. Yeah. Um, and it doesn’t mean it’s either or, but, um, and then on top of that, then we have, um, we had the search web, then we had the social web, now we’ve got the AI web. So driving traffic is becoming more of a challenge and we’re watching organic traffic, whether it’s from social or whether it’s from search. Um, so what have you learned about driving traffic in a cost-effective way? Because I’d be intrigued, number one, how’d you go from 50 to 500 in terms of recovering? Was that because you optimized content to improve your ranking on search?
Matthew Stafford
00:12:48 – 00:13:29
Um, I’ve no, I’ve never been good at SEO. Um, I have people on our team now that are good at it, but no, um, mine was always getting the eyeballs to the site. And, uh, my, my opinion. It is and it’s not always that popular, that uh traffic is not the problem. Uh, everybody thinks it is. The truth of the matter is most websites convert less than 2%. So that means if you get 100 visitors, 98 people who were interested in what you sell, raised their hand, clicked on an ad and came, left without buying anything. And everybody’s mentality is, oh, I need more traffic. I need more traffic.
Matthew Stafford
00:13:29 – 00:14:14
Like, no, if you get 2 more of those 98 people that left, you just doubled your business on the exact same ad spend. So now you can buy way more traffic than your other people can because they’re only getting 2 sales per 100, you’re getting 4. that changes your business metrics and now you can take market share. And so, uh, it’s never been for me, uh, the focus on traffic once I started working in data and analytics. It’s how I make the site so good that people want to buy or give you their lead information and let you market to them. And, and that’s really been what we’ve, uh, dialed in over the last 89 years by saying no to everything else.
Jeff Bullas
00:14:16 – 00:14:19
As in , what do you mean by everything else?
Matthew Stafford
00:14:19 – 00:14:47
We don’t, yeah, we don’t run paid media. We deal with a lot of paid media agencies that do that. Um, obviously, you know, the sites that we’re on, they have SEO and all the rest of that. Our main focus is once the person lands on that page, we do everything we can to get them to spend money or have a conversion event, which means, you know, enter their email or do whatever so that then you can market to them or. Get on a phone call or whatever.
Jeff Bullas
00:14:47 – 00:14:53
Right. So, are you concentrating more on, uh, physical products in terms of your e-commerce focus?
Matthew Stafford
00:14:54 – 00:15:38
Um, we did for the 1st 6 or 7 years, and what I realized over the last 2 years is that, um, that was actually, it limited us a lot because if you think about it, if you have a $50 product and we’re selling 1000 of them, and I come in and help you. Sell an extra 50%. Now you sold 500, you’ve only made an extra $25,000 or 250,000 after your cost of goods and ads and all the rest, the 2 or 3% that you can give me is very minimal. Um, and so I, I actually started working with some companies that sell digital products and their cost is
Matthew Stafford
00:15:39 – 00:16:00
Literally just ads. And so, um, if, if you’re working and getting it to convert to a digital product, if they sell 1000, um, they can give us a much larger percentage. And so it kind of pigeonholed us like when we only did digital or only did physical products for a while, now we do both. Right.
Jeff Bullas
00:16:01 – 00:16:16
So do you specialize more in what we call what you just described is where you help sell a product, is where you take a cut of selling their product, is you, is that, An affiliate or you’re just helping them and you take an equity position which profit share,
Matthew Stafford
00:16:16 – 00:16:46
we yeah, we do a profit share. We don’t take an equity position in the company and that’s um we’re going to own a good chunk of it. Um, most people, uh, they’re happy with this, this is what I say, most people are happy spending future money. They don’t like to spend money because their money is already accounted for. If I can help them make more, they’re willing to. They’re willing to part with that because they know in the future they’re gonna have, you know, it’ll be allocated correctly.
Jeff Bullas
00:16:46 – 00:16:58
Right. So tell us about your business model then, cause it sounds like you’ve actually maybe just part, you basically get paid on, when only when you increase sales for different e-commerce sites, is that correct?
Matthew Stafford
00:16:59 – 00:17:32
Yeah, it started that way. Now it’s got to the point where um Um, they really have to be doing about $200,000 a month for it to make sense for us to partner with them. And uh so we don’t necessarily do it over and above the 200,000 because we’ll put 5 people on their team. Um, there’ll be a front end developer, a back end developer, a Google Analytics guy, quality assurance, and then what we call an RO, which is revenue optimization rather than conversion rate optimization.
Matthew Stafford
00:17:32 – 00:18:12
And the reason why I say that is because, uh, we can make your conversion rate better by running a sale. Your conversion rate is going to go up. But what we really care about is revenue. How do you make more money that’s profitable? And that’s done through a really, really good site that’s easy for people to use that they want to come back and buy again and again. So by the time you clean up your site, you really end up having a higher repeat. A higher average order value, um, higher conversion rate, that’s really what we care about, so we’re looking at the site very holistically rather than just right at the point of sale.
Jeff Bullas
00:18:13 – 00:18:26
So, let’s talk about conversion. What are some of the key elements? You go there and go, you don’t need more traffic, you just need to be, you need to get your conversion rate from 2% to 4%, and whatever you can reach, right?
Matthew Stafford
00:18:27 – 00:19:05
Yeah, so I’m, I’m gonna give you, um, if, if the listeners actually do this, um, there won’t be a single one that doesn’t make more money. Um, and I will tell you, we have run. At this point, probably thousands of tests, definitely 100s and hundreds and hundreds of tests. Nothing has ever been more impactful than this one thing. And so every single engagement that we start, the very first thing that we do is we put a pop up on the thank you page that says, what was the one thing that almost made you not buy?
Matthew Stafford
00:19:06 – 00:19:57
Right, OK. And so somebody that just spent money with you and that uh trusts you enough to have pulled out their credit card, you ask them what they didn’t, what almost made them not buy. They will tell you what they didn’t like, or what was confusing, or what caused friction, or what they didn’t understand. And I can tell you over the last 3 or 4 years. Um, that one question has probably been responsible for 6 of our 10 biggest wins, uh, which literally ends up being millions of dollars in revenue across the different brands that we work with. And so getting that information from your customer is invaluable. Uh, and 9 times out of 10, we’re really good at looking at a site. They would tell us stuff that we didn’t notice.
Jeff Bullas
00:19:58 – 00:20:03
Yeah. Exactly, because they’d come with an outsider’s eyes rather than an insider’s eyes.
Matthew Stafford
00:20:04 – 00:20:04
Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:20:05 – 00:20:10
So, driving traffic Ben is all about paid ads for you guys. Is that correct?
Matthew Stafford
00:20:10 – 00:20:47
Um, no, because the sites that we work on, they do, they usually have a couple pronged approach. Some have influencers, some have paid ads, some do SEO, uh, all traffic’s not equal for sure. Um, they have repeat buyers, uh, so no, our, our goal is, uh, the better the site works, the better all of that works, and for sure, um, once they become a customer, how you handle your customer service makes a huge difference as to whether they’re going to come back and keep buying too.
Jeff Bullas
00:20:47 – 00:21:34
Yeah. OK. So in other words, repeat customers. So what about, OK, so one strategy is To actually increase sales is once you’ve got that loyalty, you’ve got, you’ve created trust, um, Because gaining a new customer, the numbers are something like it costs you, you know, 8 to 10 times more to get a new customer as to sell to your existing customer. I don’t know the exact number, but it’s multiples. So, uh, so in other words, Basically upselling, OK, either on the sales page or getting to buy it later, in other words, you want to get the average sale of $200 a year instead of $50 a year, for example. How do you achieve that?
Matthew Stafford
00:21:35 – 00:22:04
Um, again, that will be through a better experience on the site, for sure. Um, 11, I, I’ll give you two different examples. Uh, one thing, if you think about it, I always ask the site owner because they always go, oh, we’ll give you 10% off your first purchase. And uh it always creates a hassle for them down the line, because people will buy from them multiple times, put in different emails, etc. and I said, I said to them exactly what you said.
Matthew Stafford
00:22:04 – 00:22:51
Um, you realize that as a repeat buyer, you don’t have the acquisition cost anymore that you do on the brand new buyer that you’re giving a 10% discount to. If I bought from you already, and I liked your product and I came back and you said, oh, only first time buyers get 10% off, I feel like, why wouldn’t you treat me better than someone who’s never bought from you if I’m already a customer? And so I think that that puts a negative connotation in people’s minds. And so what we try to do is find ways to reward people to come back and buy again and again, more than what you would to acquire a new customer, because over time that person’s way more valuable.
Matthew Stafford
00:22:51 – 00:23:22
And what we found is that by doing that, um, the success, the lifetime success, uh, when things do get tough, those people have a set of loyal buyers that come back and buy again and again and again, you know, we have different sites that we work on, they have 21, 22 times repeat purchases, uh, from particular clients, and I think that that comes from the fact that they treat their customer a little different. And understand the lifetime value of the customer, not the first time acquisition.
Jeff Bullas
00:23:23 – 00:24:04
Yeah. And you only have to look at, you know, banks and mortgages, um, like, you know, big incentives to get a really low interest rate when they start, then the interest rates come down, and then the, the, the loyal customer. Uh, can’t get the rate that the new customers are going, hang on, I’m gonna spend about $500,000 interest on you in the next 20 years or it might be $1.5 million in interest. Yeah. So let’s piss our customers off that we already have, but I suppose that the side of that coin, the other side of that coin is that, It’s hard to move to a different bank and get the mortgage done because of all the paperwork, that’s much stickier.
Matthew Stafford
00:24:05 – 00:24:40
Yeah, yeah, but um, buying physical products and even, you know, digital products is not that much stickiness. Um, I, you know, I, I do a lot of podcasts and people ask me like, what’s one consistent thing that you see across these really successful brands. And I will tell you that um over the last 9 or 10 years. Every single one of them has hit that $10 million.20 million dollar mark, and in all reality, not, not the million dollar mark, because a lot of people have done that to a couple 100 of our students.
Matthew Stafford
00:24:40 – 00:25:10
Any of them that have hit that $10 million mark, they are maniacal about customer service. Like that part of their business is non-negotiable, and it’s never done poorly ever, and they communicate with their customers. And so that’s the one thing that’s not different, um, with any one of those really successful brands is that they take care of their customer, and over time, they do build a brand.
Matthew Stafford
00:25:10 – 00:25:37
Uh, 9 times out of 10 people, oh my brand, all my brand, my brand. I’m like, you don’t have a brand. And they’re like, What do you mean? I’m like, if you turn off ads, are you going to stay in business? And they’re like, No. So then you don’t have a brand. A brand is people that know, like and trust you and buy your product without you having to, um, drive them to your site. And, the way that you make a brand is by making a lot of sales and taking good care of people so that they come back again and again.
Jeff Bullas
00:25:38 – 00:26:24
Yeah. So let’s lean into, um, you know, sales pages and conversions. So we talked about improving your page by asking for that pop up. That’s a lovely, simple tactic, which you’ve said 6 out of 10 improve. What are some of the other things you can do to improve your conversion rate? Obviously user experience can be quite complicated depending on the product, but what are some tips you can provide that you’ve learned over the years to improve the sales page conversion rate. Once they show up, you’ve spent the money on the traffic, they show up and like you said, most conversion. You know, 2% is considered a pretty normal average. How could you double it, must I guarantee, but what are the? Yeah.
Matthew Stafford
00:26:25 – 00:27:08
So um I’ll give you two or three tactics that um they can apply that will go through the different stores or through the different parts of the website. I believe that each page has a specific purpose. Um, and so when you get to the checkout, uh, you’re asking them for their personal information. Their email, their address, their phone number, things like that, um, and I was reading a book by Robert Chielini, and this is 56 years ago, and in there, he talks about an experiment that he did where, um, these people were in line and like 10 people came and asked if they could cut, only they only allowed 2 people in the other 8 people, they told them no.
Matthew Stafford
00:27:09 – 00:27:34
Then the next 10 people that came, gave them a reason, and it was just a made up reason. My kids will be late for school or I, I’m running behind or whatever. And then all of a sudden 8 out of 10 people were allowed to cut, just because they gave them a reason. And then, um, so I thought, you know, we’re tracking the form field the form field errors on a checkout and
Matthew Stafford
00:27:34 – 00:28:02
We get the most errors where the email is and where the phone number is. The address is obviously, um, they don’t want to send it to the wrong address, but they’re not giving us their good email or their phone number. And so we wanted to improve that to try to improve the conversion of the page. And so what we did is we changed the text that’s in that form field. Instead of saying email, we say email required for order confirmation.
Matthew Stafford
00:28:02 – 00:28:32
And the reason why we do that is because the email, the order confirmation email is literally opened 85% of the time. It’s the most opened email you’ll ever send. And by doing that, we reduced the form field errors in the email by 279%. So 3 times less errors by putting in why we wanted their email. What we also realized without trying to do this, we were trying to reduce the number of errors.
Matthew Stafford
00:28:32 – 00:29:19
We actually started recovering our abandoned carts at a much higher level, because people were giving us a good marketing email to go ahead and get them to come back and buy. Uh, and then so that worked so well, and this is a little before SMS became so big, but SMS is actually now one of the largest ways to recover, um, revenue on your site. And so now in the phone, we put the phone required for shipping notification. And who doesn’t want to know when their product ships. And so again, we reduced the number of errors and we’ve had as much as a 17% lift on the checkout page just by putting the form field text in there telling them why we’re asking for that information. Right,
Jeff Bullas
00:29:20 – 00:29:33
That’s very cool. So, um, with this, OK, so you’re dealing with a digital product, for example, that’s, That’s a different thing. But I suppose you could change, but I suppose you could change the reason for that.
Matthew Stafford
00:29:34 – 00:29:57
Yeah, 100%, and we have, we’ve come up with ways, um, like we want to send you a PDF or, you know, um, yeah, there’s, there’s multiple different ways, but 100%. You just give them a reason. A lot of times the reason doesn’t matter. Um, we’ve definitely found that if you make it a reason that’s Um, congruent, then it works, it works better.
Jeff Bullas
00:29:58 – 00:30:06
Yeah. That’s very, very cool. So 29% and SMS was how much you said? About 17, was it?
Matthew Stafford
00:30:06 – 00:30:48
Um, no, that was 17% left on the entire page by having those two, those two fields. Um, yeah, it, it’s, and if you think about it, that’s where the transaction happens. So, um, we’ve had other, uh, we’ve had other really big lists like that. Um, but it comes from, uh, a special demographic, like on a digital product, they do about 60 million a year, and, uh, we asked that question, what’s one thing that almost made you not buy? Well, they had a really long VSL and so out of the 570 responses we got, literally 526 of them were the videos too long.
Matthew Stafford
00:30:48 – 00:31:17
And the owner said, no, we can’t, we can’t shorten the video. We’ve tried, uh, shorter videos and it ruins the conversion. And so we thought about it. It took us a day. Um, I asked them, I, I said, how do you watch videos when you’re watching them on YouTube? And they go, What do you mean? I said, Do you speed them up? And they go, Oh yeah, yeah, like 1.2, 1.5. I said, do people have the ability to speed your video up?
Matthew Stafford
00:31:17 – 00:31:43
Maybe not, um, you know, get the buy button until the end, but can they speed it up? And he goes, no. And so we sped it up and they got a 10% lift. So for them, that was a $6 million win for the end of the year by literally just taking the information that the customer was giving them instead of discounting it, finding a way that, uh, you could make the customer experience better.
Jeff Bullas
00:31:44 – 00:31:59
Because that’s the thing, isn’t it? Because people’s attention span is basically less than a goldfish. Now, I think the goldfish is at 99 seconds and the average, uh, Gen X, Gen Z, and most of us back is, you know, is about 8 seconds. So, um yeah,
Matthew Stafford
00:31:59 – 00:32:29
I think people would be shocked, um. If they saw how simple a lot of the stuff that we do is, it’s not complicated. Um, most of the time, uh, the 1st 5 or 6 months of us working on sites, uh, we’re removing stuff. We’re, we’re making the site simpler, easier, less, uh, busy, you know, less cognitive load, and that’s where you’ll get your biggest wins, not by adding new things to the site to make it sell more.
Jeff Bullas
00:32:29 – 00:32:42
Right. OK, let’s move on to some other ways of user experience and basically increasing conversion rates. One is testimonials. How important are they, um whether it’s a digital product or whether it’s a physical product?
Matthew Stafford
00:32:43 – 00:33:30
Uh, they’re super important. So reviews matter a lot. Um, in fact, Amazon did a test, and at 200 reviews, um, it literally doubled the conversion rate on the page. So, uh, our goal is, and, and we’ve seen similar. Uh, not necessarily double the conversion, but we’ve seen similar results, uh, when we get up into a decent number of reviews that, uh, the page converts much better. So people really, um, don’t want to be the guinea pig. They want to know that enough other people have, uh, chosen to do business with you and you’ve taken care of that. And another really interesting fact that most people don’t realize is.
Matthew Stafford
00:33:31 – 00:34:22
The highest converting reviews on your site are 2 stars and below, and everybody’s like, no, that can’t be true. But the truth of the matter is if you only push 5 star reviews, people don’t trust you. If you push the lower reviews and have a response and that you’ve taken care of the customer, those reviews actually convert much higher than the site average many times. And so our goal is. We definitely, um, want to push, and we’re strategic about it. Like, oh, it took 2 weeks to get my product but the person says, hey, we’re really sorry, you know, we’d love to send you some free product or whatever. Taking care of that and having that review on your site, um, will get you a lot more sales. And so, you know, we’re always trying to figure out why things win.
Matthew Stafford
00:34:22 – 00:34:42
And I just believe that overall, people don’t expect you to be perfect. They know that you’re going to make some mistakes, but if you take care of your mistakes, then they’re like, Oh, OK. Yeah, they’re human. They make mistakes. If you push all 5 star reviews, they go, yeah, they’re lying or they’re not telling us about their mistakes.
Jeff Bullas
00:34:42 – 00:34:46
Yep. So what do you mean by push 5 star reviews in terms of when
Matthew Stafford
00:34:46 – 00:35:07
someone leaves those reviews, you have the ability to um make them live on the site or to not publish them. And so, yeah, and so what I’m saying is basically when someone leaves that review, uh, we think it’s a good idea to publish it and take care of the customer and respond to them, you know, and, and make sure that it’s handled.
Jeff Bullas
00:35:08 – 00:35:26
Right. So then there’s testimonials. In other words, let’s say that you’ve got an influencer that might be promoting your e-commerce site, for example. Um, is it good to use them as, uh, provide testimonials in terms of their use of the product because they’ve used it? How powerful is that?
Matthew Stafford
00:35:26 – 00:36:02
Um, so we’ve tested that a lot of times, and typically, um, an influencer’s testimonial does not really move the needle very much. Um, I think people in general don’t trust it as, um, they’re giving an unbiased opinion, uh, where a customer does. Uh, we certainly have sites that, uh, drive a lot of sales from influencers, but it’s not typically, they’re not trying to present it as, oh, I love this product, da da da, you know, because they’re using it. Yeah,
Jeff Bullas
00:36:02 – 00:36:48
they’re seen as not trusted because everyone knows they’re being paid. Yeah, yeah, OK. All right, there’s some really great tips for everyone there. Um, so we’ve got a bit, we’ve got a bit of a hard finish for both of us here today. So, what are some of the top things you’ve learned about, um, you know, 3 things, 5 things, if you can tell us that. To increase e-commerce, you’ve, you’ve listed, you know, Traffic’s one thing, but, uh, conversion is actually better. What’s 345 things actually you would recommend on top of the ones we’ve already covered that you think are really, really important to get an online e-commerce site, whether it’s digital or physical product really, you know, growing.
Matthew Stafford
00:36:49 – 00:37:42
Yeah, so I would say, um, I think that people that have, uh, a niche store does way better than a general store. And what I mean by that is find a problem to solve and have that be the entire thing that your product line takes care of. Um, people that have general stores, uh, they tend to fail a lot more because it takes so much more money to get, uh, traffic and consistent, consistent sales. The other thing that I would say is a principle that works really well and it’s what we look at at every single page of every single site that we look at is called the hierarchy of Focus, which means um every single page should have one most important action, and that’s not just an e-commerce site, that’s any um website.
Matthew Stafford
00:37:43 – 00:38:26
And then a secondary action that people can take. But the main thing is you want them, if it’s added to cart or if it’s, um, proceed to check out or if it’s continued shipping, you want the button or the next most important action to stand out above everything else. Um, and then the last thing that I would say is. Uh, a lot of people, uh, when you land on your homepage, uh, a lot of people go, Oh, well, we drive everybody to the product page. I’m like, yeah, but they still go to your homepage to see who you are, to know, like and trust you. So your homepage is not designed to sell. It’s literally designed to build trust.
Matthew Stafford
00:38:26 – 00:39:15
And then give them easy navigation to what they’re looking for and why should they do business with you? What is your unique value proposition? If you sell ropes, why is your rope better than everyone else’s? And, and that’s where the testimonials, that’s where the companies that you’ve done business with, that’s where that stuff goes, not necessarily deeper into the site, because we’re always trying to enter the conversation. That the client or the customers have at that point on the website. And if you’re at the add to cart, uh, what are some things that are going through your mind? Well, is it American made? How quick does it ship? What are the materials? That’s not, those are the things that you want to cover, not what company that you dealt with, because at this point, they’re, they’re already beyond that.
Matthew Stafford
00:39:15 – 00:39:17
They’re trying to decide whether this is for them.
Jeff Bullas
00:39:18 – 00:39:45
Yeah. Well, that’s really, really good, because, uh, I think in the past e-commerce, decades ago, people just turned up, bought our product, and you went to the home page, and said, Where do I buy? Where’s the sales page? Instead, what happened as everyone started putting together a dedicated sales page, which they drove traffic to. But you’re saying that it’s really important for them to go to the sales page and see that one, I suppose, I suppose your home page and say, is this congruent? Are these guys experts at what they do?
Matthew Stafford
00:39:45 – 00:39:49
Yeah, what’s their unique value proposition? Yeah,
Jeff Bullas
00:39:50 – 00:40:05
Yeah, that’s awesome. So this is one question I ask all my guests is that um if you had all the money in the world, Matthew. What would you do every day that would, uh, bring you deep joy and happiness?
Matthew Stafford
00:40:07 – 00:40:57
Man, um, I, I actually really like helping people succeed at business, um, because I’ve had some really good successes and I’ve had some really, um, really colossal failures, and, uh, so I understand both ends of the spectrum. I really, really like problem solving and I would do it, um, in many cases for free if I didn’t need the money, or if I didn’t, you know, want the money for. The business, I would help people figure out how to do that because when you have a website that works really well, um, I’ve just watched it change people’s lives. You know, they have time to be a better dad, they have time to be a better mom, um, they get out of a job that they hate. Uh, I, I love what I do and I get up excited to do it each day.
Jeff Bullas
00:40:57 – 00:41:26
That’s great. Which is, most of the answers I get from entrepreneurs is not that exact answer, but that type of answer is that they’re doing it because it’s not a job they have to do to put food on the table. It’s a calling that they have been called to do, because, um, that’s their strengths and it’s also their passion. So, um. And you do enjoy cycling, which is another thing I think that maybe puts a smile on your face.
Matthew Stafford
00:41:27 – 00:41:38
Yeah, yeah. I actually love cycling. Um, if, if, if I could only choose one type of exercise, um, like based on how your question was, then I would definitely say it would be cycling.
Jeff Bullas
00:41:38 – 00:42:13
Yeah. Well, I try to mix up a little bit because I’m a bit older now and I like to keep stretching a bit. So I went to a Pilates class, but it’s just. I call it a, you know, the, the Pilates transform machine, I call it a modern torture machine. Um, and yeah, it, I, cycling is my gig, it used to be running, but, um, and the endorphins, you know, I’m addicted to the endorphins, which take a little longer to show up now, but, um, so. Matthew, thank you very much for sharing your insight. It was, uh, amazing. I’ve learned a lot and, um,
Jeff Bullas
00:42:13 – 00:42:24
Yeah, we’re in the middle of building a digital product, and, um, so we can take a lot of that, because we’ve got a good audience, but we, uh, we’re not that good at e-commerce yet, but we’re getting better.
Matthew Stafford
00:42:24 – 00:42:29
So. Oh, well, awesome. I’d love to help you, if you need, uh, someone to look it over, let me know. I might
Jeff Bullas
00:42:29 – 00:42:47
I need that. We’re in the middle of, I think we’re just trying to make sure with the, we’ve got to try and make the offer compelling, and then number 2, then is, is the next part is then getting driving traffic and conversion. So, uh, but. Yeah, I might, I might send you an email just cast your eyes open when we’re, when I’m not when it’s not so embarrassing.
Matthew Stafford
00:42:47 – 00:42:49
Sounds good. Thank you.
Jeff Bullas
00:42:49 – 00:42:55
Thank you, Matthew, and have a great evening. OK, for you, isn’t it? So what time is it there?
Matthew Stafford
00:42:55 – 00:42:57
Uh, it’s 5:48 p.m.
Jeff Bullas
00:42:58 – 00:43:04
OK, right, so we’re nearly at 9 a.m. here in Australia, so, and you’re in Florida, is that correct?
Matthew Stafford
00:43:05 – 00:43:08
Yes, yep, I’m in Saint Pete, just south of Tampa, about 15 minutes.
Jeff Bullas
00:43:09 – 00:43:12
I’ve been in Saint Petersburg, but it was in Russia.
Matthew Stafford
00:43:12 – 00:43:18
Oh, OK, yeah, different, different place. Thank you, thank you. OK, thank you.
Jeff Bullas
00:43:18 – 00:43:19
Thank you, thank you. OK, thank you.